Exhibiting nature, modernising agriculture: ecology and technology at the All-Russian Agricultural Exhibition, 1923

Abstract

This paper examines the history of the First All-Russian Agricultural and Handicraft Industrial Exhibition, which took place in Moscow during August-September of 1923. The study aims to reconstruct the environmental and agronomic contexts of the expositions presented at the Exhibition. The objectives of the study included analysing the contents, forms and slogans of these expositions, as well as identifying the ambitions of the Bolshevik leaders to publicly demonstrate the achievements of agrarian science and the results of cataloguing the natural environment and resources in the USSR. It is shown that the primary goal of the Exhibition was to convince the domestic public, especially peasants, in the advantages of the science-based “Sovietisation” of the countryside, along with modernisation of the backward Russian agriculture. The paper argues that the Exhibition became a tool for promoting various natural resources and biodiversity of the different regions of the USSR. No less important was the presentation of agronomy and agricultural technologies as practical tools for modernising agriculture.