Andy Bruno's ambitious and impeccably researched monograph revisits the territory examined by Paul Josephson's The Russian Conquest of the Arctic (2014) and John McCannon's Red Arctic (1998), and arrives at many of the same negative conclusions, but sets itself apart in its insistence upon finding new explanations. According to Bruno, scholars have tended to explain Soviet environmental shortcomings by arguing that a) communist economics are inherently wasteful and destructive; b) competition with the west prompted Soviet leaders to take the short view; or c) communist political systems are unable to balance conflicting priorities and thus ignore environmental problems. Bruno, without discounting these contentions, argues that they are insufficient. Ultimately, Bruno agrees with previous analyses that blame the Soviet regime for sometimes astonishing and sometimes senseless environmental destruction, but wants to add subtlety to our understanding by showing the influence of three other factors: a deep ambivalence toward nature inherent in Russian culture, the peculiarities of the world economy in the mid-twentieth century, and the impact of the natural world itself.

In the early chapters of the book, Bruno introduces his most developed explanation for Russian environmental failures: the existence of a destructive synergy between a desire to assimilate nature among some influential actors, and a desire to conquer it among others. Bruno acknowledges the well-documented Soviet drive to subdue nature, especially prevalent during the Stalin era, but also sees a parallel discursive thread in Russian and Soviet culture that strove for harmony and mutual benefit for humanity and the non-human world. Bruno spends more time discussing the latter (because the former has received significant attention) by showing its significance before and during the construction of the Russian railroad line. For example, Bruno cites a Soviet pamphlet, The Colonization of the North and the Means of Communication, which described the far north as “uninhabited and deserted,” and thus in need of improvement for humans as well as for itself (29). Bruno also sees this dynamic at work in the development of the nepheline industry, with scientists such as Aleksandr Fersman arguing that well-designed industrial combines could avoid polluting the surroundings and thereby generate social and economic benefits, while his contemporaries who cared little about the integrity of the natural world could proceed unchecked precisely because of Fersman's optimism.

Bruno highlights the importance of his second explanatory mechanism, the world economy, most directly in Chapter 5, “Scarring the Beautiful Surroundings,” which focuses on Soviet metal working. Here, Bruno cites a Lonely Planet travel guide describing the smelting town of Monchegorsk as a reasonable approximation of Hell. “Why did a town serving the nickel industry in the far north turn into an environmental tragedy,” Bruno asks, and why were the areas downwind of the smelters transformed into “hauntingly denuded landscapes with occasional dead shrubs and trees protruding from the toxic ground”? (170–71). In Bruno's view, the shift from extensive to intensive industrial development in the late twentieth century in much of the world decreased the profits generated by heavy industry, which drove the Soviets to overexploit and thus pollute. Hence, “neither the inherent functioning of the centralized command economy nor the competitive logic of the capitalist world-system sufficiently account for the massive environmental ruin in the Soviet Union”—instead, it is the combination of the two impulses that produced a hellscape (210).

Bruno's third explanatory mechanism centers on the agency of the natural world, because in Bruno's view, the characteristics of the reindeer, the rocks, and the railway beds shaped the world that the Russians made. As Bruno puts it, the “physical, geographical, and ecological features of the Kola north offered opportunities for, accommodated meddling by, and posed resistance to Soviet industrializers” (7). Bruno is careful to stop short of ascribing will to inanimate concepts such as climate, hydrology, and geology, but he maintains that such entities can shape history; in the case of valuable ores, Bruno says that they “lured exploration geologists to the north” (9). This is an interesting philosophical claim, although in some cases, it strains credulity; the aforementioned valuable ores, for instance, undoubtedly figure in the story of the Soviet far north, but are these rocks in some way responsible for their own careless exploitation by actively luring prospectors? At one point, Bruno goes so far as to accuse the rocks, not as easily processed as Soviet planners anticipated, of “chicanery” (99).

The Nature of Soviet Power represents an impressive effort to view Russian environmental history from a wider perspective. Rather than tell a simple story of Bolshevik aggression and myopia, Bruno describes the damaged northern environment as the result of multiple interacting forces. At times, the outcome seems overdetermined and the interaction between the forces seems murky, since Bruno's three proposed causes augment rather than replace those that have come before, and do not appear consistently throughout the narrative. Overall, however, Bruno has made a compelling contribution that should spur new and much-needed conversations.