Chapter 5

Wasteland

Platonov’s Dialectics of Waste and Recuperation

Vittoria Di Palma observes that the term wasteland originally referred to land that “stood apart from or outside of human culture.”¹ In English translations of the Bible, wasteland was rendered from the Latin terra deserta, denoting an empty land, and the Russian equivalent, pustyr’, is also etymologically related to “emptiness” and “desert.” In the Russian imagination a wasteland was a space that was unproductive and empty of life or human culture. Wasteland could be found in the heartland of Russia, in swamps and other impoverished spaces of Russian nature, untouched by the improvements of labor, science, and capital. But in a cultural imagination characterized by “arboreal chauvinism,” the arid environments on the Russian and Soviet periphery most often figured as wasteland—wild and unproductive spaces inhabited by unconquerable nomad pastoralists and ethnic Others, from Turkic nomads to the “small peoples” of the Far North and East.² Borderland colonization and the introduction of agriculture was a state practice for bringing these wastelands into productivity and rallying their populations out of historical inertia into modernity, two tasks encapsulated in the Soviet key term osvoenie (assimilation).³ This chapter explores the complex of ideas in the work of writer and land reclamation engineer Andrei Platonov, whose encounter with the Kara-Kum Desert stimulated new reflections on the place of waste in history and the role of wasteland—as vibrant and resistant matter—in Stalinist development.

Conquering the Desert

The Kara-Kum (or Black Sand) Desert of central Turkmenistan briefly became a Soviet cultural obsession when in July 1933 a team of twenty-one cars, mostly from the Gorky and Stalin auto plants, embarked on the Moscow−Kara-Kum−Moscow motor rally. Pravda and Izvestiia ran front-page stories on the expedition and followed the team over the course of nearly three months and ten thousand kilometers as they forded streams, climbed sand dunes, and traversed the roadless “white spots” on the map of Turkmenistan. In addition to promoting the new Soviet automobile industry and inaugurating exploration of a little-studied environment, the expedition had the effect of fixing the remote Kara-Kum Desert in the new Soviet cultural geography and installing it in the public imagination. The insuperable Kara-Kum, “the largest sandy desert in the world,” was represented to the Soviet public not only as a test of Soviet technology but an environmental, economic, and cultural challenge to Soviet civilization.⁴ The journal USSR in Construction ran a two-page photomontage with the caption: “In the places where lay the lifeless sands of Kara-Kum, cotton fields will bloom. And in the places where dead clay cities have been drifted over with sand for thousands of years, new cities, socialist cities, will arise.”⁵ The project to transform Kara-Kum into a garden of socialism was widely and successfully propagandized, not only in newspapers and journals but also memoirs, children’s books, and even a film produced by Roman Karmen and Eduard Tisse.

Over the course of the following two years, Kara-Kum was the site of several cultural and scientific expeditions and the subject of high-profile development projects. The centerpiece of the Soviet campaign to “socialize” Kara-Kum was a plan by the Academy of Sciences to irrigate the desert and grow cotton by diverting one of the great rivers of Central Asia, the Amu Darya, from the Aral Sea to the Caspian, simultaneously creating the conditions for the largely nomadic Turkmens to transform into a settled, modern nation. In the summer of 1934, the Academy of Sciences sent an expedition to investigate the feasibility of the plan, and the glossy illustrated journal USSR in Construction reported that if the river project succeeded, Kara-Kum “would become the granary of the world.”⁶

The project to irrigate Kara-Kum was even singled out as an exemplary topic for fiction at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow that summer. The writer and engineer M. Ilin declared, “Many times, people have spoken of the desert, or of the Amu Darya…. The river is now unstable. It is ready to break through the barriers on its path to the Caspian Sea, rush into it and irrigate Turkmeniia…. This is one of those examples of the type of story that can be seized by the author of scientific-fiction books [nauchno-khudozhestvennye knigi], for the fate of rivers, the fate of nature, the fate of things is tied here to the fate of mankind, the fate of socialism.”⁷

Figure 1. Photomontage of the Kara-Kum desert. USSR in Construction, no. 2, 1934. Ne Boltai! collection.

A brigade of Russian writers had been dispatched to Turkmenistan that very spring to help develop local literature in advance of the Writers’ Congress and to collect literary material for a volume to commemorate the republic’s tenth anniversary.⁸ Among them was Andrei Platonov, whose posthumously published novella about Turkmenistan, Dzhan (Soul, completed in 1935), drew on material gathered over the course of two trips to Turkmenistan, including a ten-day sojourn into the desert of Kara-Kum.⁹ Platonov brought a long-standing interest in the transformation of desert environments, as well as special technical expertise, to the problems of development in the Kara-Kum Desert, and he was invited to join not only Gorky’s writers’ brigade but also the Academy of Sciences’ expedition to assess the feasibility of the Amu Darya irrigation project.¹⁰ From approximately 1922 to 1927, Platonov had worked for the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture (Narodnyi komissariat zemledeliia, Narkomzem) as a regional land reclamation engineer (meliorator), a period during which he wrote scores of newspaper articles and several short works of fiction on drought, desertification, and the irrigation of arid lands.¹¹ Platonov’s major fiction demands re-examination in relation to his early career in land reclamation and the questions about land and human engineering that it generated.

Dzhan, specifically, may be read as an artifact of the brief Soviet cultural obsession in the early 1930s with Kara-Kum and the problems encountered when developing it, as filtered through Platonov’s unique experience working in arid environments. Literary scholarship on Dzhan has not placed it in this historical or biographical context; the novella’s landscape, to the contrary, has been a privileged site of interpretation for its apparent lack of geographical indexicality and its abstraction as an archeocultural site of biblical, Sufi, Zoroastrian, Greek, and Russian mythologies.¹² I read the desert landscape of Dzhan not as a purely mythological topos, but as a historically and materially determined space. Platonov’s novella constitutes a response to specific Soviet development projects, shaped fundamentally by the ongoing discourses of soil discussed in previous chapters. Reading Platonov within a continuous tradition of Russian materialism and discourse of soil reveals new dimensions of his art and shows how old myths found new expression in the age of Soviet development.

As an intervention in the ideological and scientific debates on development of the early 1930s, Dzhan may be the fiction work most symptomatic of Platonov’s evolving concerns as a meliorator. On its surface Dzhan tells the story of a mission to claim souls for socialism, not the mission to irrigate and cultivate the desert. Yet the relationship between the “fate of rivers” and the “fate of socialism”—as Ilin proposed at the Congress of Soviet Writers—is central to Platonov’s tale of the Dzhan as a nation on the fringes of both Soviet historical narrative and socialist construction at the end of the first Five-Year Plan. Platonov understands the nomadic Dzhan and the black sands of Kara-Kum to be the products of similar historical and ecological processes, and he thus asserts that Turkmenistan’s path to socialism demands an integrated reform of nation and nature. While Platonov does not directly address the monumental river project in the plot for his novella, its traces appear there, pointing to a signifying absence, an approach to the development of Turkmenistan that Platonov rejects, implicitly in his fiction and explicitly in his essays of the period.

Read as a novella of environmental and social development at the periphery, Dzhan earnestly engages with what could be called vernacular socialism and its metafictional corollary: how to tell an authentic story of the local conditions of socialist development.¹³ Arif Dirlik uses the term vernacular socialism to mean the “authentic nationalization of socialism: bringing it into the voices of its local social and cultural environment.”¹⁴ Similarly, I use the term here to suggest a vision of socialism focused on praxis, lived experience, and the distinctive conditions of local environments. As Thomas Osbourne has observed, Platonov’s work is concerned not just with utopia but with “actually existing utopia.”¹⁵ There is evidence that Platonov’s practical experience as a meliorator with the problems of arid lands reoriented his attitude to the “war with nature” toward the problems of “actually existing socialism” and the resistances and excesses of nature under working conditions. Platonov had already taken a critical, even satirical, view of Soviet-style Prometheanism in his works of the late 1920s. But in his writings on Turkmenistan, he reveals the changing sense of his responsibilities not only as a writer but as an environmental thinker. Transcending both Prometheanism and satire, these works offer a nuanced vision of socialist development, and they attempt to formulate solutions with a basis in authentic local conditions and praxes. In the Soviet cultural geography of the early 1930s, Kara-Kum was contested territory just at the border of the increasingly homogenized ideological landscape of Stalinism, and its peripheral status made it a unique staging ground for Platonov’s thought experiment in vernacular socialism in its national and natural development. In addition to its attention to Kara-Kum’s specific ecology, Dzhan presents an alternative to two totalizing Soviet master narratives that were forming in the early 1930s: in the political domain, new Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist doctrine on modes of production, and in the literary domain, the socialist realist plot. In the summer of 1934, the aesthetic values and potentialities of socialist realism were consolidated and defined at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers. In the same period, as discussed in the previous chapter, a crucial ideological debate concerning Marxist models of historical development—specifically, modes of production—resolved into a consensus supporting the five-stage unilinear model of historical development called the piatichlenka, which devalued the explanatory significance of local conditions and subsumed national historiography within a Stalinist master narrative. Platonov’s novella responds to this ideological context: the Dzhan people fall outside the “natural” laws of the piatichlenka and the paradigms of Stalinist historical development, and this fact has ramifications not only for interpreting the history of this fictional nation but also for the plotting of their future development and integration into the socialist realist narrative. Dzhan, then, is a text whose critique of Stalinist models of national and natural development requires it to take on the aesthetic work of remapping the socialist realist plot. As a practicing land reclamation engineer, Platonov reworks many of the discourses and myths of soil examined in previous chapters, placing them in a new ideological landscape. In Dzhan old myths take on new forms: the mineral cycle is literalized as the practice of geophagia among the Dzhan tribe; desertification, nomadism, and Asiatic restoration are reconfigured as a complex of myths for the Soviet multinational age; and the transformation of nature and human nature proceed in a slow, grudging dialectic that challenges the Promethean attitude associated with Marxist and Soviet theories of development.

This chapter opens with a discussion of the arc of Platonov’s writings on the desert from 1921 to 1927, the final year that he worked for Narkomzem in the provinces of southern Russia and focuses specifically on Platonov’s appropriation of the Solovevian discourse of the battle with the “Asian” desert (discussed in chapter 1 of this book). The next section considers new directions in Platonov’s writings on the desert following his first trip to Turkmenistan, focusing on two texts from 1934: an environmental manifesto, “On the First Socialist Tragedy” (“O pervoi sotsialisticheskoi tragedii”), and an essay specifically addressing the development of Kara-Kum, “The Hot Arctic” (“Goriachaia Arktika”). Reading these texts alongside Dzhan and situating the novella in its original discursive, historical, and ideological contexts, we gain a fuller understanding not only of Platonov’s account of the history and future of the desert and its nomadic inhabitants but also of the method by which this tale of socialist development at the periphery comments on the ideological concerns of the center.

Literator as Meliorator: Platonov’s Career with Narkomzem in the 1920s

Nearly fifteen years before Platonov wrote Dzhan, the devastating Volga-region drought of 1921 galvanized him into what he termed the “battle with the desert.”¹⁶ Although he had already enjoyed some literary success with the publication of his first book of poetry, The Blue Depth (Golubaia glubina, 1921), Platonov explained that the drought precipitated his decision to commit himself primarily to melioratsiia (land reclamation or land improvement) rather than literature: “What a bore [Kakaia skuka],” Platonov wrote in August 1921, “only to write about the suffering millions, when you could feed them.”¹⁷ Later revisiting this decisive moment, Platonov wrote that “the drought of 1921 made an incredibly strong impression on me, and, being a technician, I could no longer occupy myself with the contemplative affair of literature.”¹⁸ Platonov graduated from the Voronezh Polytechnic Institute in 1921 and began working as a regional meliorator for Narkomzem in 1922. During the 1920s Narkomzem was the primary Soviet state organ charged with melioratsiia, and its broad mandate was to “improve” land through a wide variety of interventions: irrigation, drainage, soil management, land resurfacing, erosion control, and the planting of shelter belts, activities that Platonov describes in diaries, newspaper articles, and memoranda from the period.¹⁹

Over the course of five years, Platonov waged war against the desert as both a meliorator and a literator (writer). Viktor Shklovsky, following his brief encounter with Platonov on an agitational trip through the provinces in 1925, took special note of the young meliorator’s concern with buffering southern Russia against desertification: “Here they are cleaning the rivers, straightening them, draining swamps, and sprinkling lime on the fields to control acidity. So that is how they cleaned up Tikhaia Sosna. Comrade Platonov is very busy. The desert is advancing.”²⁰ As Shklovsky observed, although Platonov engaged in a variety of land reclamation efforts, his greatest concern was with desertification, drought, and the irrigation of arid lands. Platonov experimented with his own designs for motors and pumps for small-scale irrigation in Voronezh, and his semiautobiographical story “The Motherland of Electricity” (“Rodina elektrichestva”) describes how a young technician resourcefully uses a motorcycle engine to irrigate fields in a provincial Russian village. A young Voronezh poet, Z. S. Markina, described her visit to Platonov’s experimental field to see his own irrigation system: “The motor pounded nearby, and water gushed out. Andrei said that the water should irrigate the earth and started to tell me about unfamiliar things, Turkmenistan, the sands which also need to drink water; he said that water is life and people must take care of the earth.”²¹ Soon after joining Narkomzem, Platonov was appointed to chair the Provincial Committee on the Artificial Irrigation of Arid Lands and in the same year wrote one of his earliest works on irrigation of the desert, the science-fiction sketch “Doklad upravleniia rabot po gidrifikatsii Tsentral’noi Asii” (“Report of the Administration of Irrigation Works of Central Asia”), later used in the story “The Ethereal Tract” (“Efirnyi trakt”). Written in the form of an official technical report addressed to Vladimir Lenin, Gleb Krzhizhanovskii, Aleksei Gastev, and others, the piece describes in fanciful detail a system to harness geothermal energy to irrigate over a million desiatini of Asian land.²²

One defense that Platonov proposed against the apocalyptic threat of desertification was the expansion of agriculture to Russia’s arid southern borderlands by means of irrigation. Platonov writes that “the problem of our age is the conquest of the steppes and deserts, the arming of Russian agriculture with agronomy and technology in order to extend it to the steppes and deserts.”²³ He even adds desert irrigation to Lenin’s famous formula of Soviet power plus electrification: “Communism is the realization of a concrete set of tasks: electrification (and general industrialization) of production and agriculture and the overcoming of the deserts by means of hydrological improvements.”²⁴

Throughout the period of his Voronezh journalism, Platonov elaborated a mythology of Russian drought and desertification that marked the desert symbolically as an “Asian” invader, associated with nomad culture. Platonov attributes the historical formation of deserts to the failure of “Asian” civilizations, writing that “the Sahara, Gobi, and sandy rivers of Asia are the excrement of irrational cultures that lay in sandy graves they have prepared for themselves.”²⁵ He further warns that southern Russia is the battle zone of this Asian environmental and cultural threat: “An arid zone is moving farther and farther inland, deep into the province—the desert is overtaking us; from the southeast, the heat of Turkestan and the dry climate of the plateaus of Central Asia are already breathing in our face across the steppe.”²⁶

Platonov’s marking of this environmental threat as “Asian” places him in a continuous discourse of desertification reaching back to Solovev. Platonov warns that Turkmenistan’s hot winds are “breathing” into southern Russia.²⁷ Referring to one alleged cause of the 1891 drought, the hot wind from Central Asia called the sukhovei, Platonov writes, “Our soil is being eaten away by ravines and deadened by the sukhovei (in our region the tongue of the desert has already pushed in from the southeast), acidic bogs are spreading, and a fine sand is conquering.”²⁸ His reference to the threat of ravines also points to Solovev’s punning title: the vrag (enemy) comes from an ovrag (ravine).²⁹ One year later Platonov echoed this warning: “We mainly have to entrench ourselves against Asia, against the heat and sand of Turkestan…. By doing this, southeastern Europe will be saved from drought, and Russia will be saved from hunger.”³⁰

In addition to these sources, Platonov demonstrated broad familiarity with fin-de-siècle scientific works on desertification by Vasilii Dokuchaev (discussed in chapter 1); the climatologist Aleksandr Voeikov, who wrote on the irrigation of Turkestan; and the expatriate Russian geographer Petr Kropotkin, whose 1904 essay “The Desiccation of Eur-Asia” argued that desertification was spreading from Central Asia to Russia.³¹ Platonov synthesizes these diverse influences, merging scientific and mystico-historical worldviews. Paraphrasing Kropotkin, and adding a touch of Solovevian millennialism, Platonov writes, “Kropotkin says somewhere, on the basis of scientific research, that the fate of southeastern Europe (our regions) is the same as the fate of Central Asia: desiccation, starvation, extermination.”³²

By the late 1920s Platonov’s writings on the “war with nature” had become less militant and more satirical, perhaps as a result of increasing disillusionment with his work with Narkomzem. In letters written during his assignment to Tambov from 1926–1927, he complains of “squabbling and terrible intrigues” within Narkomzem, a lack of expertise among staff, and resistance from the local laborers.³³ In his free hours in Tambov, Platonov turned to a story depicting the failure of a large hydroengineering project and the martyring of its engineer. The story, “The Locks of Epifan” (“Epifanskie shliuzy,” 1927), offers a key to understanding Platonov’s choices in plotting Dzhan.

Another work that anticipates the themes of Platonov’s later writings on Kara-Kum was the 1927 story “The Teacher of the Sands” (“Peschanaia uchitel’nitsa”), which closed out the first period of Platonov’s literary works on the problems of deserts and desertification. The story describes the struggles of a village schoolteacher who learns methods of land reclamation and helps to transition nomads to settled agriculture on the “border of the dead Central Asian desert.”³⁴ Platonov’s story abandons the grandiose and the Promethean to explore small, local responses to drought and desertification, prefiguring his works of the 1930s on the development of the Kara-Kum Desert.

“The Dialectics of Nature in Kara-Kum”

Platonov’s trip to Turkmenistan occurred during a distinct moment in global environmental history. In the spring of 1934, the United States had the worst drought in its history, and dust became a global obsession as great “black blizzards” of eroded topsoil swept the American plains. The American environmental catastrophe, which came to be known as the Dust Bowl, generated an international discussion about desertification and the future of agriculture.³⁵ Although the Soviet press attributed the American environmental crisis to the rapacious expansion of capitalist agriculture, the first Five-Year Plan mandated similarly rapid agricultural expansion to previously uncultivated arid lands and would, likewise, create extensive erosion.³⁶ In 1929, at the beginning of the Five-Year Plan, Ilin had written, “Our steppes will truly become ours only when we come with columns of tractors and plows to break the thousand-year-old virgin soil.”³⁷ The breaking of the thousand-year-old tselina and the transformation of steppe into farmland was regarded as a means of buffering against an encroaching desert that, even in the 1930s, was troped as “Asian.” Gorky, in his programmatic article of 1931, “On the Battle with Nature” (“O bor’be s prirodoi”) continued Solovev’s rhetoric on the war with drought: “What is the battle with drought and what does it require? From the east, from the sandy steppes heated by the sun, through the so-called ‘Kalmyk gate,’ a hot wind blows in a broad band to the northwest—the ‘sukhovei.’ … It brings with it a fine sandy dust, clogging fertile soils with it, reducing their fertility.”³⁸ Gorky identifies an “eastern” threat to the fertile soils of grain-growing regions and proposes irrigation and the planting of shelter belts as the first steps in the war with this Asian enemy, much as Platonov had in the 1920s.

By the early 1930s Platonov himself appeared to be moving away from Gorky’s “war with nature” and Solovev’s “enemy from the east.” He had already questioned the effectiveness of large-scale hydroengineering projects in “The Locks of Epifan,” and in his work “The First Ivan” (“Pervyi Ivan,” 1930) he had even broached the possibility that desertification was man-made, writing that “contemporary methods of exploiting the soil [pochva] are, of course, the reason for the formation of deserts.”³⁹ But his trip to Turkmenistan in 1934 moved him to seek out new models for understanding nature and society. In his travel notebook Platonov gnomically jotted down, “The dialectics of nature in K[ara]kum.”⁴⁰ This idea was the seed of what could be considered an environmental manifesto, “On the First Socialist Tragedy” (1934). Here, Platonov problematizes the conventions of the “war with nature”:

Nature is not great and is not abundant. More precisely, she is so cruelly designed that she has not yet yielded her greatness and her abundance to anyone. This is a good thing, otherwise—in historical time—we would long ago have stolen, squandered, and drunk nature down to her very bones. There has always been enough appetite. If the physical world had not had a single law, in fact, its most fundamental law—the law of the dialectic—in a few brief centuries people would have destroyed the world completely and in vain.⁴¹

Platonov praises the law of the dialectic for protecting nature and driving humanity toward further development. In contrast to the Promethean attitudes of his earlier works, this essay no longer presents nature as a “blind” and irrational adversary but as a “teacher,” protecting against an immature and destructive human will. Platonov notes, however, that humanity has a means of overturning the dialectic—technology: “The relationship between technology and nature is essentially tragic. Technology’s aim is ‘Give me a fulcrum and I shall overturn the world.’ But nature is designed in such a way that she does not like being outsmarted. With the necessary momentum of the lever, it is possible to overturn the world, but so much will be lost along the way and so much time wasted because the lever is so long that the victory will be practically useless.”⁴² Platonov’s reference to Archimedes’s lever offers a pointedly skeptical reevaluation of the Prometheanism of his youth. In the 1921 story “Markun,” Platonov’s title character asks Archimedes why he failed to use the earth to move the universe and asserts confidently that he himself will do what Archimedes could not. Here, technology itself figures as Archimedes’s lever; although it may indeed overturn the universe, the victory will be “useless” in view of its costs.

Platonov’s warning further echoes a controversial statement by Friedrich Engels in Dialectics of Nature: “Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first.”⁴³ Engels’s caution that nature’s conquest entails unforeseen consequences was a topic of broader debate in conservation and environmental policy in the early 1930s. Environmental historian Douglas Weiner discusses how Engels’s Dialectics of Nature became a point of contention in debates concerning use policies for nature reserves at the First All-Union Conservation Congress of 1933. The leader of the All-Russian Society for Conservation, V. N. Makarov, “corrected” his opponents’ misreading of Engels: “Engels allegedly indicates that nature ‘avenges’ man for its improper use. People, in referring to Engels’s words, lose sight of two things. First, Engels had in mind not socialist society … but the plunderous, unplanned, irrational economy of the capitalist system.”⁴⁴ Engels does implicate capitalism, but he also takes a long historical view, offering several case studies of precapitalist societies that unwittingly brought about their own environmental, and consequently social, ruin, including “Mesopotamia, Greece, and Asia Minor.”⁴⁵ Contrary to Makarov’s assertion, Engels’s Dialectics of Nature leaves open the question of whether socialist society, with its ideal organization, will evolve beyond such risks.

In his own meditation on the “dialectics of nature,” Platonov points to the abuses of imperialist and fascist systems but then argues that the Soviet Union’s own “crisis of production” should not tempt it to leverage too much technological force against nature and its law of the dialectic. The reader is left with the impression that socialism, or societies aspiring to it, may also be capable of the environmental abuses observed in other societies and modes of production. Platonov’s alternative is surprisingly mild: “We must do no more than stand in the ranks of ordinary people in their patient socialist work.”⁴⁶ Platonov’s appeal to patience suggests a critique of rapid industrialization and a reckoning with the limitations of dialectical development and authentic historical change.

Platonov’s environmental manifesto illuminates his concurrent article on the specific development of Kara-Kum, “The Hot Arctic” (1934). The symbolic association between the conquest of the Kara-Kum and the Arctic (the site of the recent, sensational SS Cheliuskin expedition) had been suggested in a 1934 Pravda article on Kara-Kum: “On a wide front, our country has led a heroic attack on the harsh, distant Arctic and has already attained the greatest successes there. Next in line: the deserts.”⁴⁷ Platonov’s essay reproduces many slogans of the war against nature: he declares that the desert is a relic of history that is “not necessary under socialism” and that the Soviets’ task is the “complete industrialization and agricultural development of Kara-Kum.”⁴⁸ But the text subversively rejects the methods employed to meet the “crisis of production,” at least under present conditions.⁴⁹ Platonov’s actual recommendations for the development of Kara-Kum are stubbornly modest, as I discuss later in the context of Dzhan’s commentary on the standard hydroengineering plot.

In “The Hot Arctic” Platonov constructs an idiosyncratic environmental history of Kara-Kum, identifying not only the desert’s origins in a hostile nature but also the failures of society. Among the natural causes of Kara-Kum’s formation are “wandering rivers” that change course on the vast, flat plains of Central Asia. Foremost among these rivers was the Amu Darya, which was widely believed to have changed course in about the sixteenth century, shifting away from the Caspian Sea to fall instead into the Aral Sea hundreds of miles to the east. The Russian orientalist V. V. Bartol’d promulgated the theory, arguing that the change in course precipitated the decline of Khorezm, a once-rich agricultural province. The idea fascinated generations of scholars and students of the region and inspired hydroengineering plans in both the Petrine and Soviet periods, plans whose shadows hang over Dzhan.⁵⁰

Although Platonov discusses the autogenic sources of desertification, he complicates the “war with nature” by identifying man-made causes of Kara-Kum’s formation—namely, “the deadly campaigns of Timur and Alexander the Great.”⁵¹ Platonov now seeks out the root causes of Asian desertification in the failures of despotic empires. Where he once drew on Solovevian associations between desertification and nomadism, here he associates desertification with conquest that transformed Turkmenistan into a “cemetery.”⁵²

Platonov’s environmental history of Kara-Kum also inscribes the desert in a Zoroastrian mythological topos with a quasi-Marxist historical materialism. He associates the settled “pre-Turkic” civilizations of Turkmenistan with Iranian civilization and attributes their destruction to a series of “Turanian” or Ahrimanic invasions. Alexander the Great, like the nomadic Turanians, is a major Ahrimanic villain of the Avestan canon, an invader who brings darkness and destruction.⁵³ Platonov writes that the nomadic Turkmens are the “descendants of Alexander the Great,” completing their association with destructive invaders who turn the garden of pre-Turkmen civilization into a desert—a cultural and environmental ruin.⁵⁴

The traces of this mythological topos are made evident in Dzhan when Nazar Chagataev recalls the tales of his childhood, those of the battle between Ormuzd (Iran) and Ahriman (Turan). Chagataev reinterprets the myth, however, as an environmental and anthropological allegory in which the nomadic Ahrimanic tribes of Asia are unable to subsist in their lifeless desert homeland and must raid the fertile gardens of Iran to survive: “Maybe one of the old inhabitants of Sary-Kamysh was named Ahriman, which means devil, and this poor wretch turned from sadness to rage. He wasn’t the most evil man, but he was the most miserable, and all his life he pounded through the mountains to Iran, to the paradise of Ormuzd, wanting to eat and enjoy himself before bowing his crying face to the barren earth of Sary-Kamysh and dying.”⁵⁵ In this retelling, the mythological figures of Ormuzd and Ahriman are the products of environmental determinism: Chagataev’s Ahrimanic ancestor inherits the barren sands of a wasteland (the Sary-Kamysh basin), while his mythological enemies—the Iranians—inherit from nature a fertile land that easily yields its riches. The ultimate source of the myth of Iran and Turan in Platonov’s telling is social inequality and the uneven distribution of natural resources.

Even if Ahriman is not responsible for the original destitution of his homeland, Chagataev nonetheless notes that he has failed to invest his labor in the barren land—he has not struggled to make it bloom:

Chagataev looked down at the earth—the pale solonetz, the clayey soil, the dark ragged, tortured dust, in which perhaps had decayed the bones of poor Ahriman, who had not known how to attain the shining lands of Ormuzd and had not triumphed over him. Why had he not known how to be happy? Perhaps because, for him, the fate of Ormuzd and the inhabitants of other distant countries with blooming gardens was alien and repulsive, it did not soothe or attract his heart. Otherwise, he—patient and active—would have done in Sary-Kamysh what had been done in Khorasan, or else conquered Khorasan.⁵⁶

Chagataev speculates that the nomad’s “heart” is not in the struggle with the desert; he prefers to subsist on the “surface” of nature, spreading out across the desert and thus causing it to extend with him. In “On the First Socialist Tragedy” Platonov explains this elemental way of life: “The ancient life on the ‘surface’ of nature could still obtain what it needed from the waste and excretions of elemental forces and substances. But we are making our way inside the world, and in response it is pressing down upon us with equivalent force.”⁵⁷ This depiction of nomadism as an engagement with the “surface” of nature and its “excretions” is crucial to understanding Platonov’s nomadic Dzhan. In the absence of agriculture, the desert dwellers of Dzhan literally consume the surface of the desert—they eat sand. Sheep and people “chew” on sand or, desperate to obtain water from it, “swallow moist sand all at once.”⁵⁸ The Dzhan even sup on the substance: “Suf’ian dug with his hands down to a horizon of moisture and began to chew the sand in his thirst. Some saw what Suf’ian was doing, went up to him and shared with him a supper of sand and water.”⁵⁹ The dirt or silt that precipitates out of fresh water is mixed back in to make it more nourishing: “Suf’ian stirred up the water by the shore so that it would become more turbid, thicker, and more nutritious.”⁶⁰ Not only do animals feed on sand, but sand in turn feeds on them. Platonov illustrates this with a robust play on words when describing how thirsty sheep, trying to obtain water from sand, inadvertently pour their own fluids back into it: “Sand did not quench their thirst, but itself drank their juice” (Pesok ne poil, a sam ispival ikh sok).⁶¹ Sand (pesok) contains juice (sok) extracted from living animals. Agriculture is the primary means of extracting and recycling mineral wealth from the earth, but the Dzhan merely forage for weeds and grasses, not undertaking the intentional cultivation of crops. Judgment is cast on this failure of stewardship when Chagataev, visiting a ruined fortress, observes “enormous grasses with thick, lush stems.”⁶² Chagataev looks “with hatred” at these plants that feed neither people nor animals but grow “only for their own pleasure.”⁶³

If people consume sand in Platonov’s metabolic vision of the desert, then they presumably excrete it. Indeed, in Platonov’s poetics, sand is the “excrement” of irrational civilizations, and the Dzhan, unable to master nature, are consigned to feed on the waste of their ancestors. Platonov offers a direct instance of coprophagia in the story “Takyr,” published in the Turkmen anniversary volume Aiding-Giunler. He describes how the young heroine, Dzhumal’, supplements her mother’s milk: “She started to enjoy being alive, and she ate clay, grass, sheep dung, coal, sucked the delicate bones of animals that had died in the sand, although she had enough breast milk. Her little body swelled up from the substances that all went into her and were used in growth.”⁶⁴ Both subversive of the natural order and fancifully dialectical, Dzhumal’ transforms inorganic matter, waste, and even excrement into food. Here, coprophagia is an attempt to recover nutrients from the desert ecosystem in the absence of a more organized means of extracting nutrients from the soil—namely, agriculture. The child’s metabolism of waste is an illustration of dialectical synthesis, and this successful alchemical act prefigures her destiny in the new socialist economy: the adult Dzhumal’ returns to her childhood home in Turkmenistan as a sort of meliorator, scouting out the site for an agricultural experiment station deep in the Kara-Kum. The young heroine of Dzhan, Aidym, displays a similar talent for transforming waste into nourishment, marking her as another new woman of Turkmenistan: “Despite eating grasses, despite her fever, her body was not slight; it took into itself everything it needed, even from the dry reeds, and was adapted to live long and happily.”⁶⁵ Socialism transforms wasteland into farmland, but as new socialist women of Turkmenistan who transform the “excrement” of nature—the desert—directly into nourishment, Dzhumal’ and Aidym incarnate dialectical synthesis.⁶⁶ These two demonstrate that “waste” is not encoded with negative semantic value in Platonov’s poetics. As Eric Naiman notes, waste in Platonov’s work stands in for the detritus of history, all that is “in danger of being left behind.”⁶⁷ In this category we may also include the otstalye narody (backward nations), like the fictional Dzhan themselves. According to Platonov’s idiosyncratic vision of the dialectics of nature, waste stores positive use value, holding it safely in suspension until it can be developed through organized, socialist labor (the process of osvoenie).

Platonov treats the desert not only as the excrement of human civilization but as the material remains of human bodies. In Dzhan the only material legacy of past generations is the dust or remains (prakh) of the ancestors. Platonov’s use of this term evokes the messianic project of Nikolai Fedorov, a nineteenth-century Russian mystic who hoped to revive the dead ancestors of humanity, particularly its first ancestors in Central Asia, by reassembling their dust (prakh).⁶⁸ In “The Hot Arctic” Platonov writes, “The meager desert, having long ago scattered its bones in dust and the dust having been spent by the wind, is disappearing and will be forever forgotten.”⁶⁹ Platonov’s ultimate desire is that this “dust” be transformed into fertile soil, a dialectical process that he understands both metaphorically and materially. This process could effect a recuperation of the remains and legacy of those who came before, but also a Liebigian return of lost resources to the metabolic economy of agriculture. Operating within this framework, Platonov totalizes the logic of human “waste” by treating excrement and human remains as a single substance requiring the same recuperation, as in his comment that Asia’s deserts are both the “excrement” and “grave” of past civilizations.⁷⁰ The recuperation of such waste was not a new concern for him. In an essay written in the early 1920s on agriculture, Platonov had even proposed that human corpses be processed into mineral fertilizers.⁷¹ In his private episteme, the dialectic of waste and nourishment is both metaphor and material fact; historical detritus of all kinds should be worked back into the soil, returned to the cycle of life, and made available to the (socialist) future through labor. Otherwise, this “dead matter” is doomed to a material afterlife on the “surface” of nature and culture, which, in Dzhan, is troped as a recapitulation of nomadic life resembling a Hegelian bad infinity. Although Platonov does not imply that the inorganic nourishment of the desert will sustain the Dzhan in a socialist future, it is, in their current stage of historical development, an appropriate and fitting struggle to assimilate the desert and absorb the waste of history.

The Amu Darya Does Not Fall to the Caspian

The threat of eternal historical stasis in this arid land also connects Platonov’s Turkmenistan writings to another trope of the 1930s, discussed in the previous chapter: the Soviet Union as an Asiatic hydraulic state. Platonov wrote about hydraulic despotism in “The Locks of Epifan” in 1927, the final year he worked in the provinces as a land reclamation engineer. The story describes a project commissioned by Peter the Great to “rally the rivers of our empire into a single body of water.”⁷² After arriving in the provincial city of Epifan, the site of the ambitious waterworks, the English engineer Bertrand Perry realizes that the construction plans he drew up in Peter’s imperial capital “had not taken into account local conditions, and especially the droughts.”⁷³ The plan has generally failed to take into consideration local environmental and social circumstances; as a result the local forced laborers die or flee in large numbers, and Perry’s team of foreign engineers, unaccustomed to local malarial conditions, succumb to fever. The ambitious project is an engineering and social failure, and the story closes with Peter, the oriental despot, ordering the torture of his engineer.

Vladimir Paperny observes that many of the hydraulic works undertaken by the new Soviet state were revivals of projects conceived or initiated by Peter the Great, notably the Volga-Don Canal and the Belomor Canal.⁷⁴ While working on the “The Locks of Epifan,” Platonov had compared his literary activity to the work of his fictional engineer in a letter to his wife Mariia: “I’ll close here, my work about Peter’s Volga-Don Canal awaits.”⁷⁵ A few years after “The Locks of Epifan,” Platonov sought to use his expertise as an “engineer of the soul” again to work on Peter’s canals. In 1933 Platonov appealed directly to Gorky to be admitted to one of the writers’ brigades being organized to document new construction projects, specifically requesting either the Belomor Canal or the Moscow-Volga Canal. Platonov noted in his application that his technical training and irrigation work for Narkomzem made him uniquely suited to writing about the canal construction. In a remark that seems perverse coming from the author of “The Locks of Epifan,” Platonov noted in his letter to Gorky that “interest in these developments wasn’t born in me ‘two weeks ago,’ but much earlier. Moreover, a few years back I myself initiated and oversaw similar work (similar not in scale or in pedagogical terms, of course).”⁷⁶

Perhaps Gorky found Platonov too much of a liability for these showcase canal projects. Instead, he dispatched him to Turkmenistan, the site of yet another canal project first initiated by Peter the Great. Indeed, we might conceive of the resulting work, Dzhan, as a transposition of the topos of oriental despotism from the Russian center back to the Asian periphery. After the failure of his exploratory mission in 1717, Peter abandoned his plans to redirect the Amu Darya, but Soviet planners revived the project, and the Soviet Academy of Sciences sent its own expedition to Turkmenistan to assess its feasibility at the height of the Kara-Kum craze in 1934.⁷⁷ Soviet scientists argued that in the sixteenth century the Amu Darya shifted toward the Aral Sea, causing the Sary-Kamysh Lake and nearby agricultural lands to desiccate. Writing for Pravda, one scientist asserted that “release of the waters of the Amu Darya into western Turkmenistan fundamentally resolves the whole problem of irrigating the most remote part of the Kara-Kum.”⁷⁸ Specifically, the Sary-Kamysh depression, the homeland of Platonov’s Dzhan, would fill with water from the Amu Darya on its eastern side and feed into the Caspian Sea through a channel called the Uzboi on its western side.

If Platonov viewed the process of writing “The Locks of Epifan” as working on “Peter’s Volga-Don Canal,” he took a rather different approach to the engineering of souls in Dzhan. The traces of oriental despotism and the Asiatic mode of production evident in Dzhan explain this choice. The only organized labor the Dzhan have ever performed was on the irrigation systems in the desert’s oasis cities. There the Dzhan dug “entire rivers for the bais” and, “worked in place of donkeys, using their bodies to turn the wooden wheel that raised water into the irrigation channel.”⁷⁹ Nazar Chagataev observes that his nation is too exhausted to develop socialist consciousness, having “wasted its body on the collective works projects [na khosharakh] and the hardships of the desert.”⁸⁰ Given the futility of their labor, we may compare the sandy basin (kotlovina) of Dzhan to the earthen foundation pit (kotlovan) that Platonov previously depicted as a burial site for Soviet workers.

This labor is indeed wasted, erased from history together with the ruins of the irrigation projects that the Dzhan built. Chagataev reflects on this historical erasure:

Was it really true that his own nation, the Dzhan, would soon lie down somewhere nearby and that it would be covered with earth by the wind and forgotten by memory because the nation had never managed to build anything in stone or metal? … All it had done was dig earth from the canals, but the flow of water had clogged them up again, and the nation once again dug out the canals and threw the silt out of the water, and then a turbid current deposited new silt and again covered their labor without a trace.⁸¹

The “flow” of history in Asia is obstructed by the cyclical return of the past, for no matter how many times the Dzhan dig out the canals, silt is redeposited. As discussed in the previous chapter, sediment is an unstable figure for historical accumulation in the Soviet imagination, particularly in the context of its “Asian” past. If Platonov previously implicated nomadism and imperialism in the formation of deserts, here he observes that oriental despotism also fails in the battle with the desert, “wasting” the labor and lives of ordinary people, burying them in silt and sand.

The Dzhan thus appear to be refugees from Stalinist historiography. Once a laboring class and political subjects of the oriental despots of Khiva, the Dzhan revert to a nomadic lifestyle and escape into the Kara-Kum—a spatiotemporal refuge from history and historiography. After leaving the waterworks in Khiva, they do not appear to engage in any sort of economic activity, they defy Soviet ethnolinguistic models of nationhood, and they appear neither to be governed by Soviet power nor to govern themselves. Violating the teleology of the piatichlenka, they retreat from the AMP and regress to ever more “primitive” states of organization, ending in an entropic political and cultural “forgetting” (zabvenie).

As Ernest Gellner points out, the AMP “contradicts both the sociological theory and the eschatological hopes of Marxism” because “it is stagnant and self-perpetuating, thus offering no hope to the humanity caught in its toils.”⁸² Gellner asserts that both the AMP and nomadism pose the same essential question about the Marxist model: “can it account for stagnation?”⁸³ In Dzhan, just as the swirling dust and circling sheep are figures for nomadic aimlessness, the cyclical silting of the canal is a figure for the stagnant Asiatic mode, in which labor does not advance political development or consciousness.

In his essay “The Hot Arctic,” Platonov makes a related objection to the hydroengineering plot as a potential continuation of the stagnant and oppressive Asiatic mode of production. He asserts that Turkmenistan’s development must be grounded in local initiatives and enthusiasm: “It is extremely important to mobilize the will and inspiration of the Turkmen people—especially young people—to conquer the Kara-Kum so that the desert will become a heroic school of socialist creation, just as the Arctic is for Russian and northern peoples.”⁸⁴ He notes that the Kara-Kum is indeed being developed already, but without the active initiative of the people of Turkmenistan: “Work on the conquest of the desert is already underway, it’s already funded, but not everyone understands the significance of this work. Enthusiasm, responsibility, joy and effort haven’t yet formed around this endeavor; there is no broad, clear idea. Is it really great and heroic how we are conducting our work in Sernye Bugri, Neftedag, Erbent, and other outposts of the desert? Is this truly a rank-and-file operation?”⁸⁵ He mentions Sernye Bugri (a site of sulphur deposits) and Neftedag (an oil town), where large-scale resource extraction was being undertaken by engineers and scientists from the center. Platonov notes that these projects do not represent the efforts of the local population, remarking, “Why do we concern ourselves so little with those simple, relatively inexpensive, and accessible things like the restoration of old takyr wells, the building of new ones, the organization of a state corps to provide technical oversight of them?”⁸⁶

In Dzhan it is indeed the small wells and natural takyr basins that supply fresh water to the desert dwellers. While the wells are not maintained and are too few to fully meet the needs of the nomadic Dzhan, they are favorably contrasted with the grand irrigation works of the bais. The ruins of the despots’ projects are erased from history, while the small wells, although neglected, continue to supply water and support life.⁸⁷ Although Platonov’s proposed interventions are more modest than the state’s radical plans for resource extraction and irrigation in the Kara-Kum, Platonov suggests that this form of vernacular socialism may be more lasting, grounded not just in technology but in the “great soul” of the people of Turkmenistan, emerging from their own culture, history, and enthusiasm.⁸⁸

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak observes that the “concept-metaphor of the AMP makes visible the site-specific limits of Modes of Production as an explanatory category.”⁸⁹ Indeed, it was the very question of site-specific limits—and the explanatory limits of Marx’s model of development—that concerned Soviet theorists as they debated whether his Eurocentric model could accommodate local conditions or allow for multilinear paths of development. The ideological consensus that formed in the early 1930s around the piatichlenka can be understood as one instance of the state attempting to homogenize Soviet ideological space. In Dzhan, Platonov does not homogenize the vernacular landscape of the Kara-Kum Desert, his reading of the social and environmental history of Turkmenistan does not conform to schema abstracted from European history, and his solutions to its historical problems are likewise site-specific.

Platonov’s attitude to the project of bringing Soviet civilization to Kara-Kum looks very different in light of his rejection of monumental waterworks in favor of a sustainable network of wells maintained by a corps of local technicians. As Platonov observes in “On the First Socialist Tragedy,” the future growth of socialist Turkmenistan depends on the technician as well as the technology.⁹⁰ Moreover, as Svetlana Ponomareva notes, the transformation of the earth in Dzhan hinges not only on land reclamation but also on “a philosophical understanding of the path of people on this earth.”⁹¹

Although Dzhan’s vernacular socialism may be read as an indictment of the grand narratives of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist teleology and technological utopianism, it is not fundamentally anti-utopian. The phantom geography of a future utopia becomes visible to Chagataev when, staring at the dry Sary-Kamysh depression, he sees a mirage: “Above the surface of the reed bed, on the silver horizon, some sort of impossible mirage was visible—a sea or a lake with ships sailing and the white, shining colonnade of a distant city on the shore.”⁹² Nazar Chagataev’s mirage is, apparently, the Sary-Kamysh Lake, into which the Amu Darya once allegedly flowed. Chagataev (whose first name, Nazar, means “vision”), apparently sees in the mirage not the past but a utopian future in which the lake will be restored and a shining socialist city founded on its shore.⁹³ Contrary to Ilin’s proposal, however, Platonov locates utopia in a distant chronotope—one that cannot be accessed within the generic or temporal conventions of the production novel or by means of the standard theme of the war with nature.

Although Nazar’s utopian vision is unstable—it is, quite literally, a mirage—Platonov elsewhere affirms that irrigation will one day transform the waste of history in Kara-Kum. This promise is distilled, surprisingly, into the silt of the Amu Darya, of which Platonov writes, “This yellow earth traveling down the river anticipatorily resembled grain, flowers, and cotton, and even the human body.”⁹⁴ This protean silt—waste that has become fertile—contains the various forms of life into which it will be assimilated and promises a future garden of socialism in which water feeds soil, soil feeds grain, and grain feeds human bodies. Soil, silt, or even sand—the “excrement of irrational civilizations”—may be a source of fertility when used rationally. Platonov even declares that “the silt of the Amu is more fertile than chernozem: it is the dust of the past. The cleansed fabric of history is a better raw material for the future than the freshness of virgin humus.”⁹⁵ Subsuming the properties of real soil into a Fedorovian historical metaphor, Platonov optimistically asserts that Central Asian civilization—and the desert—is a richer medium for socialism than Russia’s “virgin humus.” It is an implicit rebuke to the longstanding Russian and Soviet trope that celebrated the first plowing of virgin steppe, a trope that would become especially prominent with the Virgin Lands campaign discussed in the final chapter. If utopia is anywhere immanent in Platonov’s desert, it is in the sediment and waste of the past, as unstable and resistant as it may be.

I. A. Savkin observes that in Platonov’s works of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the desert functions as a nontraditional utopia: “In contrast to Plato and the tradition that followed him, [Platonov’s] model of utopian space is not the ideal city but the expanding, encroaching desert as a dominant element of the textual landscape…. The desert is the place where heaven and hell meet, where they are closest to each other.”⁹⁶ Indeed, Platonov writes in Dzhan that the Sary-Kamysh is “the hell of all the world,” and yet he sees within it the immanent material of a future socialist paradise.⁹⁷ Platonov’s desert utopia speaks to Fredric Jameson’s insight that the desert brings material reality into visibility as a construction of the mind—a space that is, therefore, available to multiple utopian possibilities. As Jameson writes, looking at the desert, one can “evoke a dialectical construction, a production by the negative, as when even wilderness itself—‘desert’ in its archaic sense of the emptiness of people—waste, the radically non-human in earthly nature, is itself brought into being and generated by the emergence of the fact of the human … in its midst.”⁹⁸

The dialectical construction of the Kara-Kum and the bringing into being of matter, as Platonov writes, requires “not only grand technology and great labor but also ‘great soul.’ ”⁹⁹ Dzhan—that is, soul—appears, unexpectedly, to be Platonov’s unified answer to the joint problem of environmental and human development in the Kara-Kum, one that seeks to assimilate rather than reject the waste of history and imagines Turkmenistan’s distinct path to socialism rather than imposing Moscow’s standard plots, whether historiographical, technological, or fictional. Platonov rejects the hydroengineering plot for his novella of Turkmenistan and with it the Promethean urge to force the dialectics of both nature and human nature. Instead, he offers his tentative hopes for an authentic vernacular socialist future for the desert and its inhabitants—ordinary people just beginning their socialist work: “a complete and laboring world, busy with its destiny.”¹⁰⁰