Environment and Culture in Russia
Bates Short Term 2006
Professor Jane Costlow
jcostlow@bates.edu
207/786-6289

 

This course introduces students to a broad range of environmental issues in contemporary Russia, and invites students to consider those issues in cultural and historical context. Students depart Boston on April 24, and spend three days in Moscow before travelling to the city of Orel, in the agricultural heartland of European Russia. During three weeks in Orel, students will live with Russian families (where university-age students speak English), take classes in conversational Russian, and have regular discussions, meetings and field trips. We will visit a local farm, talk with ecologists working on steppe restoration, visit a national park, and have a tour of the city market. Regular afternoon classes will focus on contemporary issues. Students will have ample opportunity to interact with their Russian peers. The group will also visit area museums, Leo Tolstoy's estate, and an active monastery renowned for its contributions to Russian culture. The trip concludes with three days in St. Petersburg.

This trip is open to students with no knowledge of Russian.

Application deadline is January 10 (in order to let students know prior to the deadline for applying for financial aid.. You may pick up an application form at my office, 102 Hathorn. Students will be chosen with an eye to putting together a diverse group of students with a broad variety of interests and backgrounds.

 

  

The map above indicates the major areas to be visited by the group: Moscow, Orel, and St. Petersburg.

 

 

  
   

During the first few days students will have the opportunity to visit major historical sites in Moscow, including the Kremlin. We will also visit the Moscow offices of several Federal Environmental Organizations and major NGO's based in Moscow.

 
The Cathedral of the Savior, on the Moscow River, is one of the most visible signs of Russia's cultural "renaissance" since the fall of the Soviet Union. The original 19th century church was destroyed under Stalin - and reconstructed in the late 1990's as testimony to the renewed importance of Orthodoxy in Russian life.
Central Moscow bears witness to the varied cultural and economic forces at work in post-Soviet Russia: this elegant new underground mall, built just outside the Kremlin, is a popular gathering spot throughout the year, but particularly in warmer weather. The hotel in the background was built at Stalin's command; it is now crowned with the logo of a popular beer - Baltika - which is produced through a Russian/German joint venture.
   

From Moscow the group will travel south to Orel, a city of 300,000 in the heart of Russia's agricultural region. Students will have homestays with students studying English at the local University; the Bates group will visit a local farm, a newly-established national park, and talk with local government officials and environmental activists about a range of issues.

Much of the vegetation in central Russia will look familiar to students from Maine - here, birch trees and lupines in bloom.

 

  

 

Students visit a dairy farm near Orel. Formerly a collective enterprise (kolkhoz), the farm has been privatized, and former collective farm workers now own shares in the farm, which has become significantly more productive.

  

 

 

 

 

 The group will make an overnight trip to the estate of Leo Tolstoy, Yasnaya Polyana. The estate is now a museum of living history, with exhibits on peasant life, agriculture, and a working stud farm.

Students share tea at the 'coachman's house' on the Tolstoy estate - an example of typical peasant dwellings from the 19th century.

 

  

The zapovedniks are set-aside conservation areas located throughout the former Soviet Union; this one is made up of native steppe (prairie) land - valuable for what it can teach agronomists and ecologists about how to reconstitute soil health in an area that has been heavily farmed for centuries.

 

 

 The group also visits a conservation area in the Kursk region, south of Orel, in the "black earth" region.

 

Students get a chance to chat with a liquidator who helped to put out the fires at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in 1987. Engaged in compulsory military service, the liquidators had no notion of the dangers of their work. This young man has had extensive treatment, and has overcome a series of blood diseases.

 

 

  

The canals of Petersburg in late spring - when twilight comes at 11:30 p.m.

tThe group will visit St. Petersburg before leaving for home on May 24. The pre-revolutionary capital of Russia, home to Vladimir Putin, one of Russia's cultural and educational centers, the city celebrated its 300th anniversary in 2003. While in St. Petersburg students will become familiar with a city built as a challenge to the elements - constructed at the delta of a river that regularly floods during autumn storms from the Gulf of Finland. We will meet with various local environmental groups, whose work touches on water quality issues (a long-term concern in this city of canals), urban green space, and forestry practices in the region north of the city, Karelia - an area now being heavily forested by Finnish companies.

 

Students' welfare during the Short Term is my top priority. While most trips have been hassle-free, there are certain circumstances that are unpredictable. Local contacts in each city include medical personnel. At left, Erica McIninch, a student on the Bates Short Term to Russia in 1999, had an emergency appendectomy in Orel; she's joined here in her post-op condition by one of the attending doctors.

Students should make any pre-existing conditions known to Professor Costlow; vegetarians are encouraged to be realistic about food options - and to remember the sensitivities of less-affluent host families.