Peat played a critical though largely forgotten role in the history of industrialisation and electrification in central Russia. Accompanying its incorporation into the expanding industrial economy was the construction of workers’ settlements (rabochie poselki) which housed the peat industry’s substantial workforce. These workers’ settlements were microcosms of the conflicting trends marking the rise of Russia’s industrial metabolism. Ecological disruption and social myth-making, loss and possibility, experiences of inclusion and marginalization coalesced in the everyday of these places, where the boundaries between rural and urban ways of life, agriculture and industry, production and reproduction were often blurred. Focusing on peat workers’ settlements in central Russia, this paper demonstrates that the nexus between resource extraction, migration and settlement, which is often associated with the fringes of Russia’s empires, shaped the physical and human geographies in regions close to the political and industrial centres as well. Peat was not just a fuel but also a source for place-based feelings of belonging that allowed workers to embrace the margins of Russia’s fossil economy as their home and made the decline of the peat industry at the end of the Soviet period an experience of loss and precarity.
