Andy Bruno

Stephen F. Cohen Chair of Russian History and Professor, Department of History

Department of History

Campus
IU; IU Bloomington

Full Biography

I am an environmental historian of Russia and the Soviet Union with an interest in many aspects of human interactions with the natural world. My main scholarly ambition has been to demonstrate the pertinence of environmental perspectives to major questions in Russian and Eurasian history. This goal has led me to write about animals and avalanches, climate and conservation, energy and economy, geology and gender, labor and lakes, mysteries and meteorites, revolution and reindeer, subjectivity and socialism, waste and warfare, and other themes. In my work, I highlight the potency of non-human nature and place Russia’s environmental history in comparative and global contexts. A focus on specific locations, such as borderlands in the Arctic and the Siberian wilderness, also characterizes my scholarship. My first book examined the environmental history of economic transformation in the Russian north during the twentieth century and my second book explored the history of the 1908 Tunguska explosion and the efforts to understand it.  I am currently working on two book projects. One will reconsider the growth imperative under Soviet socialism in light of recent theorizing about the Anthropocene and prospects for degrowth and the other will follow anarchist geographer Peter Kropotkin’s return to Russia in 1917 as a means to reflect on the political ecology of the Bolshevik revolution. 

Honors and Awards

  • Finalist for the George Perkins Marsh Prize for the best book in environmental history from the American Society for Environmental History, 2023
  • Honorable mention for the Reginald Zelnik Book Prize for an outstanding monograph on Russian, East European, or Eurasian history from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, 2023
  • Fellowship in Aerospace History, History of Science Society and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 2018

Research Interests

  • Russian and Soviet History
  • Environmental History
  • Global History
  • Climate History
  • Disasters
  • Political Economies and Ecologies
  • Labor and Radicalism

Education

  • PhD in History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011
  • MA in Russian Studies, European University at Saint Petersburg, Russia, 2004
  • BA in History, Reed College, 2003

Courses Taught

  • Climate History
  • Disasters
  • Environmental History
  • Historical Methods
  • Russian Empire
  • Russian Revolution
  • Russia to 1861
  • Stalinism
  • The Soviet Century
  • World History since 1500

 

Publications

Books

  • Tunguska: A Siberian Mystery and Its Environmental Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
  • The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Articles and Chapters

  • “Degrowth and Environmental History: Toward Critical Encounters” (with Matthais Schmelzer), Environmental History 31, no. 1 (January 2026): 121-130.
  • “The Growth Imperative in Soviet Socialism,” Environmental History 31, no. 1 (January 2026): 157-163.
  • “Critical Climate Histories of Eurasia: An Introduction” (with Pey-Yi Chu), The Russian Review 84, no. 2 (April 2025): 183-195.
  • “Socialist Environmental Holism in the Soviet Arctic and the Plains of Hungary” (with Viktor Pál), Ab Imperio, no. 2 (2024): 119-146.
  • “Creating the Soviet Arctic, 1917-1991” (with Ekaterina Kalemeneva) in Adrian Howkins and Peder Roberts, eds., The Cambridge History of the Polar Regions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 462-486.
  • “Atomic Visitors from Outer Space: The Tunguska Nuclear Hypothesis in Soviet Technological Imagination,” The Russian Review 81, no. 1 (January 2022): 92-109.
  • “Studying the Siberian Anthropocene: An Introduction,” The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 48, no. 3 (November 2021): 257-261.
  • “Polluted Pearl of the North: Lake Imandra in the Anthropocene” in David Moon, Nicholas Breyfogle, and Alexandra Bekasova, eds., Place and Nature: Essays in Russian Environmental History (Cambridgeshire: White Horse Press, 2021), 69-91.
  • “Environmental Subjectivities from the Soviet North,” Slavic Review 78, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 1-22.
  • “Climate History of Russia and the Soviet Union,” WIREs Climate Change 9, no. 5 (September/October 2018), doi: 10.1002/wcc.534.
  • “How a Rock Remade the Soviet North: Nepheline in the Khibiny Mountains,” in Nicholas Breyfogle, ed., Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), 147-164.
  • “What Does it Mean to Liberate a Land? Toward an Environmental History of the Russian Revolution,” in Christopher Read, Peter Waldron, and Adele Lindenmeyr, eds., Russia's Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914-22, Book 3: National Disintegration (Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, 2018), 157-177.
  • “A Tale of Two Reindeer: Pastoralism and Preservation in the Soviet Arctic,” REGION: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia 6, no. 2 (2017): 251–271.
  • “A Eurasian Mineralogy: Aleksandr Fersman’s Conception of the Natural World,” Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society 107, no. 3 (September 2016): 518-539.
  • “Tumbling Snow: Vulnerability to Avalanches in the Soviet North,” Environmental History 18, no. 4 (October 2013): 683-709.
  • “Industrial Life in a Limiting Landscape: An Environmental Interpretation of Stalinist Social Conditions in the Far North,” International Review of Social History 55, S18 (December 2010): 153-174.
  • “Making Reindeer Soviet: The Appropriation of an Animal on the Kola Peninsula,” in Jane Costlow and Amy Nelson, eds., Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 117-137.
  • “Russian Environmental History: Directions and Potentials,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 635-650.