"The occupation of beauty": Imagining nature and nation in Latvia

East European Politics and Societies

Volumn 21, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 259-293

  Schwartz, Katrina Z S ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Environment; Homeland; Landscape; Latvia; National identity

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247587610     PISSN: 08883254     EISSN: 15338371     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0888325407299781     Document Type: Article

References (126)

1. Epigram to Staislvs Sali, Latvijas dikoki un retie koki (Riga, Latvia: Zinatne, 1974 ).
2. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1986). 23.
3. Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991). 64.
4. It should be noted here that I use this term in Anthony Smith's sense of a physical landscape invested with ethnic meanings and not in Arjun Appadurai's more metaphorical sense of global ethnoscapes as the shifting and de-territorialized landscapes created by the movements of tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals in the present era of accelerated globalization. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 33.
5. Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 150, 154. For analyses of the construction of homeland in diverse contexts, see, e.g., Carol B. Bardenstein, Trees, Forests, and the Shaping of Palestinian and Israeli Collective Memory, In Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, eds., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999). Piers Gruffud, Remaking Wales: Nation-Building and the Geographical Imagination, 1925-50, Political Geography 14: 3 (1995). 219-39 ; David Lowenthal, European and English Landscapes as National Symbols In David Hooson, ed., Geography and National Identity (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994). and Tom Selwyn, Landscapes of Liberation and Imprisonment: Towards an Anthropology of the Israeli Landscape, In Eric Hirsch and Michael O'Hanlon, eds., Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space ( Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995 ).
6. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: HarperCollins, 1995). 15.
7. Smith, Ethnic Origins, 23.
8. Algimantas Prazauskas observes that among the western littoral nations [of the former Soviet region], the Latvians and Estonians are least burdened with memories, images, and symbols of the distant past. Like some other small nations of Eastern Europe, they draw inspiration from the fact of their own survival after seven centuries of foreign domination. Algimantas Prazauskas, The Influence of Ethnicity on the Foreign Policies of the Western Littoral States, In Roman Szporluk, ed., National Identity and Ethnicity in Russia and the New States of Eurasia (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 161. The notion of 700 years of slavery is mythic in its conflation of foreign domination with slavery: historians note that while manorialism appeared in the Baltic territories in the thirteenth century, it coexisted with extensive free peasant holdings, and serfdom per se began to spread only in the sixteenth century.
9. Edmunds V. Bunke, God, Thine Earth Is Burning: Nature Attitudes and the Latvian Drive for Independence, GeoJournal 26: 2 (1992). 203-9, at 203. See also Edmunds V. Bunke, Reality of Rural Landscape Symbolism in the Formation of a Post-Soviet, Postmodern Latvian Identity, Norsk geografisk Tidsskrift 53 (1999). 121-38.
10. I have explored the tension between these two national discourses, and between the outward- and inward-looking faces of nationalism more generally, in Katrina Z. S. Schwartz, Wild Horses and Great Trees: National Identity and the Global Politics of Nature (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of WisconsinMadison, 2001). and Katrina Z. S. Schwartz, Globalizing the Ethnoscape: Nature and National Identity after Communism ( Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming).
11. With a few notable exceptions, observes geographer Robert J. Kaiser, political and sociological studies of nations and nationalism... have tended to treat place as an insignificant explanatory variable. Robert J. Kaiser, The Geography of Nationalism in Russia and the USSR (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 4. Environmental historians have been much more attentive to the national meanings of place, and more recently so have geographers. On the latter, see Jan Penrose, Nations, States and Homelands: Territory and Territoriality in Nationalist Thought, Nations and Nationalism 8: 3 (2002). 277-97.
12. David Morley and Kevin Robins, No Place Like Heimat: Images of Home(land) in European Culture, In Erica Carter, James Donald, and Judith Squires, eds., Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location (London: Lawrence Wishart, 1993). 8. Kaiser's notion of national territoriality also identifies a strictly exclusionary role for homeland (Kaiser, Geography of Nationalism). See also Graham Smith et al., Nation-Building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 49.
13. Ivo Banac and Katherine Verdery, eds., National Character and National Ideology in Interwar Eastern Europe ( New Haven, CT: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1995 ).
14. Tamas Hofer, The Creation of Ethnic Symbols from the Elements of Peasant Culture, In Peter F. Sugar, ed., Ethnic Diversity and Conflict in Eastern Europe ( Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1980 ).
15. O. Kronwald [ A. Kronvalds ], Der Unterricht in der Heimatskunde (Dorpat, 1867). ALatvian translation by Bebru Juris was published in 1922 in Riga under the title Dzimtenes Mcba.
16. Atis Kronvalds, Tagadnei: izlase (Riga, Latvia: Liesma, 1987). 56.
17. Atis Kronvalds, Tagadnei: izlase, Ibid., 57.
18. Jazeps Rudztis, introduction to Kronvalds, Tagadnei, 3.
19. Jazeps Rudztis, introduction to Kronvalds, Ibid., 7.
20. Kronvalds, Tagadnei, 249.
21. Kronvalds, Tagadnei, Ibid., 247.
22. David Kirby, The Baltic World 1772-1993: Europe's Northern Periphery in an Age of Change (London: Longman, 1995). 232, 237.
23. Ghita Ionescu, Eastern Europe, In Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner, eds., Populism: Its Meaning and National Characteristics (New York: Macmillan, 1969). 97, 99.
24. Quoted in Adolfs ilde, Latvijas vesture 1914-1940 (Stockholm, Sweden: Daugava, 1976). 370.
25. Quoted in Adolfs ilde, Latvijas vesture 1914-1940 Ibid., 370.
26. Arnolds Aizsilnieks, Latvijas saimniecb as vsture 1914-1945 (Stockholm, Sweden: Daugava, 1968). 238.
27. Markus Gailtis, quoted in ilde, Latvijas vesture, 368.
28. Latvia was not ethnically homogeneous, of course, and this cultural pluralism was recognized by the interwar state, which was highly supportive (at least in principle) of minority rights. Nonetheless, nationalist politicians, alarmed by the high levels of electoral support for minority and leftist parties, from the outset began to worry about a nation-state betrayed and planned to use the power of the state to preserve the nation. Aldis Purs, Latvians as an Imagined Community (Paper presented at the Third Annual Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, Columbia University, New York, April 1998), 16.
29. Daina Stukuls Eglitis, Imagining the Nation: History, Modernity, and Revolution in Latvia (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). 185.
30. Purs, Latvians as an Imagined Community.
31. Historian Aldis Purs notes that despite the popular understanding of the vienseta as a single-family homestead, in fact many farmhands and other unrelated individuals also lived and worked in the typical homestead (personal communication, n.d.).
32. Janis Akuraters, Kalpa zena vasara: atmias zmjums (Riga, Latvia: Latvijas valsts izdevniecba, 1902 / 1956). 1.
33. Rdolfs Blaumanis, Indrni (Rockville, MD: ALA Kultras birojs, 1904 / 1965). 66.
34. K. Birnbaums, Mea dienas Latvija 1934. gada, in Mesaimniecbas rakstu krjums, vol. 12 (Riga, Latvia: Latvijas Mekopju savienba, 1934). 166.
35. Krlis Ulmanis, is darbs apstiprins msu labo gribu un nedziestoo sirds kvli, Mea Dzve 129 (1936). 4587.
36. Andrejs Plakans, The Latvians: A Short History (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1995). 134.
37. While the GNP share of agriculture, forestry, and fisheries diminished from 72 percent in 1933 to 66 percent in 1941, that of industry and the trades grew from 28 to 34 percent. And if the contribution of Latvia's state-owned forestry sector is subtracted, then agriculture's share of GNP barely exceeded that of industry. Heinrihs Strods, Latvijas lauksaimniecb a s v stu r e: no vissenkajiem laikiem ldz XX gs. 90. gadiem (Riga, Latvia: Zvaigzne, 1992), 162.
38. Artrs Boruks, Zemnieks, zeme un zemkopb a Latvij: no senkiem laikiem lidz msdi-e n m (Riga, Latvia: Gramatvedis, 1995), 361.
39. On the Soviet land reclamation program and other reforms of the 1960s, see Thane Gustafson, Reform in Soviet Politics: Lessons of Recent Policies on Land and Water (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981);
40. Zhores Medvedev, Soviet Agriculture (New York: Norton, 1987);
41. Alec Nove, Soviet Agriculture: The Brezhnev Legacy and Gorbachev's Cure (Los Angeles: Rand/UCLA Center for the Study of Soviet International Behavior, 1988).
42. Juris Dreifelds, Latvia, In Philip R. Pryde, ed., Environmental Resources and Constraints in the Former Soviet Union (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995). 116.
43. Strods, Latvijas lauksaimniecbas vsture, 256.
44. On the radical transformationism of Soviet environmental policies, see Robert G. Darst Jr., Environmentalism in the USSR: The Opposition to the River Diversion Projects, Soviet Economy 4:3(1988): 223-52;
45. Joan DeBardeleben, The Environment and Marxism-Leninism (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1985);
46. Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly Jr., Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature under Siege (New York: Basic Books, 1992);
47. Loren Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993);
48. David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970);
49. Paul Josephson, Totalitarian Science Technology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996);
50. Boris Komarov, The Destruction of Nature in the Soviet Union (White Plains, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1980);
51. D. J. Peterson, Troubled Lands: The Legacy of Soviet Environmental Destruction (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993);
52. Douglas R. Weiner, Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988);
53. Douglas R. Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999);
54. Charles E. Ziegler, Environmental Policy in the USSR (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987).
55. Aija Melluma, Metamorphoses of Latvian Landscapes during Fifty Years of Soviet Rule, Geojournal 33: 1 (1994). 55-62, at 56, 61.
56. Strods, Latvijas lauksaimniecbas vsture, 240.
57. Strods, Latvijas lauksaimniecbas vsture, Ibid., 242.
58. Strods, Latvijas lauksaimniecbas vsture, Ibid., 248.
59. Strods, Latvijas lauksaimniecbas vsture, Ibid., 250.
60. Romuald J. Misiunas and Rein Taagepera, The Baltic States: Years of Dependence, 1940-1990, 2 nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 112.
61. Strods, Latvijas lauksaimniecbas vsture, 247
62. and Boruks, Zemnieks, 363.
63. According to Soviet statistics, the employment shares underwent a complete reversal from 66 percent for agriculture and 13 percent for industry in 1930 to 16 and 40 percent, respectively, in 1987. Brian Van Arkadie and Mats Karlsson, Economic Survey of the Baltic States (New York: New York University Press, 1992). 70. (The authors note that Soviet statistics may not be accurate or meaningful.)
64. Boruks, Zemnieks, 361.
65. V. Ozola, Jauno kultras ainavu veidojot, Dabas un vestures kalendrs [hereafter, DVK] 1976: 189-191, at 190. See also I. Dulbe, Melioracija un ainava, DVK 1973: 124-27 ; and V. Ozola, Laikmets un ainava, DVK 1974: 121-23.
66. Valentin Rasputin, What We Have: A Baikal Prologue without an Epilogue, in Rasputin, Siberia on Fire (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989). 196.
67. Thomas B. Rainey, Siberian Writers and the Struggle to Save Lake Baikal, Environmental History Review 15: 1 (1991). 48-60.
68. Quoted in Weiner, Little Corner of Freedom, 335.
69. E.g., L. Suna, Pilstu zao zonu veidoanas principi, Jaunkais mesaimniecb 12 (1970). 57-66, at 57.
70. Anonymous, Kokidabas piemineki Latvija, Mea Dzv e 4 (1938). 179-80. In pre-Soviet Estonia, closeness to nature was similarly seen as central to national identity, and glacial erratic boulders figured prominently, like great trees in Latvia, as markers of that identity. Rob Smurr, Nationalizing Nature: The History, Preservation and Meaning of Glacial Erratic Boulders in Estonia ( Paper presented at the conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Pittsburgh, PA, November 2002 ).
71. Staislavs Sali, Saudzsim vecos dikokus, Jaunkais mesaimniecb 3 (1962). 68-73. The following minimum diameters were required to qualify as a dikoks by size: oak4 meters; pine3.5; ash, fir, aspen, linden, willow3; black alder, elm, maple, birch2.5; juniper0.8; yew treeany size. Staislavs Sali, Latvijas PSR dikoki un retie koki, Jaunkais mesaimniecb 12 (1970). 69-75 ; at 69.
72. Guntis Eni, Latvijas dikoku izncinanas vsture, Mea Dzve 1 (1975). 28-33.
73. Staislavs Sali, Latvijas dikoki un retie koki ( Riga, Latvia: Zinatne, 1974 ).
74. Guntis Eni, KoksDabas piemineklis (Riga, Latvia: Zinatne, 1982). 17.
75. Guntis Eni, Dikoki Baltijas republikas, Mesaimniecba un merpniecba 1 (1978). 26-30.
76. Guntis Eni, Slinkums? Problma? Nezinaana ? Padomju Jaunatne, 19 February, 1978 ; and Guntis Eni, interview by the author, Riga, Latvia, 13 July, 1999.
77. Zigmunds Skujins, Imants Ziedonis Opens Clocks, trans. Juris Silenieks, World Literature Today 72: 2 (1998). 297-300, at 298.
78. Mra Zlte, In Imants Ziedonis, Tutepats. Kopotie raksti, vol. 9 (Riga, Latvia: Nordik, 1998). 385.
79. Ziedonis, Tutepats. Ziedonis compiled the book during the late 1980s from journal entries; it was republished in 1998 as volume 9 of his collected writings. It should be noted that after the era of the National Awakening, Latvians have no longer typically used the German word Heimat to denote Latvian landscapes. However, I use the term to refer to the dominant Latvian discourse of nature as cultivated ethnoscape because this discourse has in important ways remained true to its nineteenth-century roots.
80. Eni, Koks, 24.
81. Janna Kurste, Mtiskaisfolklor, literatr, mksl (Riga, Latvia: Zinatne, 1999). 182, 201-2. See also Vilius Audrius Dundzila, Baltic Indigenous Religion, In Bron Raymond Taylor, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature ( New York: Continuum International, 2005 ).
82. Guntis Eni, Latvija ir un bs dikoku zeme, Lauku Avze, 6 September, 1994, 28.
83. Eni, Koks, 28.
84. Eni, 1999 interview.
85. Eni, Latvija ir un bs.
86. Guntis Eni, Tvu stas drgumi tavs paa roks, DVK 1994: 86-92, at 86 ; Sali, Saudzsim, 70; and Sali, Latvijas PSR dikoki, 58.
87. Ziedonis, Tutepats, 25.
88. Ibid., 290.
89. Ibid., 49-50.
90. Rasputin, Siberia on Fire, 109-10.
91. Ibid., 177
92. Both Rasputin and Ziedonis were thus following in the footsteps not of nineteenth-century German biological determinists or their explicitly racialist Nazi descendants, but of environmental determinists like Herder, who conceived of nature as determining national traits through the transmission of place-specific cultural characteristics, rather than through acquired genetic characteristics. It was not blood but language which Herder regarded as the essential criterion of a Volk (F. M. Barnard, Herder's Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism [Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1965], 70).
93. In the 1920s and 1930s, in contrast, German conservationism was co-opted by the Nazi regime, and environmental determinism gave way to full-fledged racialism, with efforts to eradicate 'Jewish influence' in the natural landscape itself (John Alexander Williams, 'The Chords of the German Soul Are Tuned to Nature': The Movement to Preserve the Natural Heimat from the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich, Central European History 29, no. 3 [1996]: 339-84, at 381).
94. See also Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience (Edinburgh, UK: AK Press, 1995);
95. Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989);
96. Josephson, Totalitarian Science Technology. Thus, Heimat has become associated with the Nazi doctrine of Blood and Soil, although its original usage invoked environmental, not biological determinism. Mainstream Latvian national discourse, however, has never emphasized blood and soil. Notions of rootedness in place are far more central to Latvian self-understandings than are notions of kinship or genetic purity. This rootedness is seen as springing from agricultural labor and the cultivation of nature, rather than from the soil as repository of ancestors' bones. Connectedness to the ancestors themselves is ensured by preserving and reproducing the landscapes shaped by their labor.
97. Ziedonis, Tutepats, 231.
98. Ibid., 263.
99. Eni, Koks, 66; and Ziedonis, Tutepats, 49.
100. Eni, Dikoki Baltijas republikas; and Guntis Eni, Tepat Latvij (Riga: Liesma, 1984). 26.
101. Guntis Eni, Ozolti, zemzarti, Oktobra karogs, 15 May, 1979, 3.
102. Imants Ziedonis, Epigram to Sali, Latvijas dikoki.
103. Ziedonis, Tutepats, 11.
104. Ibid., 197.
105. Quoted in ibid., 356.
106. Imants Ziedonis, interview by the author, Riga, Latvia, 9 August, 1999.
107. Nils R. Muiznieks, The Daugavpils Hydro Station and Glasnost in Latvia, Journal of Baltic Studies 18 (1987). 63-70.
108. Jane I. Dawson, Eco-Nationalism: Anti-nuclear Activism and National Identity in Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). See also Marshall I. Goldman, Environmentalism and Nationalism: An Unlikely Twist in an Unlikely Direction, In John Massey Stewart, ed., The Soviet Environment: Problems, Policies and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Barbara Jancar, The Environmental Attractor in the Former USSR: Ecology and Regional Change, In Ronnie D. Lipschutz and Ken Conca, eds., The State and Social Power in Global Environmental Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Philip R. Pryde, The Environmental Basis for Ethnic Unrest in the Baltic Republics, In Stewart, Soviet Environment ; and Charles E. Ziegler, Political Participation, Nationalism and Environmental Politics in the USSR, In Stewart, Soviet Environment. My interpretation of the Latvian case supports Andrew Tickle and Ian Welsh's claim that the environment is more strongly bound into the structures and values of these [Central and East European Communist] societies than the surrogacy theory would suggest. Andrew Tickle and Ian Welsh, Environmental Politics, Civil Society and Post-Communism, In Tickle and Welsh, eds., Environment and Society in Eastern Europe (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1998). 159.
109. Juris Dreifelds, Two Latvian Dams: Two Confrontations, Baltic Forum 6: 1 (1989). 11-24, at 13. Janna Kurste observes that in Latvian belletristic literature as well, the centuries-old archetypal Daugava image was preserved in the conciousness, and even more the unconscious of the Latvian reader. Every now and then (and especially during the period of nationalawakening)this image wasrevived,through overlydirectremindersof the sacrality of the Daugava(Kurste, Mtiskais, 104).
110. Dreifelds, Two Latvian Dams, 13.
111. Dabas retumu kratuve brochure.
112. Ilze Janele, Ar skatuuz savu kultrainavu, DVK 1990: 217-20 ; Andris Salna, Latvieu lauku stas psihokomforts, DVK 1990: 220-24, at 220 ; and Dzintars Driba, Harmonija latvieu tautas arhitektr ?, DVK 1992: 135-36.
113. Edgars Mucenieks, Msu dzves pamatu dzves zia, DVK 1992: 132-33.
114. Valdemrs Anctis, " Latviea svtvietas un svtumi, DVK 1993: 219-24.
115. rija Karpova, Tva majas un latviea raksturs, DVK 1993: 214-19 ; Jkabs Raipulis, Latvieu labas un sliktas pabas, DVK 1993: 205-14 ; Janele, Ar skatu ; Driba, Harmonija ; rija Elksne, Lai sauktos par latvieti, DVK 1992: 143 ; and Valdemrs Anctis, Par latvisko dabas izjtu, DVK 1993: 99-103.
116. Eglitis, Imagining the Nation, 80-84.
117. Bank of Latvia Web site, http://www.bank.lv/eng/main/lvnaud/papnaud/.
118. According to Unwin and Hewitt, The importance of this rural cultural identity to Latvia is also matched, although to a somewhat lesser extent, by the rural imagery depicted on the banknotes of... Estonia and Lithuania. Based on their comprehensive database of the banknotes of the new states of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, they report that 80 percent of notes overall employ human faces as the dominant image. Tim Unwin and Virginia Hewitt, Banknotes and National Identity in Central and Eastern Europe, Political Geography 20 (2001). 1005-28, at 1017, 1018, and 1026.
119. Students of Bauska High School no. 1, Letter to Society, Karogs 6 (1999). 249-51.
120. Skaidrte Albertia, interview by the author, Riga, Latvia, 3 November, 1990.
121. Quoted in Mark Bassin, Turner, Solov'ev, and the 'Frontier Hypothesis':The Nationalist Signification of Open Spaces, Journal of Modern History 65 (September 1993). 473-511, at 498.
122. Rasputin, Siberia on Fire, 189, 191.
123. Edmunds V. Bunke, The Case of the Missing Sublime in Latvian Landscape Aesthetics and Ethics, Ethics Place, and Environment 4: 3 (2001). 235-46. Since the National Awakening, folklorist Kurste observes, Latvia's homely landscapesthe peaceful plains, barely noticeable inclines and moderate hills, calm rivers"-have been identified with defining national characteristics:"non-aggressivity,peaceability,proportionality (Kurste, Mtis k a is, 374). Latvian landscape aesthetics have also typically lacked religious signification, in marked contrast, for example, to Polish Romantics' long tradition of celebrating Bialowieza Forest not only as primeval but as the Great Church of the future religion of the Spirit. Stuart Franklin, Bialowieza Forest, Poland: Representation, Myth, and the Politics of Dispossession, Environment and Planning A 34 (2002). 1459-85, at 1469.
124. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). 56. Too much belief in what is patently not so, concurs Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 2 nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 12.
125. On the ways in which discourse constitutes meanings and produces interpretive possibilities by making it virtually impossible to think outside of it, see Roxanne Lynn Doty, Foreign Policy as Social Construction; A Post-positivist Analysis of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy in the Philippines, International Studies Quarterly 37 (1993). 297-320, at 302.
126. Schwartz, Nature and National Identity ; Katrina Z. S. Schwartz, Wild Horses in a 'European Wilderness': Imagining Sustainable Development in the Post-Soviet Countryside, Cultural Geographies 12: 3 (2005). 292-320 ; and Katrina Z. S. Schwartz, 'Masters in Our Native Place': The Politics of National Parks on the Road from Communism to 'Europe,' Political Geography 25 (January 2006). 42-71.