Gene Autry, who rode all day long amid tumbleweeds singing their lonely song, does not seem to have reflected much on the origin of the plant, but other Americans did, including the US Secretary of Agriculture, who denounced it in 1891 not only as “one of the worst weeds in the West” but also a foreign import that “more than likely…had been brought over in some way by emigrants from Russia” (356). Farmers on the plains were more specific. Some accused Russian Mennonites of having purposely spread the weed to get back at their American neighbors, while others put the blame on Russian Jews (363), conveniently ignoring the fact that there were very few of the latter anywhere west of the Lower East Side. By contrast, back home on the steppes where it was known as the perekati-pole (“roll across the field”), the tumbleweed was both less controversial and utterly un-iconic. In fact, no one seems to have cared about it much at all, perhaps because it had already been around for a long time by the late nineteenth century and other weeds in the region were even worse. The “Father of Soil Science,” Vasilii Dokuchaev, and his students opined on the plant, but Cossack crooners, apparently, did not (362).

The lopsided cross-cultural significance of the tumbleweed is only one of the many fascinating topics that crop up in David Moon's new book, which is so rich in insights on everything from politics to culture to farming techniques to botany, in North America as well as the Russian empire and USSR, that it is hard to know exactly what to call it. It is a work of environmental history most of all, of course, but Moon's key concern is the transfer of people, practices, and knowledge from the Russian steppes to the North American Great Plains, so calling it a transnational environmental history is more exact. In fact, in keeping with the best transnational scholarship, Moon's book makes one wonder why this is not the approach every environmental history should take. National historians and yodeling cowboys would have us believe that the US plains are US history, but even sources right under our noses are proof that things are more complicated than that.

In fact, Moon lays out a whole checklist of seemingly American aspects of plains agriculture that trace back to “transfers” from the steppes. Popular wheat varieties on the plains, such as red winter wheat (Turkey Red/Krymka), came from Russia, as did the findings of Dokuchaevan soil science and the steppe-based practice of planting shelterbelts of trees to protect the land from wind erosion. Numerous physical and mental “barriers” impeded the likelihood of any of this getting across—the fact that most Russian soil research was published in Russian, for example, which was barely taught in the US prior to the 1940s and 1950s (73), as well as US suspicions of communism after 1917 (76–79). Yet if the relay unfolded nonetheless, it was because of critical persistent factors, the most important being the basic similarity in environmental conditions between the two regions and the fact that farming on the steppes had a roughly hundred-year jump on farming on the plains, making steppe-based agriculture an obvious school of sorts for US approaches.

More than anything, though, it was the work of individuals and institutions serving as “bridges” that made the transfer happen: “Farmers of Germanic origins,” including some 18,000 Mennonites from the steppes north of the Black Sea, who relocated to the plains between 1873 and 1885 (102); Jews from the Pale of Settlement and the Volga, a few thousand of whom also took up farming on the plains (106); soil scientists and agronomists from the two countries, who sent seeds, soil samples, and copies of the Journal of Forestry to each other through the mail (Russian immigrants also arrived with small amounts of seed from home); the US Department of Agriculture, which employed in-house Russian translators to translate Russian scientific research; and Russian institutions, including the Ekaterinoslav provincial zemstvo and the imperial Ministry of Agriculture, which opened offices in the US to learn from US agricultural techniques and in the process helped relay Russian knowledge and experience to their American counterparts (109–10).

The detail that Moon offers on these and other transfers is staggering. Drawing on countless archival files and even more small-run provincial agricultural publications, one gets the impression that not even a single shelterbelt has been left unexposed. (In fact, to his credit, Moon personally visited many of the sites he discusses in the book, both on the steppe and in the plains.) His work in this sense amounts to a compelling register of US-Russian/Soviet entanglement and a reminder that the far-reaching agricultural transformation of a huge North American region cannot be told simply as a national story.

In fact, properly understood, it is not even a transnational US and Russian tale that Moon is telling but rather a chapter within “one of the great transformations in global environmental history,” “the plowing up of the grasslands of the world to grow grain,” which begins on the Eurasian steppes in the eighteenth century and goes on from there to affect all the earth's prairielands (407). As Moon points out, this “great plow up” carried immense costs, both for the hunter-herder societies that inhabited the grasslands prior to the agriculturalists’ arrival and for the grassland ecosystem itself. At the same time, his book focuses most squarely on the creative labor of the farming cultures in remaking the grasslands in their own image, and perhaps his most abiding point is that no matter the differences between them—Americans on the one hand, Russians/Soviets on the other—it is their similarities that stand out most of all. In fact, the two settler societies were so similar both in their worldviews and their objectives that they themselves recognized it and readily copied from each other's experience to get the work done.