The Russian-born journalist Maurice Hindus once declared that “one could write a history of Russia in terms of mud.”1 Hindus was born in the countryside in the famine year 1891, and he personally witnessed how the condition of soil in its many forms—from mud to black earth—dictated the terms of peasant life during his childhood in the Russian Empire and later, as he reported from the front lines of collectivization in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Historical accounts from below have enriched our understanding of the experience of Russia’s peasants, those who lived closest to the earth, but none has taken up Hindus’s suggestion to focus on the earth itself, either its specific agency in Russian history or its rich symbolic life. Inspired by recent biographies of natural objects in the environmental humanities and environmental history, this book sets out to tell the story of Russian soil as an object of both nature and culture that in the age of modernity inspired utopian dreams, reactionary ideologies, far-ranging social theories, and durable myths of the relationship between nation and nature.2
Soil is the material foundation of civilizations, economies, and lifeways, and the site of the most intimate and long-standing human exchanges with nature. Soil brokers between growth and decomposition, nourishment and waste, bios and thanatos. Soil is the material index of “place” and “home,” witnessed by the common practice among immigrants of taking a handful of soil from their native village, or from the graves of their ancestors, as they traveled to a new land.3 Maxim Gorky wrote about migrants who spoke of how “every handful of soil was the very dust of their ancestors and contained everything that was memorable, familiar, and dear—watered with their sweat.”4 Myths of soil have, above all, served to make sense of our material origins and limitations, the fragility of our bodies, and our abject materiality, exemplified in the biblical creation of human life from dust. How resilient were such long-established myths of this primordial matter in the age of modernity, with its disruptions to traditional agrarian life, its great human migrations, its new technologies, and its new biopolitical and necropolitical regimes? Max Weber argued that the entry into modernity demanded the rationalization and disenchantment of the traditional world, figured as an Edenic “enchanted garden.”5 Yet becoming modern was not exclusively a matter of disenchantment with myths, but rather, their re-enchantment for a new age.6 Departing from this idea, this book tells the story of how new Russian myths of soil were created in an age of modernization, nation-building, and revolution in Eurasia, when soil was understood to sit at the crux of all economic, social, and national problems. Many of the collective traumas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Eurasia directly concerned the relationship between people and the symbolically charged soil beneath their feet: serfdom and emancipation, settler colonialism, collectivization and forced resettlement, recurring harvest failures and famines, and territorial invasions in war and its aftermath. Under these conditions old myths were not dispelled so much as reconfigured: the peasant’s understanding of soil as the material foundation of human life was displaced by the political economist’s understanding of soil as the material basis of all social and economic relations; the modern rational human (from the Latin humus, soil) now walked alongside such ancient mythic figures as Adam (from the Hebrew adamah, red earth) and Mother Moist Earth (Mat’ syra-zemlia), the Slavic folk deity.7 In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams reflects on such coconstitutive changes in the myths and material conditions of the countryside over four centuries of agrarian change, arguing that the English experience was particularly significant because such transformations were so early and thorough.8 We find a similarly illuminating case for study when we consider the shocks to rural life in Russia and the Soviet Union and their assimilation in the cultural sphere over the course of two compressed centuries of dizzying modernization and revolution. This book tells the story of how the city made sense of such radical changes in the matter, space, and people of the countryside, focusing on soil as a crucial site for modernization and its fantasies.
This book is framed by two main questions: How is soil, as the site of traditional values and lifeways, remythologized in the modern age? And how does soil, as a material substance, resist what Stacy Alaimo calls the “dematerializing networks” of culture and the symbolic processes involved in making sense of our world? How does nature resist our attempts to give it meaning? I approach these central questions by providing a genealogy of key Russian and Soviet cultural myths of nation and nature rooted in soil, ranging from Fedor Dostoevsky’s “native soil” movement (pochvennichestvo) to the Soviet myth of the Virgin Lands. As many of the book’s episodes show, Russia’s soil was long considered the site of its backwardness and its “Asian” alterity vis-à-vis European modernity. Soil was consequently the site, along with the human body, of the most violent assaults of modernization in Russia and the Soviet Union. Among the stories that this book tells are those of the many Russian and Soviet intellectuals, politicians, writers, and scientists who imagined that their belated agrarian society could make a historical leap into industrial modernity.9 Their commitment to securing food production and improving the material conditions of millions of impoverished people is an essential context for understanding Soviet attitudes to nature. Nowhere did the drama of development have a more immediate impact on human lives than in the countryside, where it reshaped “the entire millennial pattern of peasant life.”10
In this turbulent age of modernization, new mythologies of soil developed in the cultural sphere even as the material substance itself frustrated utopian fantasies. Although this book focuses on modern myths, discourses, and metaphors related to soil, each episode also highlights the resistances of soil as matter. Often represented as primordial and formless, inert and abject, soil simultaneously attracts and frustrates attempts to give it form in our physical and cultural landscapes. It is among those material objects that, in Christopher Breu’s words, “refuse full socialization and resist symbolic manipulation.”11 I show how attempts to “socialize” soil—to theorize it as an object of social relations and to make it productive under socialism—were countered by the resistance of the material itself. Soil does not always behave as it is meant to, as various episodes in the book demonstrate. Finally, the stories told here show how key intellectual, political, and artistic figures respond to this resistant materiality and how their ideas are changed by this contact: Vladimir Lenin bases a key Bolshevik political concept on a model of nineteenth-century soil chemistry; writer and land-reclamation engineer Andrei Platonov retheorizes Marxist ecology in the arid landscape of the Kara Kum Desert; Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov questions the valorization of agriculture over pastoralism in the era of the Virgin Lands. On the basis of such stories, this work aims, on the one hand, to expand our understanding of the cultural processes that “write” nature and, on the other, to reflect on how nature inspires culture—from literature to social theory.
This book is by no means a comprehensive study of soil in Russian and Soviet culture. It is a first attempt at excavating the matter of Russian soil from the layers of cultural myth that have sedimented around it. Readers may find expected myths, episodes, or figures missing from these pages. What I offer is a selection of key episodes: myths of soil that are richly and extensively ramified, that refresh our understanding of well-worn topics or texts, or that intersect with material history in striking ways. Although these are fragments from a broader history, I believe that they work together to show how matter and myth act upon each other, producing what Heather Sullivan calls an “energizing slippage.”12 Each of the six chapters reflects on a form of soil and its symbolic life: native soil, matter, dirt, sediment, wasteland, and virgin land. While each of these terms deserves its own Begriffsgeschichte, or conceptual history, what I offer instead is an applied case study that works through a specific historical event, body of work, discursive episode, or myth. These cases are arranged in chronological order and build upon each other, showing how discursive and symbolic resources accumulate within this culture over time, from serfdom through emancipation and the Great Reforms, to revolution, collectivization, and the late socialist friendship of nations. The first three chapters are grounded in the nineteenth century and focus on debates about soil as a source of Russian national identity, while the final three chapters turn to the Soviet period and the place of soil in the development and building of a new socialist multinational state. The chapters also form transhistorical pairs. Chapters 1 and 4 address soil as the symbolic site of national specificity, whether this property is seen as a resource or a liability. Chapters 2 and 5 consider models of soil and society and how material exchanges between humans and nature are mediated through soil. Chapters 3 and 6 deal directly with the symbolic and political functions of soil in the cultural domain during moments of transformation in agrarian life.
This book interrogates the very notion of “Russian” soil, and thus a note on the title is warranted: while the cultural myths explored here are Russian, their territory is Eurasian. Each of the three final chapters juxtaposes the Soviet center with a specific Central Asian space: Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan respectively. Soil was troped as “Asian” and regarded as a cause of belated development in Russian cultural myths, and Soviet Central Asia was thus a particularly symbolically charged site of modernization efforts involving irrigation, water infrastructure, and farming.13 I highlight continuities across these various Eurasian spaces, but I also show how ideological and symbolic systems devised for the Russian heartland transformed when transplanted to other soils. Given the importance of mapping ecological and cultural difference for the practice of statecraft in Eurasia, it is unsurprising that “space, place, and landscape” (to borrow W. J. T. Mitchell’s formulation) have been central preoccupations for humanistic scholarship on Russia and the Soviet Union.14 This book builds on that body of scholarship as it examines how Eurasian lands have been viewed and territorialized, but it also follows the blade of the plough down through the surface of the landscape and map and into the matter beneath.15
In the modern age, soil has become a “specialized instrument of production,” dedicated to human purposes and stripped of biological complexity.16 In this new agroecological system, historically distinct not in kind but in scale, the use of specialized machinery, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides raised crop production and supported growing human populations at the same time that it reduced the teeming biological life in soil.17 But soil has not been simplified by such new agroecological regimes, it has rather been incorporated into an immensely complex human economy, rerouting its material flows—biological, mineral—through increasingly labyrinthine social, economic, and political circuits. Soil resides in multiple human ecologies, including new ecologies of knowledge. While this work is primarily concerned with the meanings attributed to soil, it is also attentive to materiality, and is inspired by new critical frameworks in Science, Technology, and Society Studies (STS) and new materialism.
Soil is a material artifact of human agriculture and social relations, and as such, it is an exemplary object of Bruno Latour’s nature-culture, a material substance that has been entangled in human systems over millennia. This complex object is, in Latour’s words, simultaneously “real, collective, and discursive.”18 Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer argue that our knowledge of such boundary objects is produced by “extremely diverse groups of actors—researchers from different disciplines, amateurs and professionals, humans and animals, functionaries and visionaries.”19 This formulation of cooperative agency aptly describes both the production of knowledge about soil and the production of the material substance itself. Knowledge about soil is generated by farmers, natural scientists, economists, politicians, and a variety of cultural producers. Soil is also produced materially by a complex assemblage of humans, animals, plants, bacteria, water, machines, and other agents.
It is this deep entanglement that inspires Heather Sullivan’s call for ecocritics to take as their object of study not wild and pristine nature, but “dirty nature,” that is, the environment that is already irreversibly enmeshed in “the dirty human sphere.” Sullivan argues that dirty nature is “an antidote to nostalgic views rendering nature a far-away and ‘clean’ site precisely in order to suggest that there is no ultimate boundary between us and nature.”20 The environmental historian William Cronon similarly questions the centrality of what he calls the “wilderness premise” in ecocriticism, namely the idea that “nature, to be natural, must also be pristine—remote from humanity and untouched by our common past.”21 It is no accident that the central object of interrogation for both Sullivan and Cronon is the clean/dirty dichotomy, a fundamental human framework for policing boundaries between self and other. Agriculture, as the site where humans dirty their hands with nature, also becomes a site where pure wilderness is dirtied by human contact. As we conceptualize an ecology grounded in dirt theory, then, agriculture is an illuminating object of study. Moreover, agrarian thought, as a tradition of human negotiation with the environment that is informed by praxis, should be reread as a kind of environmental thought.22 Our sublime reflections on nature may be productively “contaminated” by a fuller account of the experience of hunger, labor on the land, and our ongoing negotiations with the hard limits of the natural world. As Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing notes, “purity is not an option,” and we must come to think of “contamination as collaboration.”23
So intimate are the material exchanges between humans and soil that we might refer to soil as our “trans-corporeal” body, adapting Stacy Alaimo’s term for the interpenetration of the human body and the material world that is “outside” it. As Alaimo notes, the human body is in a constant state of exchange and interaction with “non-human creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors.” Echoing Latour, she explains that this kind of interaction “necessitates rich, complex modes of analysis that travel through the entangled territories of material and discursive, natural and cultural, biological and textual.”24 Alaimo’s term is particularly useful for thinking about the metabolic relationship between humans and soil: soil is a site of mineral exchanges between humans and their environment throughout life and in death. In this respect Alaimo’s new materialism is not so distant from the “old” materialisms treated in this book. The agricultural chemist Justus Liebig, for example, envisioned a model of metabolic exchanges between humans and soil mediated by practices of agriculture, waste, and burial. Liebig described the flows of this ecstatic transcorporeality, as minerals from the soil “assume the form of corn, flesh, and bones; they pass into the bodies of men, and again assume the same form which they originally possessed.”25 Liebig’s vision of soil metabolism shaped Marxist models of socially mediated material flows and influenced such figures as Vladimir Lenin, Vladimir Vernadsky, and Andrei Platonov. Platonov drew on Liebig’s metabolic model when he described the silt of the Amu Darya: “This yellow earth traveling down the river anticipatorily resembled grain, flowers, and cotton, and even the human body.”26
Such materialist visions of the interpenetration of the human body and the natural world may help us to read beyond the Soviet Promethean rhetoric of the mastery of nature and inspire us to write, in turn, new narratives of the Soviet environment. A number of works in the growing field of Eurasian environmental history have complicated our understanding of the Soviet environment, offering a more nuanced view of the relationship between state ideology and practices that impact the environment.27 In the Soviet negotiation between the imperatives of development and stewardship, we can discern what Andy Bruno calls a dualism of hostility and holism.28 Moving beyond the totalitarian model of Soviet history allows us to see continuities with the pre-Soviet past and to recognize more diverse forms of agency—among scientists, farmers, and even actors in the natural world, from minerals to permafrost.29 More ambitiously, we might reconsider the critical potential of Soviet materialisms and how they might speak to contemporary new materialism and ecocriticism.30
While the present book is an empirical study, grounded in a specific geographical-cultural zone, it is in conversation with a broader field of environmental humanities. Over the last few decades, the humanities have seen a methodological turn toward materialist and even posthumanist orientations in recognition of the limits of cultural criticism.31 As the foregoing suggests, this book does not de-center the human from its analysis in the hope of bringing the natural world into clearer focus; it embraces “dirty nature.” Soil, human bodies, and human societies have coevolved and coproduced each other for millennia.32 Moreover, I believe that the processes of human signification and knowledge production, and even our “spontaneous” experiences of nature, continue to be structured by the cultural, linguistic, and social domains. This book attempts to thread the needle by attending to both the myth and the materiality of soil. I believe the humanities have an important part to play in the critical study of the environment. Recognizing the explanatory limits of culture and language, we may yet salvage the critical insights and tools that the cultural and linguistic turns have produced for demystifying our discursive, cultural, and scientific constructs. Understanding the structure of our collective myths about the material world is a necessary step toward dispelling those myths and initiating a fuller encounter with the nonhuman world.
Throughout the nineteenth century, insecurity about Russia’s lack of historical progress often took the form of a compensatory valorization of traditional Russian life, essentialized in the relationship between the peasantry and the soil. From Slavophilism to pochvennichestvo, the discourse of native soil (pochva) made a fetish of rural life and traditions, whether in pastoral fantasies of the mir or rural commune, or idealizations of the Russian peasantry. Russia’s peasants were understood to be rooted in their native soil (a concept the Germans expressed as Bodenständigkeit) by the regime of serfdom, and were therefore imagined as the custodians of an authentic Russian national identity. Dostoevsky’s call for a “return to the soil,” taken up by the populists of the late nineteenth century, exemplified the desire of the urban Westernized intelligentsia—the “city,” in Raymond Williams’s schema—to seek common roots in a native soil uncontaminated by foreign cultural transplants. Chapter 1 traces the biopolitical metaphors of native soil, rootedness, grafting, and transplantation through nineteenth-century Russian discourses of the nation and locates their origin in the German philosophical traditions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly in the work of Johann Gottfried Herder.
While figures like Herder had attempted to ground their theories of national difference in material and environmental conditions, soil nonetheless remained primarily a cultural, discursive, and philosophical construct in the age of Romantic nationalism. But by the early decades of the nineteenth century, the study of nature was disengaging itself from Naturphilosophie and claiming ever-greater authority on the basis of empirical data and controlled experiment. The matter (materiia) of soil, which had remained chiefly the occupation of the farmer and peasant, was now being claimed by new institutions of scientific knowledge. Chapter 2 considers how the Russian discourse of soil was reterritorialized by debates about philosophical materialism emerging in the 1840s, focusing on the Russian reception of the agricultural chemistry of German chemist Justus Liebig (1803–1873). Liebig was discussed by such cultural figures as Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and Fedor Dostoevsky, and his model of soil metabolism served as inspiration for Karl Marx’s concept of “social metabolism.”
Soil was a central matter of debate between philosophical idealists and materialists in nineteenth-century Russia, and it played a similar role in related debates concerning literary realism, which upended the norms of aesthetic idealism prevailing in the age of Romanticism. Realism emerged on the grounds of empiricism and methods of objective scientific observation, and dirt (griaz) became the exemplary object of realist observation and social critique. While dirt was a fact of rural life in Russia, its function in realism was more than mimetic: dirt signaled a deliberate aesthetic and political intervention in a literary system that had previously excluded “low” subjects, from the life of the peasantry to unsanitized visions of nature. Chapter 3 shows how “dirty literature” and its critical response, the discourse of aesthetic pollution, emerged at moments when boundary formation in the literary system and crisis in agrarian life coincided. This chapter reads Russian realism through that dirty lens, focusing first on the emergence of naturalism and realism between the 1840s and the 1880s, during the crisis of serfdom and the Great Reforms; and second on the formation of socialist realism in the early 1930s during the crisis of collectivization. The chapter shows how in both periods, dirt, as a central material fact of peasant life and a symbol of systemic disorder, challenged aesthetic norms and expanded the critical potential of literature.
The first three chapters of the book reflect on the relationship between Russian national identity and its soil; the final three chapters expand their focus to the place of soil in the multinational project of Soviet culture. Just as native soil and dirt had functioned as symbols of Russian identity, the figure of sediment (otlozhenie) took on important symbolic work in critical discourse and literature of the early Soviet period. Chapter 4 focuses on sediment as the symbol of an Asiatic past in the Bolshevik cultural imaginary. Soviet literature of the first Five-Year Plan identified Russia’s allegedly backward, Asiatic nature with the geological foundations beneath Soviet construction. Because this sediment was consistently imagined as a site of historical inertia and accumulation—economic, cultural, and material—its reform could only be accomplished through violent interventions. The texts examined in this chapter reflect on the reshaping of the inert sediment of Soviet land (through large-scale construction projects) as well as the sedimented matter of the human psyche (through perekovka, or psychological reforging). Historical sediment threatens Soviet construction in these novels, but even more terrible are the monumental public-works projects of the first Five-Year Plan, troped as “monoliths” that demand the sacrifice of human bodies. Soviet revolutionary dreams in these novels are re-encoded as a regression to oriental despotism, emblematized by the sacrifice of human laborers and their burial in the ground beneath Soviet construction.
Soviet construction aimed to reform the very geological foundations of Soviet nature. In Literature and Revolution, Lev Trotsky described how humans would arrogate to themselves complete mastery over geography, geology, and nature: “The present distribution of mountains and rivers, of fields, of meadows and steppes, of forests, and of seashores, cannot be considered final. Man has already made changes in the map of nature that are not few nor insignificant. Man will occupy himself with re-registering mountains and rivers, and will earnestly and repeatedly make improvements in nature. In the end, he will have rebuilt the earth, if not in his own image, at least according to his own taste.”33 Chapter 5 explores the limits of Soviet efforts to refashion nature, to transform deserts into gardens, and to “socialize” wasteland (pustyr’). This chapter reads the literary works of Soviet writer Andrei Platonov in the context of his second career as a land reclamation engineer in the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture, whose mandate was to make land more productive through a range of chemical, hydrological, and physical interventions collectively known as land reclamation (melioratsiia). Platonov’s technical experience with land reclamation and his ongoing engagement with the transformation of nature inspire the tale Dzhan (Soul, 1935), set in the Kara-Kum Desert of Turkmenistan.
The final chapter considers the place of virgin soil (tselina) in the Russian cultural imagination, culminating in discourses and cultural artifacts surrounding Nikita Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands campaign (1953–1964). I will discuss how virgin soil was imagined as both a natural resource and a symbolic resource, central to re-energizing the Soviet polity and restoring the Romantic connections between people and land that had once been expressed in the nineteenth-century discourse of Russian pochva. The eroticized myth of virgin nature was intended to bring the newly unleashed libidinal desires of Thaw-era youth into the service of the state’s plan to master the feminized and ethnicized nature of Siberia and Kazakhstan. This final chapter brings the cultural biography of Russian soil full circle by showing how the Virgin Lands campaign hollowed out the myths of the Russian settlement of the steppe, the conquest of nature, and the Soviet friendship of nations.
From Adam’s origin in clay to our final interment in the earth, we tell stories about soil. In the ones that follow we see how soil is imagined as a site of identity, meaning, and possible redemption of the material world itself.