Between World War I and the Great Depression of the 1930s, American agricultural experts and business people began talking about transforming agriculture from a small-scale family-centered operation to a large-scale and potentially corporate entity. As wheat farmers in California had shown, the combination of flat, featureless land, such as the central valley, and newly developed gigantic planting and harvesting equipment, could revolutionize the farming of other crops, at least in theory. The idea sparked the imaginations of many different players in the agricultural arena, and experimentation began in Montana and the Dakotas shortly after the war.

One element of this story was an episode in which the Russian government, itself fascinated with the potential to grow vastly more grain on the steppes, collaborated with some of the Americans by bringing experts and machinery to Russia to see if this could really be done. Facilitated by American communists familiar with agricultural production techniques and markets, this group enabled a set of experiments in Russia in the early 1920s. Historians have written about this story in the past, but many key details were unclear. Maria Fedorova’s extensive research and book goes far beyond filling in the blanks of the story; indeed, she has developed an entirely new argument based on new and important materials she has unearthed.

Fedorova’s central argument is that the relationship between the Russians and the Americans was far more balanced than previously suggested. That is, the Russians were not simply passive recipients of American expertise and assistance, but active participants who, like the Americans, had their own agenda regarding industrial farming. For the Russians, producing enough food for the population was a key issue—famine was an ever-present concern, but they also hoped to raise money by selling wheat on the world market, a problematic trade-off, as we know. On the American side, the agenda was one that American experts used continuously throughout the twentieth century—testing the efficacy of a new technology, seed, animal, or farming technique using other countries as the laboratory. In this case, the experimental question was whether scaling up a grain farm—from 40 acres to 400 acres—could be done at all. But inspired by the development of Henry Ford’s mass production operations in the 1910s, American agricultural experts were keen to find out more.

Fedorova has unearthed a great deal of new material regarding this roughly ten-year episode, especially from the Russian archives. She deftly explores the role played by the Russian Agricultural Bureau (RAB) in New York, an organization that coordinated the many visits to the US of Russian scientists and government workers, including Nikolai Vavilov and Dmitri Borodin in the early 1920s. With support from the RAB many of these visitors traveled extensively around the US, especially visiting the big wheat farms in the northern plains of Montana and the Dakotas. Fedorova also provides a lot of new information on the rather shadowy Hal Ware, an American communist who facilitated many of these farming operations in Russia under the auspices of the American Communist Party. She also sheds new light on the role of Millburn Lincoln Wilson, the agricultural economist in Montana who got involved in the Russian project before his later position in the US Department of Agriculture. This is incredibly rich material, and Fedorova does an excellent job of explaining how all of these interconnections between the Russians and the Americans both led to a grand experiment and to it’s demise in a few short years. It is a fascinating story, well told.

One of Fedorova’s most compelling observations is that in any of these international relationships based on testing and implementing innovations, each side has an agenda that may or may not be clear at the time, or even later. American historians have lately begun to document many of the less than innocent rationales for involvement in international agricultural work. It turns out, not so surprisingly, that it was not just goodwill that beaconed Americans to the Global South in particular, or the Russians to the US. Fedorova has provided a fascinating story that shines a light on both the compelling reasons for global cooperation, and the seemingly intractable differences that upend it. This is an important book for scholars of agricultural history and diplomatic relations alike.