Excerpt from Soil Salinity and Irrigation in the Soviet Union: Report of a Technical Study Group An agreement was concluded on December 1, 1959, between the Govern ments of the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics providing for exchanges in the cultural, technical, and educational fields. This is the second such agreement; the first was concluded in 1958. Agriculture, which plays an important role in the national economies of the two countries, was specifically included in the agreements as a field for exchange of specialists. The us. Department of Agriculture accordingly sent to the Soviet Union in 1960 four technical study groups of specialists in the following subjects: Handling, storage, and transportation of grain; food processing; agricultural information and planning; and soil salinity. The Soviet Union in turn sent to the United States in 1960 three delega tions of specialists in the following subjects: Food processing; fertilizers, insecticides, and weed killers; and agricultural science and information. In 1961, three additional Soviet teams were sent in the following fields: Cereal and forage seed production; breeding and hybridization of cattle and pigs; and mechanization of cultivation and harvesting of sugar beets and potatoes. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Blending close readings of literature, films, and other artworks with analysis of texts of political philosophy, science, and social theory, Mieka Erley offers an interdisciplinary perspective on attitudes to soil in Russia and the Soviet Union from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. As Erley shows in On Russian Soil, the earth has inspired utopian dreams, reactionary ideologies, social theories, and durable myths about the relationship between nation and nature. In this period of modernization, soil was understood as the collective body of the nation, sitting at the crux of all economic and social problems. The "soil question" was debated by nationalists and radical materialists, Slavophiles and Westernizers, poets and scientists. On Russian Soil highlights a selection of key myths at the intersection of cultural and material history that show how soil served as a natural, national, and symbolic resource from Fedor Dostoevsky's native soil movement to Nikita Khrushchev's Virgin Lands campaign at the Soviet periphery in the 1960s. Providing an original contribution to ecocriticism and environmental humanities, Erley expands our understanding of how cultural processes write nature and how nature inspires culture. On Russian Soil brings Slavic studies into new conversations in the environmental humanities, generating fresh interpretations of literary and cultural movements and innovative readings of major writers.