Chapter 6
Virgin Land
The Libidinal Economy of Virgin Land
U studentov est’ svoia planeta,
Eto … eto … eto tselina!
—“Planeta tselina,” a song from the Virgin Lands era
In the song “Planet Virgin Land” (“Planeta tselina”) the Soviet youth who embark on the mission to farm the Virgin Lands (tselina) are compared to the heroes of the early Soviet space program. In fact, these young tselinniki are literally explorers of an alien planet: “Students have their very own planet. It’s … it’s … it’s the Virgin Lands!” The emphatically existential refrain of eto builds up tension as we approach touchdown on this alien planet.1 As the song suggests, the ambition to conquer “virgin lands” is not confined to the Soviet Union or even to planet Earth: extraplanetary tselina awaits Soviet exploration, settlement, and development. The Virgin Lands campaign of 1953–1964—the effort to cultivate thousands of hectares of fallow or previously unfarmed land in Siberia and Kazakhstan—coincided with the height of the Soviet space program, and the Kazakh steppe was an epicenter of the colonial fantasies that both efforts exemplified, an increasingly petrified ambition to make not only the Earth, but the universe “red.”
This chapter examines the Russian cultural mythology of “virgin soil,” with particular attention to its culmination in the discourses and cultural artifacts surrounding the Virgin Lands campaign, initiated by Nikita Khrushchev in the year of Stalin’s death. The Virgin Lands campaign was intended to address the very real material problem of grain shortage in the Soviet Union, but it was also expected to reinvigorate the polity and mark the transition to a new phase of communist development after Stalin’s death. Leonid Brezhnev, whom Khrushchev sent to Kazakhstan in 1954 to replace the local Party secretary, wrote in his memoirs of the Virgin Lands campaign: “Sometimes people ask: who authored the idea of the virgin lands? … It was the great idea of the Communist Party to turn the lifeless, remote but fertile eastern steppes of the country into a land with a developed economy and a high level of culture.”2 Brezhnev’s insistence on the collective vision behind the Virgin Lands campaign captures the breadth of the cultural myth of Russia’s historical mission to cultivate the great expanses of the Eurasian steppe.3 Although the Party did not originate these ideas, it did operationalize and give them political expression, as previous governments had done before and as Soviet successor states would do again.4
Tselina was a symbolic construct, materialized by Soviet state agricultural, economic, and social policy. As a natural and symbolic resource, it was crucial to both the material sustenance and the symbolic regeneration of the polity. Yet tselina was conceptually unstable and scientifically underdetermined. The term was even applied to land that had been previously plowed if it had fallowed for a number of years.5 Tselina was characterized by contradictions: it referred to land that was so marginal that it was not under cultivation, yet was imagined as fantastically fertile; it was land inhabited by pastoral nomads, yet imagined to be empty of life. Tselina also had paradoxical spatiotemporal qualities. It was both old and new: its fertility was the accumulation of millennia of uninterrupted natural processes, yet it was only just entering the human economy through labor. Finally, tselina circulated in multiple, sometimes competing, symbolic economies: it was a symbol of Russian settler colonialism made to resignify in the new idiom of Bolshevik decolonization; it figured in local agrarian traditions and emerging bodies of scientific knowledge; it was central to the Cossack myth as well as Marxist theories of value and modes of production. This chapter explores these myths of tselina, and the process of transforming a “natural” resource like virgin soil into a symbolic, discursive, and political resource. Among other things, the Virgin Lands campaign was a state-sponsored attempt to re-enchant and restore the Romantic and symbolic connections between people and land that had once been expressed in the nineteenth-century discourse of pochva. This closing chapter brings the cultural biography of Russian soil full circle by showing the Virgin Lands campaign as a return to the Romantic national myth-making of the nineteenth century and an attempt to bring about a postmaterialist re-enchantment of national soil.
Virgin Land in the Late Soviet Cultural Imaginary
In the twenty-five-year period between the start of the Virgin Lands campaign and its effective fossilization in the cultural domain (with the publication of Leonid Brezhnev’s memoir of the campaign, Tselina, in 1979), tselina was at the center of a new national discourse of soil. Where pochva and chernozem had been keywords of Russian nationalist discourses of the nineteenth century, tselina performed political work in the postwar, post-Stalinist, and multinational Eurasian space. The campaign was directed at the “development of virgin and fallow lands” (osvoenie tselinnykh i zalezhnykh zemel’). “Tselina” or “tselinnyi” connotes something “whole” and “unbroken,” soil that is imagined to have never been plowed. Tselina was the most common keyword of Khrushchev’s campaign, but other terms cluster around it, including nov’/novina (new land) and devstvennye stepi (virgin steppes). All these terms foreground the libidinal economy of the virgin lands in different ways and were deployed in the marketing of the campaign to young people of the Thaw era as a space of sexual freedom and exploration away from the scrutiny of family and neighbors and the claustrophobic dormitories, communal apartments, and villages of postwar European Russia.6 Each of the terms examined here carries its own semantic and historical associations, and while I mark out their differences, I also treat them together within the single cultural topos of virgin land.
The construct of tselina was legitimized by Soviet scientific institutions and popularized through a state-sponsored program of cultural production. Soviet writers and artists were enjoined to contribute to the mythology of tselina and to propagandize the campaign to young people.7 In literary works, political speeches, and journalism from the Virgin Lands campaign, the construction of tselina is notably metadiscursive, as if it is acknowledged to circulate in a closed economy of symbols.8 As one Russian author writes, “The word ‘tselina’ will never lose its freshness, and will remain through the centuries a symbol of valor and heroism.”9 If such statements seem banal from the pen of a Russian writer, they gain a tinge of irony when written by a Kazakh; the Party functionary Ablaikhan Dzhulmukhamedov writes that “the heroic virgin lands epic forever remains an unfading symbol of friendship, international brotherhood and unity of the Soviet people, witness to the wisdom of the agrarian politics of the Party.”10 In print and speech, the campaign is consistently described as a “symbol of the heroic exploit” of the people, and a “symbol of heroism and glory.”11 In the collection In the Virgin Lands (Na zemliakh tselinnykh), published in Almaty in 1955 when the campaign had scarcely started, authors had already begun to eulogize the campaign and treat it as a purely symbolic object.12 The insistence on the symbolic value of tselina is inescapable, even as writers try to narrate this object. Tselina has a vanishing material referent—the moment virgin land is plowed, it is simply moved to the unromantic category of farmland, as susceptible to soil depletion and crop failure as any other arable land. Perhaps this is why writers insist upon the eternal “freshness” of its signifiers. These signifiers and symbols seem to circulate in a closed economy of socialist realism. As Evgeny Dobrenko has observed, socialist realism was an autonomous cultural domain with internally circulating symbols and tropes, many of which originated in Party speeches.13 Many of the keywords of the Virgin Lands cultural campaign were drawn from Khrushchev’s declaration that the “development of the virgin lands is the great feat (podvig) of our heroic nation in the building of communism, it will live through the ages.”14 Writers sometimes repeated Khrushchev’s slogans nearly verbatim, while others extrapolated themes from the limited keywords of official discourse. The word “podvig” triggers associations with the bylina, or Slavic epic poem. It is the heroic feat that the bogatyr, or hero, must accomplish, usually involving a journey away from home, a battle against enemies, or a bride-taking. The terms “podvig,” “bylina,” and “bogatyr” help to structure Virgin Lands literature. In the poem “Tselina,” P. Kviatkovskii writes:
This is the field of the heroic feat [podvig] …
And no matter how many days and
years have passed,
There will sound a single
melody—
Mighty, proud,
like a bylina—
With the words: tselinnik
and hero.15
Aside from official speech, literary criticism helped to guide authors in their depiction of the Virgin Lands. In “Tselina and Books,” a 1956 article in Novyi mir, the literary critic V. Kardin attempts to establish principles for literature about the campaign, focusing on its epic qualities. Kardin urges writers to show the “high romanticism of the heroic battle for grain.” In Kardin’s hierarchy of literary genres, the epic novel evolves out of lesser genres like plays, stories, and sketches, which primarily chronicle history, rather than interpret it. He writes that the virtue of the epic is that the author selects “the most important and the most characteristic, knows how to discard minor particulars and come to the most important generalizations, allowing us to comprehend the meaning of what is happening as a whole.”16 He cites Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel Virgin Soil Upturned (Podniataia tselina) as a successful epic of collectivization, the likes of which the Virgin Lands campaign had yet to produce. Kardin’s esteem for the epic form’s integrated historical vision, with its resonances of national and personal heroism relates to the propagandistic function of this literature. Kardin asserts that the Virgin Lands campaign needs literature—and even holds writers responsible for the attrition of workers from the Virgin Lands. He recounts a conversation with a kolkhoz boss: “—Yesterday when we were trying to figure out why people are leaving the virgin lands, we forgot one reason.—What was that?—I didn’t think of it until the middle of the night. It will probably seem strange to you: Literature.”17 As Kardin suggests, literature shapes how people make sense of their own lives and the decisions they make; as a result, literature also has the power to determine social and material realities. Young tselinniki were guided to think of themselves as bogatyry in the great bylina of the Virgin Lands podvig in order to weather the material hardships of the “dead” steppe. As Kardin quotes Ilia Selvinskii, “Virgin soil is upturned first of all by the human soul.”18
The First Furrow
Katerina Clark traces the literary topos of the bylina in Soviet literature from its peak in the 1920s and 1930s through its routinization in the 1940s.19 However, we can see in the literature of the Virgin Lands an attempt to re-energize the topos, by retelling the national epic as a coming-of-age tale of both the nation and the individual through the heroic sexualized conquest of virgin land. The discourse of virginity is inescapable in the cultural production surrounding the Virgin Lands campaign. Erotic energy powers the myth of the Virgin Lands, with the fertility of the land and the nation its implicit goal. As Eleonory Gilburd notes, after the 1920s “the Soviet Union had lost the language of sex,” and any depiction of sex in literature was smeared as “naturalism” (as were depictions of other physiological processes, including defecation, as I discussed in chapter 3).20 By the Thaw period, writers had abundant resources for euphemizing and sublimating sexual content. Readers of the 1950s and 1960s were shocked by direct reference to sex, but they were quite used to its sublimation in earthy folkloric tropes of plowing, sowing, and harvesting. In Virgin Lands cultural production, the plowing of the “first furrow” was the most important recurring sexual motif, and the traktorist who plows the first furrow is the chief hero of the Virgin Lands bylina.21
The 1955 collection In the Virgin Lands contains lyric poems and short stories that work within the virginity topos, often expressed in banal metaphors. In M. Balykin’s story “The Spring Column” (“Vesenniaia kolonna”), an old kolkhoz boss resigns because his heart can’t take the excitement of all-night plowing by the youthful newcomers.22 These young tselinniki are compared to tumbleweeds as they enjoy the (implicitly sexual) freedom of youth.23 The fear of losing one’s virginity is vulgarly mocked: a spoiled female cat that refuses to mate with a lowly male is described by the narrator as an “old maid.”24 Virginity does not have value in this symbolic system—value is created only at the moment of lost virginity, a principle that is grounded in Marx’s ecological economics, as I will discuss below. In A. Lemberg’s “The First” (“Pervenets”), one character remarks on the momentousness of the first plowing: “Soon the novosely [new settlers] will come, but the land already won’t be virgin!”25 In A. Shamkenov’s “In the Fire” (“U kostra”), the Russian hero’s girlfriend is compared to an apple tree that blooms only for him, echoing the folkloric association of the apple with fertility and suggesting that the Kazakh steppe needs a new lover because indigenous Turkic nomads have failed to make it fertile.26 In the poem “About the Heroic Deed” (“O podvige”), Arkadii Ryvlin writes that if “it were easy to be the first to cut deeply into the unplowed land” or if every maiden always agreed to every proposal, it wouldn’t be a podvig.27 The message is that the young male tselinnik should be persistent in overcoming the resistance of virgin land and maiden alike. Elsewhere in the collection, tselina is like a “sleeping princess [tsarevna] who has lain in dull silence,”28 or has been “slumbering for hundreds of years” and must be “woken.”29 This banal discourse of virginity was not limited to literary fiction: the popular science book The Inhabited Virgin Lands (Obzhitaia tselina, 1964) observes that “this steppe has not given birth to anything” (eta step’ nichego ne rodila).30 The languorous earth is feminized and orientalized: as the Georgian poet Iosif Noneshvili writes in his Virgin Lands verse, “You’ve rested long enough, earth … let homes, heroes, and children be born.”31
Plowing is the dominant metaphor for the sexual act, but irrigation is also sexualized, evoking the Slavic myth of Perun, the god of rain and fertility. In his sketch of life on a Kazakh kolkhoz, the journalist Sabit Mukanov quotes a tselinnik who observes that “the soil and depths contain limitless riches but are not endowed with water.”32 In Vladimir Soloukhin’s “The Birth of Zernograd” (“Rozhdenie Zernograda”), the “first water” found is “sacred,” like the first furrow, and when it is located, a rumbling emerges deep in “the womb of the earth” (v chreve zemli).33
The virginity question and the friendship of nations are often worked out simultaneously, as the Kazakh nation and nature are the feminized principles in this union. In P. Danilov’s painting The First Furrow, a young couple—apparently a Russian man and a Kazakh woman—stares hopefully into the far horizon near a tractor and a black strip of newly plowed earth. In the film Ivan Brovkin in the Virgin Lands (Ivan Brovkin na tseline), the gender roles in the marriage plot are reversed, as a young Kazakh man pursues a female Russian doctor. This reversal of the expected hierarchy of gender is rendered not as romance, but as comedy: the Kazakh man is a figure of fun because of his modest stature beside his towering Russian sweetheart. The “friendship” of nations is also naturalized as a conquest of the feminized Kazakh steppe by the masculine Soviet (usually Slavic) hero and the technology he masters. The Party is the ultimate masculine principle in the Virgin Lands; its tractors and plows have awoken the “dead” steppe and made it fertile. In the poem “Your Fruits” (“Tvoi plody,” 1958), published in Literaturnaia gazeta, Sabit Mukanov writes: “Oh, Party! You brought to life the expanses of the steppes…. You raised us as your faithful sons. You sowed generously in the Kazakh steppes, in the open, burning hearts of Kazakhs. And the good seed now bears fruit, its fruits are sweeter than honey on the lips…. We are happy that the Kazakh nation lives as an equal in the great Fatherland…. You sow our path with fertile seed.”34 Mukanov’s poem highlights the interconnection of the “friendship of nations” and the loss of virginity: Kazakhs have been raised as stepchildren, adopted by the Soviet multinational state (like true sons). But the Virgin Lands campaign is the proper consummation of this union and the fulfillment of the Party’s patriarchal function as it also inseminates Kazakh land and Kazakh hearts, producing truly hybrid Soviet-Kazakh offspring. While the lyric “I” of the poem is male, he is inseminated and feminized, placing him in the conventional hierarchies of difference: advanced versus backward nations; agricultural versus nomadic nations; technology versus nature; male versus female. These axes of national, natural, and sexual difference are superimposed upon one another, inscribing actual power relations into the myths of virgin land.
Mukanov’s poem was published well into the era of de-Stalinization in 1958, and where we might once have read “Stalin” as the father of nations, we find the “Party.” In the collection In the Virgin Lands, unnamed “leaders” figure as the gardeners of the Soviet state and the Virgin Lands. Vladimir Gordienko’s poem, “The Flowers of the Kremlin” (“Tsvety Kremlia”) opens with a news item from Akmolinskaia pravda, the main newspaper of the Virgin Lands region in Kazakhstan: “A female worker at the new Nikolai Ostrovskii sovkhoz in the Akmolinsk oblast’, Maria Koroleva, recently received a package from her mother, who is the Kremlin florist. The mother sent her daughter as a present seeds from the Kremlin flower garden.”35 In the poem that follows, Gordienko gives the feminine principle a more active role in the gardening metaphor, as a “mother” who nurtures the flowers in the Kremlin flower garden. She collaborates with the implicitly male leaders: “The great leaders loved to rest near the Kremlin flower beds. And they planted sprouts in spring soil, sharing this work with the florist.”36 The trope of Stalin as gardener of the state reached its peak usage in the 1930s, but the Virgin Lands campaign temporarily revived it, with the Party (after 1956) replacing Stalin as gardener. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman defines the modern “gardening state” as one that views the “society it rules as an object of designing, cultivating and weed-poisoning.”37 The gardening state imagined by Bauman was brought to life in the Virgin Lands campaign, in the direct efforts of the state to cultivate a new land and a new polity through the joint enterprise of land and social engineering. Implicit in these “gardening” efforts is violence against an abject feminine nature, whether it is virgin land or the “primitive” nature of the ethnicized subjects of the Soviet multinational state.
Although we could understand the myth of virgin land as a Soviet innovation with roots in Russian folklore, the discourse of virginity also plays an intriguing role in Marxist ecology: “virgin nature” is imagined to exist in a pristine state untouched by any economic, cultural, or social relations. In Capital, Marx addressed virgin nature in the context of his theory of value: if the value of an object is defined by the labor invested in it, then virgin nature has no value before labor is invested in it. It exists outside of production and social relations. “The land … in its original state in which it supplies man with necessaries or means of subsistence ready to hand,” Marx writes, provides “the universal material for human labor.” This category, which includes fish, timber from “virgin forests,” and raw ore, he contrasts with what he calls “raw material” that has already “been filtered through previous labor,” such as ore already extracted. To become raw material in Marx’s sense, the natural resource must have “undergone some alteration by means of labor.” Here he stresses the relative rarity of the first category of natural resource in farming: “With the exception of the extractive industries, such as mining, hunting, fishing, and agriculture (so far as the latter is confined to breaking up virgin soil [jungfräuliche Erde]), where the material for labor is provided directly by nature, all branches of industry deal with raw material, i.e., an object of labor which has already been filtered through labor, which is itself already a product of labor.”38 What are the stakes of Marx’s reasoning? One lesson is that virgin lands agriculture is categorically distinct from agriculture in previously cultivated areas. The former operates on “free” virgin nature, the latter on raw materials that are already embedded in the human economy of labor and capital. This may be one of the ideological bases for extensifying agriculture to “new” lands instead of intensifying agriculture in “old” lands, one of the chief debates in this period between Khrushchev and his chief political opponent, Georgii Malenkov.39
Another notable feature of Marx’s reasoning is the comparison of agriculture to mining; virgin soil is a source of age-old mineral wealth that only the cultivation of crops can extract for human use. As discussed in chapter 2, Marx was strongly influenced by the model of soil and social metabolism of the agricultural chemist Justus Liebig. Marx’s view here of agriculture in virgin lands as equivalent to mining shows his literal understanding of the material exchanges between human agents and their environment. Several literary works from the Virgin Lands cultural campaign use the title “Goldmine” (“Zolotoe dno”), drawing attention to this association.40 Philip Pryde sees in Marx’s view the grounds of an ecological ethics that literally does not value nature: virgin nature costs nothing, and costs to virgin nature are externalized, so to speak, since they cannot be accounted for in the labor theory of value. This was not perhaps only an external critique of the basis of Soviet Marxist ecology; Pryde quotes an unnamed Soviet source in 1967 who observes that as long as natural resources are “regarded as free and are not incorporated under the heading of the country’s natural wealth, the wastage of those resources will continue with impunity.”41 Piers Blaikie, in his now classic work, The Political Economy of Soil Erosion, explicitly links this observation to the Virgin Lands campaign and its use of “virgin soil.”42 The problem of how to assign value to nature was not a uniquely Soviet problem, but Marx’s writings on virgin nature show the particular form that the problem took in Soviet ecological economics. The Soviet soil scientist Vasilii Viliams refracted these values when he asserted that “the steppe, like all natural phenomena, should be developed and not remain an eternal given.”43 In light of the feminization and devaluation of nature in the Virgin Lands cultural imaginary, Marx’s view of the “free gift” of “virgin” nature looks like a caricature of the reproductive economy that he elsewhere critiqued.
The story “The Camel’s Eye” (“Verbliuzhii glaz,” 1961), by the Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov calls all of these meanings of virginity in the Virgin Lands into question.44 The story stages the conquest of the virgin steppe by Soviet agriculture as a sublimated sexual conquest, but unlike other works discussed here, “The Camel’s Eye” makes a searing critique of the libidinal economy of virgin land. The virgin lands are not a free market of sexual exchange in which women and men, Russians and non-Russians are equally empowered, nor is the transformation of steppe to sown an act of sexual liberation. It is a misuse of the “free” gift of nature’s vitality and fertility.
The story plays out in Anarkhai, in the wormwood steppeland between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, where the hero, a high-school graduate named Kemel, is sent on work assignment. Kemel has been captivated by the myth of the virgin lands: “I believe people will one day bring water to this land and green orchards will grow, water will flow in cool irrigation canals, and winds will ripple the golden fields of corn. Villages and towns will spring up and our descendants will call this steppe the bountiful land of Anarkhai.”45 The Komsomol sends Kemel and his peers off as “noble conquerors of virgin land,” yet when Kemel arrives at the camp, he is given the unglamorous job of a water carrier and is constantly terrorized by the abusive tractor driver Abakir.46 One morning as he fills the water tank at a spring he dubs “Camel Eye,” Kemel meets a young shepherdess who remains unnamed through the story. Aitmatov alternates pastoral scenes of lyric beauty associated with the spring and shepherdess with scenes of sexual and Oedipal violence associated with Abakir, the tractor, and the plow. The innocent shepherdess, surrounded by sheep and lambs, is an icon of vitality who manages the vital economy of her flock, and Kemel feels compelled to define himself in contrast to her, volunteering, “I’m more interested in mechanical things.”47 Indeed, Kemel has decided that he will “be master of this land yet, and the machines in it.”48 But there is a deep ambivalence in his dreamy, poetic nature. The beauty and purity of the wormwood steppe inspire Kemel to write lyric poetry, but his verse takes on the dead form of the conquest myth: “The day is near, the hour is nigh, /When this expanse of wormwood scrub /Will become a glorious land.”49 Kemel’s access to the pastoral lyric and the shepherdess herself is effectively ended when he attains his goal of riding on the tractor. Kalipa, the only woman engaged in this higher-status, male-coded work gives up her place to soothe Kemel’s masculine pride.50 As Abakir drives the tractor, Kemel takes Kalipa’s place on the trailer, controlling the plow blades.
Kemel sublimates his sexual desire in the plowing of the virgin land. He enjoys “the steel blades underneath my straddled legs … tearing up and pushing aside the steaming, peaty thick layers of virgin soil.”51 As he cuts the first furrow in the virgin soil, he reflects on his fascination with the new and the fresh—the pleasure of being the first to leave tracks in untouched snow, or the first to pick tulips in spring.52 But Kemel is still dominated by the older man: naked and “shiny with sweat,” Abakir knocks the shirtless Kemel to the ground, where he lies “clutching the earth and biting his lip so as not to utter a moan.”53 As Abakir dresses himself after a struggle that suggests sexual violence and domination, he gloats that the young man has gotten a “smell of the earth.”54 Their relationship turns from sadomasochism to Oedipal struggle for the sexual right to the virgin land. In the climactic scene Abakir attempts to seduce the innocent shepherdess, leaving Kemel to drive the tractor. While Kemel fears for her safety, he is torn by his desire to finally drive the tractor himself and chooses to keep plowing.55
Throughout the story the feminized principles of fertility and vitality are mocked and misused. Abakir impregnates the lovesick Kalipa and then suggests that she have an abortion. After Abakir harasses the shepherdess and Kemel fails to intervene, she and her flock disappear into the steppe and are never seen again. Watching over the camp is the figure of a stone woman (kamennaia baba), a legacy of the nomadic Turkic peoples who inhabited the Eurasian steppe for thousands of years. She is an avatar of the feminine and the pastoral in the story, but Kemel projects onto her lifelessness, formlessness, emptiness, and mute indifference—just as he does the steppe itself. Kemel dreams of the day when he can go off to the shepherds and find the young woman, but he does not realize that her vitality, as a part of the steppe and its deep pastoral culture, has been destroyed by the plow that he wields. As Kemel sits by the spring one evening thinking of the shepherdess, a mated pair of jairan, steppe deer, approach to drink. They halt at the edge of the field, afraid of the “unfamiliar spongy soil that smelt of oil and metal … What had happened to the steppe? Where was their old path? What force had churned up the earth?”56
The departure of the jairan echoes the failed romance with the shepherdess, and on the metaliterary plane it signals the generic ascendency of the Soviet epic over the pastoral.
The epic topos of the Virgin Lands campaign, with its bogatyr performing the heroic deed of conquering the steppe, obliterates the pastoral topos with its shepherds and its metalyrical tribute to verse and song. The locus classicus of the pastoral is Hesiod’s Works and Days, which tells of a “golden” generation of humans created by the gods, “without anxieties, without labor and woe.”57 In this lost age of ease and abundance before agricultural labor, “the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things, rich in flocks and loved by the blessed gods.”58 In this pastoral vision, the earth is abundant and the golden ones are surrounded by their flocks—a life-bearing reproductive force for nomadic pastoralists.
Aitmatov makes a metaliterary comment on the devaluation of the pastoral by making Kemel an amateur poet. Kemel translates the sublime beauty of the steppe into verse that is a tissue of political catchphrases and clichés from the Virgin Lands campaign. He writes that the virgin steppe has remained “untraveled for centuries” and is “destined to become a lush land.”59 Indeed, we know from Kemel himself that the steppe is not untraveled: the story opens with Kemel telling his fellow workers about the deep history of the steppe from the Kalmuks to the Kyrgyz and Mongols. Kemel’s historical imagination is so vivid that he can even feel the “vibration of thousands of hoofs” and see camps, caravans, and peaceful herds of sheep and horses.60 Why, then, does he call the steppe “virgin” and “untraveled”? Having rejected the pastoral and its values, Kemel can only be a bad poet, producing a Sovietized parody of epic verse. The myth of the virgin lands is a dead form that limits the shape of Kemel’s dreams and blinds him to the very source of the vitality that inspires him. Kemel’s imagination has been colonized by the romantic myth of the garden, and he too readily accepts the myth of virgin land as his own epic, the site on which his own Bildung and that of his nation will become realized. Kemel’s submission to this patriarchal violence echoes Kalipa’s free choice of Abakir as her master. Romantic desires have led them both to the wrong dreams and the wrong masters. When she learns that Abakir has abandoned her and left the camp, Kalipa recognizes that the gift of her fertility has been wasted, asking, “What have I brought water for?”61 Waking from a reverie, she murmurs, “I dreamed…. Dreamed of what?”62 Kemel pities her, but oblivious to his own subservience, he continues plowing and dreaming of the shepherdess the plow blades have chased away.
The Resistance of the Material
Aitmatov’s story was adapted for the screen by the Soviet Ukrainian filmmaker Larisa Shepit’ko, as her diploma work for VGIK in 1963.63 Shepit’ko’s film Heat (Znoi) is relatively loyal to the plot of the original literary work, but as a filmic object, it adds a material and evidentiary dimension to the story that Aitmatov tells. Shepit’ko’s film is an indexical document of the erosion of the fragile topsoil of Kazakhstan’s virgin land. This material fact is only occasionally witnessed in Aitmatov’s story: after his first day of plowing, Kemel’s “mouth, nose, ears, and eyes were all clogged with dust and sand.”64 But in Shepit’ko’s film, dust cannot be ignored: it fills the frame, it obstructs our vision, it insists upon its stubborn materiality. At moments, dust makes the diegesis of the film illegible—we literally cannot see the action of the film through the clouds of dust, nor can we “read” the ostensible meaning of the plot. The film’s deepest meaning is on another plane—not in the script or the diegesis, but in the material.
Materiality does not always conform to the “cultural scripts” that we use to master it.65 The kind of material resistance that Shepit’ko’s film indexically records is an antidote to high modernist dreams of mastering the “free gift” of nature. It is with this thought, and a turn to visual representation, that I will conclude this chapter. Throughout this work, I have primarily focused on verbal texts. Here, I turn to the visual representation of the Virgin Lands campaign. There are a number of films devoted to the Virgin Lands campaign and a significant body of easel paintings, many of which remain in the Altai State Art Museum in Barnaul.66 In the spring and summer of 1954, a brigade of painters from Moscow traveled to the Virgin Lands, and their works were exhibited and reproduced in a published collection the following year.67
The paintings of the Virgin Lands raise the problem of how to represent soil in its stubborn and intractable materiality. Here, I take two paintings to illustrate: P. Danilov’s First Furrow (1957–1958), and Mikhail Budkeev’s First Furrow (year unknown). The trope of the first furrow was a standby in visual art just as it was in literature. Yet in the visual domain, what obtains is not an eroticized object of conquest, but its inverse—the abject, formless, and mute material body of the soil. In both paintings (as in many others in this genre), a tractor stands in the center of the painting, breaking the line of the horizon, and from it originates the apex of a black triangle, spreading out to its base in the foreground. This black triangle represents the virgin soil upturned.
Figure 3. P. Danilov, Pervaia borozda (First Furrow) (1957–1958), Oil on canvas. A. Kasteyev State Museum, Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Danilov’s First Furrow depicts the friendship of nations and the theme of the old and the new. The composition of the painting reflects this theme, with elements of the old world pushed to the outer margin of the painting: a horse-drawn wagon stands at left and an old Kazakh herder in a traditional Kalpak hat leans on his stick at right. Closer in, two European men lean over the gaping earth, one of whom appears to be an agronomist (a stock character in both paintings and literary works); staring into the far horizon is a heterosexual couple—apparently a European man and a Kazakh woman—symbolizing the fertile union of nations; the tractor itself is near the center, but not the central agent; and at the very heart of the frame, where all lines converge at the apex of the black triangle, is a young Kazakh man, the future hero of this national epic.
Budkeev’s painting is less pictorial and more impressionistic: the feathergrass of the steppe is a wild maelstrom of paint strokes, and the black soil turned up by the five-bottom plow is even more abstract—daubs of paint that range in color from black to brown to blue stand in for its unformed materiality.
In these paintings, however, the brush does not illustrate soil so much as it erases illustration and representation altogether. In fact, the brush acts much like the plow—undoing form and revealing the raw material underneath. The pictorial surface and its illusions of perspective in these paintings are replaced by pure texture: paint draws attention to its own materiality and that of soil. Virgin soil is not visually charismatic, but it claims our attention as the mysterious source of all other features on the canvas. The human figures, the tools, and the technology are all motivated by the presence of this natural substance. Its aura is palpable. As we stand before these paintings, we have the feeling that if we scrape away the feathergrass, the tractors, the animals, and the human figures on the surface, we will find this black earth under it all—the source of fertility and the site of an unsettling encounter with formless materiality.
Luce Irigaray captures this threatening aspect of raw matter in her critical, feminist account of Platonic materialism. In Plato’s theory of forms, matter is coded as maternal—a passive substance that must be shaped by the paternal principle of form. But as Irigaray points out, this formlessness makes matter not only abject, but also powerful: matter “is both radically lacking in all power of logos and offers, unawares, an all-powerful soil in which the logos can grow.”68 This is the paradox of materiality: it both invites and resists our attempts to give it form through logos—language, signs, and myth. In these paintings, the act of plowing may promise a perfectly legible field of wheat at some future harvest time, but the dark paint that stands in for soil is not iconic, representational, or legible—it points only to itself as matter. Soil is effectively “unpainted” from the painting, retaining the terrifying indeterminacy of real, formless matter. As Kaja Silverman writes in her response to Irigaray, this formless “maternal” matter “lends herself to the production only of ‘bad’ copies: of copies that travesty what they imitate,” a process that Silverman regards defiantly as the triumph of matter’s unmasterable creative force.69 If we may take one step further, socialist realism was the primary form of socialism, and real agriculture, working with the intractable matter of soil, could never be contained by such a ready-made form. As Christopher Breu notes, if artists and scholars don’t give attention to the material world with its “resilience, contingency, and obduracy—in short its negativity—it is too easy to integrate it into our systems of representation and linguistic denotation.”70 Although the visual narrative of these paintings is Soviet technological mastery over an inert, feminized (and ethnicized) material world, the negative space of the “black triangle” at the center of each painting preserves our encounter with what is unnarratable, unrepresentable, and unmasterable.
There is ongoing debate about what kind of long-term ecological impact the Virgin Lands campaign had and whether it can be judged as successful in creating sustainable agriculture in arid and marginal lands. There was a broad consensus in the Cold War era that the campaign was disastrous and fundamentally ill-conceived, a view that Paul Josephson echoes in his recent environmental history of Russia.71 Recent scholarship has made a case for nuancing or revising this view of the Virgin Lands. Marc Elie calls for a more robust model of nature-culture relations in explaining drought in the Virgin Lands.72 Michaela Pohl gives a thick account of the social and economic impacts on the region and also argues that local scientists learned from the environmental failures of the first years of the campaign and developed innovative soil conservation and plowing techniques that resulted in better ecological and economic outcomes.73 Based on extensive interviews with both newcomers and natives with firsthand experience of the campaign, Pohl argues that the campaign effected a genuine “material rehabilitation” of eastern Kazakhstan. This material reality was obscured, she notes, by the grand rhetoric of what she calls the “Virgin Lands cult, a bureaucratized Soviet version of a Wild West epic.”74 Sometimes our cultural myths betray us.
The rehabilitation that Pohl mentions addressed indirectly the traumas of the recent Soviet past: the Gulag camps and the Kazakh famine. Pohl writes that, although Khrushchev “never came out and openly talked about its Gulag past, nor the Kazakh famine,” the Virgin Lands campaign was nevertheless in dialogue with these events.75 As Pohl shows, the Gulag and the Virgin Lands are like overlays on a map of Kazakhstan, although they are often visualized as distinct topoi. Writing about the Soviet nuclear legacy in Kazakhstan, Magdalena Stawkowski adds the nuclear topos to these “overlapping landscapes.” Stawkowski observes that the well-worn paths of historical scholarship sometimes prevent us from seeing the obvious interconnections between events that unfold in a single geographical space.76 The logic of this discursive delimitation and the historical archive it has produced obscures the fact that these projects are geographically, environmentally, and culturally interpenetrated. It is possible that they exemplify a single cultural logic.
As discussed at the start of this chapter, the Virgin Lands campaign also coincided with the height of the Soviet space program, and Kazakhstan, which provided the launch site, was a crucial locus for both in the late Soviet cultural imagination. The 1965 work Planet Tselina publicizes youth construction projects in the virgin lands, opening with the following epigraph: “On the dusty paths of distant planets,/ Our tracks will remain …”77 Kazakhstan was troped as a dusty, distant planet, and its tselina was discursively constructed as a dead and empty expanse—an Urlandschaft, or primordial landscape, on Earth. The development of the “virgin lands” was thus imagined as a rehearsal for terraforming the dead and empty expanses—the tselina—of other planets. The explorers of Planet Tselina explain: “We discovered a planet. The sun rose over the boundless steppe. We did not sleep. We wanted to see what kind of a planet it was. And now a huge red-hot sun slowly cut through a yellow haze of air that had not cooled down during a stuffy night. The yellow steppe spread all around, almost desert. And above, the sky grew light…. Some landed on the planet again and again. Some even remained there forever. We discover planets so that we can work on them.”78
In Planet tselina, the colonial fantasy of remaking an inert alien landscape into a familiar home is mixed with Marxist valorization of labor as its own end: we discover planets so that we can work on them. The Planet Tselina myth places the Virgin Lands project in a satisfying historical teleology that links past efforts to cultivate a garden on Earth and to colonize the frontier together with imagined future efforts to cultivate new cosmic lands—from black earth, to red Soviet lands, to a red cosmos.