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– Right here, this is it. – I can’t really spot it… – Can you see how the ground lifts up a bit? – Yeah. That’s it? – Well, it’s been a while. Plants grow like crazy over here.

Sasha is standing in the middle of a brown field, his hand tracing the edges of what once was someone’s home. It took me a while to “see” the house. The area is covered with thick grass reaching my waist, and nothing gives away the remains of human presence except for an unremarkable mound swelling a few feet above the ground. For all I know, this could be land never before touched by the foot of man. Disappointed, I turn around and wade back towards Sasha’s run-down Honda. From the road, the traces of the house, concealed by a rippling brown wall, are even less visible. It starts to drizzle again, so I hurry into the car, and we drive off towards the volunteer house.

Sasha lights up a cigarette. I ask him if he has ever found anything of interest at this spot. No, he says, but he found coins and an imperial dagger in the Elephant Bay. He later sold the dagger for good money to a Japanese collector. How does one search for something like that? He bought a metal detector a few years ago. It’s a fun hobby, but his ex-wife nagged him to death for spending hours on end digging through dirt. I stare at the muddy road outside. It’s one of those windy, soggy days of late fall. We keep talking about something else, but my mind wanders back to the house. I can’t believe it was completely gone, like nothing ever happened, in just a few decades. How odd that a whole era went by and barely scratched the surface of the island.

Credit: Rusana Novikova

Sasha in a brown grass field searching for Japanese artifacts with a metal detector (Tikhoe, Sakhalin Island, November 2021)

Sasha is a local. He was born and raised in Tikhoe village on Sakhalin, about 2 hours north of the island’s capital. Once a Russian penal colony, the northern edge of the Japanese empire, and a Soviet industrialization frontier, Sakhalin remains a far-flung periphery where imperial histories settle into the soil. When Sasha was a kid, the town was already on its way out, but back in the 1960s—the elders say—it housed and employed around 3,000 people. Sasha tells me there were houses all along the bumpy two-mile road from the train station to the beach. I find it impossible to believe. Most people worked in logging; some serviced the railroad. Today, everyone except for Sasha and sixty or so people are gone. By the time I finish writing this article, Sasha will be gone, too. He will be fired from his job as a warehouse keeper for excessive drinking.

In a span of 70 years, the history of the island propelled forward before abruptly coming to a halt and running backward, meticulously unravelling the grand projects mapped out by the Soviet state. Today, the island’s countryside looks like a post-apocalyptic natural laboratory—dense underbrush stifling dirt roads, birch and aspen groves taking over potato fields, and lush, exuberant grasses hiding whole villages that sank underground. How do we make sense of this emergent landscape and the histories that shaped it? To outsiders, it reads as an unruly wilderness, a sign that the work of “civilization” hasn’t been complete. To locals, like Sasha, it is a bitter reminder of days that are long gone.

Credit: Rusana Novikova

A fireweed field sprawling inside an abandoned greenhouse (Seymchan, Magadan Oblast, July 2023).

Nearly thirty years after the Great New Wilderness Debate, academia has largely come to recognize that wilderness is a cultural and historical construct. Yet despite decades of scholarly critique dismantling the myths of wilderness and frontier, Siberia and the Far East remain firmly ensnared in these tropes in public narratives. The region has long occupied the “wild slot” in the imaginary of international audiences and those Russians who never ventured beyond the Ural Mountains. Together with the Amazon, it’s the no-man’s land par excellence. After all, for many foreigners, the Trans-Siberian railroad stands as the quintessential wilderness adventure—an iconic journey steeped in frontier romance. Russians, too, routinely refer to Siberia and the Far East as “the bear’s corner,” or nowheresville, alluding to its remote location, difficulty of access, and sparse population. Just like any other stereotype, this imagery rests on a binary opposition: local environment is cast as both sublime and unforgiving, pristine and inhospitable, while its people are simultaneously seen as courageous, resourceful frontiersmen and backwater barbarians irrevocably stuck in their ways.

The Russian government is eager to exploit the imagery of remote wilderness in its current effort to recolonize the region. In 2016, it launched the Far Eastern Hectare* *program (later expanded geographically and renamed the Hectare), a state initiative that—similar to the US Homestead Act of 1862—grants land to anyone willing to move to Russia’s rural periphery. Program officials don’t hesitate to portray the Far East as an untapped frontier waiting to be discovered, enjoyed, and developed. The program’s website greets visitors with a perfect bucolic landscape: a small settlement, a country road cutting through a meadow, a pond, and a lush green forest framing the entire scene. Scroll down, and you’ll see a panoramic shot of a fireweed field and a mountain ridge covered with snow and green shrubs. Likewise, a promotional video on the landing page features expansive forests, bright-green meadows, rivers, lakes, and barren mountains—without the slightest hint of human presence.

These widely circulated and persistent fantasies erase not only centuries of Indigenous land stewardship but also the unprecedented Soviet campaign to urbanize and industrialize the region. In fact, the Hectare program explicitly draws on the language of osvoenie, or colonization, which presumes the existence of empty, untouched wilderness in need of development and domestication. However, it would be a mistake to interpret the cliches that force the Far East into the wild slot merely as ignorance on the part of the public or the government’s deliberate invention. My encounter with Sasha was crucial for understanding the difference between wilderness as a discursive construct and the environmental processes that make such imaginaries possible in the first place. The state’s ability to promote the idea of the wild Far Eastern frontier is predicated on material transformations in the region unleashed by twentieth-century history. From the sedentarization campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s that displaced Indigenous people from their ancestral lands to the collapse of industrial agriculture in the 1990s, these landscapes were emptied, transformed, and subsequently abandoned long before they could be declared “wild” once again.

Credit: Rusana Novikova

A kindergarten playground overgrown with birch saplings (Seymchan, Magadan Oblast, July 2023).

And yet, the landscapes emerging from abandonment, infrastructural decay, and overgrowth are anything but wild. I call them feral. Neither a timeless wilderness nor a stagnant ruin, these feral landscapes are a testament to the ebbs and flows of environmental and political histories in Russia’s remote periphery. But they reveal their story only to those who care to search for it.

Scholars have written about it before. The dramatic reconfiguration of people’s material and social worlds after 1989–91 and the effects it engendered across the post-socialist space have been variously conceptualized as the unmaking, ruins, debris, emptiness, and remains, among other approaches. Borrowing the language of my interlocutors in the Far East, I choose to describe this process as odichanie, or the feral drift, a term that aptly captures the changing nature of rural landscapes in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse. Talking about the transformation of rural Russia in recent decades, my interlocutors have invariably described it in terms like odichalo, or became feral, pozaroslo, or overgrew, and zapustelo, or fell into neglect. These verbs convey bitterness and regret about Russia’s declining role as an agricultural stronghold, emphasizing the negative character of the feral drift. The decay of the countryside unleashed by the events of the early 1990s is understood as a symptom of broader civilizational decline, of Russia’s downfall on the global stage. For my interlocutors, the environmental transformation unfolding before their eyes is closer to a feral drift than to a return to a virgin or unspoiled condition presumed by the adjective “wild.” Abandoned fields overgrown with birch trees are by no means a reversal to some “original nature.” Instead, they are a poignant reminder of what happens when the biggest social experiment of the twentieth century is no more.

Olga Povoroznyuk is the section contributing editor for SOYUZ.