@article{f7809fe6f5c749abbd11c3fc15ef18e3,
title = "Two pairs of women's boots for a hectare of land: Nature and the construction of the environmental problem in state socialism",
author = "Zsuzsa Gille",
note = "Funding Information: When asked some years ago how much a hectare of Kuzbass land cost, a Soviet mine engineer answered {"}two pairs of fashionable women's boots.{"}1 Marshall Goldman, who related this story, dismissed the engineer's claim as frivolous. In fact, {"}favor value{"} was a defining feature of the former state socialist countries. The system of horizontal favor relations and favor value determined in important (and contradictory) ways not only the allocation of goods and services but also the use of nature — a fact not acknowledged by the rulers of the old state socialist world. This simple omission had complex environmental as well as economic consequences. State environmental * I am indebted to Andrew Szasz, James O'Connor, Ronnie Lipschutz and Michael Urban, all faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz, for their encouragement and challenging advice, as well as to the members of the 1992 U. C. Santa Cruz graduate seminar {"}Sociology of Environment{"} for the inspiration of our discussions. I thank David Goodman, Michael Burawoy, Martha Lampland, Istv{\'a}n R{\'e}v and Iv{\'a}n Szel{\'e}nyi for their feedback on earlier versions of this paper, and S{\'a}ndor Berki for his help in arranging interviews in Hungary. The research for this article was made possible by a grant from the Center for German and European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.",
year = "1997",
month = dec,
doi = "10.1080/10455759709358758",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "8",
pages = "1--21",
journal = "Capitalism, Nature, Socialism",
issn = "1045-5752",
publisher = "Taylor and Francis Ltd.",
number = "4",
}