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In Hero Projects, Paul R. Josephson traces how, over the last one hundred years, the Russian tsars, commissars, and oligarchs embraced megaprojects to create the world's largest empire. Built by peasants, gulag prisoners, and Communist volunteers, the projects are wide-ranging and numerous--including nuclear power stations, pipelines across the tundra, railroads from Europe to the Pacific Ocean, and hydropower stations and canals. Sweeping in scope, Hero Projects establishes the strong continuities in political culture in Russian history; reshapes the meaning of empire, extending it to include internal colonization; and expands environmental and social history through the study of big technology.

This authoritative history of the Russian nuclear age describes the rise of nuclear physics in the USSR, enthusiastic pursuit of military and peaceful nuclear programs through the Chernobyl disaster, the collapse of the Soviet Union and ongoing self-proclaimed 'renaissance' of nuclear power today. Josephson examines both military and peaceful nuclear programs for the long durée whilst also grappling with the political and ideological importance of nuclear technologies, the associated economic goals, the social and environmental costs, and the cultural embrace of nuclear power. Probing the juncture of science, history, environmental studies and politics, Nuclear Russia considers the atom in Russian society as a reflection of Leninist technological utopianism, Cold War imperatives, scientific hubris, public acceptance, and a state desire to conquer nature. Furthermore Josephson highlights the significance of ethnicity and gender by exploring how Kazakhs and Nenets lost their homelands and health in the wake of nuclear testing, as well as the sexualization of the taming of the female atom in the Russian 'Miss Atom' contests that commenced in the 21st century.

Main description: Vladimir Putin has redoubled Russia's efforts to secure the Arctic, seen as key to the nation's economic development and military status. This history brings into focus a little-understood part of the world that remains a locus of military and economic pressures, ongoing environmental damage, and grand ambitions imperfectly realized.

Main Description:Spanning nine time zones from Norway to the Bering Strait, the immense Russian Arctic was mostly unexplored before the twentieth century. This changed rapidly in the 1920s, when the Soviet Union implemented plans for its conquest. The Conquest of the Russian Arctic, a definitive political and environmental history of one of the world's remotest regions, details the ambitious attempts, from Soviet times to the present, to control and reshape the Arctic, and the terrible costs paid along the way. Paul Josephson describes the effort under Stalin to assimilate the Arctic into the Soviet empire. Extraction of natural resources, construction of settlements, indoctrination of nomadic populations, collectivization of reindeer herding--all was to be accomplished so that the Arctic operated according to socialist principles. The project was in many ways an extension of the Bolshevik revolution, as planners and engineers assumed that policies and plans that worked elsewhere in the empire would apply here. But as they pushed ahead with methods hastily adopted from other climates, the results were political repression, destruction of traditional cultures, and environmental degradation. The effects are still being felt today. At the same time, scientists and explorers led the world in understanding Arctic climes and regularities. Vladimir Putin has redoubled Russia's efforts to secure the Arctic, seen as key to the nation's economic development and military status. This history brings into focus a little-understood part of the world that remains a locus of military and economic pressures, ongoing environmental damage, and grand ambitions imperfectly realized.

After visiting Russia in 1921, the journalist Lincoln Steffens famously declared, "I have seen the future, and it works." Steffens referred to the social experiment of technological utopianism he found in the Soviet Union, where subway cars and farm tractors would carry the worker and peasant—figuratively and literally—into the twentieth century. Believing that socialism and technology together created a brave new world, Boleslaw Bierut of Poland and Kim Il Sung of North Korea—and other leaders—joined Russia's Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky in embracing big technology with a verve and conviction that rivaled the western world's.Paul R. Josephson here explores these utopian visions of technology—and their unanticipated human and environmental costs. He examines the role of technology in communist plans and policies and the interplay between ideology and technological development. He shows that while technology was a symbol of regime legitimacy and an engine of progress, the changes it spurred were not unequivocally positive. Instead of achieving a worker's paradise, socialist technologies exposed the proletariat to dangerous machinery and deadly pollution; rather than freeing women from exploitation in family and labor, they paradoxically created for them the dual—and exhausting—burdens of mother and worker. The future did not work. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the end of communism's self-proclaimed glorious quest to "reach and surpass" the West. Josephson's intriguing study of how technology both helped and hindered this effort asks new and important questions about the crucial issues inextricably linked with the development and diffusion of technology in any sociopolitical system.