War and Insect Control in Russia / Soviet Union, 1900-1940

The Bolsheviks seized power during the Great War and built their dictatorship through a “continuum of crisis” (Holquist), channeling the violence of total war inward. The forced collectivization of agriculture, an unprecedented and cataclysmic experiment attempting to “modernize” the countryside in the context of a looming “inevitable war,” would trigger another wave of ruthless state violence against the peasantry. I analyze the overlap of armed conflicts and “natural” disasters in the long sequences of war, revolution, and civil war and through the forced collectivization and its aftermaths. Discursive and action categories, regimes of mobilization, and imaginaries and technologies expanded from the waging of war to the management of nature. The porosity between war and natural disasters remained starkest in the margins of the Imperial/Soviet territory. Environmental and rebel threats came to be interrelated in the peripheries, where “militarized” practices of pest control and successive “disinhibiting” (Fressoz) toxic experimentations were adopted in emulation with European colonial practices. The Stalinist “revolution from above” worked as an incubator of the military-scientific experiments and practices of the 1920s.