The good, the bad, and the pochvoved: Viktor Kovda, Soviet soil science, and the agromeliorative complex

Abstract

This article focuses on Soviet soil scientist Viktor Kovda (1904-1991) and offers insights into the history of pedology, a scientific discipline caught between empiricism and ideology, and broadly traces its evolution in Russia and the Soviet Union. Pedology was neither completely controlled by the state nor were state policies necessarily influenced by the large body of research done by its representatives. As such, Kovda was both a true politician of pedology and a propagandist of his own ideas on soil reclamation and agriculture. Throughout his long academic career, he successfully maneuvered the deceptive shallows of state ideology and pseudo-science both domestically and internationally. Combatting soil degradation and natural destruction, Kovda presented valuable criticism against the evolving agromeliorative complex, represented since the mid-1960s by the influential Ministry of Melioration and Water Management (Minvodkhoz), for its one-sided focus on hydrotechnical fixes that ignored ecological requirements. Eventually, Minvodkhoz was dissolved under Gorbachev and the meliorators’ ludicrous plans were halted. The pedologists’ potential to transform Soviet and post-Soviet society according to their epistemic ideals, however, quickly lost momentum.