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Agricultural Involution in the Postwar Soviet Union

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2014

Jenny Leigh Smith
Jenny Leigh Smith*
Affiliation:
Georgia Institute of Technology
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Abstract

This article describes a form of agricultural labor intensification common in the postwar Soviet Union that shares some important similarities to Clifford Geertz's notion of agricultural involution, first devised to describe Javanese wet rice agriculture. Using the examples of hog farming and cotton production, this paper describes the phenomenon of postwar agricultural involution, and explores its limits and possibilities. The most important divergence from Geertz's original model is that in the Soviet cases, agricultural involution did not attain any form of environmental equilibrium; in fact, because of agricultural involution, the Soviet Union was forced to confront the environmental limits of agricultural intensification. The concept of agricultural involution provides a way of thinking about the relative flexibility or rigidity of agroecological health in the face of labor intensification. This quality—how much additional labor and how many extra humans an agricultural ecosystem is able to support—is critical in evaluating how robust or fragile a landscape is.

Type
Environment and Labor
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 85 , Spring 2014 , pp. 59 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2014 

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References

NOTES

1. The literature on this process is voluminous and largely focused on the United States. The best works on this topic include Daniel, Pete R., Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 (Champaign, IL, 1986)Google Scholar; Fitzgerald, Deborah, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven, CT, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Danbom, David, The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900–1930 (lowa City, IA., 1979)Google Scholar. The most comprehensive book on Russian and Soviet agriculture, Nikonov, A. A., Spiral Mnogovekovoi dramy: Agrarnaia nauka i politika Rossii, XVIII–XX vv. (Moscow, 1995)Google Scholar, discusses mechanization but not deskilling.

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