Ilya Kalinin — Soviet Oil and Russian Cosmism: Techno-Conservative Formation

Ilya Kalinin (IGRec)

As a rule, the technological pathos of mastering nature is associated with the discourse of modernization, contrasting it with the conservative ethos of preserving tradition. Within this framework, a series of oppositions is constructed: civilization vs. culture, modernization vs. tradition, the rush to
the future vs. the preservation of the past, technological vs. organic, machine vs. spiritual, extractive approach to natural resources vs. environmental sensitivity, etc. However, in late Soviet reflections on the relationships between society and nature, technology and natural resources, economy and
culture, we find a specific formation (a combination of technology and ideology) that represents a radical synthesis of these oppositions. We propose to describe this as techno-conservatism, which combines a hybrid of hyper-modernist and conservative themes—radical technological optimism alongside sensitivity to historical tradition, machine enthusiasm fused with a natural philosophy focused on the mythologization of organic nature.

The meeting point of these seemingly incompatible elements is found in the late Soviet history of oil field development, particularly in the various representations of this history (memoirs of geologists and oil industry leaders, journalism and fiction, documentaries, and cinema). The formation I
conceptualize, a characteristic form of energetic imagination, will be analyzed based on the corpus of sources listed above. Notably, certain works (primarily Alexander Prokhanov’s novels The Nomadic Rose and The Place of Action, as well as Andrei Konchalovsky’s film epic Siberiade) allow us to
detect traces of Russian cosmism and radical techno-conservative utopia in the late Soviet reflections on oil and its socio-cultural significance. These ideas, though pushed out of official Soviet culture, were preserved in the depths of the oil fields.