Tetiana Perga: Waste recycling in Totalitarian Regimes: Peculiarities of Ukrainian Context of the 1920s

I aim to challenge the prevalent notion that waste recycling activities commenced in the USSR during the Cold War era and demonstrate 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, I 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, I 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. My research is grounded in previously unexplored documents from Ukrainian archives. Short Bio: Tetiana Perga 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. Recent publications include: Tetiana Perga, Waste for the Soviet Economy: Recycling of Rags in Ukraine in the 1920s, in: Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, vol. 6, no. 1 (2023), 1-15, and Eco-Nationalism in the Soviet Union in the Late 1980s and Early 1990s: The Ukrainian Case, in: Frank Jacob and Carsten Schapkow (eds.), Nationalism in a Transnational Age: Irrational Fears and the Strategic Abuse of Nationalist Pride, Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2021, 177-194.