A Failed Environmental Turn? Khrushchev’s Thaw and Nature Protection in Soviet Russia

This article aims to identify a “Thaw” in Soviet environmental history. Focusing on the attempts from some actors, above all writers and scholars of the Academy of Sciences to promote an ambitious law at the all-Union level in the second half of the 1950s, it uses new evidences from the central Russian archives to show the existence of an offensive by activists and experts in this field, but also their failure to obtain the creation of a unified state committee of ministerial rank. If the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Nature (VOOP) was sidelined in this battle, the 1960 Law on Nature Protection was significant for its members. It cited the VOOP as the main organ of control in the environmental field, and created an opportunity for new “social organizations” to emerge in the country: the Brigades for Nature Protection (DOP), the first of which was created at Moscow State University.