Amid the post–World War I food insecurity, Soviet and American agricultural experts relied on transnational networks, bridging ideological differences. As Soviets traveled across the US agricultural regions and Americans plowed steppes in the southern Urals and the lower Volga, both groups believed that innovative solutions could be found beyond their own national borders. Soviets were avidly interested in American technology and American agricultural experts perceived the Soviet Union to be an ideal setting for experimenting with and refining modern farm systems and organizational practices. As Seeds of Exchange shows, agricultural modernization was not the exclusive domain of Western countries.

About the speaker: Maria Fedorova received her Ph.D from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2019. She arrived at Macalester College as a Wallin Postdoctoral Fellow in Russian and Modern European History. In 2021, Maria became an Assistant Professor in the Russian Studies Department at Macalester. Her research focuses on the transnational circulation of knowledge and technologies between Russia/Soviet Union and the world during the twentieth century.

About the moderator: Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate in History at Ohio State University. Based on archival, oral history, and library research conducted in Tajikistan between in 2022 and 2023, his dissertation explores on the development of the cotton sector in late-Soviet Tajikistan, exploring how immense global technological changes in large-scale industrial farming shaped lives, labor, and environment in this former Soviet Republic.

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