Books by Bathsheba Demuth

“Floating Coast is about the environment and what modern society does with it when we come to this land at the end of the world. What is unique about the book is that she looks at this from both sides of the Bering Strait: American and Soviet, comparing the two archenemies of the Cold War. The regimes had completely different ideologies. They were both messianic in their own right: only they had the right way to deal with the issues of environment, development, and indigenous population. And, indeed, they came with their own playbooks. But the most striking and maybe depressing, conclusion is that they came to the same results. Whatever the policies are, the result is the same, which is a bit disheartening. But that’s also a way to think about us as a world community and what we do with our environment, despite our differences, because it looks like, whatever the differences are, we end in the same place. We are destroying and exploiting the environment by our attempts to civilize it, to turn it into a productive force.” Read more...

The Best Russia Books: the 2020 Pushkin House Prize

Serhii Plokhy, Historian