On Russian Soil: Myth and Materiality

By Mieka Erley

Blending close readings of literature, films, and other artworks with analysis of texts of political philosophy, science, and social theory, Mieka Erley offers an interdisciplinary perspective on attitudes to soil in Russia and the Soviet Union from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. As Erley shows in On Russian Soil, the earth has inspired utopian dreams, reactionary ideologies, social theories, and durable myths about the relationship between nation and nature.

In this period of modernization, soil was understood as the collective body of the nation, sitting at the crux of all economic and social problems. The "soil question" was debated by nationalists and radical materialists, Slavophiles and Westernizers, poets and scientists.

On Russian Soil highlights a selection of key myths at the intersection of cultural and material history that show how soil served as a natural, national, and symbolic resource from Fedor Dostoevsky's native soil movement to Nikita Khrushchev's Virgin Lands campaign at the Soviet periphery in the 1960s. Providing an original contribution to ecocriticism and environmental humanities, Erley expands our understanding of how cultural processes write nature and how nature inspires culture.

On Russian Soil brings Slavic studies into new conversations in the environmental humanities, generating fresh interpretations of literary and cultural movements and innovative readings of major writers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781501755705

Book preview

On Russian Soil

Myth and Materiality

Mieka Erley

NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS

an imprint of Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration and Translation

Introduction: Groundwork

1. Native Soil: The Roots of the Organic Nation

2. Matter: Models of Soil and Society

3. Dirt: Dirty Literature

4. Sediment: Soviet Construction on Asian Soil

5. Wasteland: Platonov’s Dialectics of Waste and Recuperation

6. Virgin Land: The Libidinal Economy of Virgin Land

Epilogue: Beyond Earth

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

In a family photograph from the 1920s, my grandmother and her sister, toddlers with bobbed hair, are sitting in a field encircled by chickens on the farm their mother owned in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky. As children, they worked alongside their mother in this field, setting tobacco, planting strawberries, and picking beans for market through the years of the Great Depression. I have fond memories of childhood visits to the farm, where muddy cattle trails ran alongside the Little Elkhorn creek, and where a stunning variety of wildflowers grew—Solomon’s seal, stonecrop, and the quaintly named butter-and-eggs plant, which I collected and pressed in a botanical album. But by the 1980s there was already a decisive consolidation of industrial farming in the United States. With encroaching development, the decline of tobacco, and the rise of big agribusiness, few small family farms in Kentucky like my grandmother’s were sustainable by the close of the Reagan era. In 1996, after the passing of my great-grandmother, aged 101, on the farm she had lived on her entire life, most of that farmland was sold for suburban tract houses. In our private life it was the end of four generations of farmers on that Bluegrass land, and in America it was the definitive end of the great georgic myth of America as an agrarian republic of smallholders.

In America as in Russia, many of us are only a few generations away from working the land and the constant attention to seasonal cycles, weather, fertilizer, and above all, the condition of the soil. The Green Revolution that enabled this demographic shift over the course of the twentieth century did not solve what nineteenth-century Russians called the soil question but rather rendered it invisible in many parts of the industrialized world. But the soil question has returned to visibility in recent years, from the growth of community-supported agriculture and the revival of small organic farms to internet discussions about the lack of micronutrients in industrially farmed food. As Wendell Berry writes, The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all…. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.¹

This book is a historical study of a distinctive place and time, but it is motivated by a broader desire to understand how people make sense of the hard material realities of the human condition—in this case our dependency on the soil to feed ourselves—and how these material realities shape our dreams and myths. Agriculture has been our security against the state of bare life, but climate change has made us more aware of the fragility of our existence, our dependence on nature, and the limits of our ability to solve any problem with technology, and we are again urgently revisiting questions about how we use our limited arable land.

Soil remains an ongoing source of material resistance in a world of frictionless data, where the immaterial dialectic of binary code seems to master all material flows. However virtual life may appear, grain is still grain, in the words of Leonid Brezhnev, and soil is still soil. One day we may indeed loosen our immemorial ties to the soil as technological innovations offer new means of food production, but for now our dependency on the soil is a universal condition that unites human societies across millennia. The story of Russia’s relationship to its soil may serve to remind us of the conditions of food scarcity that were once a central feature of human experience—conditions that still persist in the developing world and that, in the age of planetary climate change, may once again come to define our lives.

Acknowledgments

No book is produced by the author alone. I am indebted to everyone who supported this project or shared their time, energy, and ideas. Sam Hodgkin more than anyone else enabled this project to materialize and shared the burdens that it entailed over many years. My sincere thanks also go to my colleagues in the Russian and Eurasian Studies Program at Colgate University: Sergei Domashenko, Jessica Graybill, Carolyn Guile, Ian Helfant, Alexander Nakhimovsky, Alice Nakhimovsky, Nancy Ries, and Kira Stevens. I am especially grateful to Alice Nakhimovsky for staying on message about what it takes to finish a book.

Language is the foundation of this project, and I thank those who taught me Russian language and literature at Hampshire College and Amherst College, especially Joanna Hubbs, Stanley Rabinowitz, Viktoria Schweitzer, Catherine Ciepiela, Tatyana Babyonysheva, and Jane Taubman. In the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, Lisa Little and Anna Muza supported my development as a teacher and ongoing student of Russian. It was a privilege to have such readers as Irina Paperno, Olga Matich, Eric Naiman, Harsha Ram, Anne Nesbet, and Viktor Zhivov, and I am further indebted to Joachim Klein for sharing his expertise on topics as varied as pastoral poetry and the history of the Belomor Canal. I owe Irina Paperno and Olga Matich a special debt of gratitude for their generous support and care. They have fundamentally and indelibly shaped how I think.

Thanks go to all the editors and staff at NIU Press and Cornell Press, including Christine D. Worobec, Jennifer Savran Kelly, and especially Amy Farranto for her support through the life changes that occurred between the contract and final manuscript. I am grateful to Andy Bruno and Thomas Newlin, who reviewed this manuscript for NIU Press and who took time, in the midst of a pandemic, to generously share their ideas and discuss specific problems. Any shortcomings in this text are my own, of course.

A formative influence on this book was the Eurasian Environments conference in 2011 at Ohio State University, organized by Nicholas Breyfogle. This was my first encounter with environmental history, and my thanks go to the participants of that conference for having shared their work and welcomed a Slavist into their midst, with special thanks to Nicholas Breyfogle, Maya Peterson, Andy Bruno, Pey-Yi Chu, and Julia Obertreis. I am also grateful to Mark Bassin, Jane Costlow, Irina Sandomirskaia, and Jillian Porter for sharing ideas or reading parts of this material at various stages.

In the course of working on this project, I received support from the US Department of State, the Slavic Department and Dean’s Office at the University of California, Berkeley, and Colgate University. The Summer Research Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University provided support for the use of their library collections. Having spent the final months revising this manuscript under the unprecedented conditions of the closure of every library in the United States, I am especially grateful to have had access to these and other wonderful library collections at earlier stages. Global quarantine is not the most felicitous time to seek image permissions, and I thank all those who helped me to obtain them where it was possible: Molly Brunson for sharing invaluable advice; Gainee Nurkabayeva, Christopher Baker, Gul’zira Moldasheva, Altynzhan Khozhamuratova and all the directors and staff of the A. Kasteyev Art Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

Finally, while completing this manuscript, I received an unexpected letter from Professor Anvar Kacimov, a hydrologist and applied mathematician who worked in Kara-Kum Desert in the Soviet period and who now carries out work in the deserts of Oman. I am grateful to Professor Kacimov for sharing with me his thoughts about Platonov, Soviet engineering, and the nostalgia he feels for a country that no longer exists. May we, as Slavists, remain caretakers of the intellectual traditions, ways of reading, lifeworlds, and hopes of this phantom country. In this state of existential homelessness, let us be warmed by fellow feeling and united in the devotional act of reading.

Note on Transliteration and Translation

I have followed the Library of Congress system for transliteration of Russian. Soft signs have been omitted from personal names (Solovev rather than Solov’ev), and I have followed English convention in the case of names with established English spellings (Chernyshevsky, Gorky, Mandelstam, etc.). Unless noted, translations are my own. Where I use a preexisting translation, I have noted any alterations, often made to restore the original text’s precision in agronomic or soil terminology.

Introduction

Groundwork

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.

Matter and Myth

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

Soil and Material Ecologies

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