The Soviet vision of seamless transformation – for example, converting peatlands into energy sources and arable land, and people into compliant laborers – was largely realized. However, as Jeanna Kolesova reveals, this transformation left behind traces of persistent violence, such as smoldering ‘zombie’ fires that erupt into large-scale wildfires every 10 to 15 years, increased greenhouse gas emissions, and the oral histories of workers injured by relentless physical labor.
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Can you imagine an ideally constructed structure, a closed system where nothing is wasted, but pure transformation is possible? One such system is very familiar to me: the peat industry. The harvest of peat was once a measure of process. A sign that a scientific way of production rules, where mathematical logic governs what should be attended next and where people become data and data becomes the input to statistical calculations.
The best way to describe this structure is with an equation:
mₜ· vₜ² + Wₙ· hₙ = mᵢ · vᵢ² + W𝒻 · h𝒻
On the left side:
mₜvₜ – the accumulated mass and speed of human and machine labor. Often, a female peat field worker, knee-deep in mud.
Wₙhₙ – weight and height of peat as stored potential for human consumption.
On the right:
mᵢvᵢ – the mass and momentum of ideological and economical drive.
W𝒻h𝒻 – the projected weight and height of the ideal future. Earlier: Communist is a vector: a directional force giving shape to conversion. Now: commodification.
But even ideally closed systems over time start to leak and leave traces. This equation is nothing but speculation – an attempt not to explain, but to trace how people and landscapes were rendered into a resource and which legacies of it are still present. Imperial practice is not a singular mode but a continuum of governance styles, extractive economics, and symbolic representations that began in the imperial era and find new forms today.
Wₙhₙ=W𝒻h𝒻: The framing of wetlands
There is something in the swamp that resists. A texture, a rhythm, a refusal to be controlled. Neither land nor water, always in-between, in transition – swamps remain unsettled substances for humanity. They spill over the borders drawn for them, defy containment, and elude classification. Maybe this is why they have been so thoroughly targeted by human intervention. Europe’s wetlands have borne the full weight of human ambition: more than half of all mires no longer accumulate peat, around 10-20% have disappeared entirely.
The Russian Empire built massive drainage systems to turn “uncultured”, “non-suitable”, “economically useless” wetlands into useful arable land. With the rise of the Bolsheviks, the wetlands were recast. They entered a new stage of transformation – as a resource. The civil war in Russia (1917–1922) disrupted access to major energy regions, leading to a railway collapse and fuel shortages. Industries dependent on Donetsk coal and Baku oil practically ceased to function. In 1920, the GOELRO plan addressed this by prioritizing local, second-grade energy sources – peat, oil shale, and brown coal – alongside hydroelectric power. The plan projected a more than seventeenfold increase in electricity output and a more than elevenfold rise in peat extraction. In the rhetoric of the Soviet state, electrification was presented as a “revolutionary breakthrough” that transformed nature into an “endlessly useful and controllable force.”
The peatland, also known as the “Sleeping Beauty,” held within it an energy that at first glance was “hidden and waiting to be released” (Gorky, Kirsanov, Peregudov, Prishvin, et al). In the book “Conquest of Power” B.P. Weinberg reveals, it was organically unpleasant for the almighty man to see unused potential, and he sought to turn green idlers, peacefully ending their lives without benefit to man, into obedient slaves. Institutions like the Main Peat Committee were created to organize extraction, survey deposits, and build infrastructure. Projects like the Shatura power plant (and many more over the Soviet Union) – deemed vital for national defense – grew into industrial cities with autonomous satellite settlements around them. Peat, once overlooked, became a resource, powering both machines and ideology.
mₜvₜ²=mᵢvᵢ²: The framing of labor
The choreography of Soviet labor cannot be separated from its velocity: electrification required huge amounts of bodies, massive numbers of bodies, streamlined into production and calibrated to the mechanical tempo of extraction. Labor was measured in terms of the volume of peat extracted or the number of power plants opened in ‘record time.’ Beyond the transformation (conquest) of nature, electrification was also tasked with transforming the human body and mind into an “electrically enlightened New Soviet Person”.
Electrification and parallel industrialization triggered large-scale relocation of the rural population. According to the census, the rural population declined from 82% in 1926 to 67% in 1939, 48% in 1959, and 38% in 1970. In 1926, 87.9% of women aged 16 to 59 worked in agriculture and were often redirected into seasonal labor. Peat extraction, until the 1960s, was seasonal and mostly manual. Female workers were brought in from neighboring regions: always rural, but ethnically and culturally diverse – Russians, Mordvins, Chuvash, Tatars, Maris, Bashqorts. They arrived by train, recruited and housed in hastily built barracks near the extraction sites. Their labor was meant to be temporary, but some remained. The settlements absorbed them; their names disappeared into the homogenizing logic of Soviet census categories. “But what’s the difference?” a former peat worker asked and provided a prompt answer: “Now they’re all Russians.”
Labor on the peat fields exceeded what the state chose to measure. Pain, disease, and injury were not counted. The work was grueling, “primitive,” as one worker put it. During an eight-hour shift, a woman might carry up to five tons of peat, each load heaved over her shoulder in rapid rhythm to meet quotas. Breaks were rare. Overtime was expected. For ten kopecks more, bodies pushed past exhaustion.
The consequences were long-lasting. In 1931, one medical study “Rationalization and Improvement of the Work of Female Peat Boggers” found that 61 out of 100 female peat workers suffered from chronic menstrual disorders. Infertility was widespread. In severe cases, prolonged heavy lifting led to uterine prolapse. Yet in literature and propaganda, these women were recast as heroines – transformed by the very labor that injured them. Their labor was a resource, essential to sustaining electrification.
Imperial legacies
The Soviet vision of seamless transformation – of peatlands into sources of energy and arable land, and of people into uncomplaining laboring bodies – was, to a significant extent, realized. Yet this transformation left behind traces of persistent violence: smoldering zombie fires that erupt into large-scale wildfires every 10 to 15 years, increased greenhouse gas emissions, visible scarring of the landscape from satellite imagery, depopulation of deindustrialized areas, and oral histories from workers who sustained injuries due to relentless physical labor.
Both the landscape and the human body serve as witnesses to this past and ongoing violence – because the imperial and colonial legacies did not end with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In fact, the Soviet peatland policy found new continuity in Russian governance. In 2016, the government reclassified peat as a renewable energy source, promising local energy development and the economic revitalization of so-called ‘depressed’ rural areas.
Residents of former working settlements often inhabit a space of comfortable nostalgia. I spoke with a former seasonal peat worker who described her teenage years laboring in the fields. She recounted grueling quotas, where exceeding targets might earn an extra ten kopecks, and chronic illnesses and clouds of insects that devoured exposed skin. Yet she concluded with a striking contradiction: “We were young, life was very enjoyable and nice back then.”
During a research trip to Latvia last year, I happened to meet an engineer and former manager of the Baloži peat factory who had worked in my home region during the Soviet era. Our conversation quickly turned to the massive 1972 peatland wildfire near Moscow, which had begun in the harvesting fields. Just five years later, in 1977, the Soviet Union ratified the Ramsar Convention, formally committing to the international protection of wetlands. Among the 35 sites designated in Russia, one includes coordinates that almost precisely match my own region. Yet the official description ambiguously refers to a nearby area. On the ground, despite this formal conservation status and even the presence of a national park, peat extraction has not only continued, but it also intensified in recent years.
Capacity for refusal
In 2010, the region experienced another massive wildfire with similar scale, intensity, and emissions. Since 2016, peat extraction has expanded further, especially in areas previously exploited during Soviet times. In Latvia, too, contemporary harvesting occurs on land drained during the Soviet period.
What emerges from these stories is not just a reflection on extraction, but a repetition of imperial logic across time. Peatlands continue to be framed as untapped reservoirs of energy, economic value, or geopolitical stability – while the bodies laboring within them are again abstracted as instruments of state policy or market efficiency. The language may shift, but the structure endures.
So, we return to the equation:
mₜ· vₜ² + Wₙ· hₙ≠ mᵢ · vᵢ² + W𝒻 · h𝒻
This is no longer a balanced system. The transformation was never total. The ideological machine leaks. What endures are its unresolved residues – excesses of pain, memory, refusal, and ecological resistance. The system persists, but imperfectly. Wetlands resist classification. Bodies remember what regimes forget. The future that was once projected was neither ideal nor clean – but its machinery, in altered form, continues to turn.
To bear witness to the peatlands today is to face this duality: as sites of resource extraction and as landscapes of resistance. They are not just backdrops to policy or history, but active terrains where bodies, narratives, and ecosystems confront the ongoing aftermath of imperial transformation. If the ideological machine continues to turn, then so too does the capacity for refusal – for slowing down, leaking, or overflowing its boundaries.