US researcher Sophie Pinkham's new book reads Russia through its forests

Cornell University professor Sophie Pinkham has published "Oak and Larch: A History of Russia's Forests and Its Empires" in 2026, exploring how the forest shapes Russian culture, politics, and identity from medieval times to the war in Ukraine. In an extended interview, Pinkham discusses forest spirits, Siberian colonisation, nationalist ideology, and the ecological consequences of war.

Cornell University comparative literature professor and journalist Sophie Pinkham has spent years writing about Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, and her new 2026 book, Oak and Larch: A History of Russia's Forests and Its Empires, approaches that vast region through an unexpected lens: the forest itself.

From climate change to the leshy

Pinkham, also the author of Black Square, a book about post-Soviet Ukraine, says the project grew out of an earlier idea about how climate change might reshape Russian politics and economics. «At some point I started thinking about forests, forest spirits, and other forest characters from Russian literature,» she explained. «I gradually came to understand that the forest, along with its real and imagined inhabitants, is one of the key motifs of Russian history and culture.»

The result is a cultural history told from the forest's point of view, weaving together ecology, literature, cinema, and politics. The forest spirit known as the leshy serves as a recurring guide through the centuries, from the Neolithic to the present day. Pinkham chose the figure deliberately: «Nobody lived from the Neolithic to our time. The leshy worked well as a through-line connecting different parts of the story.»

Siberia, colonisation, and the American parallel

One of the book's most provocative arguments draws a comparison between Russia's eastward expansion into Siberia and the American westward frontier. Pinkham acknowledges obvious geographical and climatic parallels, but stresses important differences. American settlers often moved as families, creating stable communities from the start, while Russian settlers were predominantly men; Slavic women who arrived in Siberia were often exiles. This shaped a far greater degree of cultural mixing with indigenous peoples.

Crucially, the conquest of Siberia was driven above all by fur, which gave Russian colonisers a strong incentive not to destroy indigenous populations, since local hunters were indispensable to the entire economy. «Without local hunters, the whole system simply didn't work,» Pinkham notes. She was also struck by a detail she had not previously known: the anarchist Bakunin, during his Siberian exile, reportedly discussed the creation of a "United States of Siberia" that would unite with the United States of America.

Nationalists, wooden houses, and the "Russian ark"

The book traces how love of the forest feeds directly into Russian nationalist ideology. Pinkham examines the Izborsky Club's concept of the «Russian ark», the idea that Russia preserves authentic Christian civilisation against a flood of liberalism, feminism, and homosexuality. In this worldview, one cannot feel truly Russian in a modern Moscow apartment; only a traditional wooden house, close to the land, will do.

This thread connects the derevenshchiki, the village prose writers of the Soviet era, including Valentin Rasputin, to figures like Mikhail Tarkovsky, nephew of the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, who lives in Siberia and has made documentary series about traditional hunters. Pinkham was surprised to discover that Mikhail Tarkovsky has ties to the aggressive nationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin and even travelled to the front in Donbas. «Most people probably don't know about the connection between the aggressive chauvinist Prilepin and the nephew of Tarkovsky living in Siberia,» she said.

War, wilderness, and Ukraine's changing landscape

Among the book's most striking passages are those dealing with what researchers now call «war wilding», the process by which landscapes revert to a wilder, more natural state when human activity ceases due to conflict. Pinkham is careful not to frame this as a benefit of war. «The ecological damage from the Russian invasion of Ukraine is colossal, as is the human damage, of course,» she says. But the phenomenon is real: rivers have returned to older channels after wartime dam destruction, allowing the return of species linked to floodplains.

She also notes that much of eastern Ukraine's forest cover consists of artificial Soviet-era pine plantations, poorly suited to the region's naturally steppe or mixed forest-steppe landscape. Ukrainian ecologists, she reports, are already debating whether war-transformed landscapes should simply be left as they are rather than restored to their pre-war configuration, which may, in any case, have been ecologically fragile.

Ending on beauty

Pinkham closes the book with the art festival Archstoyanie at Nikola-Lenivets, where monumental wooden sculptures are ritually burned. She wanted to end on a note of hope: «After the full-scale invasion, there has been a strong tendency in the media to demonise Russians in general. And while I am extremely, extremely negative about the war and the Russian state, I believe Russian culture and art still have a future.»