When the journalist Maksim Antonovich critiqued the symbolic use of soil by the pochvenniki, he did so with a conscious political agenda. For materialists and social radicals like Antonovich, the mystifications of native soil threatened to obscure the urgent significance of real soil for the fate of the Russian people: Russian soil required not sublime contemplation but cultivation and improvements, informed by scientific research. This chapter considers the process by which advocacy of practical soil science and agronomy, against the emptiness of pochva, became an established position in the Russian cultural field of the late nineteenth century, with far-reaching consequences for Russian and Soviet attitudes toward agriculture and soil management as social questions. This story is told through an illustrative case study of the cultural reception of the ideas of German chemist Justus Liebig (1803–1873).
As the founder of one of the most important chemical research centers in Europe, the Giessen Chemical Institute, Liebig would become a pioneer of modern organic chemistry and one of the most significant promoters of science in the public interest in nineteenth-century Europe. Liebig revolutionized agriculture with his assertion that plant life relies on minerals for nutrition, laying the foundation for the development of artificial fertilizers and the later Green Revolution. Liebig’s 1873 obituary in the English journal The Chemical News summed up the chemist’s renown among the general public: “The application of chemistry to agriculture, and to many of the wants of daily life, received so powerful an impulse from Liebig, that the popular mind has taken him for the representative of the science in its application to practical purposes.”1
Liebig’s ideas on soil fertility were at least as powerful an influence on the Russian “popular mind” as on the English or European mind, and arguably more so, in view of the pervasiveness of the “soil question” in nineteenth-century Russian political and intellectual history.2 When Liebig’s ideas began to filter into Russia, they met with a charged political and cultural environment. Beginning in the 1840s and intensifying in the 1860s, Liebig’s work was widely discussed in Russia’s press and literature, among gentlemen farmers and amateur scientists, by novelists such as Dostoevsky and Ivan Turgenev, and among Marxist and other social revolutionaries. Liebig’s ideas became a site of contest between the Romantic, antireductionist trend in science and the radical, positivist-materialist trend that would follow, and between the social and political postures associated with those two tendencies. Liebig’s name became a rallying cry for groups with different political agendas and a symbolic object of contention between intellectual generations. Above all, Russian discussions of Liebig and his materialist soil chemistry refracted questions about Russian society and how Russia’s distinctive national spirit arose from its native soil. In addition to tracing Liebig’s direct impact on Russian discourses of agriculture, history, and society, this chapter will consider how creative reworkings of Liebig’s ideas by such figures as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and Aleksandr Engelgardt had a far-reaching impact on Russian and, later, Soviet attitudes toward soil and society. The transfer of Liebig’s ideas across epistemic domains—from soil science to social science—framed discourses of soil, social formations, and agricultural policy for a century to come. This study of the reception of Liebig in Russia traces a genealogy of the Soviet political concept of the smychka (the unification of the city and countryside) from Liebigian soil economy to Soviet political ecology. The study also examines how models and metaphors travel across the scientific, social, and cultural domains, and how Liebigian agricultural chemistry became a cipher for materialist philosophy and radical politics in an era of political repression.
Before discussing the Russian cultural reception of Liebig’s ideas, it is necessary to provide some background on Liebig and his ideas. Liebig’s renown, like that of many great popularizers of science, was far greater in his own time than today. At his peak of productivity from the 1840s to the early 1870s, his name was constantly before the European public in the ephemera of the age; these encompassed an extensive body of journalistic writing including his popular Letters on Modern Agriculture, public and professional polemics around his work, product testimonials, and his own commercial ventures (of varying success) involving everything from chemical fertilizer to meat extract. Liebig’s books on plant and animal chemistry, moreover, were popular among lay audiences and were translated into a number of European languages by his numerous students. Even if Liebig’s works have been called too technical for the lay reader—Karl Marx complained of having to “wade” through them—it did not prevent a broad public from attempting them.3 In a widely circulated anecdote it was said that the passport official who examined Liebig’s documents on his arrival in London in 1842 shook his hand and affably chatted with him about his first major work, Agricultural Chemistry.4 In addition to his direct outreach to the public, Liebig was enormously important in building the institutions that supported the development of chemistry as the editor of a major journal of the day, through his professional relationships with chemists across Europe, and in his long teaching career, which produced several generations of students who would go on to form the core of Europe’s great body of chemists and industrialists.5
Liebig’s mineral theory of plant nutrition supplanted the prevailing “humus theory” of his German predecessor, A. D. Thaer, which asserted that humus, the “living” component of soil, nourished plants, while minerals, the “non-living” component of soil, were not necessary to plant nutrition.6 Liebig argued that, in fact, all life has a chemical basis and that “non-living” substances like minerals interpenetrate soil, plant, animal, and human organisms. Liebig writes that minerals from the soil “assume the form of corn, flesh, and bones; they pass into the bodies of men, and again assume the same form which they originally possessed.”7 As Liebig notes, this mineral economy depends on the recycling of minerals back into the soil as fertilizer, a process that, he argued, was not only technologically but also economically and socially mediated. Liebig’s original German term for this process of exchange across the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms was Stoffwechsel (metabolism), translated into Russian as obmen veshchestv, literally “the exchange of substances.”8 Liebig narrativizes the movement of minerals and imagines the exchanges among plant, animal, and human life through the medium of soil as chemical equations that must be balanced.
As Liebig suggests in his Organic Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology (1840), the relationship between human bodies and human agriculture is essentially one of chemical affinities. Plants resemble humans insofar as they contain the substances of our flesh and blood: sulphur, phosphorus, nitrogen, alkalis, phosphates, etc.9 The formation of these constituents of our blood—for human blood has a “vegetable composition” in Liebig’s words—is the main purpose of agriculture. It is an extension of Liebig’s reasoning that the forest environment does not correspond to human physiology in the way the cultivated field does: “Agriculture differs essentially from the cultivation of forests, inasmuch as its principal object consists in the production of the constituents of the blood; whilst the object of forest culture is confined principally to the production of carbon.”10 Forest landscapes will never “resemble” humankind as the cultivated landscape does (here one wonders whether Liebig was thinking of Romantic poetry’s pathetic fallacy). Agriculture, as an extension of human culture, deeply reflects human needs and values and is a site of transcorporeal exchanges with nature.
Liebig was a transitional figure between German romantic Naturphilosophie, exemplified by the works of Goethe and Friedrich Schelling, and the new philosophical materialism. After attending lectures by Schelling in his student days, Liebig wrote that “Schelling possessed no thorough knowledge in the province of the natural sciences, and the dressing up of natural phenomena with analogies and images which was called exposition did not suit me.”11 In his later works, Liebig would call this Romantic tendency in science “a dead tree, which bore the finest leaves and the most beautiful flowers, but no fruit. With an infinite sagacity, only pictures were created.”12 But Liebig’s vision of organic exchange owed something to Romanticism’s ecstatic vision of unity under the surface of shifting forms. While Liebig offered materialist explanations of nature, the poetics of his scientific vision are Romantic. Although his work opened the way for a nonvitalist explanation of human and plant life, it also lent itself to Romantic interpretations of nature. Blood and soil are the same substance in different forms, an echo of the Herderian discourse of the organic nation that would later inform German discourses of Blut und Boden, and Russian discourses of narod and pochva. Not only was biblical Adam formed from soil—so, too, was modern, biochemical man.
Thus, despite his rejection of Naturphilosophie and his endorsement of rigorous experimentation, empirical data, and the practical application of scientific knowledge, Liebig himself would come under fire for antireductionism and excessive “literariness.” Liebig’s mentor and erstwhile friend, the chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius, ironically made a similar insinuation about the literary nature of Liebig’s own work, writing of the latter’s Agricultural Chemistry, “This kind of facile physiological chemistry is created at the writing table.”13 A younger generation of positivist materialists in Europe took up Berzelius’s critique of Liebig, but in Russia the chemist was venerated in materialist thought and discourse for several decades to come.
Liebig’s Giessen Chemical Institute has been called a “chemist breeder,” and indeed a significant number of Russia’s chemists and scientists in the mid-nineteenth century were mentored by Liebig or one of his disciples.14 By the 1860s Liebig’s Russian students had returned home to establish themselves as major figures in their fields and to propagate Liebig’s legacy and materialist vision of the world in both the scientific and cultural domains. This cohort formed the first generation of Russian chemists: Nikolai Nikolaevich Zinin (first chairman and cofounder of the Russian Chemical Society), Nikolai Nikolaevich Sokolov (who published the first Russian journal of chemistry, Khimicheskii zhurnal, from 1859–1860 together with the agronomist and journalist Aleksandr Nikolaevich Engelgardt), Aleksei Ivanovich Khodnev, Nikolai Erastovich Liaskovskii, Fedor Fedorovich Beilstein, and Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Fadeev, among others. Liebig’s famed student Aleksandr Abramovich Voskresenskii, called the “grandfather” of Russian chemistry, trained the succeeding generation of Russian scientists—among them Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev, the physical chemist Nikolai Nikolaevich Beketov, and Nikolai Aleksandrovich Menshutkin (discoverer of the Menshutkin reaction).15 Beketov and Mendeleev, in turn, mentored the founder of modern soil science and soil classification, Vasilii Dokuchaev (who was nonetheless critical of Liebig’s limited chemical vision of soil). Aside from the transmission of influence through these direct lineages, Liebig shaped Russian chemistry on an institutional level, as the first Russian chemistry labs were modeled on the Giessen research center.16
Liebig’s students of chemistry also popularized his ideas by translating his works into Russian. The earliest translations, mostly excerpted in journals, were published in the 1840s and 1850s, but it was not until the 1860s that Liebig’s works exploded in Russia, a trend coinciding with the professionalization of his first generation of Russian students and the coming of age of a generation of radicals known as the “men of the sixties.”17 Between 1860 and 1863, at least nine full Russian translations of Liebig’s books were published, a sensation that Aleksandr Engelgardt remarked on in an editorial in Saint Petersburg News in 1863.18 The first full Russian translation of Liebig’s Agricultural Chemistry was published in 1862 by Liebig’s student Pavel Antonovich Ilenkov (1821–1877), who would become professor of chemical engineering at St. Petersburg University.19 Brockhaus-Efron, the authoritative Russian encyclopedia of the prerevolutionary period, hailed Liebig’s work as a “blessing to mankind” because of the promise it held to increase crop yields and end hunger.20 As Liebig’s works became widely available in Russian, and with the memory of the 1833–1834 famine fresh in their minds, many Russians had high hopes that Liebig’s ideas could provide a solution to the multifaceted “soil question” in Russia.
The reach of Liebig’s ideas in Russian society extended, then, through scientific institutions, print publications, professional relationships, and, finally, social-intellectual circles. The kruzhok, or intellectual circle, had become an important institution of intellectual life during the repressive reign of Nicholas I, and it served as a forum for the intermixing of politics, ideology, and science. Not only within kruzhki, but throughout all informal circuits of intelligentsia sociability, Liebig’s disciples brought their scientific interests, education, and expertise to the troubling questions of Russian society.21 There were many close social and family ties among scientists and artists during the mid- to late century. For instance, the chemist Nikolai Beketov and his brother, Andrei Nikolaevich Beketov (a celebrated botanist who wrote extensively on soil conditions) were close friends of Dostoevsky, who parodied Liebig as an empty cultural signifier.22 These social networks conditioned the movement and contestation of metaphors and images across cultural and scientific domains.
Materialism as a philosophy was nearly inseparable from radical politics in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, and Liebig, as an icon of materialism in Russia, also became an icon of radical politics. In Europe Liebig’s works emerged during a period of political revolution, but in Russia these works were received in an era of political repression. Michael Gordin notes that the “German states perceived the revolutions [of 1848] to be at their roots agricultural disturbances caused by instability in crop production.”23 Liebig himself argued that agricultural chemistry could help stabilize the social order by ensuring “greater crop stability across harvests.”24
While German states and scientists were promoting agricultural chemistry as a utopian cure for revolutionary unrest, Nicholas I was reacting to the events of 1848 with repressive measures, including curtailing foreign travel and study and eliminating philosophy from the university curriculum.25 Nearly all of Liebig’s most important Russian disciples had studied in Giessen before 1848, and they were a key force in importing to Russia not only Liebig’s ideas but materialist philosophy in general. Victoria Frede notes that Nicholas I’s censorship “delayed the arrival of the new materialism into Russia.”26 Throughout the repressive decades of the 1840s and 1850s, however, agricultural chemistry became a safe way of discussing new materialist ideas. Crucial to the strategic interests of the Russian state, Liebig’s works managed to escape the censor, yet they carried potentially subversive materialist ideas and placed soil in a broader social and political economy in which serfdom was an inescapable question. It was but a short step from Liebig’s mineral theory of nutrition to a materialist ontology of human life, and as the Dutch physiologist Jakob Moleschott would suggest, cognition as well (exemplified by the slogan “No thought without phosphorus”).27 Thus, it was precisely due to the political repression of mid-nineteenth-century Russia that Liebig’s works on agriculture became so symbolically charged: they offered a means of talking about new materialist philosophies and of critiquing the Russian sociopolitical order grounded in an unbalanced economy of soil. By the 1860s, while Liebig’s ideas were being critiqued in Western Europe as vitalist and “literary” by a younger generation of positivist materialists, many young Russians continued to hail Liebig as an icon of scientific materialism and a broader materialist philosophy, as well as of radical politics.
If Liebig exposed a generational divide in Russia, that divide was exemplified by the polemic between the gentry belletrist Ivan Turgenev and the radical writer and critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Liebig appears in the works of these authors as a symbolic object of contention between two ideological camps and intellectual generations in mid-century Russia. In 1861 Turgenev had dissolved his relationship with the journal The Contemporary over ideological conflicts with Chernyshevsky and a younger, politically radical generation of contributors to the journal. This debate was playing out publicly just as Turgenev was finishing work on his novel Fathers and Sons (1862), and Turgenev’s portrait of the young nihilist student Evgenii Bazarov was regarded as an unflattering reflection of Chernyshevsky’s generation of positivist materialists. The novel has been widely read as a “concrete social picture” of the generational conflict between the men of the forties, liberals like Turgenev who favored gradual reform of Russia’s political institutions and a holistic vision of anthropos, and the succeeding generation of radicals, “men of the sixties” like Chernyshevsky.28
Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons is a compendium of the intellectual debates of the age, and Liebig appears in Turgenev’s story as an empty idol of the younger generation.29 In the novel the positivist materialists Bazarov and Nikolai Petrovich excitedly discuss a number of contemporary works of science and social theory, and a dilettante “lady chemist” named Kukshina refers to Liebig in order to legitimate her amateur enthusiasm for chemistry. At their first meeting, Bazarov and Kukshina turn their conversation from lunch to Liebig:
[Bazarov]: “A piece of meat’s better than a piece of bread even from the chemical point of view.”
[Kukshina]: “Are you are studying chemistry? That is my passion. I myself have even invented a new sort of glue.”
[Bazarov]: “Invented glue? You?”
[Kukshina]: “Yes. And do you know for what purpose? To make dolls’ heads so that they won’t break. I’m practical, too, you see. But it’s not quite ready. I’ve yet to read Liebig.”30
Kukshina applies Liebig’s chemical theories to the formulation of better glue for dolls’ heads. The name Kukshina evokes kuksha (a jaybird, or a slatternly woman), but also kukla, or doll. In his savage parody of the lady chemist, Turgenev declares Russia’s men and women of the sixties to be puppets uncomprehendingly replicating Western materialist discourse. Kukshina and her dolls also constitute a parody of the mechanist and materialist view of the human body—a doll held together not by vital spirit but by chemical glue.
Chernyshevsky responded to Turgenev’s provocation in his work of the following year, What Is To Be Done? (1863), a major influence on the architects of the Russian revolution, including Lenin, who famously called it his favorite novel. In What Is To Be Done?, Liebig’s ideas concerning soil appear as the basis for an extended metaphor in the famous dream of the novel’s heroine, Vera Pavlovna. The evening before her dream, Vera’s dinner guests steer the conversation to “the current debate about the chemical basis of agriculture according to Liebig’s theory, the laws concerning historical progress—an unavoidable subject of conversation in such circles at that time.”31 Later that night, Vera Pavlovna’s dream logic fuses agricultural chemistry and human historical development into an extended metaphor of Russian soil and revolution. In the dream the young positivist materialists Lopukhov and Aleksei Petrovich contrast plants grown in “real” soil with those grown in “putrescent” soil. Real soil is composed of healthy elements (elementy) which form “complex chemical arrangements” through energy from the sun. The main element of this healthy soil is labor. Putrescent soil, on the other hand, is characterized by “stagnation.” This discussion of healthy and putrescent soil mobilizes a dialectic between pochva and griaz’ (dirt). Chernyshevsky marks griaz’ as Russia’s real soil, while the putrescent and fantastic soil of Vera Pavlovna’s dream is the symbolic pochva of Russia’s organic nationalist discourse: an emptied sign, filled with abstract cultural symbolism.32 Liebig’s writings on soil inspired Chernyshevsky’s metaphor of revolutionary social transformation, where minerals and labor circulate freely in a healthy economy of soil, a utopian vision in which labor cures the defects of the “stagnant” Russian national character and improves the quality of the mythologized Russian pochva.
Chernyshevsky’s vision of the imbrication of soil economies and social economies echoes Karl Marx’s extension of Liebig’s agricultural models into sociopolitical theory. While formulating Das Capital, Karl Marx was keenly interested in new developments in agricultural chemistry, a field that was already making important social and economic changes throughout Europe. Liebig in Germany and John Bennet Lawes in Scotland were developing fertilizers that could raise crop yields significantly and mitigate the effects of the declining fertility of Europe’s soil under the Raubsystem.33 In his letters to Engels, Marx wrote that “the new agricultural chemistry in Germany, especially Liebig and [Christian] Schönbein … are more important than all the economists put together.”34
As Joan Martinez Alier, John Bellamy Foster, and others have shown, Marx extended Liebig’s diagnosis of the source of soil depletion into a broader socioeconomic critique of the unhealthy relationship between city and country.35 In Liebig’s model of mineral exchange, the agricultural cycle depends on the return to the soil of all extracted minerals in the form of food waste, animal waste, and human waste (and even human remains). Liebig writes that “in the large towns of England, the produce both of English and foreign agriculture is largely consumed; elements of soil indispensable to plants do not return to the fields—contrivances resulting from the manners and customs of English people … render it difficult, perhaps impossible, to collect the enormous quantity of the phosphates which are daily, as solid and liquid excrements, carried into the rivers.”36 Liebig considered it a major problem for agriculture and society alike that minerals were not returned to the soil of the countryside, but were “wasted” in cities, poisoning water and spreading disease.37 These were conditions of both social and soil imbalance between the country and the city. Marx explains how Liebig’s agricultural metabolism is sealed into the larger interdependent processes of “social metabolism.” He writes that “large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism [Stoffwechsel], a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country. (Liebig.)”38 Marx assures his reader that “social metabolism” is prescribed by nature, as he transfers a “natural law” from soil science to social science. Marx interprets what Foster calls the “metabolic rift” as a broader form of economic exploitation of the country by the city.39 Friedrich Engels, in “The Housing Question” (1872), also appeals to Liebig as an authority in his articulation of the “rift” between town and country: “The abolition of the antithesis between town and country is no more and no less utopian than the abolition of the antithesis between capitalists and wageworkers. From day to day it is becoming more and more a practical demand of both industrial and agricultural production. No one has demanded this more energetically than Liebig in his writings on the chemistry of agriculture, in which his first demand has always been that man shall give back to the land what he takes from it, and in which he proves that only the existence of the towns, and in particular the big towns, prevents this.”40 In his discussion of the “antithesis” between town and country, Engels frames Liebig’s theory of soil metabolism in dialectical terms and suggests that Liebig’s work points to an effective means of synthesizing town and country into a single economy, founded on reciprocal material and mineral exchanges.
The impact of Marx and Engels’s interpretation of Liebig on later Soviet agricultural and social policy is clear, but the concept of imbalance between city and country also evolved independently within the Russian intellectual tradition. In his Sketches from the History of Labor (1863), the radical critic Dmitrii Pisarev echoed Liebig’s critique of robbery of the soil:
Only in one case does human intervention weaken the productive forces of nature; this occurs when a person takes out the raw products of the earth to distant markets, and thus permanently deprives the land of its known constituents and does not return any fertilizer in exchange. Such a course of action is possible only in places where there are few people, and where consequently there is no industrial activity. If there were a lot of people, enterprise would be necessary, factories would grow, the raw products would be recycled [pererabotyvat’sia] and assimilated on the site. The remains of processed products would provide rich fertilizer, and the soil rather than being depleted, would continually become more fertile.41
Pisarev implicitly argues against the law of diminishing returns; in his view the only condition under which agricultural labor reduces the fertility of soil instead of enhancing it is one characterized by unbalanced exchange between raw products of the country and processed products from the industrial center. Pisarev focuses on the need for the products of agriculture and industry to be consumed and then recycled (from waste to fertilizer) within a single location and community. The chief theorist of pochvennichestvo, Nikolai Danilevskii, too, comments on the “metabolic rift,” observing of Chinese agriculture that, “in the words of Liebig, this is the only rational agriculture, since it gives back to the soil what it takes from it as harvest, without resorting to importing fertilizer from outside sources, which doubtless must be considered agricultural exploitation.”42
Liebig’s model of the robbery of nutrients from the countryside also drew the interest of Aleksandr Engelgardt, a distinguished chemist, popular journalist, and active figure in the Russian Populist movement of the 1870s. Engelgardt had studied with Liebig’s disciple Nikolai Zinin before attaining the position of chemist and rector at the St. Petersburg Agricultural Institute.43 Engelgardt wrote that as a student he was “very attracted to Liebig’s scientific genius” and interested in Liebig’s observations about soil exhaustion.44 Engelgardt himself developed phosphate fertilizers and worked together with Pavel Ilenkov (Liebig’s student and translator) to develop a chemical process to dissolve bones for fertilizer using alkalizing compounds, a method (later called the Ilenkov-Engelgardt method) that Ilenkov discussed in detail with Liebig himself in their correspondence.45 Unsurprisingly, given the links between materialist philosophy and political radicalism, Engelgardt was arrested during his tenure at the Agricultural Institute and in 1881 went into internal exile on his estate near Smolensk, where he continued his agricultural experiments and wrote prolifically on agronomy, farm management, and soil improvement.46
Beginning in 1872 Engelgardt had published a regular column on agriculture in “Letters from the Country” in the popular journal Notes of the Fatherland. In one of his letters, Engelgardt applies Liebig’s theory of the “robbery of the soil” to the description of peasant and gentry estates in his own region:
In our parts, both the landowners and the peasants fertilize their land with manure. The need for fertilizer has entered everyone’s consciousness, so that the landowner devotes all his attention to building up stores of manure…. But at the same time that the landowner, who is selling grain and cattle, renting out his meadows in part, and leasing land for flax and grain, depletes the soil due to the removal of soil particles [pochvennikh chastits] (most importantly—phosphate salts) through the grain, cattle, and hay, by contrast, the peasant by bringing in grain, straw, etc., improves and humifies his own land, bringing in soil particles from outside.47
Engelgardt describes the peasants’ practice of skimming hay, straw, flax, grain, and firewood from rented gentry land to enrich their own small plots. Peasants also consume the fruits of their own land and their “excrement remains on their own plot.”48 “Thus,” he writes, “the peasant brings soil particles as hay from other places, and the soil particles remain on his allotment, increasing the amount of nutrients in his land.”49 Large gentry farms continually lose minerals through the export of agricultural produce:
The situation is completely different on the farms of landed gentry. There the soil is always exhausted, and farming further exhausts the land. Under serfdom, the landed gentry produced enormous quantities of grain, which they sold from their holdings and which carried off with them masses of valuable soil particles taken out of the earth, carried them across the sea to the Germans and the English, carried them off to the cities, from which these particles flowed down into the rivers.50
The peasant gleaners are in “metabolic competition” with landowners. Engelgardt’s description of local Russian agricultural conditions closely models Liebig’s description of the unbalanced social metabolism of soil, but with a distinctly Russian class character.
So far, I have discussed Liebig’s place in Russia as a matter of diffusion and reception. However, both Liebig’s works and their Russian adaptations must also be understood as products of the systemic transformation of the world economy and Russia’s place in it over the course of the nineteenth century. In this context, Russian intellectuals’ critique of soil mismanagement as an exploitative extraction of resources takes on an international dimension: as Engelgardt points out, the mineral wealth of the soil was expropriated not only from the countryside to the city, but from Russia to the West.
Foster situates Liebig’s work in Europe’s so-called soil crisis of the early nineteenth century.51 Intensive agriculture had exhausted the soil of western Europe, particularly England, where the Industrial Revolution had led to an urban population boom and increased food demand. The value of England’s bone imports (for mineral enrichment of soil) increased in the fourteen years after 1823 from 14,400 to 254,600 pounds.52 The exhaustion of the soil in western Europe led to a decline in harvests by the 1840s, which in turn led to an international demand for Russian grain. In this way, Russian chernozem entered the world economy as the source of Russia’s comparative advantage in grain monoculture. Large-scale Russian grain exports began during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, but the watershed for Russia’s emergence as a major grain exporter was the repeal of the British Corn Laws in 1846–1849.53 Through a series of booms in the second half of the nineteenth century, Russian grain achieved dominance in British and west European markets and then entered into competition with emerging grain exporters such as the United States and Argentina. The early Soviet Marxist historian M. N. Pokrovskii even considered the export of grain to have been the pivotal factor in Russia’s entry into bourgeois capitalism, culminating in the Stolypin period’s booming grain profits and “conquest of Russia by foreign capital.”54
Russia’s semicolonial entry onto the world market as a raw material exporter, in combination with the new Liebigian anxieties that soil nutrients were leaving the country along with the wheat and rye, set in motion discussions about the effect of capitalist agriculture on the patrimony of national soil. Liebig set out a concrete basis for such concerns in his introduction to the 1862 edition of Organic Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology, where he noted that the battlefields of the Crimea were a source of bones used to enrich British soil.55 For Liebig this was just another instance of the theft of mineral resources from one country by another. After all, any trade goods could become fungible through Stoffwechsel: “The importation of urine or of solid excrements from a foreign land is quite equivalent to the importation of corn and cattle.”56 But the Herderian discourse of homeland as burial ground provided a different set of terms for understanding such nutrient extraction as sacrilege and cultural grave robbery.
While Liebig’s critique of the robbery of nutrients is obvious in the case of the actual exportation of bones, Russian intellectuals, both conservative and radical, applied the same critique to the broader phenomenon of capitalist agricultural exports. The emergence of Russian soil science was directly related to the conversion of the soil of the Russian Empire into a global commodity. The growth of the grain market gave an impetus to understanding the distinctive characteristics of Russia’s regional soils, but it also transformed the nutrients in the soil into fungible assets, as it converted them first into grain, then foreign currency.57 It was the equation between export agriculture and theft of the national patrimony that provided the implicit basis for Dostoevsky’s tirade against Jewish capitalist ruination of Russian soil in the Crimea, discussed in the previous chapter. Non-Slavs, without roots in the soil, were not judged to be fit stewards of the land. Rather they were robbers extracting its nutrients to exchange for cash on the world market. Vladimir Odoevskii, in his late essay “It Is Not Enough” (1867), makes soil exhaustion a first principle of the rise and fall of nations:
All the complicated reasons for relocations, wars, raids, robberies, and, in general, violent movements of peoples, as well as internal upheavals, come down to one basic and very prosaic one: the depletion of the soil, to the need to look for another, more fertile one—in a word, the need to saturate oneself. Liebig notes that if a person could only eat water and air, then there would be no violence, no disorder, no reason for lawlessness, no slavery or cultivation of one person by another—but a person depends on the soil.58
Odoevskii echoes Liebig’s (fundamentally Malthusian) assertion that hunger and desire for land are the source of all militarism. Nonetheless, he concludes on a hopeful note. Although Malthus correctly judged the drivers of human history, Odoevskii observes that “practical science has vindicated Providence against Malthus’s blasphemy”: that is, the bountiful harvests brought by Liebigian agriculture will bring an end to the Malthusian war of human against human and predation of nation upon nation.59
These discussions of soil and mineral economy had an impact decades later on both environmental and social policies. The unification of city and country (smychka goroda i derevni) became a crucial slogan of the 1920s, and it can ultimately be traced to Liebig’s system of soil metabolism—but not only by way of Marx and Engels.60 There is a distinctly Russian genealogy of the smychka and social metabolism that drew on the highly developed Russian discourse surrounding Liebig and Russian soil directly, as seen in the writings of Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, Engelgardt and many others. The early Bolsheviks, as heirs to this Russian materialist tradition, read Liebig within an interpretative framework established both by Marx and by their Russian radical predecessors. Lenin was a careful reader of Engelgardt, for example, although he rejected Engelgardt’s populist valorization of agriculture over industry.61 Lenin echoed Liebig’s prescription that mineral exchange between the city and the country should be balanced: in his 1919 document “On the Transportation of Fertilizers by Rail,” he declared that shipments of chemical fertilizers to the country should be precisely equivalent to shipments of grain to the city.62 Where Liebig had recommended managing the exchanges between city and country as one would balance a chemical equation, Lenin brought those exacting equations into the realm of social policy.
Later, with the “strategic retreat” of NEP, Lenin seems even to have regarded the smychka as a way to come to terms with free trade—which he feared would lead to the “full restoration of capital”—by imagining the NEP economy as a system of moneyless exchange between city and country. As historian E. H. Carr notes, Lenin “seems at first to have envisaged the exchange of goods between town and country as a grandiose system of organized barter.”63 Thus, by ending the exploitative extraction of nutrients from the countryside to the city, he hoped to limit the damage done by Russia’s continued large-scale export of wheat under NEP—that is, the continuation of the semicolonial relationship of Russian agriculture with Western capital that he had critiqued in his prerevolutionary works. Within the Soviet Union the smychka could recuperate wasted nutrients domestically through mechanisms of state control that could not yet be applied to the global market.64
Lenin’s innovation in interpreting Liebigian social and soil metabolism, then, was the centralized control of these metabolic exchanges within a state apparatus, managed by the first generation of professional Russian scientists and technicians, who were themselves products of the nineteenth-century tradition of cultural and scientific materialism (and in many cases claimed direct professional descent from Liebig through a chain of apprenticeships). The smychka—grounded in a unified system of social and soil metabolism—would offer a model in the later Soviet period not only for the exchanges between city and country, but also between center and national republics within the Stalinist “all-union division of labor,” which coordinated the material flows of the Soviet economic regions.