Hello, I am a historian interested in the roles that materialities and ideals of progress have played in making modern societies in Europe. I conduct research on the history of technology, the environment, and the economy, with a particular emphasis on state socialism from a transnational perspective. My teaching also centers on environmental history, the Cold War, decolonization, and postcolonialism.
I hold my PhD in Social Sciences (Social and Economic History) from the University of Helsinki (2017). Between 2015 and 2022, I worked at the HSE University in Saint-Petersburg. In 2021, I was a fellow at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg. Currently, I am an Associate Professor in Modern European Economic History at the University of Bergen (UiB), Norway.
I also serve as a member of the Executive Committee of the Society for the History of Technology (2025-2027) and a board member of the journal Environment and History (2024-2027). I am also a member of the Young Academy of Europe.
My first book, entitled The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology, was published by the MIT Press in 2024, drawing off part of my doctoral dissertation. It examines the relationship between nature and humans under state socialism by looking at the industrial role of Soviet forests and introduces the notion of industrially embedded ecology to the scholarship. The book explores how specialists working in the forestry industry viewed the present and future of forests contributing to sustainability. When faced with the prospect of wood shortages, it argues, these specialists came to develop new industry-ecology paradigms. The book looks at the materiality of Soviet industry through forests and wood to reconsider the dominating narratives – ecocide and environmentalism – to argue that past experience of modern dictatorships produced a specific industrial ecology aimed at more efficient exploitation of nature.
My current book project is titled From Oil to Food: The Soviet Microbial Protein Project and the Quest to Feed Humans.
How can food production become less dependent on agriculture and ecological conditions? From Oil to Food explores the postwar scientific and technological ambition to produce protein from non-food resources, such as hydrocarbons and methanol, through the use of microorganisms. Developed internationally across Western and Eastern Europe, Japan, China, and the United States, microbial protein research promised to transform food production by shifting it from fields and farms to laboratories and industrial facilities.
Focusing on the Soviet Union from the 1950s to the 1980s, the book traces how this ambition evolved from scientific research and laboratory experiments into state-supported industrial production. It examines the roles of chemists, microbiologists, industrial actors, and political institutions in developing microbial protein, assessing its nutritional value and safety, and determining its place in food systems. Although some scientists envisioned microbial protein as a direct source of human food, Soviet industrial production ultimately focused on protein-vitamin complexes used as animal feed, through which protein could reach human consumers in the form of meat.
The book follows the promises, materialization, and reassessment of microbial protein production. It explores how scientific expectations were translated into industrial projects, how concerns about health and environmental consequences shaped their development, and how an ecological catastrophe at an industrial plant near Leningrad, growing social protest, and the collapse of the Soviet Union contributed to the end of production.
At the center of the book is the concept of food autonomization: the attempt to relocate essential functions of food production from agricultural and ecological processes into human-controlled technological systems. From Oil to Food argues that this ambition did not eliminate dependence on nature. Instead, it reconfigured human–nature relations and redistributed dependencies across technological infrastructures and industrial systems.
Bringing Soviet history into the broader history of postwar food science and technology, the book shows how food became an object of chemical and microbiological research, industrial experimentation, and state planning. It offers a historical perspective on the promises and limitations of attempts to transform the production of food through science and technology.
REVIEWS
*Mariia Koskina, Agricultural History (August 2026)
*Daniela Russ, Kritika (July 2026)
*Marcin Krasnodębski, Ambix (January 2026)
*Katja Doose, Canadian Slavonic Papers (September 2025).
*Ivan Zykin, Rossiskaia istoriia (September 2025).
*Jawad Daheur, Artefact (July 2025).
*H-Environment Roundtable “The Green Power of Socialism”, organized by Stephen Milder, contributors: Julia E. Ault, Katja Doose, Tatiana Kasperski, and Péter Szabó, Spring. https://networks.h-net.org/kochetkova-green-power-socialism-wood-forest-and-making-soviet-industrially-embedded-ecology-h (June 2025)
*Robert Balogh, Vidéktörténet Évkönyv 5 (2025)
*Arlita Lusiana Wardani, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (April, 2025).
*Anna Sokolova, Laboratorium (no. 1, 2025).
*Moe Romanoff, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association (fall 2024).
*Timm Schönfelder, Ab Imperio (November, 2024).
*Michael Corsi, H-Environment (September, 2024).
*Laurent Coumel, The Russian Review, Volume 83, Issue 3 (July 2024): 479-480.
*W.B. Whisenhunt, CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries (July 2024).
*Choice Book Reviews for Academic Libraries: recommended as the top 75 Community College Titles (July 2024).
BOOK TALKS
- 2025 Book Talk: New Books on Modern Histories of Forests and Society Across the Globe, Annual Meeting of the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH), April 9.
- 2025 Presentation of the book The Green Power of Socialism, the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe in Leipzig, January 8.
- 2024 Presentation of the book The Green Power of Socialism at the Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talks, the Stavanger University, December 2.
- 2024 Presentation of the book The Green Power of Socialism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), Environmental History Today, the Project of the European Society for Environmental History, February 29.
- 2024 Podcast with the New Books Network. Presentation of the book “The Green Power of Socialism”, 3 June. Available at https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-green-power-of-socialism
- 2024 Soviet Industrial Ecology. Podcast “The Eurasian Knot”, the project by the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, 15 May. Available at https://shows.acast.com/eurasian-knot/episodes/6744b7bcc11fbabc61b781bd
- 2024 Forest and Industry in the Late Soviet Union. Conversations in Forest History of the Forest History Society, 14 May. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcHsMyNtmUQ
- 2023 Nature and Industry in Late State Socialism. A History of Soviet Forests, University of Oslo, December 13.
BOOK USED IN SYLLABI
Exceter University
Ohio State University
University of Bergen
University College London
Indiana University
Recommended by MITLearn
PUBLICATION
Books
2024 The Green Power of Socialism: Forest and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Peer-Reviewed Articles
2026 "Zero Growth, Socialist Modernity, and the Anti-Environmental Turn in Eastern Europe," Journal of Modern European History (co-authored with Olšáková, D., Duančić, V., Kazakov, G., Lajus, J., Milder, S., Muić, V., & Trufanova, O.)
2026 "History of Technology in Russia: Navigating a Shifting Terrain," Technology and Culture 67: 1, pp. 227-240.
2026 "Food Chemistry, Fat Experiment, and Palm Oil in the Late Soviet Politics and Industry," Global Environment 19:1, pp. 157-174.
2026 "Introduction. Global fat resources: Connecting themes, approaches and narratives, ca. 1850-2022," Global Environment 19:1, pp. 4-12 (co-authored with Matthias Heymann and Ines Prodöhl).
2025 "People's Control and the Morality Quest in the Late Soviet Economy," Journal of Social History, published as the first view.
2025 "Public Libraries and the Contemporary Politics of Great Patriotic War Memory in the Pechenga Region, Russia," Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 11:2, pp. 55-84.
2024 “Being Together, Growing Affluent: Institutions of Integration and the Making of Technological Power in the Comecon,” Europe-Asia Studies 76:10, pp. 1503-25, co-authored with Aleksei Popov.
2024 “Making Food Modernity: Science and Technology in Late Soviet Nutrition and Food Production,” Contemporary European History 33:2, pp. 583-98.
2024 “Quality and Mass Consumption Goods in Late Soviet Society,” Perm University Herald. History 62:3, pp. 149-62, co-authored with Julia Lajus et al. (in Russian).
2022 “Performing Inventiveness: Industrial and Technical Creativity in the USSR, 1950s-1980s,” The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 49:3, pp. 249-73.
2022 “Abandoned, But Not Forgotten Heritage: Former Industrial Enterprises in Cultural and Urban Russian Landscapes,” Heritage and Society 15:3, pp. 277-98, co-authored with Anna Petrova.
2022 “A Socialist Construction for Siberia: Comecon and Ust`-Ilimsk Forest Industrial Complex in the USSR, 1970s-80s,”Journal of Contemporary History 57:2, 479-98, co-authored with Aleksey Popov.
2021 “Technological Inequalities and Motivation of Soviet Institutions in the Scientific-Technological Cooperation of Comecon in Europe, 1950s–80s,” European Review of History: Revue europeenne d’histoire 28:3, 355-73.
2020 “Challenging Europe: Technology, Environment, and the Quest for Resource Security,” Technology and Culture 61:1, 282-294, co-authored with Matthias Heymann et al.
2019 “Soviet Industrial Production and Waste Dispersal: A Case Study of Pulp and Paper Plants on the Karelian Isthmus, 1940s-1980s,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 67:3, 269-82, co-authored with Pavel Pokidko.
2019 “An Ecological Controversy: Soviet Engineers and the Biological Treatment Method for Industrial Wastewater in the 1950s and 1960s,” Ab Imperio 1, 153-80 (in Russian).
2019 “Milk and Milk Packaging in the Soviet Union: Technologies of Production and Consumption, 1950s-70s,” Russian History 46:1, 29-52.
2018 “Between Water Pollution and Protection in the Soviet Union, mid-1950s-60s: Lake Baikal and River Vuoksi,” Water History 10:2-3, 223-41.
2018 “Emerging Scholars in the Age of Uncertainty: Goals and Plans of ESEH Next Generation Action Team in 2018–19,” Environment and History 24:4, 579-81, co-authored with Viktor Pal et al.
2018 “Industry and Forests: Alternative Raw Materials in the Soviet Forestry Industry from the mid-1950s to the 1960s,” Environment and History 24:3, 323-47.
2018 “’A Shop Window Where You Can Choose the Goods You Like’: Finnish industrial and trade fairs in the USSR, 1950s–1960s,” Scandinavian Journal of History 43:2, 212-32.
2016 “Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Western Forestry Systems and Soviet Engineers, 1955-1964,” Technology and Culture 57:3, 586-611.
2015 “A History of Failed Innovation: Continuous Cooking and the Soviet Pulp Industry, 1940s-60s,”History and Technology 31:2, 108-32.
Book Chapters
2026 “The Ideals of Rationality and Development in the Late Soviet Political Economy,” The Yearbook for the Global History of Development, ed. by Corinna Unger, Iris Borovoy and Ismay Milford, pp. 71-92.
2024 “The Achilles Heel of a Big Player: Technology and Modernity in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and Russia (19th to 21st Centuries),” In Global History of Technology, ed. by Liliane Perez et al., co-authored with Julia Obertreis, Brepols, pp. 195-218.
2023 “Soviet Technological Aid and the Technopolitics of Hydropower in Africa during the Cold War,” In Transplanting Modernity, ed. by Jenny. Leigh Smith and Thomas Robinson. University of Pittsburg Press, 146—64, co-authored with David Damtar et al.
2021 “Machinery, Cookers, and Cellulose: Analysis of Soviet Technologies during the Cold War”, In New Time, New Field: Changing World of Qualitative Research and New Technologies, Olga Zvonareva et al., eds. St. Petersburg: Aleteia, pp. 283-314 (In Russian).
2021 “Baikal Waters: Industrial Development and Institutional Debates, 1950s–1970s,” In: Place and Nature: Essays in Russian Environmental History / Ed. by David Moon et al. White Horse Press, Ch. 13, pp. 292-312.
2017 “A Sign of Good Neighborliness”: Images of the Saimaa Canal in the Soviet Union,” In: Waterways and the Cultural Landscape / Ed. by Francesco Vallerani and Francesco Visentin. Routledge, Ch. 4, pp. 44-59.
I have taught a wide range of topics and historical methodologies, including the history of the Cold War, the history of science and technology, environmental history, European and global history, and decolonization and post-colonialism. Additionally, I have supervised students' internships, project work, and fieldwork.
I teach from an interdisciplinary perspective and have worked with students from diverse backgrounds and interests. My courses have been attended by students from programs in history, political science, social sciences, engineering, and computer science.
Currently, I am developing a project on history as a usable past teaching and learning how history can be taught as a useful knowledge.
*Current collaborative project: 2026-2027 --- Research and Teaching Project funded by The MIT-Norway University of Bergen Seed Fund “The Usable Past: Connecting History and Engineering”
Among the public outcomes of my students' work are:
*The exhibition prepared by my students and me following a research trip to Lake Baikal, where we examined the interactions between the lake and humans.*
HSE University, 2021 (as shown in the right picture)
*Website showcasing the completion of students' project work on the urban histories of the Cold War from 2019 to 2021.*
