A Soviet Green Revolution? An Exploration of the Baraev Scientific-Research Institute for Cereals and Industrial Agriculture

This paper begins with a thought experiment: Did the Soviet Union have a Green Revolution in industrial agriculture? The traditional narrative of the Green Revolution is one that began with the Rockefeller Foundation and USAID in the immediate postwar years in an effort to alleviate world hunger through widespread adoption of new agricultural technologies: huge grain monocultures on the basis of hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizers, synthetic pesticides, and new management techniques to accommodate these technologies. The social and environmental consequences of the Green Revolution are mixed at best, while the echoes of neo-colonialism continue to resonate into the twenty-first century. This paper seeks to understand to what extent these material changes can be seen in the Soviet Union. From 1954-1964, Nikita Khrushchev oversaw the plowing up of 25 million hectares of steppe grasslands in Western Siberia, the Northern Caucasus, and in Northern Kazakhstan for grain cultivation. The All-Union Scientific-Research Institute for Cereals, established in 1957 in Shortandy, Kazakhstan, developed hybrid wheat seeds adapted to the harsh climate of the steppe, in addition to a variety of chemical and mechanical technologies to aid in their successful cultivation. This paper considers the scientific developments in plant breeding, soil science, and the burgeoning science of erosion studies, and how these innovations were adapted to the specific climactic circumstances of the steppe. By shifting the locus of analysis of postwar Soviet agriculture to the periphery, the complex (neo-)imperial dynamics and the features of a centrally planned economy reveal the peculiar nature of the Green Revolution in the Soviet Union.