Energetika: Gleb Krzhizhanovskii's Conception of the Nature-Society Metabolism

There has been a growing interest in the relation between Marxism and the Soviet Union’s relation to nature. While historical scholarship rarely explores the intellectual context in which the Soviet experiment unfolded, ecomarxists tend to describe the Soviet Union’s mistaken path as a result of the loss of ‘metabolic’ thinkers. This article challenges the neat divide between a ‘metabolic’ and ‘productivist’ Marxism byanalysing the energy-economic thinking of Gleb M. Krzhizhanovskii, chairman of the electrification commission (GOELRO) and the State Planning Commission (Gosplan). Krzhizhanovskii understood human production as part of the general life process and envisioned the energy economy to become an ‘ennobling’ element within nature. His argument rested on the hope that large-scale electrification, district heating and electro-chemistry––realisable under Socialism––could help govern the metabolism between nature and society more rationally. The history of energetika shows thatproductivist and metabolic thinking are more intricately connected than thought before.