Nataliia Laas

This project overturns the conventional view that the late Soviet economy was primarily plagued by shortages and shows that the chief difficulty was in fact overproduction and waste. Based on research conducted in more than a dozen archives in Estonia, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States, the project argues that after the Second World War, the Soviet Union faced a new challenge of overproducing factories, glutted markets, and the excess of useless commodities. This economy of waste provoked popular “waste anxieties” about the squandering and overexploitation of natural resources, labor, energy, and capital. By the late 1980s, Soviet society became thoroughly engrossed in radiation- and nitrate-poisoning panics over toxic waste found in food, water, and air. Concerns over waste represented a form of mass environmental thinking under socialism that defined the proper relations between the economy and the environment. Politicized “waste anxieties” prompted the people to defend their consumer and ecological rights and to reimagine their relationship with the socialist state through the concept of environmental citizenship. By uncovering socialist waste, this project urges readers to think about modern history as a history of the global movement of toxins, discards, and useless objects.