Mega-Dams in the Hydrologics of the Socialist Anthropocene

This article considers artworks that recorded the construction of four mega dams in Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia and Siberia between the 1930s and 1960s, which as exemplary hydroforming projects trailblazed the expansion of the socialist developmentalist model to the non-Russian territories of the Soviet Union. As centrepieces of the planned economy, mega dams performed as engines of the expansion of heavy industry, as infrastructural hubs for resource extraction, as drivers of social mobilization, and as markers of the enlisting of nature in the building of the socialist system. State commissioned representations of dam building by Gustavs Klucis, Issak Brodsky, Mikayil Abdullayev, Ural Tansykbayev and Wolfgang Mattheuer are approached through the concept of the Socialist Anthropocene to reveal the geological scale of socialist interventions in hydraulic systems, the goals of social transformation with which they were entwined, and changing environmental policies, practices and attitudes. At issue is the extent to which socialist realism was a vehicle not just for the celebration of the hero projects of Soviet industrialization, but could also bring an implicit environmental critique of their social and ecological impacts.

ARTMargins, Volume 14, Issue 2, pp. 11-38.

doi:10.1162/artm_a_00411

https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/14/2/11/131441/Mega-Dams-in-the-Hydrologics-of-the-Socialist

Content for this article is available at MIT Press. It is available as: No Access/Subscription Only . Click here for more information.