Paper short abstract:

From travelling engineers to socialist megalomania, hydrotechnical projects were fashioned after high-modernist ideas. For decades, warning voices on soil erosion from within and abroad were ignored. This unveils a problematic path dependency in infrastructure design difficult to abandon once taken.

Paper long abstract:

From travelling engineers towards the end of the 19th century through Western involvement in forced industrialization to international criticism of large-scale constructions, Russian and Soviet hydrotechnical projects were present on the global agora of knowledge. Especially since the late 1950s, one can observe a vivid transnational exchange of expertise during an era of high-modernist promises, but also a rise of globally similar issues like soil erosion and habitat destruction. This unveils a problematic path dependency difficult to abandon once taken. For decades, warning voices were ignored.

As early as the mid-1930s, Soviet soil scientists like Viktor Kovda, who became a driving force behind the “Soil Map of the World” and a highly active protagonist on the international stage, pointed at the dangers of soil degradation through salinization. However, adapted methods that took local conditions into account seemed incompatible with the abstract centrally controlled system of a socialist command economy. As a result, harvests collapsed even on the world’s most fertile soils, the black earth (chernozem). In the late 1980s, an area the size of Croatia suffered anthropogenic soil salinization across the Soviet Union.

While soil erosion as an environmental issue had created awareness at least since the turn of the century, the political context in which it could be framed changed significantly with time. This paper’s perspective therefore questions the implications of a supposed ‘Age of Ecology’ (Joachim Radkau) since the 1970s, promising new insights into transnational technopolitics and local agency alike in proposing solutions to a pressing ecological problem.