In 2011 it was reported that chernozem, the Eurasian black earth celebrated for its fertility, was being stolen by the truckload from Ukrainian farmland.1 A rusty, Soviet-era Kamaz truck could carry off ten tons of soil at a time, mostly taken, it was said, from the neglected plots of elderly folks and deceased landholders. The fertile black soil was allegedly being sold on the black market by corrupt local officials and rapacious entrepreneurs. This tale of stolen earth, complete with the Gothic element of neglectful (because dead) landlords, reads like a confabulation of the plot elements of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. The story crystallizes overlapping fears of national decline, territorial invasion, resource mismanagement, and environmental degradation. In this modern tale moral degeneracy is an emergent feature of global neoliberal capitalism and its practices of deterritorialization. Dead landlords and corrupt officials are selling off the national patrimony of the Ukrainian homeland on the global market, one cubic meter at a time. One Ukrainian journalist gestured to the many ways that soil signifies, warning that “our compatriots are selling off what is most sacred—our national treasure, our native soil.”2
Many of the myths in the preceding pages imagine soil as a hyperlocal object, produced under specific environmental conditions and situated in a specific place—whether the field, the estate, the village, or the nation. But soil has always been animated and mobilized through larger circuits of economic exchange and material flows. In the story of Ukrainian soil theft, there is an echo of nineteenth-century fears about capitalist robbery of soil fertility through grain exports, but this time those fears are literalized: capitalist penetration of the former Soviet Union has turned both land and soil into commodities on the world market. As we develop new technologies and adopt new agricultural practices, every property that we have traditionally associated with soil is under re-evaluation; not only is chernozem mobile, but its genesis also may not be exclusively dependent on place. Dokuchaev postulated that chernozem was formed by the interactions of the dry steppe climate and steppe vegetation in a process that unfolded over millennia. As discussed in chapter 1, Dokuchaev had asserted that many other countries “could last millions of years, but never, under the present climatic conditions, see the bountiful soil that is the native and incomparable wealth of Russia.”3 But researchers are beginning to ask whether chernozem might not be exclusively a product of natural processes, but rather, like the terra preta of the Amazon, a product of human culture.4 Recent work by Russian archaeologists and soil scientists has considered the theory, based on the study of Central European chernozem, that the “black horizon” between chernozem and lower strata may in some cases mark the advent of plowing, wildfire management, and mixing of existing soils with charcoal, waste materials, and imported soil.5
If chernozem is an artifact of culture as much as nature, then there is a prospect of consciously accelerating its formation—or even creating it artificially. Ukrainian chernozem is not only stolen but legally exported as a “starter” for the production of artificial chernozem. A layer of chernozem is laid over an area of existing soil, sown with grasses, infested with worms and ants, irrigated with preparations containing specific fungi and bacteria, and treated with manure, compost, peat, and minerals.6 In an open letter published in Agrarian Life, the agricultural engineer Iurii Peskov calls for the Russian Ministry of Agriculture to invest in producing such artificial chernozem.7 His “biotechnology project of artificial soil formation” promises to restore and reproduce the specific soils of various soil-climatic zones within Russia, and, scaled up, throughout the world. He appears to call for both biotech solutions—the development of artificial soil substrates—and techniques that work in situ to break down “parent rock into soil within 5–6 months.” By making chernozem the subject of his appeal, Peskov summons the cultural myths surrounding Russian soil science as an area of scientific prestige and national pride: both the soil and the soil science of Russia have something special to offer the world.8 Rather than a static matrix in which to grow foreign transplants, soil can export its local culture, becoming in the process a mobile, extendable resource. Peskov stresses the importance of such efforts to the evolution of the human race, noting that after the development of fire and tools, “the birth of agriculture was the second technological revolution of humanity, and the creation of artificial soil will be the third.”9
Artificial soils may offer a solution to the problems of soil production on Earth, as well as hold the promise of extraterrestrial colonization. In the 1960s, when the USSR was developing a plan for human spaceflight to Mars, Vladimir Soldatov and his colleagues at the Belorussian Institutes of Chemistry and Experimental Botany developed an ion-exchange substrate that could function as an artificial soil in space.10 “Biona,” as it was called, could produce high crop yields continuously for three to five years without any supplementary fertilizer. The newspaper Soviet Belorussia reported in 1970 that this artificial soil was “a battery of fertility.” Expressing the most Promethean Soviet hopes for the transformation of nature, the article enthused that the “addition of just one percent of this ‘resin’ to ordinary sand makes it quite suitable for agriculture. This means that deserts can be made fertile.”11 In a secret year-long flight simulation to prepare for a Mars flight, scientists used the soil substrate to grow Chinese cabbage, cress, borage, and dill under an artificial xenon sun.12 The soil scientist Andrei Nikolaevich Bozhko cowrote a memoir with the journalist Violetta Gorodinskaia about his experiences on his year-long “flight.”13 Bozhko describes the ion-exchange resins that serve as soil: “our ‘beds’ consist of such a substrate saturated with salts. Outwardly, it looks like sand. In fact, this is a mixture of resins that supply plants with mineral nutrition elements, and therefore there is no need to prepare a nutrient solution for them, but it is enough to moisten the substrate from time to time with water. It then gradually, as the plants need it, releases the stored water and salts. In addition, it absorbs the root secretions of the plants and thereby protects the crop from poisoning by its own metabolites.”14 Such human artifice calls into question the very definition of soil.
The production of artificial soil is the high modernist project par excellence, the culmination of the utopian dreams of the previous two centuries, from Liebig’s theory of mineral exchange to late Soviet efforts to transform deserts into gardens. In 1923, with the recent memory of famine in mind, Andrei Platonov wrote that “in order to beat hunger, we must take agriculture from nature’s hands and put it in mankind’s hands.”15 Artificial soil would appear to fulfill the dream of mastering the resistance of the material world that Platonov so powerfully renders in his writings. As the stories on the preceding pages may remind us, hunger is the ultimate basis of the desire for technological mastery over nature. Soviet environmental ethics have frequently been explained as the product of an ideological distortion field, but we should not dismiss the explanatory power of material conditions. Hunger is a phenomenological experience common to nearly every generation of Russian and Soviet people across the span of this book. It is critical that we remember this context, for it is yet another way that nature, bodies, and culture co-evolve and coproduce each other.
This new turn of technological modernity calls for revision of our cultural myths, just as previous turns have done. When we speak of ion-exchange substrates as “soil,” even the conceptual coherence of soil as a material object breaks down. The rapid acceleration of the processes of soil formation and the creation of artificial soils also reflects a fundamental change in the spatiotemporal qualities of this natural resource.16 If we create artificial soils, we will remove this natural resource from its life in natural time. Soil under such conditions would no longer function as a material index of place, where generations farm, labor, and bury their waste and their dead alongside an assemblage of nonhuman agents, living and nonliving. This artificial soil cannot be read as a stratigraphic inscription of culture, lifeways, and natural events unfolding together in natural time. In The End of Nature, Bill McKibben remarks on how we have “overpowered in a century the processes that have been slowly evolving and changing of their own accord since the earth was born.”17 But given soil’s longer history as a symbiont of human culture, this projected “end of soil” is less a story of the transformation of nature than of a radical rupture in human culture. After all, soil is so much more than a substrate for growing the food that sustains us. It is the site of our most important rituals, the resting place of our dead, a bank of ancestral and personal memory. As we seek out new homes on Earth and beyond, new rituals of memorialization, and new ground for our utopian dreams, let us remember the collective history preserved in the earth, our transcorporeal body.