The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures Slavic Colloquium presents Nicholas Breyfogle, Professor of History and Director of the Harvey Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching at The Ohio State University: “Confronting Catastrophe: The 1861-62 Lake Baikal Earthquakes and the Meanings of Nature in Imperial Russia”
This talk examines the multiple, terrifying earthquakes that struck the Lake Baikal region between December 30, 1861 and January 12, 1862. A seismic hotspot, Baikal was no stranger to earthquakes—with thousands of minor tremors and hundreds of major upheavals documented in the last five hundred years—but none was as powerful as 1861-62. Among widespread damage, the epicenter of one quake in the middle of Lake Baikal unleashed a tsunami of water and ice that rolled over the steppe before being hemmed in by the mountains. More than 200 square kilometers of land fell underwater. The talk uses these seismic events as a window onto the role of natural disasters in the social and cultural lives of the Imperial Russian population and as a way to understand the environmental sensibilities of the people around Lake Baikal (Siberia’s “Sacred Sea,” the oldest, deepest, and largest lake (in volume of water) on the planet). It examines the competing discourses used to explain the earthquakes, among representatives of different religious faiths and members of the scientific community, and the ways in which these earthquakes tended to reinforce a view of nature—and Lake Baikal in particular—as dangerous, capricious, and life-taking.
Dr. Nicholas B. Breyfogle is a specialist in the history of Russia/Soviet Union, global environmental and water history, and public history. He is the author/(co-)editor of multiple volumes, including Hydraulic Societies: Water, Power, and Control in East and Central Asian History (2023), Place and Nature: Essays in Russian Environmental History (2021), Nature at War: American Environments and World War II (2020), Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History (2018), Readings in Water History (2020), Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History (2007), and Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia’s Empire in the South Caucasus (2005). He is currently completing two books: “Baikal: the Great Lake and its People” and “Water: A Human History.” Since 2007, Breyfogle has worked as co-editor of the online magazine/podcast/video channel Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, http://origins.osu.edu and most recently on Picturing Black History, https://www.picturingblackhistory.org/. In 2024, his next co-edited book, Picturing Black History: Photographs and Stories that Changed the World will be published with Abrams Books.