Environmental Relationalities 95
advanced space of the Soviet Union. Despite the many negative experiences
that Brown highlights in her book regarding radiation and the consequences,
the workers do experience their work as crucial to communism and feel
downgraded when sent out of the zone as a result of increased radiation:
“Many people experience termination as form of deportation or forced resettlement, a reversal of the promise of social mobility.” 36 While Brown follows
a clear agenda that works out the vulnerability of workers vis-à-vis nuclear
enterprises, her sources are controversial within the tension to contribute
to modernity and victims of this process. What matters for the discussion
is the contextualization of modernity as lying in the hands of individuals to
master difficult and impossible conditions for the sake of an idea of “future” –
designated as communism. This promotion of individual responsibility for
the “construction site of socialist modernity” is not restricted to the nuclear
project, as the analysis of the diaries from the times of Stalinism written by
Jochen Hellbeck shows. 37 Instead, the project in Ozersk was integrated into a
concept that linked the individual to communist success.
This is, however, not to be applied to the whole Soviet Union, or at least
not in the context of nuclear production sites. The tension between pollution, difficult working conditions, and communism, as this chapter will
assert, is contextualized in different relationalities. If Ozersk was integrated
into Stalin’s individualization of responsibility for socialist modernity, this
was not necessarily how other sites became integrated into local worker’s
discourses in other parts of the Soviet Union. Magdalena Stawkowski has
shown how in the immediate surroundings of the Semipalatinsk nuclear test
site, people continue to use a vocabulary of progress rather than disaster when
reflecting on their lives today. 38 Thus, the Soviet Union did not produce
one homogenous discourse and certainly no classic orientalist discourse and
positioning. Rather, it is argued that nuclear production and uranium mining shared the same space of secrecy on the all-Union level but were locally
integrated into the relationship which the working populations had to the
environment through political discourses that may go back into history. For
instance, uranium mining and nuclear fuel production sites in the Urals were
conceptualized as the development from the Bronze Age to the Soviet atom,
a success of individual investment in transforming the environment into a
technological space: “The low mountains rose like a purple bruise in the distance. The men came across a collective farm on Lake Kyzyltash next to the
ruins of a nineteenth-century mill. The twentieth-century villagers, living
more primitively than their ancestors, fished from dugout canoes with grass
nets. This was the spot, the scouts reported back to Moscow. Such were the
Bronze Age beginnings of the Soviet atom.” 39
In contrast to the above quote, Stawkowski describes how the affected
population of the Kazakh steppes transforms along with their (polluted) environment. 40 She relates how people believe that they can eat the wheat grown
on the polluted fields, keep animals, and live with the environment, even if
others (who arrive with protective clothing and instruments to measure the
advanced space of the Soviet Union. Despite the many negative experiences
that Brown highlights in her book regarding radiation and the consequences,
the workers do experience their work as crucial to communism and feel
downgraded when sent out of the zone as a result of increased radiation:
“Many people experience termination as form of deportation or forced resettlement, a reversal of the promise of social mobility.” 36 While Brown follows
a clear agenda that works out the vulnerability of workers vis-à-vis nuclear
enterprises, her sources are controversial within the tension to contribute
to modernity and victims of this process. What matters for the discussion
is the contextualization of modernity as lying in the hands of individuals to
master difficult and impossible conditions for the sake of an idea of “future” –
designated as communism. This promotion of individual responsibility for
the “construction site of socialist modernity” is not restricted to the nuclear
project, as the analysis of the diaries from the times of Stalinism written by
Jochen Hellbeck shows. 37 Instead, the project in Ozersk was integrated into a
concept that linked the individual to communist success.
This is, however, not to be applied to the whole Soviet Union, or at least
not in the context of nuclear production sites. The tension between pollution, difficult working conditions, and communism, as this chapter will
assert, is contextualized in different relationalities. If Ozersk was integrated
into Stalin’s individualization of responsibility for socialist modernity, this
was not necessarily how other sites became integrated into local worker’s
discourses in other parts of the Soviet Union. Magdalena Stawkowski has
shown how in the immediate surroundings of the Semipalatinsk nuclear test
site, people continue to use a vocabulary of progress rather than disaster when
reflecting on their lives today. 38 Thus, the Soviet Union did not produce
one homogenous discourse and certainly no classic orientalist discourse and
positioning. Rather, it is argued that nuclear production and uranium mining shared the same space of secrecy on the all-Union level but were locally
integrated into the relationship which the working populations had to the
environment through political discourses that may go back into history. For
instance, uranium mining and nuclear fuel production sites in the Urals were
conceptualized as the development from the Bronze Age to the Soviet atom,
a success of individual investment in transforming the environment into a
technological space: “The low mountains rose like a purple bruise in the distance. The men came across a collective farm on Lake Kyzyltash next to the
ruins of a nineteenth-century mill. The twentieth-century villagers, living
more primitively than their ancestors, fished from dugout canoes with grass
nets. This was the spot, the scouts reported back to Moscow. Such were the
Bronze Age beginnings of the Soviet atom.” 39
In contrast to the above quote, Stawkowski describes how the affected
population of the Kazakh steppes transforms along with their (polluted) environment. 40 She relates how people believe that they can eat the wheat grown
on the polluted fields, keep animals, and live with the environment, even if
others (who arrive with protective clothing and instruments to measure the