Vol. 2 No. 1 (2025)
Narratives

A Journey through Soviet and post-Soviet Plant Entanglements

Susanne Fehlings
Frobenius-Institute for Research in Cultural Anthropology at Goethe-University Frankfurt a.M.

Published 2025-03-18

Keywords

  • Caucasus,
  • Central Asia,
  • fruit crops,
  • food,
  • post-Soviet

How to Cite

Fehlings, Susanne. 2025. “A Journey through Soviet and Post-Soviet Plant Entanglements”. Plant Perspectives 2 (1):165-81. https://doi.org/10.3197/WHPPP.63845494909753.

Abstract

This essay aims at unravelling Soviet and post-Soviet livelihoods and landscapes by looking at plant entanglements. It is about my own journey as an anthropologist and about leitmotifs I encountered across the post-Soviet space in almost two decades of fieldwork in Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.

References

  1. Bhattacharya, J., C. Gathmann and G. Miller. 2013. ‘The Gorbachev anti-alcohol campaign and Russia’s mortality crisis’. American Economic Journal: Appplied Economics 5 (2).
  2. Cameron, S.I. 2018. The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
  3. Dalby, A. 2002. Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
  4. Dalley, S. 1993. ‘Ancient Mesopotamian gardens’. Garden History, the Journal of the Garden History Society 21.
  5. Dalley, S. 2013. The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  6. Davies, R. W. and St. G. Wheatcroft. 2004. The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
  7. Frazer, J.G. 1906–1915. The Golden Bough (Third Edition): A Study in Magic and Religion. London: Macmillan and Co.
  8. Gosh, A. 2023. Der Fluch der Muskatnuss. Berlin: Matthes und Seitz.
  9. Grayson, A.K. 1996. Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC (1114–859 BC). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
  10. Gurchiani, K. 2022. ‘Die verborgene Macht der Bäume. Urbaner Widerstand in Tiflis’. In F. Sutterlüty and A. Poppinga (eds). Verdeckter Widerstand in demokratischen Gesellschaften. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag.
  11. Kuromiya, H. 2008. ‘The Soviet Famine of 1932–1933 reconsidered’. Europe-Asia Studies 60 (4): 663–75.
  12. Levin, G. 2006. Pomegranate Roads: A Soviet Botanist’s Exile from Eden. Forestville: Floreant Press.
  13. Malinowski, B. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: G. Routledge & sons.
  14. Malkki, L.H. 1995. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.
  15. Olma, N. 2020. ‘Urban Ruins: Of Tashkent’s trees, old-timers, and newcomers’. Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights 24 March: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/urbane-ruins-of-tashkents-trees-old-timers-and-newcomers
  16. Pianciola, N. 2004. ‘Famine in the steppe: The collectivization of agriculture and the Kazak herdsmen, 1928–1934’. Cahiers du monde russe 45 (1/2): 137–92.
  17. Pollan, M. 2001. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. New York: Random House.
  18. Regniez, P. 2016. Au pays de la vigne et du vin, la Géorgie. Paris: éditions des Indes Savantes.
  19. Saroyan, W. 1940. ‘The pomegranate trees’. In W. Saroyan, My Name is Aram. San Diego: Harcourt Brace.
  20. Rudnytskyi, O., St. Kulchytskyi, O. Gladun and N. Kulyk, N. 2020. ‘The 1921–1923 famine and the holodomor of 1932–1933 in Ukraine: Common and distinctive features’. Nationalities Papers 48 (3): 549–68.
  21. Schivelbusch, W. 1990. Das Paradies, der Geschmack und die Vernunft: Eine Geschichte der Genußmittel. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.
  22. Schmidt, M. and A Dörre. 2011. ‘Changing meanings of Kyrgyzstan’s nut forests from colonial to Post-Soviet Times’. Area 43 (3): 288–96. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2010.00988.x
  23. Shirinian, G. N. 2017. ‘Starvation and its political use in the Armenian Genocide’. Genocide Studies International 11 (1): 8–37.
  24. Stepanyan, N. 2014. ‘Pomegranate: Multitude in unity’. In G. Parolly, K. Grotz and W. Lack (eds), Caucasus: Plant Diversity between the Black and Caspian Seas, pp. 111–13. Berlin: Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum Berlin-Dahlem.
  25. Stone, D. 2017. Pomegranate: A Global History. London: Reaktion Books.
  26. Ter Minassian, T. 2007. Erevan: la construction d’une capitale à l’époque soviétique. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes.