In a 1977 monograph devoted to the work of Ural Tansykbayev (1904-74), it was reported that the celebrated Uzbek artist witnessed with pride and joy the transformation of his native land by the Soviet people and sought through his painting to capture the “merging of the unmergeable.” In this presentation we will consider the extent to which the merging in socialist art of the infrastructures of industrial modernity – the proliferating mines, factories, railroads, pylons, dams and canals, with the remains of the natural environment – solitary trees, retreating lakes and distant mountains, constituted a latent form of ecological critique. How far did the emergence of more equivocal and conflicted depictions of the industrial landscape reflect growing ecological awareness, serving also as unwitting documents of the distinctive environmental histories of the Socialist Anthropocene?