The Transformation of Nature: Geoengineering and the Soviet Union

It may seem strange to us living in the modern day to think of a time when environmental concerns were not as prevalent as they are today. A time when paint was made with lead and the first ever air quality control bureau was being established in L.A. That time was the 1940’s, and in the 1940’s there were a lot of very important things happening.

But let’s set all of that aside for now, and let’s talk about nature, specifically nature in the Soviet Union. Soviet intentions and policies for nature had many aspects. First and foremost, most people know that Russia is massive, and very sparsely populated. Modern day Russia covers about 11% of the world’s total (land) area, Siberia being 5/6ths of that. Yet Russia has a population of only 143.3 million people, a little under half that of the U.S.’s 331.9 million inhabitants. Back in the late 1940s, Russia had been through WW1, the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian Civil War, and finally WW2. The USSR was not in an enviable position, but Stalin still had big plans for the nation.

Soviet agriculture had never been effective, with several devastating famines sweeping the nation since WW1, and many areas remaining sparsely populated. Many resources in the nation were untapped, and a lot of areas, particularly the steppe regions of the USSR, were dusty or otherwise unfit for development. The government sought to try to remedy a lot of these problems with a huge government works project.

The plan they came up with was what they called the “Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature”. They were to plant shelterbelts,  introduce grassland crop rotation, and construct ponds and reservoirs to ensure high sustainable crop yields in steppe and forest-steppe areas of the European USSR. The project was perhaps the first large-scale ecological construction project in the world. But despite the effort and intentions, the project failed for a variety of reasons. Many of its failures were a result of ineffective planting and growing techniques, lack of material, or malplanning, not necessarily flaws with the idea itself. It did increase crop yields in some areas, like some collective farms in Ukraine, but not as much as hoped.

But what I want to discuss about the project was the way Soviet officials, and most importantly Soviet propaganda, viewed the project. Soviet propaganda displayed the project as a great patriotic effort to mold and improve nature for the Soviet people. There is an image commonly associated with the project you can easily find online of Stalin with a green pencil in his hand looking at a map of a reforestation plan. The text on the image reads “и засуху победим”, “we’ll conquer drought too”. Soviet propaganda continually described the soviet projects as improving nature, molding it with human ingenuity for the good of mankind. Or in this case, the good of Iosef Stalin. (that’s not a typo) 

If that is sounding familiar to you, it should. The plan described by soviet officials is basically a primitive form of geoengineering. I wanted to discuss this because 1. I like reading and talking about the Soviet Union and 2., to emphasize that there is nothing new under the sun. Even very obscure and new ideas like geoengineering have practical historical comparisons. This project began over seventy years ago, yet its objectives and implementations can still be relevant today. There’s a common saying, “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. This isn’t entirely true, as every situation is different in one way or another, a better version of the saying would be “those who do not learn from history are doomed to be uninformed”. Even in a time when we don’t think of environmentalism, with enough research there is still plenty to be learned.