Modernist Dreams and Agrarian Realities

Soy Expansions in the USA and USSR during the Global Agro-Food Regime Transition, 1920s–1950s

Abstract

This article compares the “soybean revolutions” envisioned in the USA and the USSR from the 1920s to the 1950s. Using an adaptation of the multi-level perspective to historical inquiry, the paper traces niche formation, crisis management, and regime building across both cases. In the United States, a state-coordinated yet decentralized knowledge network (US Department of Agriculture, experiment stations, and the American Soybean Association), synergies with hybrid corn, New Deal price and conservation policies, wartime substitution of tropical oils, and postwar trade frameworks upscaled soy from experimental niches to a pillar of the US-centred agrofood regime. In the Soviet Union, early imperial and Far Eastern niches, centralized institutionalization under the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and ambitious five-year plans encountered ecological mismatches, weak knowledge transfer to collective farms, coercive collectivization, and repression of scientific expertise. Despite propaganda, selective incentives, and episodic industrial uses, soy remained regionally confined and socially devalued, its expansion repeatedly stalling. The paper argues that these divergent modernization pathways – low modernist, participatory, and socioecologically embedded in the USA versus high modernist, directive, and disembedded in the USSR – better explain the complex outcomes of the “soybean revolutions” than the simple systemic opposition of ‘market’ versus ‘plan.’