18 February 2026

Uncovering Russia’s dark soul

The country’s vast woods have been overlooked in our understanding of its violent history

Trees appear more frequently than rulers in The Oak and the Larch, Sophie Pinkham’s ambitious book about the history of Russia, traced from prehistoric times to the present day. Nearly 50,000 anti-war citizens, helped by the organisation Idite Lesom (“Escape through the Forest”), have fled the biggest modern land empire by wooded routes into neighbouring countries or remain hiding among the Russian pines and oaks.

This is an old phenomenon. For centuries, forests have been a friend to those on the run from Muscovite, tsarist and Soviet communist invaders and oppressors. A rights activist has said on behalf of Karelia’s Sámi people, “We have lived on these lands for thousands of years. Do you know how many Putins there have been in our time? This is the tactic: go into the woods, hide, don’t stick your head out, and wait!”

Russians were among the earliest refugees hunted by the armed forces. The authorities were also motivated by commercial objectives: when the tsars moved into Siberia, one of their goals was attaining the valuable furs of the sable in the forests and the beavers in the rivers. The indigenous tribes were penalised if ever they failed to facilitate the trade.

Even so, territorial conquest produced tensions in Russia’s management of landscape. So long as hunting remained a primary recreation for the elite, forests needed to be preserved, often by inflicting punishment.

Hunting did not remain the nobility’s sole priority. In the 18th century, Peter the Great gave urgency to the requirements of his new navy and, in quest of timber for his ships, decreed capital punishment for anyone who chopped down even a single oak tree – even where people in outlying regions needed woodlands to build their settlements.

For much of the 19th century the Caucasus mountains were a zone of fighting. The army commanders took the strategic decision to devastate the wooded areas from where the Dagestani and Chechen raiders attacked. The resultant deforestation wrought serious damage to the natural habitat.

Pinkham’s book offers a unique way to understand the shifts and turns of Russian and Soviet history, tugging the focus away from conventional accounts of high politics and armaments production. She dwells on the role of the arts – more precisely literature – in trying to shake Russians out of assuming that they could do to the unbuilt environment whatever took their fancy. The authorities under tsars and commissars were warned against treating their empire as a vast playground.

The novelist Leo Tolstoy was among the first to suggest that the old ways of life among Russians and Chechens were of more lasting value than the timber, furs, oil and gold that dominated imperial commerce. He set an example by refusing to cut down the trees on his vast family estate. Dropping the customs of his ancestors, he recommended the way of the peasantry. Anton Chekhov cast a more sceptical eye on rural life but his last play, The Cherry Orchard, lamented the felling of trees for dachas being built for the nouveaux riches.

When seizing power in the 1917 revolution, the communists rejected this ideology. One of them memorably called it “the belch of reactionary romanticism”. Bolshevism under Stalin offered panegyrics to the conquest of nature. Industrialisation and agricultural collectivisation gained official precedence over popular needs. The entire peasantry suffered appalling hardship; wherever ethnic groups had a nomadic pattern of life, the Stalinist militias forcibly “sedentarised” them. Before they could become farmers and meet the exorbitant grain quotas for the authorities, they chopped down the surrounding forests to increase the sown acreage.

As Pinkham points out, Stalin realised that this was producing an ecological disaster that held a dagger to the throat of his economic objectives. After the Second World War he agreed to reforestation measures. Implementation was counter-productive because he took advice from his crackbrained chief biologist, Trofim Lysenko, who assured Stalin that acorns planted in inhospitable soil would inaugurate a paradise of oak trees. Darwinian competition for survival, he insisted, would soon lead to a superlative wooded covering that no capitalist horticulture could match.

Stalin died in 1953 without having recognised that Lysenko’s ignorance was causing almost as much damage as deforestation had done in the 1930s. Buthis belated indulgence of forestry at least began an invigorating trend in Soviet literature. Although the references to Stalin in Leonid Leonov’s The Russian Forest (1954) were removed, the author’s mystical evocations of the spirit of woodland survived the censor’s red pencil and earned him the 1957 Lenin Prize.

A swathe of the intelligentsia joined in a quiet campaign against communist eulogies to urbanisation and industrialism at the expense of simple older Russian values. The Kremlin allowed the campaign because it at least condemned foreign capitalist alternatives. During Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, many of them came to the fore. The novelist Valentin Rasputin even belonged to the Presidential Council. Such writers received the freedom to denounce the recent damage done to rivers, lakes and woods.

Fittingly, the Soviet Union’s final lurch into oblivion began in December 1991, when the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belorussia met in the Belovezha Forest near the Polish frontier. It had been maintained in a primeval condition by successive rulers of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian empire, who enjoyed hunting the wild boar and bison. The Ukrainian president, Leonid Kravchuk, embarrassed himself by failing to shoot any of the pent-in game before the political talks began. The next day, sitting with Russia’s Boris Yeltsin and Belorussia’s Stanislav Shushkevich, he co-signed the death certificate of the multinational Soviet empire.

Subsequent years have not been kind to many forests in the ex-USSR, even when their rulers proclaimed a commitment to conservation. Donbas has suffered a prodigious wartime loss of its woodland. Pinkham does not deal with the Russian army’s devastation of Ukrainian pine and broadleaf trees, presumably because the book has “Russia and its Empires” in its subtitle – and, Vladimir Putin notwithstanding, Ukraine is no longer part of an imperial domain.

Between 2001 and 2023, Russia lost about 12 per cent of its tree cover through climatic change. In 2021 the Siberian forests experienced the largest wildfires in Russian annals until blazes even worse than them broke out in 2024 and generated a smoke haze over the Pacific as far as California.

Trees still mean a lot to Russians today. As anyone who has lived among the Russians will say, they have a stronger connection to the ways of their rural past than people in most Western countries. They know where to gather wild strawberries in the forest; their knowledge of fungi, both edible and poisonous, remains intact; many of them have the skills to construct wooden dachas and sheds.

Sophie Pinkham succeeds in writing with a leaf-like lightness while focusing on heavy and important themes for both Russia’s future and ours. She quotes from an episode in one of Valentin Rasputin’s great Siberian stories, in which a young fellow declares man to be the king of nature. This draws a cutting response from Darya, an elderly woman unashamed of her time-honoured mindset: “Yes, yes, king. But just you reign for a bit and you’ll be sorry!”

Robert Service’s “The August Coup” will be published by Picador in June

The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires
Sophie Pinkham
William Collins, 304pp, £25

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[Further reading: Robert Duvall was a class act]