Ecotourism and Post-Industrial Development in the Russian Periphery

This paper draws on the case of Komsomolsk‑na‑Amure, a planned city built in the 1930s in the Khabarovsk Region, to explore interwoven moral imaginaries of industrialization and nature in Russia’s Far East. Widely celebrated in the Soviet press as ‘the City of Youth’ built by communist volunteers who traveled from all over the USSR to construct an urban socialist utopia in the taiga, Komsomolsk’s mythos has historically been defined by the trope of triumphant subjugation of the unruly wilderness. In the 1960s, as love of one’s region and its natural splendor became central to Soviet patriotic visions, Komsomolsk’s hinterland witnessed a rapid development of ecotourism, designed to provide residents with local recreational alternatives to distant resorts in the Western part of the USSR. The city’s enterprises, including shipbuilding and aviation plants, played a key role in financing and maintaining the ex‑urban summer camps, sanatoria, and ski resorts. However, economic decline and massive depopulation since the 1990s have left the city’s (peri‑)urban infrastructures in ruins. By exploring attempts to revive these leisure enterprises on a commercial basis in the post‑Soviet era, I illuminate the challenges associated with the market‑oriented transformation of what were once considered state‑provided services, and analyze the potential trajectories of profit‑generating nature tourism for the development of sparsely populated and hard‑to‑reach places like the Khabarovsk Region.