Wednesday, September 24, 2025

Katja Bruisch Publishes Burning Swamps: Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia’s Fossil Economy

Katja Bruisch published Burning Swamps: Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia’s Fossil Economy with Cambridge University Press.

Burning Swamps traces the forgotten role of peat in Russian industrialization and electrification and points to the social and ecological legacies of this history. Providing a corrective to more familiar energy history narratives dominated by coal, oil, and gas and with an eye to the intersecting histories of labour and matter, this book moves beyond the socialism/capitalism binary in historical accounts of the modern Russian economy and underscores the crucial role of seemingly marginal people, places and resources in the broader trajectory of the planetary emergency.