Zeit: 18-20 Uhr

Tetiana Perqa (Heidelberg):
Waste recycling in Totalitarian Regimes: Peculiarities of Ukrainian Context of the 1920s

Erster Vortrag im Berlin-Brandenburger Colloquium für Umweltgeschichte (BBC) im Sommersemester 2024
Veranstalter: Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF Potsdam)
Organisation des BBC im Sommersemester 2024: Jan-Henrik Meyer (ZZF Potsdam), Astrid M. Kirchhof (Wandlitz)

About the presentation
Tetiana PerqaI will address the role of waste in sustaining the existence of the Soviet totalitarian regime. She aims to challenge the prevalent notion that waste recycling activities commenced in the USSR during the Cold War era and demonstrates that the implementation of extensive waste reuse programs began from the very inception of the Soviet Union, as early as the 1920s. Taking the Ukrainian SSR as a case study, which ranked second after the RSFSR in terms of economic development, she will illustrate the connection between waste collection and war, charity, and barter, as well as various practices employed by Ukrainian collectors in intense competition for waste. Additionally, she will demonstrate that during the early Soviet waste regime, various colonial practices concerning resources began to form, one of which involves the extraction of waste from the periphery. Her research is grounded in previously unexplored documents from Ukrainian archives.

About Tetiana Perga
She received her Ph.D. degree from Kyiv State University named Taras Shevchenko, Kyiv, Ukraine. She has been working at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine for more than 30 years. She has been a DAAD fellow at IOS Regensburg (2018), and at Heidelberg University (2022), and is currently a Volkswagen Foundation research fellow at Heidelberg University (2022-2024). She is a member of the European Society of Environmental History (ESEH), Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem Research Group in Jewish environmental history. Her main research interest is environmental history.