Beyond Formal Environmentalism: Eco-Nationalism and the 'Ringing Cedars of Russia

摘要

The frame of "environmentalism" in academic and policy literature on Russia tends to focus on the "formal" environmentalism sector in Russia, thereby relegating phenomena such as the conservative, eco-spiritual "Anas-tasia" or "Ringing Cedars" movement to the domain of religious or spiritual studies. Yet this movement is significant for understanding the ecopolitical field of contemporary Russia and the processes of meaning-making within that field. At the same time, calling Anastasians "environmentalists" would obfuscate and flatten the thick complexity of a movement that might be labeled "ecological" in the West, but which has to be understood through the lens of disenchantment with the state and the forms of nationalism it generates. One such form is a reactionary eco-nationalism that is discursively decoupled from the state, and expressed through mythohistorical narratives as much as "back to the land" agricultural and homesteading practices.