What if Sheila Fitzpatrick's string-pulling, free-loading Homo sovieticus was compelled to enroll creatively not only his compatriots but also materials and nature in the struggles for survival? What if the fuzziness of private property in postsocialist Romania in Katherine Verdery's classic article “The Elasticity of Land,” had just as much to do with meandering streams, winds, and trees dying or growing, as with the absence of proper legal or cartographic documentation due to “purely social” history? What if figurative spaces such as Alexei Yurchak's “internal exile,” “zagranitsa,” “parallel universe,” or “vnye” were real places and were in and of nature—as Douglas Weiner started to consider when he called his nature preserves and circles of conservationists “little corners of freedom”?

In this article, Jane Costlow considers the ways in which Ivan Turgenev and Vladimir Korolenko use literary conventions—from gothic setting and narrative voice to metaphors of natural community—to reflect on poaching, violence, usufruct, and rational forestry. While both authors demonstrate concern for the fate of Russia's forests, the narratives discussed here (two stories and a travel memoir) are tempered by a sense of complex moral and political context, and the realities of property law and class both before and after 1861. Costlow considers foresters' advice and assumptions about peasant violence and the need for “enlightened” surveillance but focuses on imaginative writing that refuses simple solutions to vexed questions. Turgenev's narrative emphasizes the moral entanglements of a narrator who wants to intervene and protect, whereas Korolenko's account of the trans-Volga woodlands balances critique and ecological vision in dialogic form.

In this article, Diana Mincyte looks at subsidiary farming during the years of intense collectivization and political repressions in Soviet Lithuania, 1948-1953. Through an analysis of how peasants imagined, experienced, and interacted with their environments, Mincyte constructs agricultural labor as a site through which Lithuania's peasants negotiated their relationship to the state and nature. She argues that because the peasants’ physical survival during this period depended solely on the harvests from the farms, the peasants constructed themselves primarily as subjects of land and nature, rather than as citizens of the Soviet state. Instead of focusing on how individuals reinvented themselves according to the ideologies of the New Soviet Man/Woman, the environmental approach she develops here shows that creative agricultural labor played a significant role in the processes of building socialism in Lithuania's villages.

In this article, Katherine Metzo examines the creation of Tunka National Park in Russia's Lake Baikal region. Formed in the last days of the Soviet Union, the park represents the efforts of local indigenous elite to manipulate state policies on conservation to return control over natural resources to the local population. Metzo sees the formation of the park as part of a cultural revitalization movement through its ties to a broader Buriat national-cultural movement that emerged in late socialism. Movement leaders were vnye, in Alexei Yurchak's sense of the word, as they promoted their personal as well as the national-cultural agenda through the inbetween spaces created in the discussion of nature conservation.

This article presents a critical political ecology of the various forms of tree theft in a Bulgarian locality. Based on primary fieldwork carried out almost annually since 1992, Chad Staddon argues that even in a relatively tightly bounded space such as a single locality or forest stand, environment-society relationships are sufficiently complex to make the enterprises of analysis and theory-building quite challenging. Yet, as this case study of tree theft shows, it is precisely because environment-society relationships are so intertwined that a “symmetrical” treatment of humans and nonhuman actors is required that takes us well beyond the bounds of “traditional” political ecology. Locating the treatment of tree theft in just such a social theoretical framework offers many benefits. Staddon contends that it is not possible to really understand, or develop policy for, tree theft without carefully considering the relational networks that bind together all the protagonists, including loggers, foresters, policy-makers, and local people, as well as trees, forests, road networks, and other nonhuman agents.

Stalin's support for Trofim Lysenko in the late 1940s has come to exemplify Stalinist science and the deleterious effects of gross political intervention in scientific affairs. In this article, Ethan Pollock turns our attention to the harsh criticism of Lysenko that occurred in the Central Committee in the last years of Stalin's life and situates that criticism within a broader move in Soviet ideology toward nauchnost' or scientific truthfulness. In the later 1950s nauchnost' grew even stronger in nearly every other field of science. Still, Lysenko prolonged his hold on power in Soviet agricultural science as Nikita Khrushchev attempted to reassert the importance of partiinost’ or partymindedness. Lysenko's promises of great agricultural rewards and plans to radically transform nature were only fully rejected by the party when Khrushchev himself was removed from office.

While a central policy of the Independent State of Croatia during World War II called for the removal of “Serbs,” the majority of people who identified themselves (or were identified by the regime) as Serbs in Sarajevo—the second largest city in the state—remained “safe.” In order to understand why this was the case, Emily Greble Balic examines the interplay between local identity politics and state policies of genocide and nation-building. In so doing, she sheds light on such broad issues as the ambiguity of national identity at the local level; the limitations of traditional understandings of “resistance”; and the options open to members of the victim, or “foreign” group, as a result of the disjunction between national and local agendas.