Waste in totalitarian regimes: recycling in the early Soviet Union. Ukrainian context

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr.-Ing. Tetiana Perga, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 541235895

This project is aimed at investigating and conceptualizing waste recycling in the early Soviet Union, the period of origination, and the establishment of this policy. We seek to challenge the popular idea that waste recycling activities started in the USSR after WWII and demonstrate that in the Soviet Union, the implementation of extensive waste reuse programs began from its earliest days of existence. The case of the USSR not only illustrates the peculiarities of waste processing under a totalitarian regime in conditions of economic scarcity and limited consumption but also allows us to examine its waste disposal policy through the lens of colonial studies, center-periphery relations, and their projection onto contemporary relations between some post-Soviet states. Our hypothesis posits that during the early Soviet waste regime, various colonial Soviet practices began to take shape, and one of them - was pumping resources from the periphery. We consider that this applies not only to various natural resources but also to waste. We intend to demonstrate this by taking the example of the Ukrainian SSR. This project opens up prospects for the exploration of regional specific of waste recycling in the USSR which will deepen our knowledge about this state and for a comparative analysis of the Soviet waste management policies with similar activities in other totalitarian and non-totalitarian regimes that existed in Europe in the early 20th century, such as Nazi Germany. The central question of this research remains: What role do waste materials play in the functioning of totalitarian regimes? How might a waste (their scarcity and abundance) impact the development of the economy, technology, social relations, networks of various actors, and consumption culture? This project is based on previously unexplored documents from the Ukrainian archives, Soviet scientific-popular literature and Soviet press.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Heike Weber