Presentation short abstract

Follows the fate of Soviet-era rice varieties to show how seed knowledge survives, disappears, or becomes memory after post-Soviet institutional decline.

Presentation long abstract

This paper traces the quiet afterlives of several rice varieties once developed and cultivated in a Soviet model kolkhoz in Kazakhstan. In contemporary district reports, only a single externally sourced variety appears. Yet retired agronomists and long-time residents recall locally bred seeds that circulated through Soviet breeding programs and, in some cases, may still survive in private holdings and personal seed stocks. Their presence today is uncertain — held in memory, reputation, and occasional practice rather than institutional registry.

The purpose of this study is not to establish which seeds remain, but to explore how agricultural truth becomes fragile when the infrastructures that once stabilized it have receded. Through ethnographic fieldwork, archival encounters, informal conversations, and time spent in markets and administrative offices, the research follows seeds as they pass between bureaucratic simplifications, partial archives, and lived recollection.

Rather than framing this as a story of loss alone, the paper attends to how knowledge persists unevenly — through individuals, habits, and quiet acts of custodianship — and how authority over knowing what grows reassembles in the absence of formal institutional oversight. Seeds here offer more than a botanical trace; they reveal how post-Soviet food systems depend on fragile epistemic remains and the people who continue to hold and enact them, long after official systems have forgotten.