First Large-scale Study of the Impact of World War I on the Ecology of Eastern Europe Conducted by Russian Historians

Historians from Samara National Research University and Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University named after K.D. Ushinsky – Oksana Nagornaya, the head of the research group, Yaroslav Golubinov, Yulia Zherdeva and Alexandra Likhacheva – conducted a large-scale study of the impact of World War I on the nature and ecology of Eastern Europe. The scholars looked at the world war in the context of an ecological catastrophe and irreparable damage to nature, plants and animals. Such a study has not been conducted earlier in Russian historiography.

Scientific research was carried out over several years as part of an international project supported in 2021 by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research. Based on the results of the research, Russian scholars published a series of scientific articles, and a nearly 400-page collective monograph titled “Man versus the Environment: Landscapes of the Great War in Eastern Europe”, was also prepared and published recently.

"Any war entails an environmental disaster, only the scale varies. In terms of its impact on nature, the First World War itself was the largest environmental disaster of that time. Our study focuses on the Eastern European theater of military operations, since it has been studied by historians much less than the Western one. I will say without false modesty – apparently, we are the first with such a study in Russian historiography. Certain individual topics attracted the attention of researchers, but no one has ever considered this issue in a comprehensive, full-scale manner before. If you look at books and articles about the First World War in Russian, you will not find such a formulation of the subject. Of course, both our articles written as part of the study and our collective monograph cannot fully exhaust all the issues of this topic. We only set a certain new direction in Russian historiography”, said Yaroslav Golubinov, Dean of the Faculty of History at Samara University, a member of the Russian Association of Historians of the First World War.

As the scholar noted, nature has always acted only as a background to military operations. Military leaders just assessed the suitability of a particular area for attack or defense, and, of course, no one thought at all about the environmental consequences of their actions. The rapid development of science and technology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries led to the fact that during the First World War, the environment in Europe was subjected to incredible pressure. New types of weapons and new forms of battle changed the landscape of the theater of military operations beyond recognition, and tireless work in the rear depleted natural resources in the warring countries.

One of the prerequisites for significant damage to the environment was the rapid growth in the use of oil and oil products: the number of vehicles in the armies that needed fuel increased by leaps and bounds. For example, according to statistics, by the beginning of the war, the vehicle fleet of the Russian Imperial Army numbered only 711 cars and 101 motorcycles in all military districts. Three years later, in the autumn of 1917, the active army already had more than 2.6 thousand cars, 4.5 thousand trucks, 1.6 thousand ambulances, 395 tank trucks and 87 kitchen trucks, over 2.4 thousand motorcycles, more than 70 radio station vehicles, as well as searchlight vehicles and generator vehicles. Although it can be noted that about a third of the total number of cars and motorcycles were commonly under repair due to breakdowns and damage.

The burning of oil and oil products caused great damage to the environment: when troops advanced and retreated, the fuel was always burning – the attackers tried to destroy the enemy's fuel reserves, and the retreating troops set fire to their own oil tanks so that the valuable resource would not fall into the hands of the enemy. The annals of the history of the First World War included the operation to destroy Romania's oil resources, carried out in November 1916 by the British major John Norton-Griffiths, nicknamed Hellfire Jack (incidentally, the future director of the Arsenal English Football Club). During the operation, a special unit under the command of Hellfire Jack burned and poured from the tanks onto the ground and into rivers about 1 million tons of oil so that it would not fall into the hands of the advancing Germans. For comparison: during the Gulf War in 1991, slightly less was spilled and burned – about 820 thousand tons of oil.

During the hostilities, rivers and lakes were polluted not only with oil products, but also with ptomaine and chemical poisons. The search for drinking water became a constant task on all fronts.

"During the war, the troops deployed geological search parties, constantly looking for underground sources of potable water. All the places where it was possible to drill wells were marked on the maps. In addition to water bodies, forests, which served as a source of building materials and fuel for heating, were also seriously damaged. Sometimes the troops deliberately destroyed large forests. For example, on the Eastern Front, the Germans cut down about 5% of the Belovezhskaya Pushcha, sending 5 million cubic meters of valuable timber to Germany. Incidentally, Germany turned out to be, it seems, the only Western European country that preserved its forests practically untouched during the First World War – due to the brutal deforestation of the captured territories. But in Britain, due to the need for timber, about half of all forests were cut down during the war – every second tree. Partial restoration of the plantations there was possible only half a century later", noted Yaroslav Golubinov.

Serious changes also occurred with the soil. The so-called "no man's land", i.e. the territory between the trench rows of the warring parties, suffered the most – it was shot through the most. The top layer of soil on the fronts was almost completely destroyed, numerous craters caused wind and water erosion. Hundreds of millions of artillery shells, billions of rifle and machine gun cartridges – the earth was literally stuffed with iron and lead. According to Russian historical documents, in order to strengthen just about 10 km of positions on the front line, 8,400 poods of barbed wire, 90 poods of telegraph and telephone wire, 470 poods of nails, 375 poods of staples for wire fastening, 170 poods of building brackets and another 40 poods of "small metal parts" were required. That is, on average, about 15 tons of iron were consumed per 1 km of fortifications, and a significant part of it most likely remained in the soil after the end of the war. And this is only a small part of what was used, documents show that the amount of metal needed by the front was constantly increasing.

"Of course, the animal world also changed because of the war. The most well-known fact is the almost complete disappearance of the famous European bison in Belovezhskaya Pushcha, although the last European bison there was killed after the war. Everyone suffered from the hostilities: migratory birds lost their way, forest animals lost their usual hunting grounds and migrated, went to new places, encountering people. A separate and often very dark story is the use of horses at the front, there were hundreds of thousands of them on both sides. They died in attacks and near trenches under fire, died from the strain of dragging unbearable loads", said Yaroslav Golubinov.

According to the scholar, it is completely impossible to calculate even approximately the damage caused to the nature of Eastern Europe during the war.

"Calculating the damage from World War I in Eastern Europe is extremely difficult because the war did not end there on November 11, 1918, as it did in France and Belgium. Newly born states – Poland, for example – immediately got involved in conflicts with their neighbors, and the fighting took place in the same places where Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian armies had recently fought each other. The damage on the Western Front was more or less calculated by the French, since they wanted Germany to pay for everything. The amount of reparations after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles amounted to 132 billion gold marks. But even there it is difficult to assess the long-term damage that the fighting inflicted on soils, forests and wildlife. The Eastern Front was more extensive, it passed through more diverse landscapes – mountains, swamps, steppes, and the wounds inflicted on nature by the war were slightly less noticeable in Eastern Europe, but no less painful. Specific calculations, I repeat, are difficult in general, because in 1917–1922 the territories through which the front passed were in a state of political chaos. Calculations of military damage should have been made after the war, but the change of power in Russia and the formation of new states prevented such a comprehensive assessment. Now, after more than a hundred years have passed since the end of military operations, this is practically impossible to do", concluded Yaroslav Golubinov.