Abstract
Shaw, D.J.B., ‘Soviet Geographers and the Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature’, 5th International Conference of the European Society for the History of Science and Technology, Athens, November 2012
The ‘Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature’ was a grandiose, Communist Party and Soviet government-sponsored scheme for the amelioration of climatic conditions across the forest-steppe and steppe vegetation zones of the European USSR and, in its broadest manifestation, across adjacent parts of south-western Siberia and Central Asia. The immediate historical context was provided by the food shortages of the post-war period which were exacerbated by drought and climatic fluctuations. The region which was the object of the scheme was in essence the USSR’s breadbasket and it was believed that by planting a whole series of shelter belts and attendant environmental measures a significant and reliable increase in agricultural production might be secured. The entire plan was to be put into effect within fifteen years.
Whilst a considerable amount of academic research has been done on the politics surrounding the plan and on its generally negative environmental consequences, less attention has been paid to the role of scientists in its design and implementation. This paper seeks to make a contribution to our understanding of that role by focusing on one group of scholars, namely the geographers. Though by no means central to the scientific input into the plan, and indeed having considerable uncertainties over the value of their efforts, the geographers nevertheless played an important role, aided by the broad interdisciplinary nature of their subject. For example, the forest botanist V N Sukachev, who was director of the State Forestry Institute, also headed the department of biogeography in the Faculty of Geography at MGU. Geographers also looked back to the earlier work of V V Dokuchaev and A I Voeikov as progenitors of their work on the plan. The paper will consider some of the scientific, political and practical problems which geographers faced in their attempts to realise the Stalin Plan.