Maria Fedorova, "Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935" (Northern Illinois UP, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Jenna Pittman
Guest: Maria Fedorova, author of Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2025)
Date: October 9, 2025

Seeds of Exchange explores the technical, scientific, and interpersonal exchanges between American and Soviet agricultural experts during the interwar period. In this conversation, Maria Fedorova discusses her origins in food and transnational history, the unique archival work underlying her research, and her book’s central argument: that knowledge exchange—not one-way transfer—defined U.S.-Soviet agricultural cooperation from 1921–1935.

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Maria Fedorova’s Path to the Book (02:28 – 04:46)

• Academic Journey: Maria began in Moscow with a history degree, then shifted from American intellectual history (anti-intellectualism) to food history in graduate school due to a personal interest in bread baking.
• Pivot Point: Her advisor encouraged her to write about what she was passionate about—bread—which led to research on Wonder Bread and the U.S. baking industry during WWI.
• Discovery of Her Topic: Leveraged her Russian language skills to investigate American aid to Soviet Russia post-WWI and began to question narratives that U.S. food aid was a one-sided event.

“At that moment I really was into bread baking … my first foray into agricultural and food history was about the history of Wonder Bread.”
—Maria Fedorova [03:22]

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Existing Scholarship and Archival Adventures (06:26 – 12:12)

• Limited Historiography: There’s a considerable gap regarding U.S.-Soviet technical agricultural exchange in the interwar period, both in agriculture and in broader studies of knowledge transfer under socialism.
• Interdisciplinary Influence: Fedorova built on the methodology of knowledge circulation and transnational history, connecting food, hunger studies, and science/technology history.
  • Noted recent works: David Moon’s The American Steppe, Erin Hale Doral’s Corn Crusade.
• Archival Process:
  • Worked in American, Russian, and British archives, focusing on following the paper trails of individual experts across the Midwest.
  • Memorable Anecdote: While researching at the Hoover Institute, she found a literal piece of 1918 bread mailed to Herbert Hoover during rationing efforts.

“I actually found a piece of bread in one of the folders, in an envelope which was addressed to Herbert Hoover.”
—Maria Fedorova [11:13]

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Bringing in Women and Underrepresented Voices (12:48 – 15:17)

• Challenge: The core archival voices were mainly white, male scientists and experts.
• Approach: Traced the involvement of women as supportive figures—wives showing Soviet peasants how to use tractors, female journalists like Anna Louis Strong, and accounts from children who lived on Soviet-American agricultural projects.
• Visualization: Photographs and memoirs supplement gaps where women’s own voices were missing in the official record.

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Exchange versus Transfer: Conceptual Foundations (16:31 – 20:15)

• Critique of "Transfer": The term implies hierarchy and a one-way process (“sender/recipient”), which did not align with the bidirectional reality she found.
• Why "Exchange":
  • Multidirectional movement of ideas and technology.
  • No strict hierarchy—Soviets and Americans mutually learned, sometimes resisted, sometimes undermined each other.
  • Exchange is not always equal or tangible; it’s more about transformation of ideas and practices.

“For me, transfer implied a one directional movement of ideas … and I was not satisfied with it because I saw that this was a multi-directional transfer, if we want to use this word.”
—Maria Fedorova [17:08]

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Contested Ideologies & Diplomacy (21:36 – 24:58)

• Shared Challenges: Despite ideological conflict, both countries saw feeding their populations as crucial after WWI. There was a temporary convergence in approaches to agriculture.
• Decline in Collaboration:
  • Soviet experts initially welcomed travel and knowledge exchange.
  • Political climate shifted: post-First Five Year Plan, growing anti-communism (US) and increasing suspicion of "bourgeois" (pre-revolutionary) experts (USSR).
  • By the 1930s, professional connections became riskier and less frequent.

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Memorable Moments & Anecdotes

Montana Hostility:

• A Montana farmer refused to meet a Soviet delegation, leaving his farm to avoid contact, yet the Soviets toured it regardless. [26:25–26:43]

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World War I as a Turning Point in Global Agriculture (27:33 – 31:18)

• Transformation: WWI spurred countries to rethink food production, with agencies like Hoover’s Food Administration organizing massive aid.
• Ideological Framing: Humanitarian food aid carried ideological purposes—to curtail the spread of communism by demonstrating capitalism’s benevolence.
• Birth of International Agricultural Cooperation: For the first time, major agricultural experts from across the world met at the Paris Peace Conference, launching journals and transnational dialogues.

“By providing food, you prevent the spread of communism. So ... who and how will feed the world after the war became paramount for everyone.”
—Maria Fedorova [28:48]

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The Central Role of Montana in U.S.-Soviet Exchange (31:52 – 36:42)

• Why Montana?
  • Eastern Montana’s climate and soils resembled Russia’s Volga region, making it ideal for experimentation.
  • Expert Emmet Wilson from Montana State College was hired by Soviets to advise on a major farm project near Rostov.
  • Wilson’s travels across the USSR—including the Trans-Siberian Railroad—led to high demand for his “insider” views upon return.
• Notable Quote:
  • After returning, Wilson was so overwhelmed by requests to talk about the Soviets, a colleague joked about making a silent film just to answer people’s queries. [36:18]

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The End of the Cooperation Era (36:42 – 39:39)

• Collapse, Not Catastrophe:
  • Political and intellectual rifts—U.S. anti-communism, Soviet turn to more national and collectivized agriculture—gradually eroded exchanges by the mid-1930s.
  • The Great Depression was seen by Soviets as proof the American system didn’t work, prompting them to distance themselves.
• Long Unwinding:
  • There was no sudden cutoff; exchanges faded rather than ceased abruptly.

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Broader Transnational & Ideological Implications (40:42 – 44:44)

• Beyond Ideological Rivalry: Looking beyond diplomatic narratives to the working scientists and experts reveals productive, creative cooperation—even among “enemies.”
• The Interwar Legacy: This period prefigured the Green Revolution’s focus on scale, technology, and internationalization.
• Food Insecurity as Central Theme: The ongoing global struggle to feed populations effectively united experts, regardless of politics.

“The First World War showed that those countries that could manage their food production distribution effectively, they won the war, and those who couldn't, they just fell.”
—Maria Fedorova [44:44]

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Closing: Fedorova’s Next Project (45:20 – 48:29)

• New Direction: Exploring the history of horticulture and “cold climate” agriculture in extreme northern regions (northern U.S., Canada, Scandinavia, northern Russia).
• Personal Inspiration & Climate Change: Directly inspired by correspondence with a Minnesota farmer; ties to global seed technologies, plant genetics, and the environmental challenges of today.

“Yeah, for now. The project is called Winter is Coming. Hello, Game of Thrones.”
—Maria Fedorova [48:15]

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “At that moment I really was into bread baking ... my first foray into agricultural and food history was about the history of Wonder Bread.”
  —Maria Fedorova [03:22]

• “I actually found a piece of bread in one of the folders, in an envelope which was addressed to Herbert Hoover.”
  —Maria Fedorova [11:13]

• “For me, transfer implied a one directional movement of ideas ... and I was not satisfied with it because I saw that this was a multi-directional transfer, if we want to use this word.”
  —Maria Fedorova [17:08]

• “By providing food, you prevent the spread of communism. So ... who and how will feed the world after the war became paramount for everyone.”
  —Maria Fedorova [28:48]

• “The First World War showed that those countries that could manage their food production distribution effectively, they won the war, and those who couldn't, they just fell.”
  —Maria Fedorova [44:44]

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Takeaways

• The U.S.-Soviet agricultural relationship in the interwar years was neither one-sided nor strictly ideological, but an evolving, mutually influential exchange shaped by pressing shared challenges.
• This “hidden history” complicates traditional Cold War-era narratives, showing transnational cooperation and knowledge sharing at a time of growing international rift.
• Food insecurity, technological experimentation, and the pragmatics of feeding nations sat at the heart of both transnational politics and the lived experiences of agricultural experts.
• Archival research in this area is still developing, offering rich ground for further studies—especially around underrepresented voices, environmental history, and the global movement of seeds and ideas.

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Transcript

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[Jenna Pittman]

Hello everybody, and welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm Jenna Pittman, a host for the network today. Today we'll be talking to Maria Fedorova about her new book, Seeds of Soviets, Americans and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921-1935. Published by Northern Illinois University Press in October of 2025, Seeds of Exchange explores the exchange of technical agricultural knowledge between the US And Soviet Union in the interwar period. With that, Maria, I'm so excited to have you here today. Welcome to the show.

[Maria Fedorova]

Thank you so much. And I'm delighted to be here.

[Jenna Pittman]

So I wonder if we could start just by you telling us a little bit about yourself and how you came to write Seeds of Exchange.

[Maria Fedorova]

Yeah, absolutely. I think I have a long story and a short story, so I'll try to be somewhere in the middle.

[Jenna Pittman]

So.

[Maria Fedorova]

First, where I came from. So I got my specialist degree in history in Moscow, Russia, and then I got a Fulbright to do an MA in American History at Washington State University. And there I was actually not focusing on agriculture at all. I focused on intellectual history. I wrote about American anti intellectualism in the 20th century. And then when I went to Santa Barbara and had one of those crises that probably a lot of graduate students experience at some point, my advisor Nelson Lichtenstein said, what do you really like to do? And that's what you probably need to write about. At that moment I really was into bread baking. And I said, okay, I'll write about bread. And that's where it all started. So my first kind of foray into agricultural and food history was about the history of Wonder Bread and the baking industry during the First World War. But I felt like that was not enough because I had this know Russian language and I started looking for connections between the United States and Russia and I found one that was around the First World War and it was American aid to Soviet Russia in 1921, 23. And this is where I started thinking about the question of food insecurity and international exchange. So the idea that Americans supplied food aid to the Soviets and then nothing really happened, that the Americans really didn't learn anything from that experience. I started questioning that. And that is how I kind of came to write about Soviet and American experts going back and forth during the interwar period and trying to solve this big problem of what, how we're going to feed people after the First World War.

[Jenna Pittman]

Yeah, I mean that's absolutely fascinating. I love that you started out with like, well, I like making bread. Let's trace that back. I think it's so interesting seeing kind of where commodities come in so quickly to these histories. I think that's really wonderful that you challenged kind of this conception that like aid was given and then it just went nowhere. And yeah, I think hearing how you've come to this topic and writing this book definitely makes me understand your interest in green and this transnational exchange and kind of your emphasis on the idea that it's exchange. And I think we'll dive into that a little bit. But kind of going to the historiography that is existing, it feels like. And from what I've seen, there's not a super large historiography of the exchange of technical agricultural knowledge between the US and the Soviet Union both during the interwar period as you explore, but also just more broadly throughout the 20th century. Because personally I've been diving into this similar type of, type of field and I'm always looking for things of transfer of science and technical knowledge, like seed exchange, just like what you studied and really just science under socialism and agricultural science under socialism. And I'm like shocked by how hard it is to find things that are exploring the topics that I'm really interested in. Or I'm like, there's gotta be something there. And so I guess I'm just wondering what scholarship you built from in approaching this study and what your archives were and what you found particularly useful.

[Maria Fedorova]

Yeah, I think that there has a lot been done about the transfers or circulation or exchange of knowledge and technology, but not in agriculture. And I think that we can look, I don't know, David and German's Modernization from the Other Shore as an example or all other books that not necessarily focus on the United States and Russia or the Soviet Union and use their methodology. And that's where I relied on that scholarship, on scholarship of circulation of knowledge. That was the first point. But then recently, only in the last five, seven years we have this books by David Moon, the American Steps by Erin Hale Doral Corn Crusade, who also focus on the exchange of agricultural knowledge. But Hale Doyle in a little bit different period. And then the American Steps, David Moon focuses more on the late 19th, early 20th century and also from the perspective of environmental history. And I'm sort of fitting like right in between them for my interwar period. So this was the scholarship like on the kind of historians who focus on the Russia and the Soviet Union. But I also feel like a lot of my thinking stemmed from the history of food and history of agriculture. So I Especially during wartime because. Because that histography gave me an idea about what if we look at wartime as this kind of turning point that transforms our understanding of food production and consumption and how not only say consumers or policymakers, but how also experts start thinking about food in a different way, how war reshapes because they see starvation in some areas. They see, I don't know, overproduction in other areas. And how do they. How do they start thinking about what are we going to do with this big problem. And also of course, history of science and technology. And this is where the term transfer came into play. Because a lot of story of American Soviet relations is the story of a transfer that during the interwar period there's a lot of American technology and expertise going to the Soviet Union. So it also talk. Have the conversation with. With these historians. And I think history of hunger, History of hunger is a. Is another important kind of part of scholarship. I I remember reading James Vernon Hunger History and being just blown away by how the concept of hunger, the idea of Hunger changes over time and especially during the 20th century, how states get this. So I thought, okay, well, how, if we apply this idea, how does it fit into the American Soviet context? So that's.

[Jenna Pittman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think there is. You're right that there is so much when you look kind of outside of. Outside of specifically seed. Extreme.

[Maria Fedorova]

Yes. When you don't have that specific field, you start looking outside of the field, looking at what other people do and how they do it. And of course, I forgot to mention transnational history. I mean, that transnational turn definitely impacted my thinking. Thinking and kind of the shape of the whole project. Oh, yeah, you also asked about the archives, so. Yes, I. So I worked both in American Russian archives and in British archives. And I think the Russian archives. I don't think I have a lot of funny stories about that, but I have stories about American archives for sure. So I think that. So if you ever decide to write about Midwestern agriculture, I can give you a route. Because I almost followed the route of migrant cultural experts going from Lincoln, Nebraska, then to Iowa, then to Madison and Wisconsin, then to Chicago. So I actually skipped Minnesota, where I am right now, but also Montana archives are amazing as well because they experimented so much with large scale agriculture during the interwar period. But the funny story about the archives is that when I was working at the Hoover Institute in Stanford, looking at the papers of the American Food Administration, and the American Food Administration was a wartime agency that organized food aid for the allies. So during that time, the Food Administration called on the American people to save wheat and sugar and meat. And American people responded by sending recipes of different breads with bread. And I actually found a piece of bread in one of the folders, in an envelope which was addressed to Herbert Hoover. And it was sealed. So I opened it and so there. And then suddenly there was something from 1918, like a little piece of bread from 1918. So I immediately talked to the archivist and they said it's better to close this because we do not know how much mold on this.

[Jenna Pittman]

Yeah, anyway, yeah, that's really, really interesting. I'm sure that that was definitely an interesting archival process, basically going to all of the land grant universities. So. Yeah, yeah. Really seeing every state in the Midwest.

[Maria Fedorova]

Yes, yeah. And I think that, like when, because I decided to focus on the stories of experts, I had to trace their routes and trace their papers all over the Midwest because there is no one archive that I could go to and write that history.

[Jenna Pittman]

Sure, sure. Well, I think that brings me to something that you address in this book, but I do want to ask it here. So you mentioned that your main archival voices are from experts, which at this time was predominantly white male scientists and agricultural experts. How do you bring women's voices into this book? Because I think that's something that I definitely want you to highlight here.

[Maria Fedorova]

Yeah, absolutely. I, I think that like all historians was like, I did my best to find, to find those voices and they are definitely not in the archive in this direct way, but women support these projects. They go with agricultural experts to different places, like to Toikina. Toikina. It was a small village and is still, is still there. It's in the Perm region and southern Urals. For example, Harold Ware, an American communist agricultural expert, went to modernize Soviet agriculture in the southern Urals and his wife followed him and she was the one to show Russian, Soviet, Soviet peasants how to use a tractor, which was absolutely horrifying for them that a woman was driving a tractor. And though we do not really hear her voice there, but the photograph of her was published in newspapers. So we can sort of still address the fact that, yes, the agricultural experts were predominantly male and they kind of drove that discourse. So other stories, I think that's also. Female journalists also go to the Soviet Union and write about the experiments. Anna Louis Strong was one of them. And also we see also I was able also to find voices of children because some of these agricultural experts, they do not travel alone, they travel with their families. So they bring their entire family, including children, to this large scale projects. And one of the children actually wrote a memoir about it, her Memories of Pity Boursk, which is in the Northern Caucasus. And that was a great source. And I think that somebody should write.

[Jenna Pittman]

A book about this. Yeah, yeah, thank you for that. Yeah. And I think what really struck me is as you're reading the book, I mean, I am the person who typically is like, where, where are the women in this story? But this one is one where it's just by nature. I think the central voices that I'm sure are so present in the archive. It's just, it's not women, unfortunately. But I think you make such a conscious effort to make sure that they're not women are not excluded from this book. And I think that that is something where I'm like, yeah, it would be so easy to say, you know what, I'm going to do a chapter on something also about this, exchange something more about the impacts of this. But instead you make sure to bring in a chapter about women. And I Think that's a really great example that's being set. I definitely want to get to your specificity in the using, in using the term exchange. It's such an important aspect of this study is how you define exchange and how you're using that instead of transfer. Because actually I'll let you explain, but you don't use terms like transfer or import or sale. And can you describe why you choose the term exchange and the specificity around that?

[Maria Fedorova]

Yeah, I came it was also not an easy road to the term exchange because initially when I was writing a draft of this, of my dissertation, then I used the word circulation and because Benedicta Zimmerman used that and I felt like this was the best term to explain what was happening. But circulatory knowledge is, I felt like that model did not. As I was going and researching this material I felt like circulatory model could not really explain the way knowledge was traveling between the two countries. But the notion of exchange was. So I will go into this in a second, but why I could not, why I did not want to use transfer. For me transfer implied a one directional movement of ideas, that is number one. And I was not satisfied with it because I wanted, I saw that this was a multi directional transfer, if we want to use this word right. And the second idea, and I hear and I rely on somebody else's thoughts, this is not mine, is that the term transfer means that there's some kind of hierarchy or power relations where one act actor will always be a sender and another one will be a recipient. And you cannot break that hierarchy. And again I, I, as I was looking at the papers and the archives I saw that there was no that hierarchy. The kind of one dimensional hierarchy did not exist. And at both American and Soviet experts they constantly talked to each other and they exchanged ideas and they, they also undermined each other and they mistrusted each other and they didn't use each other's ideas thinking that they were not good. Including Soviets, Soviets especially in the 30s, in the late 30s they say we're not going to follow the American model. So this is, this just doesn't work. Our model is much better. And so the term then, then I came to the term exchange and I felt like it would describe the relationship between agricultural experts much better. And the third point I think I try to make is that the exchange doesn't have to be equal. So for example, I give you two apples and you give me back two apples. Okay? So sometimes when I talk about the book I am athletes. So what did they exchange? And I'm, I'm not interested in really what, but in how it worked. Because, yes, if we look at the physical evidence, yes, of course the United States sent more tractors, say, or agricultural implements. Right, but, yes, and the Soviets did not send tractors to the United States, of course, but I feel like Americans also got something of it by working on those large scale farms in the Volga region. They learned about managing scale farms, they learned about labor, they learned about, like, laws of rationalization of production. And then they brought those ideas and they did not necessarily say, okay, let's implement. The Soviets are doing it. Right? No, but they still publish papers. They, they had intellectual conversations, so they disseminated that knowledge. And this is, this is the part of the exchange.

[Jenna Pittman]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think that's such a important factor to note that you can't look at this as a direct thing that you can assign a tangible value to. You can't say, well, the US Sent X amount of goods over and they didn't get that in exchange. Because there's certain things that cannot have a value necessarily affect that. Especially under the Soviet Union had a model for assigning value to things that the US does not capitalism, like. Yeah, anyway, that's a whole, whole different thing. But it makes me think of the other day I was having this discussion in one of my seminars about how this narrative that often emerges in the historiography is that socialism is the opposite of capitalism and these systems are completely incompatible and they don't work together at all. And I think that's something that this book does such a good job of challenging by emphasizing that exchange is that there's still some, there's still some areas in which, like, they both have the same goals, like they're desiring the same development kind of at the same time. And it's not completely incompatible. I think as the simplistic maybe misconception might go.

[Maria Fedorova]

Yeah, I completely agree with you. I was looking at these ideological enemies, but thinking about them, how they see one problem and they see the problem of feeding the population, that is the problem for them. After the First World War, they realized that. Well, I think that Hoover's Food Administration put it really well, food will win the war. Right. And that reorganizing those small farms into something more efficient, more rational is both concern for both the Soviets and Americans. And yes, in the end, the, they kind of, their paths, they take different paths. But at one point there is this moment of convergence where they, I think, together, together also with a, you know, there's parts that I did not touch the European agricultural experts who were also concerned about about this. But I hope somebody else will write about that.

[Jenna Pittman]

Yeah, of course. Well, I think that brings me to another main question that I, I wanted to bring up here which is kind of talking about what like how actors on both sides perceived the kind of interesting diplomatic and international relationship that emerged from this contact between Soviet and US actors.

[Maria Fedorova]

Yeah. So I think that a good like it's, it's a definitely evolving perception from the early 1920s to the to 1935. If in the early 1920s and I will use the Soviets as an example here, Soviet agricultural experts see lots of opportunities for traveling to other countries including the United States. And they certainly like it's not an entirely open period, but there is a chance for them to go and explore the United States. And we can see actors like Nikolai Vavilov and Macinsky and others who are in my book that they with a lot of difficulty and after getting lots of signatures they get a chance to go to the United States. And Vavilov even establishes the Russian Agricultural Bureau in New York. Yes. And but over time, over the course of the year after the first five year plan began and the first purchase of the so called bourgeois scientists, those scientists who worked before the revolution, we can see how those political tensions they affect the work and the ability of Soviet agricultural experts to either rely on their American connections or even use the American model as a model for the future of Soviet agriculture. In this case for the Soviet or for the American side. You can also see the growing, the growth of anti communism in the early 1930s and how that affects the USDA and also kind of lower level the local level how now connections with the Soviets are not seen as something really beneficial for your career.

[Jenna Pittman]

So yeah, thank you for that.

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[Jenna Pittman]

Definitely. Very interesting. Just thinking about and knowing the narratives that are described in this throughout the chapters and that really contextualize this history through the experience of these contacts and some of the little quips that come out of. Like. I think it was the Montana farmers, like, really distrustful.

[Maria Fedorova]

One of them. Yes. During the visit of Soviet experts, it was probably in the early 1930s.

[Jenna Pittman]

Yeah.

[Maria Fedorova]

One farmer just left his farm. So in order not to meet the Soviet delegation, they go, okay. They still tour the farm without.

[Jenna Pittman]

Right, yeah, yeah. He was like, I won't be a part of it. But.

[Maria Fedorova]

Yes, but won't be a part of it.

[Jenna Pittman]

Yes. Well, I think. Yeah, I mean, that's all very interesting. I guess I just brought up the Montana agriculture, and that is such a central part here. So I think first we need to talk a little bit about World War I and that kind of period, and then the Montana agriculture. Montana just being such a. Such a central site of this exchange. So I guess starting with World War I, how was the exchange of knowledge and agricultural technology shaped by World War I and its aftermath? And agriculture as a global industry. I think you started to touch on this a little bit earlier, but how was agriculture as a global industry really transformed by World War I and, you know, the experience. Experience of hunger and changes in production and consumption and everything.

[Maria Fedorova]

Yeah, yeah. I think that World War I was one of those transformational moments when national governments, policymakers, farmers, experts, rethought what food production and consumption and distribution would look like and should look like, because during the war, we see agencies like I mentioned, like the Food Administration, that is not a government agency, but it works closely with the government and supplies this enormous amount of food to the Allies. And the goals. Of course, there are several goals there. First, to establish American presence in the European market as Russia collapsed and could not provide any food. But also, it's an ideological reason, because by providing food, you prevent the spread of communism. So in that, the question of who and how will feed the world after the war became paramount for everyone. And even during the Paris Conference, agricultural experts from the United States and from a variety of European countries, they also have a meeting at that time, and they discuss the future of agriculture. They established a journal, World Agriculture, and they start publishing extensively on these questions about what other countries do in terms of agricultural production and where we're all going. So this. I think that it's. I want to, of course, to Make a very big claim and say that this is the first time, you know, the international community, you know, probably not, but it was definitely an important moment when we hear voices from different countries and different experts as saying we need to rethink agricultural production and we need a new model that will work. And I think that World War I really stimulated that thinking because there were, of course, there was a lot of experimentation even before the war, but the war was this transformative moment for this.

[Jenna Pittman]

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Just thinking of what I've been reading recently, kind of thinking about World War I is really the first moment where there's reliance on other nations for your nation's commodity, like security of commodities. I think that's something really unique that becomes a fear in the interwar period that your country might not be able to have enough food in circulation or could be cut off from the supply of really essential things if the world political situation.

[Maria Fedorova]

Yeah, you're absolutely right. Yes. From the blockade during the war is a great example of this. And also on the other side, it's providing humanitarian aid because this was also the first attempt to provide this international humanitarian aid. Before that, it was mainly even private organizations that did this. But here we see here that almost at the state level, big organizations provide food aid.

[Jenna Pittman]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And almost the idea of aid as alliance and aid as, like, I'm sure that that was not like a new thing in this period, but it seems like in the interwar period, you see, like, very specifically, like, aid is given to military friendship a little bit.

[Maria Fedorova]

Yes. Yeah. Then, you know, then the question is like, why? Why did Americans give aid to Soviet. Russ, there are questions about this and of course the answers are economic answers. Right. And because of the crisis of overproduction American. The American farm lobby really pushes the idea of, let's send all this grain to countries that are starving and help American farmers. But also it's an ideological reason, of course, and political to demonstrate the value of capitalism over communism.

[Jenna Pittman]

Yeah, yeah, of course. So kind of turning to the importance of Montana and Montana and agriculture at this time, you mentioned Montana was experimenting a lot with large scale agriculture, and that was really compatible with the Soviet system at the time. And so I wonder if you might speak a little bit about the relationship between experts of US Agriculture, ag science in Montana, and then the Soviet agricultural experts. And kind of specifically through that lens of being so central to this narrative.

[Maria Fedorova]

Yes, Montana is so central because. And I'm talking about eastern Montana where all this large scale experimentation was happening. And it is so Central, because of its climate and soil, is pretty close to what we see in the Volga region. And so in there I focus on the history of Emma Wilson, who worked at Montana State College and now it's Montana State University. He was seen in the 1920s, 1930s as this leading expert in large scale agriculture and experimentation. He oversaw several farms in eastern Montana where he worked on the questions of rationalization of production, on the farm labor questions, et cetera. So when the Soviets were looking for an American expert to hire to manage a gigantic farm near Rostov on Don Wilson became that figure whom they really wanted to bring to the Soviet Union. And through some networks he was hired to go to the Soviet Union and to spend several months there managing the farm. And he, upon the reception of that offer, he was, at first, he was not sure whether he wanted to do it, but I found so many letters from his colleagues from USDA saying, yes, you should do it and you should go and see what the Soviets were doing and you will get this will be experience of your life.

[Jenna Pittman]

So.

[Maria Fedorova]

And he, I think, well, partly why he went was because he was just supported by so many colleagues who were so excited to. Because he also had to promise them that he will write back about all of his experiences. Yeah. So when he goes to the Soviet Union, he spent summer months there and tries to come up with this big plan on how the Soviets should manage the farm. And part of the Soviets accept that in some parts they don't. But also then Wilson, after he was done on that farm, he also travels throughout the Soviet Union using Trans Siberian Railway and gets all the way to Vladivostok. And he also went to Birobidzhan. I mean, this is a great experience for agricultural, for an American agricultural expert, just to see the Soviet Union, to see different types of agriculture. He also advises on agriculture in Birobidzhan, which was great. And then after that he comes back to Montana again and he's bombarded with these letters asking him to either give talks or to write something about Soviet agriculture, because it was the USDA and just American agricultural scientists in colleges saw that he was a carer of this valuable knowledge about agriculture.

[Jenna Pittman]

Wow. Yeah. I mean, it's absolutely fascinating and that's really interesting to think about how he goes on this amazing tour of the Soviet Union, Trans Siberian Railroad, and then he goes back to Montana, where, I mean, it's hard to get places and everything far away. So it's interesting to think about. And then, I mean, he's just absolutely overwhelmed with people wanting to hear more about Soviet agriculture. And he's all of a sudden the guy who knows Soviet agriculture.

[Maria Fedorova]

Yeah, I think one of his, one of his acquaintances, he says, okay, let's just. And he was also the one who traveled to the Soviet Union. He said, I'm so tired of people asking me to tell about the Soviet Union. I'm thinking of just recording something like a silent movie and just show it, just show it so that people will stop asking me to tell about the Soviet Union.

[Jenna Pittman]

That's funny. So I think that kind of brings me to the. I mean, because this is such a strong relationship that you're describing and such a strong exchange that's occurring. Why was the American and Soviet agricultural relationship abandoned? Because these problems didn't go away. And it was abandoned a little bit before the outbreak of World War II. So I wonder if you might talk about that a little bit.

[Maria Fedorova]

Yeah, I think that there were political reasons for that and also I would say intellectual as well. So the political reasons is on the American side we see that during the Great Depression there are. American socialists see the Great Depression as this moment of crisis and moment that will push the United States into a more socialist path. But of course we know that that didn't happen and that anti Communism grew in the late 1920s and 1930s. And that meant that having connections with the Soviets was not good for your research and for your disposition within the USDA or any other university. So that is. So that's kind of the political, political reasons on the, on the American side is that this, this exchange was gradually abandoned. There was no one stopping point. They still kind of. American Soviets still exchanged letters and they were still. But it's just, it decreases, the exchange decreases significantly. On the Soviet side we see the, the introduction of the first five Year Plan and they turn to collectivization, which is a different model of large scale agriculture. And we can see how the Soviet Union is gradually moving away from the American path and how they see the Great Depression is definitely a crisis, but also an indication that the American agricultural system was not working and that the Soviet one would be the solution to farm problem, to this farm crisis. And yeah, so that is kind of shifting away from Americanism in Soviet thinking towards a more national model of agriculture.

[Jenna Pittman]

Yeah, it's very interesting to think about looking at the Great Depression is like, well, that's not working. Like that's not a great model. It's interesting to see the deterioration of that relationship kind of over time and just as world events unfold.

[Maria Fedorova]

Yeah. And that is Why I did not finish the book with the outbreak of the Second World War.

[Jenna Pittman]

Yeah, I think that's very effective because that would kind of feel a little bit misleading, like, oh, that was the end, but really it was just a long, long time. It's just like a long and steady process, it feels. But I guess that makes me kind of curious about just how this decade of cooperation between the US and the Soviet Union fundamentally shaped the transnational spread of agricultural knowledges and processes and technology. I wonder if that's maybe a little bit more in terms of just broadly where the study fits into more general transnational developments. You know, agricultural development in Europe, Russia, sorry, the Soviet Union, the US Kind of all happening at the same time. And it's really just this moment of rapid transition, or maybe collaboration is a better way to put it. But I wonder if you might speak to that a little bit.

[Maria Fedorova]

Yeah, absolutely. I think that when we look at the Soviet Union and the United States during this period, we tend to see two ideological enemies. The lack of diplomatic recognition also shapes our understanding of the relationship between the two states during that time. And that is kind of the global view at this relationship. But if we go to this kind of middle level, at the level of experts or in the people who work at colleges and universities, we can uncover a more complex story of the actually intense and very productive relationships between the two countries that were only seemingly ideological enemies, but they shared the same problem. And they try to cooperate and try to find a solution to that problem. And whether they fail or not, it's a good question. But I think that if we look at, not the diplomatic level, but at the level that lower, at the personal connections, that we can uncover a much more complex story of relations between these two countries. And also I think that by looking at the exchange of agricultural knowledge during the interwar period, we can see the interwar period is this moment of experimentation and a moment when new ideas about what will become large scale agriculture that they emerged. Sometimes we see, okay, Post World War II, the Green Revolution is when all the experimentation was happening. That's how our food system, you know, what we have right now, was shaped. But I think that the interwar period shows that there were lots of discussions and debates about this already, and they were important. They definitely formed some of the ideas of what we now think about when we say large scale agriculture.

[Jenna Pittman]

Yeah, that's very interesting. Thank you for that. How does this study kind of, of contribute to our understanding of deeper ideological and economic processes that were taking place in the late 1920s, early 1930s, this interwar period.

[Maria Fedorova]

Yeah, I think that we can understand that people struggle with the question of food insecurity. That was one of the chief concerns about how national governments are going to feed people and how these people are not going revolt against those national governments. I think that is probably this study really focuses really that question about food insecurity that really drives. And because the First World War showed that those countries that could manage their food production distribution effectively, they won the war, and those who couldn't, they just fell. So, and that's kind of what the study wants to show, that they were different models and solutions to the problem of food insecurity. Yeah. And eventually the Soviet Union and the United States, they went their own way. But after the war, after the Second World War, we can still see that the exchange continued, but just on different terms.

[Jenna Pittman]

Yeah, that's really fascinating and I think that's a very, very brilliant point that countries that could manage their food insecurities and their production more efficiently won the war. I mean, it really becomes so central and I don't know why the wording that you approach that with really kind of made me shift. Shift my perspective or maybe just consider that a little bit of a different light. But yeah, very, very interesting and I think that's a good note to kind of start to wrap up on. So after this book, what are you working on now?

[Maria Fedorova]

Yeah, that's a great question. So I feel like I didn't go far away from agriculture and from the questions of agriculture. But my new project was inspired by some, by, by an email from a farmer from northern central Minnesota who asked me, do you know anything about cold climate plants, plant varieties that I can grow here, but there should be a Russian. I don't think so I know anything about this. And so we started thinking about cold climate plant varieties that can be grown here in Minnesota. And that went into a larger question about, oh, well, did anyone try to like, what is cold climate agriculture or agriculture for extreme northern. And extreme northern. I'm quoting right now, the expression from the 19th century, extreme northern climates. So the next project will focus on the history of horticulture in these extreme northern regions. And I'm going, and I'm still, I'm a transnational historian. I just, I just cannot for some reason focus just on one place. So it's going to be northern United States and Canada. It's going to be Scandinavia and northern Russia. It's, it's European part in thinking about what, how you can grow and what agricultural plant what plant breeders thought you could grow in these regions and how they try to experiment with different plant varieties. So I think that.

[Jenna Pittman]

So fascinating. I didn't mention this, but I grew up on a grain farm in Michigan, and my older brother sells soybeans and wheat and corn seed, and he has such a knowledge of the technologies that are, like, the seed technologies that are available now. And I consistently, anytime somebody starts talking about plant genetics, I get, like, really excited because I'm like, I love talking about this, and I'm so glad to see that there's starting to be such an emphasis on, like, that is so important. And it is such a transnational study because it's so rare that these plants or these genetics are being developed just within a specific region. A lot of times it's very, like, transnational and, like, it's a very global process.

[Maria Fedorova]

So, yeah, I was definitely inspired by plant studies and just philosophers who write about plants and also climate history. I think that's all, like, also kind of the scholarship that.

[Jenna Pittman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I mean, that feels very timely with just the climate changes that are happening in the world currently, such an interest on, you know, environmental changes and processes.

[Maria Fedorova]

So, yeah, so, yeah, for now. Yeah. The project is called Winter is Coming. Hello, Game of Thrones. Yeah, it was going to be about cold climate.

[Jenna Pittman]

That's very exciting. I definitely look forward to seeing that one come out as well. So for our listeners, Maria Fedorova's Seeds of Soviets, Americans in cooperation in Agriculture, 1921-1935, published by Northern Illinois University Press, is out now. Maria, thanks so much again for being here today. I really enjoyed, first off, reading this book, but also just chatting with you and picking your brain on a few things.

[Maria Fedorova]

Thank you so much, Jenna.