I am an environmental historian and researcher within the field of environmental humanities. The focus of my research lies in examining the impact of industrialization and climate change on landscapes and communities in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, from the nineteenth century to the present day.
In 2013, I defended my Candidate of Sciences dissertation in History at the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tatarstan. In 2024, I completed my PhD at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Since 2014, I have been a member of the European Society for Environmental History. I am currently based at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe in Leipzig.
Melting Mountains. Society, Environment, and the Vertical Climate Frontier in the Greater Altai (1950-2020)
My current research project explores how the peoples of the Greater Altai have perceived, experienced, and adapted to climate change between 1950 and 2020.
This transboundary region—situated at the heart of Eurasia and divided among Kazakhstan, Russia, China, and Mongolia—is home to a rich mosaic of cultures and ecosystems that are acutely vulnerable to a changing climate. The project investigates how climatic transformations have affected traditional economies, local ecologies, and community life, with particular attention to rising temperatures, shifting precipitation patterns, and their cascading effects.
Special emphasis is placed on social conflicts surrounding climate risk governance, as well as on the evolving relationship between local populations and state institutions. By centering postcolonial perspectives and the notion of climate injustice, this research aims to illuminate the lived realities of climate crisis in a region often overlooked by global climate discourse.
The project is funded by the Leibniz Association (2024–2029) and hosted by the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) in Leipzig.
My previous project explored the history of industrial pollution—one of the most pressing environmental challenges of the modern era—and its role in shaping early environmental governance in the Russian Empire. It demonstrated how efforts to combat water contamination from industrial waste fostered new forms of interaction among citizens, experts, and state officials. These interactions helped lay the foundations for environmental legislation and a broader civic engagement with ecological issues.
Pollution—understood as “matter out of place”—proved to be deeply entangled with social hierarchies, political ideologies, and the evolving civic culture of the late imperial period. By adopting a localized and archival-driven approach, the study offered new insights into the emergence of environmental consciousness.
The project addressed a significant gap in the historiography of environmental regulation. Whereas water pollution control in Western Europe and the United States has been extensively researched, Russia’s role in nineteenth-century global debates on pollution had remained largely overlooked. My findings show that the Russian Empire—an autocratic polity with advanced scientific institutions, a rapidly industrializing economy, and vast territorial complexity—developed early mechanisms for managing industrial pollution well before the Soviet period. Moreover, these proto-environmental initiatives helped shape Soviet ecological policies and proved remarkably durable, even through the revolutionary transformations of 1917.
In Dire Straits. Struggle with Industrial Water Pollution and birth of Russia’s Environmental Policy(1873-1931)
