SUMMARY:

Recent environmental history scholarship has suggested that a distinctive environmental orientation existed in the state-socialist countries of Eastern Europe. Scholars working on countries ranging from Czechoslovakia and East Germany to Hungary and the Soviet Union have reevaluated the uniformly negative environmental assessments of state-socialist countries and have begun to focus on a more complicated common feature. In numerous state-socialist countries of the twentieth century, experts and politicians put forward a “holistic” disposition that sought to negotiate the complex interconnectedness of nature and society and balance economy and ecology. Despite the growing number of scholarly works that evoke a type of environmental holism in the state-socialist countries of Europe and Northern Eurasia, little work has been done to assess the similarities and variations of this holistic impulse. To help advance the scholarly conversation about environmental holism under state socialism, this article analyzes developments on the Kola Peninsula in the USSR and on the plains of Hungary. In doing so, it explores how the Soviets and Hungarians aimed to harmonize human relationships with the rest of nature and helps further establish socialist environmental holism as a main distinguishing trait in the environmental history of twentieth-century communism.