“Nature Protection” in Siberian Cities of Science: Environmental Ideas in Scientific Institutes and Higher Education in the USSR (1950s–1970s)

This article outlines the formation of ecological ideas in the late USSR, both in the union centre and in the Siberian periphery. The author focuses on the emergence of nature protection legislation and the activities of special academic commissions on this topic in the Union republics in the late 1950s and early1960s. Relying on the verbatim report of the Third Meeting on Nature Protection in Novosibirsk in 1961, the author reconstructs the agenda of this activity, the organisational measures which the introduction of nature protection in the USSR was associated with and the possible connection of this turn with Khrushchev’s decentralisation reforms in economic management. Since the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences attached a special role to nature protection in its activities, the work of the relevant academic commission of the Siberian Branch of the Academy of Sciences is traced in the 1960s, when nature protection gradually ceased to be a priority topic of state policy, and the appeal to it provoked interdepartmental conflicts (the largest one being the Baikal Pulp and Paper Mill discussion). It is likely that due to these circumstances, the Academic Commission as an integrating institution disappeared by the early 1970s, and the topic of nature protection remained the interest of either the Presidium of the Siberian Branch of the Academy of Sciences or individual enthusiasts. The efforts of the Presidium were embodied in the “Siberia” socio-economic programme, and enthusiasts managed to introduce nature conservation into the curricula of faculties of biology and geography at universities. Additionally, the author considers the activities I. P. Laptev, a Tomsk ichthyologist, who brought up several generations of ecologically sensitive specialists at TSU. The reproduction of such an environment in Soviet universities led to the emergence of a professional movement of nature conservation groups. At the next stage and in the changed political environment of the 1980s–1990s, their members managed to fill the staff and administrative niche of state bodies and numerous non-profit organisations.