Soviet eco-cosmopolitanism? Oceans in late Soviet travel literature

Abstract This paper investigates cultural manifestations of an eco-cosmopolitan consciousness in late Soviet travel literature. Drawing from recent reappraisals of cosmopolitanism in postcolonial studies, ecocriticism and the “oceanic turn”, it argues that late Soviet culture saw a growing awareness of global environmental risks that fostered values and practices of investigation and cooperation. While cosmopolitanism had been a politicized accusation in late Stalinism, used to legitimate repression and anti-Semitism, its values and practices were gradually rehabilitated in the post-Stalinist period. This cosmopolitanism was fueled by a desire of Soviet scientists and authors for recognition by their Western European counterparts and the growing significance of international cooperation in oceanography. This late Soviet eco-cosmopolitanism also increasingly acknowledged the significance of non-human forms of life and established a systemic view on entanglements between world regions on the one hand and human and non-human forces on the other hand. Many consequences of the Anthropocene that have resulted in the fateful transformation of the oceanic world discussed today become legible in this historical reconstruction examining a body of texts mostly overlooked in scholarship thus far.