SUMMARY:

In her article, Natalia Ryzhova analyzes the reasons that the “soybean revolution” never took place in the USSR. By virtue of its colonial expansion in the Far East, by the turn of the twentieth century Russia had an advantage over any other country in studying, cultivating, and exporting Manchurian soybeans – soon to be recognized as a technical crop of major importance. The demand for soybeans skyrocketed through the twentieth century, driven by the need for cheap protein, fodder for intensive animal farming, and technical oils. Russian agronomists experimented with adapting Manchurian varieties of soybeans to various local natural conditions, and there were stories of successful commercial cultivation of this crop in different provinces. In the early 1930s these precedents encouraged Soviet planners and botanists to envision the large-scale implementation of soybeans in the collectivized agriculture. Manchurian varieties along with others imported from the United States were planted year after year in southern regions of the USSR, particularly in Ukraine and the Northern Caucasus, with dismal results. Ryzhova demonstrates how the miscoordination between the overly centralized structures of knowledge production, economic planning, and plant cultivation undermined the prospects of the would-be soybean revolution.