On December 4, at 7 pm Tbilisi time, the biweekly research colloquium of the Institute for Social and Cultural Research, Ilia State University, will host Kateryina Burkush with a talk on her research project: “Policies and Practices of Decentralized Timber Procurement in the Late Soviet Union (1950s-1980s)”.
Abstract:
Since the 1930s, timber extraction in the Soviet Union became the domain of a centralized timber industry. In this presentation, Kateryna discusses a lesser-known phenomenon: decentralized wood procurement policies and practices that existed alongside centralized logging and evolved during the post-Stalin decades, complicating the Soviet economic landscape of resource exploitation and distribution. As the main timber industry was unable to produce sufficient quantities of wood to satisfy internal demand, the state allowed various organizations to conduct independent wood procurement for their own—usually construction—needs, and research reveals that these activities were far more than peripheral. In fact, they were a commonplace feature of the Soviet forest economy.
Using the 1967 storm in Latvia as a case study, Kateryna shows how the policies and practices of timber self-procurement conflated and intensified as multiple organizations tried to gain access to the fallen timber. Analysing the handling of the storm’s consequences as a vivid illustration of Soviet decentralized economic practices, it is placed within a longer history of Soviet independent timber harvesting, identifying its main actors and exposing conflict, reliance on migrant labor, and private initiative on the borderline of socialist legality.
Bio:
Kateryna Burkush is a research fellow at the University of Turin, where she is a part of an ERC-funded project “Industrial Wood: European Industrialization as Seen from the Forest (1870-1914),” focusing on the microhistories of commercial timber exploitation in the late Habsburg Galicia. She earned her PhD in history from the European University Institute (Florence) with a thesis on seasonal contract workers in the late Soviet Union. Her research interests lie on the intersection of history of natural resources, labor, migration, and oral history.
The event will take place in English via Zoom. Registration is required.
To register please follow this link.
Photo: Central Audiovisual and Electronic Archive of Ukraine