Authors

Discussion

This paper examines how climate science and geoengineering in the Soviet Arctic were deeply entangled with colonial forms of knowledge, power, and territorial control. It argues that the large-scale climatic transformation projects developed in the Soviet Union during the second half of the twentieth century — plans to artificially warm the Arctic in order to make the Northern Sea Route navigable year-round and to render the region economically productive — must be understood not as isolated technoscientific experiments but as continuations of imperial practices of appropriation, extraction, and spatial domination. The Arctic served as a laboratory for expanding Soviet state power through scientific intervention and infrastructural conquest, turning the polar environment into both a testing ground and a stage for performing socialist modernity.

The paper uses climate engineering projects to analyse and reflect on imperial imaginations of climatic futures. It argues that the logic of environmental domination characteristic of imperial and colonial projects persists in today’s global climate politics. Contemporary proposals for geoengineering and “planetary management” echo Cold War fantasies of climatic control, perpetuating the extractive mindset that produced the ecological crisis in the first place. By linking the history of Soviet Arctic science to current debates on the Anthropocene, this paper highlights how climate change cannot be understood apart from the histories of colonial violence and exploitation that have shaped both the planet and the epistemologies through which we study it.