The term Anthropocene, popularised by J.P. Crutzen,  suggests that humankind has become a global geological force in its own right (Steffen et al., 2011). In the search for the origins of the Anthropocene, it is often associated with capitalism(Foster, Clark, York, 2010; Zalasiewicz, 2019), most notably the US hegemony (Foster, Clark, 2021). The question is even raised as to whether the Anthropocene should be called the Capitalocene (Moore, 2016). Marxist philosophy and the ecological policy of the Soviet Union are presented as a counterbalance to predatory capitalism towards nature. But even while admiring this policy, it is acknowledged that it has been ambivalent (Foster, 2015). As Bolotova notes, “The slogans on the conquest and subjection of nature were among the most important ideological frames of the Soviet state. The idea of human dominance over nature and the call for humans to subdue, modify and reconstruct a chaotic and meaningless nature in order to regulate natural processes supplemented the overarching goal of a total reconstruction of the social order, making for an intrinsic link between state policy and the ideology of conquering nature in the USSR” (2004, p. 107). But in its outward-looking propaganda, the Soviet Union positioned itself as the greatest defender of nature and a fighter against the capitalists destroying it. The aim of this presentation is to analyse which of the Soviet Union's narratives - the conquest of nature or the preservation of nature - was dominant in Soviet educational policy and school practice. Has attention been paid to the ecological problems of the Soviet Union itself: the Aral Sea's destruction, the rivers' diversion,  the causes of desertification,  destructive forms of timber exploitation, irrational mining practices, etc?

Main methods: analysis of scientific literature and historical sources. To focus the research objective on teaching in the Soviet school, the discipline of geography was chosen as one of the most relevant to the teaching of ecology. The geography curricula, guidelines for geography teachers, methodological tools and geography textbooks for the years 1945-1988 were selected for further analysis. The analysis was based on sources in the Lithuanian language but it is important to point out that most of them were translated from Russian and that education in the Soviet Union was highly unified.

Preliminary analysis shows that the first narrative was dominant in the internal politics of the Soviet Union, as well as in the practice of education. The image of the Soviet man as a conqueror of nature was constructed. Most teaching and learning tools did not present anything related to ecology or consequences of excessive exploitation of natural resources and disproportionate interference into nature “while changing riverbeds or destroying mountains” either. Only at the end of the 1970s and at the beginning of the 1980s several sentences about environmental protection stated to appear in textbooks.

Bolotova, A. (2004). Colonization of Nature in the Soviet Union. State Ideology, Public Discourse, and the Experience of Geologists. Historical Social Research, 29(3), 104-123. Foster, J. B. (2015). Late Soviet Ecology and the Planetary Crisis. Monthly Review, 67(2) DOI: 10.14452/MR-067-02-2015-06_1 Foster, J. B.,& Clark, B.(2021). The Capitalinian: The First Geological Age of the Anthropocene. Monthly Review, 73(4). https://monthlyreview.org/2021/09/01/the-capitalinian/ Foster, J. B., Clark, B., and York, R. (2010). The Ecological Rift: Capitalism's War on the Earth. Monthly Review Press Moore, J.W. (2016). Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. PM Press. Steffen, W., Grinevald, J., Crutzen, J. P., & McNeill, J. (2011) The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 369 (1938), 842–867. doi:10.1098/rsta.2010.0327 Zalasiewicz, J., Waters, C. N., Williams, M., and Colin P. (2019). The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit: A Guide to the Scientific Evidence and Current Debate. Cambridge University Press.