By RICARDO CAVALCANTI-SCHIEL*
The USSR's Grand Plan for the Transformation of Nature tells us that the magnitude of its impact was only possible because it combined knowledge, systemic planning and the sovereign will of the nation.
The last two decades of the last century saw the emergence of agroecology as an initially anti-systemic movement, but progressively assimilated as part of the new environmental agenda, while the number of studies that would characterize it as an applied discipline – which would incorporate, from a new perspective, knowledge of soil science to ancestral agricultural practices – would grow exponentially in the first decade of this century.
The concept, however, was formulated in 1928 by a Russian botanist and agronomist, Vasily Mitrofanovich Benzin, who dedicated himself to the study of traditional drought-resistant crops, settled in the United States and spread his idea there in the following decades. The first and largest agroecological program ever developed to date was also Soviet: the so-called Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature, initiated in 1949, after the great drought of 1946-47 and the food crisis that followed.
This plan is very different from contemporary agroecology, and this probably explains the extent of its transformative impact, to this day, in the former Soviet republics of the European continent, all the way to the foothills of the Caucasus, even if, due to sheer political pettiness, it was not carried out. This difference can be summed up in two words: planning and scale.
And this difference is of such magnitude that contemporary agroecology even avoids mentioning it (and even less reflecting on it), attributing the pioneering of agroecological knowledge in its formative phase (from the 30s to the 50s) to Germans and North Americans, completely ignoring the efforts of the Soviets.[I].
The Soviet steppes west of the Urals ― from the taiga in the north to the Black and Caspian Seas in the south ― have historically concentrated the best farming and livestock regions not only in the country but also in the world, due to their fertile black soils, chernozem. However, they have also always been at the mercy of dry winds coming from the southeast, that is, from central Asia. With their intensive exploitation and the surface erosion produced either by the uncontrolled melting of snow or by torrential rains from rasputitsa (the wet mid-season), the top layer of these soils becomes sandy and, with the winds, is released into gigantic clouds of dust known as “black storms”.
In the spring of the year when Vasily Benzin formulated the concept of agroecology, Soviet scientists calculated that in the regions of central Ukraine, Donbass, Stalingrad and Astrakhan the winds lifted more than 15 million tons of chernozem to a height of up to 1 km, destroying a layer of 10 to 15 cm of arable soil. This phenomenon once again caused crop failures between 1929 and 1931, generating yet another of the “great famines” that devastated the region and spread to the rest of the country. Ukrainian nationalist revisionism today blames “Moscow” exclusively for the famine. This is clearly not the story that nature tells.
Vasily Benzin was not the only one to study the relationship between agriculture and drought. In the same year, 1928, a team of Soviet agronomists led by Vasily Dokuchaev, Pavel Kostychev and Vasily Williams began a pilot experiment to plant forests in the arid Astrakhan region, between the Volga and the Caspian, where summer temperatures reach 53°C.
They concluded that, with proper management care, this was not only possible, but that a single seven-and-a-half-meter-tall pine tree collected 106 kg of water during winter frosts, preventing erosion by snow, reducing soil evaporation by 20% and producing shade in the summer when the temperature was 20% lower. Just as important, if not more important, than physical protection from the wind was the containment of erosion and the maintenance of soil moisture.
In the decade that followed, government attention and efforts focused on industrialization, thanks to which the Soviet Union emerged as the great victor of the Second World War – at a devastating human cost; the blame, as is well known, was on the Nazi extermination strategy. However, for twenty years, even during the war, the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, the universities of Moscow and Leningrad, five departmental research institutes and ten special forestry and agricultural educational institutions in various cities throughout the country continued their environmental studies, until another great drought and its “black storms” came in 1946, followed by the great famine of 1947, which is estimated to have killed around 770 people of those who had managed to survive the war.
It was then that the research of Soviet scientists was taken to the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Council of Ministers, and in 1948, it gave rise to the “plan for planting protective forests, introducing grass crop rotations, and building ponds and reservoirs to ensure high sustainable yields in the open steppe and wooded steppe regions of the European part of the Soviet Union.” As was customary in the politics of personality cult, the plan was widely publicized as “Stalin’s Plan for the Transformation of Nature.” And this would later lead to its stigmatization.
Everything was attributed to leader Yosef Stalin, and it is curious to note that the side effect of the “cult of personality” was a depersonalization of Stalin himself, who became a symbolic vessel for any state policy. On the other hand, by prohibiting the cult of personality, the Cuban Revolution, for example, would make the “Revolution” itself that vessel. These are high stakes, but at the same time, declarations of historical responsibility that Western “democracies” are not only not used to making but often stereotype as “populist.”
The Plan was based on the planting of eight large forest belts along the hydrographic basins of the Volga, Ural, Don and Dnieper rivers, with widths between 60 and 300 m and extensions ranging from 170 to 1.100 km, totaling a length of 5.320 km (approximately the distance between Maceió and Santiago de Chile) and an initial area of 112 thousand hectares planted with oak, linden, ash, poplar, Tartar maple, yellow acacia and other tree and shrub species; in addition to preserving existing forests and reconstituting those that had been destroyed by the war.
The forest belts were still expanding in a grid-like fashion, with perpendicular woodland lines, in order to create favorable microclimates in an area of 120 million hectares (30% larger than the entire Southeast region of Brazil). In addition, plans were made to build more than 44 lakes with fish farms and reservoirs surrounded by riparian forests, as well as to introduce a crop rotation system, in which cereals, legumes and grasses were interspersed. To this end, 120 forest nurseries, 110 agricultural nurseries, 570 forest protection stations were created to manage the forests, accompanied by the technical contingent to do so, in addition to mobilizing 10 collective farms to grow seedlings. The “preciousness” of growing currants and raspberries in the forests to attract birds was even reached.
The objectives of the plan, designed to be developed between 1949 and 1965, were as ambitious as its size: the complete food self-sufficiency of the Soviet Union, followed by the expansion of cereal and meat exports to the entire socialist bloc, in addition to a significant expansion and diversification of the country's flora and fauna.
The environmental and economic results were soon evident. In the first years of implementation of the plan, the biocenosis of the steppes was stabilized. For the first time in 250 years, the process of reducing forest cover in almost all open steppe and woodland steppe areas was halted. In the fields protected by forests, the oxygen saturation of the soil increased, and the runoff of snowmelt and rainwater was contained, so that up to 80% of the moisture was absorbed by the soil, which, being more compact, was no longer affected by the winds.
Thus, it was not, strictly speaking, a matter of simply physically containing the winds from Central Asia, but above all of retaining water. This strategy would anticipate by six decades what the Russian Anastassia Makarieva, the Russian Victor Gorshkov and the Brazilian Antonio Nobre would demonstrate from the Amazon: the tropical forest is not a passive result of “natural” humidity; it is the trees of the tropical forest that attract, retain and control humidity, producing, in addition, the “aerial rivers” that make agriculture possible in the South, Southeast and Center-West of the country. Without the trees in the Amazon, it would not only be this last region that would turn into a desert, but also those other three Brazilian regions. Trees as subjects of the climate?… It is worth adding that the conclusions of these three scientists, announced between 2013 and 2014, were not well received by the mainstream of hegemonic climatology.
From an economic perspective, the crop rotation implemented by the Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature restored the soil fertility of the steppes and facilitated a better connection between agriculture and livestock. Due to all the impacts of the Plan, in five years, the yield of grain crops (wheat, rye and oats) increased by 25 to 30%; of vegetables, by 50 to 75%; and of grasses for livestock, by 100 to 200%. Collective farms began to produce 80% more meat and lard, with pork production increasing by 100%. Milk production increased by 65%; of eggs, by 240%; and of wool, by 50%.
To attribute to this great agroecological program the designation of “transformation of nature”, as originally done, is nothing more than a way of paying tribute to the ancestral “Promethean” cultural attitude of the West of recognizing this nature as an object of manipulation,[II] an attitude evidently recycled and enhanced by our modernity and its avatars of science and progress. But, in practice, the results of that transformation unfold other implications, which subvert the mere position of externality (manipulable) attributed to nature.
Between the late 80s and early 90s, geographer William Denevan and anthropologist William Balée demonstrated: (i) that a considerable portion (if not most) of the Amazon’s vegetation cover is, in fact, the result of thousands of years of Amerindian intervention; (ii) that the anthropogenic forest contains greater biodiversity; and (iii) that the image of untouched nature in the Amazon may not be much more than a myth. We could therefore ask ourselves: is what we call “nature” in fact an intangible exteriority? Or is it irremediably the result of a biotic interaction?
Interestingly, “Stalin’s” transformation of nature says the same thing that Amerindian peoples, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, have long been telling us: everything is articulated in a great transformative connection, or, according to the formula of old Chief Seattle, in his famous letter from 1855 to the President of the United States, “whatever is done to the earth will fall upon the sons of the earth.” It is no coincidence that the Andeans make their what are you Pachamama rituals: we are all in permanent debt to each other, to all “things” and beings. It is not a matter of mere “ecology” (specialized knowledge for a separate thing); it is a matter of worldview.[III]
Debt implies reciprocity; a reciprocity that has now been expanded, interspecies. Perhaps the most enduring lesson of agroecology is simply that interaction is not destruction, that is, the summary denial of reciprocity. In practice, “production” does not (and never has) come from a tabula rasa. Just to insist on an old Marxist triviality, it is not based on or explained by products, but rather (in and by) relations.[IV] This also means that nature is not a “preservable” exteriority; it will always and necessarily be “interactable”. But, of course, this idea of placing the relationship as a logical precedent is unimaginable for the (cosmo)logic of possessive individualism.[IN] and his nominalism of things-in-themselves (starting with the “individual” itself – then come “identities” and other similar nonsense).
The Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature did not survive Stalin; and simply because it bore his name, it was as if it were he, Yosef Stalin, who had gone to plant pine trees in Astrakhan in 1928. With the death of the Soviet leader in 1953 and the rise to power of Nikita Khrushchev, the entire plan, which had completed less than a third of its planned duration, began to be curtailed in the name of the fight against the cult of personality. Two years later, it was definitively abandoned.
With the death of the “pharaoh” Stalin, his temples were to be destroyed, and the hieroglyphic cartouches bearing his name were to be erased. The new science of the Soviet Union was to establish renewed theories about agriculture, based on the intensive use of fertilizers, and about the irretrievably non-forest origin of the chernozem, so that no one would ever think of forests there again.
Forest protection stations were closed down and ministerial institutions dedicated to forestry issues were systematically dismantled. As a result, forest management was abandoned, as were thousands of ponds and reservoirs for fish farming, which ended up covered by duckweed. Forest belts began to be intensively deforested to obtain timber and build country houses. In 1963, due to soil erosion and new storms, another food crisis broke out in the country, and the Soviet Union, which wanted full food autonomy, had to sell 600 tons of gold (one third of its reserves) to import grain.
Still, many forests have survived. Today, they are poorly cared for by local farmers, who have no knowledge of forest management and to whom the State intends to transfer responsibility for their recovery, by recognizing them as “unproductive”. In their vicinity, the thickness of the chernozem increased from 40 to 70 cm.
They also provide shelter for hares and squirrels, mushrooms and wild boars, birds, partridges and pheasants. In drought years, the yield in protected fields is two to three times higher than in unprotected areas. The “revolutionary” idea of biocorridors, now applied on several continents, is just a pale copy of what the Soviets did 70 years ago.
With Perestroika, the planting of tree species, which had been restricted to 30 hectares per year, fell to 300 hectares. Today, the level of water supply in Russian agriculture is three and a half times lower than it was in the mid-80s. In 2010, the European part of Russia was engulfed in major forest fires.
The other story that the Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature tells us is that the magnitude of its impact was only possible because it combined knowledge, systemic planning and the sovereign will of the nation to implement it. And perhaps it is precisely here, semiotically speaking, where the epithet “of Stalin” is capable of rehabilitation. After all, there must be some reason why the “pharaoh” Stalin (a person ritualized as a state power, and not simply an “individual”, as liberal logic likes) is today, 33 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the historical figure most admired by the Russians. This may be neither a guilty conscience nor self-deception. It may be… worldview.
The term in which that sovereign will is realized (and formally it does not matter so much how it is constituted) is precisely what, at the beginning of this text, we called “scale,” the ghost that, in the end, haunted Khrushchev’s counter-effort. After all, a part of the forest belts survived.
Instead of individual, local and corporate micro-efforts – which comfort politically correct consciences and fuel current agroecological dreams –, realizing the transformative and at least minimally regenerative impact required for an entire biome would not require thinking from a Whole ― that is, from the nation (something that musician Dimitri Shostakovich and lyricist Yevgeny Dolmatovsky expressed discursively in the verse “Let us clothe the Fatherland with forests!”[YOU]) ―, so that this impact is minimally effective?
Here comes the public dimension. And here comes a problem that contemporary agroecology does not seem very willing to consider. However, when half a country is burning in fires, perhaps this is an issue that deserves some attention. The rest is nothing more than the fatality of luck and the denial of politics (no matter how pretty and “alternative” it is painted). And even if a great famine, a great drought or a great flood comes, it will all seem too late. At least now, under the sign of the climate crisis, fatalism has a scapegoat to guarantee the business as usual.[VII]
*Ricardo Cavalcanti-Schiel Professor of Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS).
Notes
[I] See, for example, the article by researchers Alexander Wezel and Virginie Soldat, from the Institut supérieur d'agriculture Rhône-Alpes (ISARA), in Lyon (France): “A quantitative and qualitative historical analysis of the scientific discipline of agroecology” (International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability 7(1): 3-18, 2009).
[II] In this regard, see: Hadot, Pierre. 2004. Le voile d'Isis. Essay on the history of the idea of nature. Paris: Gallimard. (Translation into Portuguese: The Veil of Isis. An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
[III] In contemporary anthropology there is a more precise technical concept with greater analytical implications to express this idea: “regime of sociality”. For further information, you can consult, for example, my article “Las muchas naturalezas en los Andes” (Periphery 7, 2007, Barcelona): https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=5003905.
[IV] On the other hand, anthropologists have long demonstrated that the idea of production is not sufficient to cover the entire spectrum of reciprocity. Strictly speaking, and now contrary to the Marxist perspective, production is not the term of the universal, just as “consumption”, the battle horse of (liberal-)utilitarians, is not either.
[IN] I refer here, of course, to Crawford B. Macpherson's classic, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). (Translation into Portuguese: The political theory of possessive individualism. São Paulo: Peace & Land, 1979).
[YOU] “Song of the Forests” (cantata, 1949, for tenor, bass, children's choir, mixed choir and orchestra).
[VII] This text has made extensive use of data compiled by Russian engineer Boris A. Skupov, compared with other sources.
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