All shook up: the shifting Soviet response to catastrophes, 1917–1991

Extract

Soviet communism sought to transform society and to master nature. But nature occasionally overwhelmed it. Nigel Raab's study of major Soviet disasters offers many original insights into these incidents—all but one of them earthquakes—to explore state responses and social consequences.

Disasters are major crises that require urgent and improvised actions, strain resources and mobilize populations. Through official choices of publicity and suppression, and social processes of remembering and forgetting, they become absorbed into collective memory. As Raab notes, ‘during times of disaster, strengths and weaknesses are exposed in a way that they are not during normal times’ (p. 13). The study of disasters offers insight into how a system works. Raab's case selection helpfully covers different phases of Soviet history, facilitating the comparison and contrast of responses and effects. He also touches on lesser disasters like storms, floods and road accidents to elaborate his themes.

The first of the major events is the Crimean earthquake of 1927. This took place in the last days of the New Economic Policy, before Stalinist collectivization and crash industrialization. The relief effort was regional rather than national, and was left largely to Russia (RSFSR) rather than the Soviet state. Little publicized, it is best known to a wider audience for being mentioned in Ilf and Petrov's comic novel Twelve chairs. The 1948 Ashgabat earthquake occurred as the Cold War was getting under way. High Stalinism could permit no hint of vulnerability, and there was little publicity beyond the local level. The toll of tens of thousands of lives (including the mother of future Turkmen leader Saparmurat Niyazov) could not be mentioned—Soviet media reported fatalities only in neighbouring Iran. Like its Crimean predecessor it was officially forgotten for decades.