The Socialist Anthropocene denotes the version of the Anthropocene that unfolded on the socialist side of the Cold War divide. Its entwined social and environmental histories are illuminated in the art, and visual culture of the socialist world, not least in depictions of the vast project of infrastructural, agricultural and geoengineered interventions into the natural environment decreed in the Stalin Plan for the Great Transformation of Nature of 1948.

The presentation considers the distinctiveness of the Socialist Anthropocene, including outlining the tension between the modernising and colonising tendencies of socialist transformation, especially about the histories of expansion into the indigenous territories of the Soviet North and South. Furthermore, it will address the alternative epistemologies of socialist science, grounded in understanding the Earth as an interconnected ecological system and manifest in Soviet advances in climate science since the 1960s.