Communism - The Highest Stage of Ecology [Peacemongers]

Henry Hakamaki: Hello, Guerrilla History listeners. This is co-host Henry. This week we have another very special release for you. It's an episode from another show hosted by a couple of great comrades in Sweden. The name of the show is, and I apologize to all listeners in Sweden, Fredshetsarna, which translates as Peacemongers in English. Salvatore Engel de Mauro So a little bit about Retschitzana or Peacemongers. As I said, it's a geopolitical show that's based in Sweden by a couple of great comrades. We have Mehmet and Erik hosting it. And you would certainly recognize a lot of the guests that they've had for their English language episodes, at least. Just to name a few of them, they've had Lara and Cody from the Good Shepherd Collective, who, of course, have been on Guerrilla History. They've had Jared Ware from Millennials Are Killing Capitalism, also a guerrilla history guest. Asa Wynn-Stanley, another guerrilla history guest. Let's see, they have a lot more, actually. They have Sina Rahmani, who has been a guerrilla history guest before and is the producer of Adnan's other show. They've also had Adnan as a guest before. So if you haven't checked out those episodes yet, you should definitely check them out. The show is really great. I highly recommend subscribing to it. I will have their information linked in the show notes. So do check that out. They don't have any ways of supporting them in terms of Patreon or anything. So the way that you can support them is to help share their episodes or share this episode. Today we're going to be releasing their newest episode, which is titled Communism, the Highest Stage of Ecology. So listeners, for those of you who are unaware, the most recent Iskra translation that has come out that I worked on with Salvatore was Communism, the Highest Stage of Ecology. which is a book by French scholar Guillaume Suing. It looks at agroecology in Cuba. It looks at the ecological transformation of the Soviet Union, both during the Stalin period as well as the post-Stalin period, particularly the Khrushchev era. It takes a look at dialectical materialism within science. It's really a fascinating book, and you probably could guess that it was a pretty fascinating book because the conversation that we had with them about it was about two and a half hours long, and it definitely could have gone a lot longer. So again, I'm going to have Fred Schatzarna, or Peacemongers, linked in the show notes below. Do subscribe to them. Do share their episodes. I hope that you enjoy this conversation. I just want to also mention, before we continue in, that you can find the book that we discuss, Communism, the Highest Stage of Ecology, at iskrabooks.org. A reminder that all ISCRA books are available for free as PDFs, or you can buy a paperback or hardcover of this book. Of course, the most important thing for us is that you get the information into your hands regardless of your situation. So if you're only able to download the PDF... go ahead and do so. That's the most important thing for us. But do also keep in mind that Iskra Books is a non-profit, volunteer-run, communist publishing company, and as such, your book purchases are what allow Iskra Books to continue making the books that they do. So if you find the work that Iskra does valuable, including this work, Communism in the Highest Stage of Ecology, or all of the books that we've put out by people like Torkel Lausen, we have Lucerto Translations, we have a lot of very interesting things coming out from Iskra. Do, if you have the financial ability to, go to iskrabooks.org, check out the catalog, buy a book or two, request your local bookstores to stock Iskra books, call your local library and request that they stock some Iskra books in stock because all of those things do allow Iskra to continue running and doing the important work that Iskra does. But the most important thing, as we said, is to get the information into your hands regardless of your situation. So even if you're just able to download the book, go to iscribooks.org, download it for free, read it, make use of the information, and do spread the word about it. We think that it's a really important work. We would love more people to read it. And just as a final notice, if you're listening to this and you also have... a show and would like to discuss communism the highest stage of ecology you can get in touch with me i know i'm not on social media really at all these days but you can get in touch with me by emailing the gorilla history email account it's gorillahistorypod at gmail.com g-u-e-r-r-i-l-l-a historypod at gmail.com i am rather inundated with work these days so As much as I would love to correspond with everybody who writes in, I just don't have the ability to do so right now. But if you are interested in talking about this book, I certainly will try to make time for that and can also connect you with Salvatore so we can have a great conversation about it. So with all of that being said, I'm going to shut up now and turn you over to Peacemongers. I hope that you enjoy this conversation on communism, the highest stage of ecology.

Mehmet: Hello everyone, welcome to Fred Setsana or Peacemongers in English. Today we have a fantastic episode with Salvatore Engel de Mauro, sorry I had to write that down, and Henry Hakamaki and also Erik from our own pod. Salvatore, would you like to introduce yourself?

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: Sure. And thank you very much for having me on, for inviting me. I am a faculty member at a university here, geographer, and try as best as I can to contribute to understanding the relationship between socialism and environmental impacts.

Mehmet: Thank you. And Henry, please go ahead. Who are you?

Henry Hakamaki: So I first I want to echo Salvatore's appreciation for the invitation to come on to the show. It's a great pleasure. And I also just want to mention that while we had many people reach out to us that they were interested in this book, this is the first media interview that we've done on it. So you have that honor. Or maybe we have the honor. In any case. I'm Henry. I am an educator. I'm based in Russia and have been for just under five years. Most people, if they know me, would probably know me as a result of either co-hosting Guerrilla History podcast or through some of the work that I do with Iskra Books, including works with Salvatore, which I'm very pleased to be able to do.

Mehmet: awesome thank you and welcome so the title of the book was uh pedophilic cannibalism the highest stage of capitalism right that was the no sorry that was the working title i had to i had to do it so communism the highest state of ecology is the book you translated together right So what is your relationship to, sorry, how come you chose the book? Why did you translate specifically this book? And what relationship do you have to the subject itself?

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: Well, it was rather fortuitous. I had written a similar book, a bit different in some respects, but a similar book. I was working on it simultaneously, unbeknownst to me that Guillaume was already writing and had published his book by the time that I was finally getting a book contract to write mine. And so when I knew of this book, I knew of Guillaume's book, through Café Marxiste, which is, I find, one of the better YouTube presence, types of YouTube presence in French, in France anyway. And he was interviewed and he described his book and his findings. But I couldn't get hold of his book until after I published my own. So I cited him. And then he saw my book and he contacted me. Um, and I couldn't be more pleased. So then I finally get around to getting a copy of the book and I discuss it with many folks because I was rather excited and then discuss it with Henry. And so, you know, we had already done a translation of Los Urdo together. And I thought, yeah, this book would be quite valuable in English language. I think a lot of English speakers would find this very useful.

Mehmet: Sorry to jump in, but what was the title of your own book and the Losurdo book you've translated together, just so people know?

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: Oh, sure. Yeah, so mine was Social Estates and the Environment. Lessons for Ecosocialism and the Lasurda book was the one on Stalin Black Messiah yeah well Critique of a Black Legend as we translated I think in hindsight maybe I don't know it's a difficult thing to translate from the Italian different denotations in the different languages but yeah those were the two books yeah thank you so this was rather fortuitous and uh and it was very i mean it was great it was the timing i guess of the arrival of the book into my hands and so funny reading it um instead of learning uh through you know verbally present for a verbal presentation and then um just a combination of having already been at work with henry was basically the catalyst for this project

Mehmet: And relationship-wise, today I actually listened to that guerrilla history episode about your book, Salvatore, which was a great episode. We should definitely link to that episode. Great episode. Thank you. But did you know each other from before that episode, or was that the first sort of interaction you had?

Henry Hakamaki: I can answer that. I had come across Salvatore's name previously through some papers that he had written, but I wasn't personally familiar with him. I did have a friendly relationship with Pluto Press at the time. And when I saw that Salvatore's book was coming out, I thought to myself, this has to be an episode for guerrilla history. And so I contacted Pluto and said, give me Salvatore's contact information. Let's make sure that we get this done as quickly as possible. And I got a copy of the book, which I brought to Russia with me. It's one of the few books that I brought in my first trip here with me. And yeah, loved the book and really looked forward to the interview. And the interview went for, you know, you listen to it almost three hours, very in-depth. It was one of my favorite interviews to this day, one of my favorite interviews. And After that, Salvatore and I just started emailing back and forth about things that we talked about in the interview, other things beyond that. And so we developed a relationship after that point to the point where eventually we got to the Lesurdo book where it was presented to me that we would have the opportunity to translate Stalin history and critique of a black legend through Iskra. And the folks at Iskra turned to me and they said, you know, Henry, you were one of the people that was pushing for getting this book translated through Iskra. Why don't you just take it? And I thought to myself, well, I am not a native Italian speaker. So that's a terrible idea. But I do know a native Italian speaker that I'm on very friendly terms with. So I kind of strong-armed Salvatore into doing that work with me. And... Yeah, we have been very close friends. I think it's fair to say ever since then, we've done subsequent translation works. We have another one in the works right now. And yeah, I think that I just also want to add a little bit about why this book, Communism, the Highest Stage of Ecology, really caught my imagination when Salvatore brought it up. Because... I know most people who listen to guerrilla history, the people who listened very early on probably know my background, but people who have been listening for only the last couple of years probably don't know. Before I was in the field of education, I was a scientist myself. I was in the field of science anyway. I was still studying, but in any case... While I was studying viruses primarily, I did, of course, have a very keen interest and a deep interest on the questions of eco-socialism and the environment, which is how I came across Salvatore's name in the first place. So... being able to, when Salvatore came to me after we did the Lasorda book and said, you know, Henry, I have this possible other book that we can work on from this French scholar, Guillaume Suing, and it's a book on Soviet Union and Cuba and agroecology and all of these sorts. I said, of course, sign me up. I'm more than happy to work on that. It's a topic I'm very interested in and I get to work with you again. So yeah, I didn't need a whole lot of convincing to to sign up for that project.

Erik: Excellent. I read this when I was in Cuba, so it was very good. I got to see the ecology in an organoponic farm, and I showed them the book, and it was very interesting. Anyway, before we start, I also want to say to all our Swedish listeners, at least, that I happen to run a bookstore for my party branch and have imported books from Iskra. And I plan to do it soon again. So you could email us at fredsetsarna at gmail.com and just say, order these or just check them out. They are all free as PDF. So highly recommend them. Anyway, we usually mostly talk about war and imperialism and resistance. So ecology is sort of out of our scope. But when we look at imperialism, both control of land and resources are very core components. And we can see like anti-ecological warfare used by, for example, Monsanto incorporating seeds and pesticides in Latin America or use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. or how important food sovereignty is under sanctions. And on the resistance side of things, progressive movements are often split up between different questions or ideological battlegrounds, whether it's workers' rights or peace, environment, etc. And every issue is in itself fractured into different tendencies. So to situate this book, why is this book important to ecological discussions and why should Marxists or peacemongers or guerrilla historians be in the forefront of ecological discussions?

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: Okay, I suppose I'll take this first. There are quite a few reasons I suppose I can think of, and I'll try to articulate this as effectively as I can. This is important for ecological discussions because in environmentalist movements in particular, there is a tendency to vilify socialist countries for their environmental record, But there's also a tendency in some parts of leftist circles, too, to do the same. And so empirically, this is all incorrect, just on those terms. But also in terms of strategy, it's very short-sighted because it then leaves avenues open politically for opportunism from the right. And it is not by accident that green parties gravitate very often to coalition work with even fascists or right-wing parties. And, of course, we have the example of Germany. In terms of imperialism, you have the Greens being involved in the bombing of Yugoslavia, for example, in 1998. So there are multiple reasons, I suppose, why it would be very important... from a point of view from environmentalist movements and with respect to marxists and peacemongers who i hope and guerrilla historians um why is it important to be at the forefront of ecological discussions um as far as i've come to understand the ecological issues um in terms of um social struggles um it's not so much about environment at all it's really about quality of life and quality of life is a basic aspect of of working class life and in that respect uh yes i think it's necessary to be at the forefront um for that reason alone you know if one rereads or reads for the first time angles um the condition of the the english working class Those are environmental conditions. And I think the task of any working class-based party or movement should also be, among others, to fight for better quality of life conditions and to understand ecosystems and the environment in a much wider way than the bourgeoisie have inculcated on us, which is a dichotomous view of nature, in which we have the environment on the one hand and then we have society on the other, or culture. And that view is what leads to bourgeois environmentalism, which has to be fought ideologically and in everyday social struggle to recognise that ecosystems are not something that we behold as a museum piece somewhere outside, you know, away from us, but it's our everyday reality. And as such, it's of vital importance. I mean, I mean that literally of vital importance to a working class movement in that respect.

Henry Hakamaki: So I'll add in my perspective on these questions, and I'll take them in turn in the order that you ask them. So the first one was, why is this book important to ecological discussions? And I'm going to first say, this is an extremely important book for ecological discussions, but it's not only this book. It's other books like those that Salvatore continues to write. Salvatore has a couple of new books out recently, which we have to discuss sometime soon, Salvatore. But... This book and books like this are absolutely critical because they are what are going to be able to create the conditions where we can shatter the ideological stranglehold that capitalism has surrounding ecological discourses. As of now, the dominant narrative is that ecology is a moral concern separate from politics or that it can be solved through market mechanisms and consumer choice. Or now we also have these trends today of techno-optimism where, of course, technology is driving the ecological crisis in many ways, but we can also technology ourself out of the ecological crisis. And if we just enable the technology technological corporations, the billionaires, the oligarchy to create the technology that will get us out of this situation. Well, surely they will because they'll understand the long-term impacts of the course that we're on right now. This is a fantasy. This is a fantasy. Green capitalism is a fantasy. The narrative deliberately obscures the truth, which is that the unending relentless drive for profit is the engine of planetary destruction. It is. We have to just be upfront about that. And this book, it brings up that there are two axes of analysis that we have to always keep in mind. And it goes back to the way that you asked the question in that your show focuses on war and imperialism. This is connected with it. Yes, it's a book on ecology, but it is connected with it because we cannot ignore when the question is on ecology or the environment, class struggle and imperialism. We have to demonstrate with concrete historical examples that only when systems are in place that try to move beyond the profit motive... a socialist system based on planning, collective ownership. Only these sorts of systems have the possibility of managing to integrate large-scale, sustainable, ecological practices into development. So going back to my background of working with viruses, if you talk about ecology without talking about capitalism... It's like talking about a symptom or a disease, but refusing to name the pathogen and refusing to find ways that you can treat the pathogen. The disease that we're seeing is ecological destruction. The pathogen is capitalism. In order to treat that disease, we have to eliminate the pathogen. We have to dismantle capitalism, global capitalism, global imperialist capitalism. So moving on as to why Marxists, I think you said peace activists, guerrilla historians should be at the forefront of these ecological discussions. It's because the ecological crisis is the ultimate systemic crisis of capitalism, and understanding systems is our purview. The capitalists don't understand systems, at least not beyond the way that focuses on how they can utilize the system to extract a profit. They don't think about the connections between non-profit-oriented aspects of the global system. That's our view. Peace activists understand that resource wars, climate refugees, imperialist scrambles for fossil fuels. I mean, look at what's happening in Venezuela today. You know, that's a very naked example. example of this imperialist scramble for fossil fuels. Although, as I mentioned recently on Guerrilla History, if we just totalize it into being the resources, it misses the point that also there is setting examples against non- systemic actors. So those that are acting outside of the imperialist capitalist global system, or trying to find alternative ways of operating, you have to beat them. If you're the capitalists, you have to condition other countries into understanding that negative impacts will happen to them if they try to act outside of what you're trying to impose upon them. But nevertheless, fossil fuels are a big aspect of that. Guerrilla history. guerrilla historians rather, we try to reclaim history from the powerful, the ones that typically have had the opportunity to write history and to dig up the buried legacies of past struggles as well as existing examples of socialist ecological praxis like we see in this book by Guillaume Suing. We have to not concede this ground on the ecological debate to liberal moralists or the green capitalists, corporate sustainability consultants, what have you. We have to be the ones who step up, understand the root causes, the historical struggles. and the absolute necessity of a radical, revolutionary transformation of society in order to move beyond this. That's our purview, and they are not going to do it for us. We must be on the forefront of this question.

Erik: Thank you. Thank you very much. So I wanted to go through the book a little. It's mainly three parts, with the first part being Cuba, or agroecology, but mainly focusing on Cuba. Also mentioning Burkina Faso and during Thomas Sankara, which is very fascinating as well. And during the period of the USSR in Cuba, When the USSR fell in 1991, Cuba faced the special period and very unique circumstances. So how does ecology become a necessity in the special period? And what can we learn about the Cuban process and prerequisite factors to ecological development, such as education, worker power? or self-determination, organizational structure, etc.

Henry Hakamaki: Salvatore, do you want to take a crack at that first, or do you want me to say something?

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: Either way, I mean, maybe I'll just say a few short things. I have a feeling that Errol himself would actually be an even better place to answer that question, because of having been there. I've never actually been to Cuba, although I've corresponded with a few Cuban scientists and I wish I could actually go there and witness in person how things have been achieved in spite of the blockade that is now, what, more than 65 years on, and is being undermined even further by... And this is kind of related to answering the question. It's being exacerbated by undermining the ability for energy provisioning by attacking Venezuela, of course, and by the US imperialists surrounding all these Pacific, I mean, Caribbean countries with the Navy, in any case. it's important to emphasize that the agroecological principles and just in general the environmental policies that eventually enabled progress to be made since the early 90s in Cuba, long precede the early 90s. I mean, there had to be an educational system that promoted certain kinds of scientific endeavors, scientific research that laid the groundwork for being able to succeed in spite of adversity in the 1990s. And it's incredible what was achieved under such incredible hardship in order to just feed people. So that's one aspect. More specifically, in terms of agroecology, that actually was already being developed in the 1980s, at the very least. And that's also something that is oftentimes skipped or omitted, especially by detractors of the Cuban Revolution. You know, they'll just think, oh, it's just because of the end of the Soviet Union that they had to scramble and find, you know, ways of practicing farming without using pesticides or agrochemicals as much.

Mehmet: Is that the definition of agroecology?

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: Oh, I'm sorry. I presumed that that would be a widely known understanding and I should apologize.

Mehmet: For the people who've read the book, yes, absolutely. But not for our usual people who are going to go, what now?

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: Yeah, I'm sorry. So, I mean, agriculture can be defined in many ways and there are attempts also by liberal elements to hijack it. So basically, it's something that's developed as a term in the 1970s, late 60s, and it has both technical and social aspects. The technical aspect is to... apply ecological principles to farming so that you can avoid as much as possible agrochemical use, if not reduce them altogether. And it also includes irrigation systems, putting together different kinds of intercropping systems, meaning you put like different kinds of plants together so that they can enhance each other's growth. But that takes reliance on two things. One is of course, field experiments, the usual agronomic kind of study, but more importantly, a lot of the traditional knowledge systems that have already developed these techniques for thousands of years. And so it's also a process of recovery of existing knowledge systems that are being undermined. And so agroecology in terms of the social aspect also includes promoting um the campesino the the peasant systems uh and the peasant knowledge systems that exist and uh and also um this is where you can have different kinds of agroecologies some of it is more focused on you know small scale peasant systems and that's what they really want to revive or promote and others see that you have to go a bit beyond that and see how you can coordinate these systems at the national level or international scale. Like, for example, the Movimento the Trabalhadores Sem Terra in Brazil, the MST, the Landless Workers Movement, who have been promoting agroecology exactly in that way. How do you coordinate across multiple scales so that you can promote, yes, this kind of farming that dispenses with agrochemicals and that focuses on intercropping and traditional knowledge systems, while at the same time providing for reliable food sources beyond just the village where the food is produced. So there's an aspect of food sovereignty as well that is implicit in agroecology, in terms of laying the groundwork to have uh people who produce food not relying on large corporations and breaking free from that monopoly so there's also that food sovereignty aspect so there are the social and technical aspects i hope that's that makes it more understandable that was fantastic so to go back oh thank you very much thank you and thank you for asking and and that's so important um my bloody academic work, you know, just, I take for granted certain terms, you know, and that's something I still have to kick the habits of.

Mehmet: You need, you need ignorant people like me to pull you back to the pedagogical side of things. So I'm, I'm happy to be the dummy one. So go ahead, please. Sorry.

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: Yeah. Um, if anyone is the dummy, this would be me for not recognizing that fact. But anyway, um, So the agroecological principles that were studied already by the 1980s, they became very important in the 1990s with the reactionary coup that led to the destruction of the USSR. And so, as I was saying earlier, if it hadn't been since the Cuban Revolution, the education programs, the promotion of environmental principles, even though they may not have looked like they were being put into practice, but certainly the first thing that one has to, I guess it's going to be a theme that's going to run through maybe our entire discussion and maybe we'll come back to it repeatedly, but you have a situation of dependent development and underdevelopment, mass poverty, illiteracy, healthcare doesn't exist. Your life's starting almost from scratch and under siege. So you have to develop industry, you have to develop all sorts of means in which you can just survive. And yet, even under such incredibly awful circumstances, laying the groundwork for understanding ourselves as part of nature, not as separate, because that's a Marxist principle and it was being applied. It's just that it could not be over the short term, and this is something that Guillaume emphasizes, over the short term, you could not necessarily concretize an ecological perspective. But as matters develop further, one gains more sovereignty, then other possibilities can be put in place. And whenever the opportunities arise, they will be put in place under a socialist system. In Cuba, the situation was such that they had to depend. It's an island. I just sometimes have to remind myself, it is an island in which you cannot really grow cereal crops. You cannot produce the kind of food that most of us in the global north, but in many other parts of the world, will take for granted. There are limited areas of production for agriculture. And then you have a history of slave plantation systems that have contributed to the destruction, of course, not just of ecosystems in terms of sugar-playing plantations, but the destruction of or very destructive kind of relations in society that also one has to still fight against, especially racism. and machismo so you're dealing with all these kinds of circumstances how do you organize a farming system that is not only not dependent on agrochemicals but also that is socially constructive um and as all of these were being tackled in different ways but they were foiled by imperialist forces of course you also have enemies from within so i wouldn't want to discount that either or internal contradictions to deal with um But again, education systems, policies to change the way that people think about society as well, instead of... racialized kind of hierarchical system as people were taught from birth, you know, as something more egalitarian. And all of these kinds of struggles play into the development of farming systems that, um, I guess, you know, the fashionable term now is equitable, but basically, you know, redistributive. Um, and, um, and that, um, and that are focused on feeding people, not on profitability, to say the least, but not at the expense of people's health and also the health of ecosystems that goes with it. And in an island the size of Cuba, you have to think even more about ecosystems and making sure that they're livable because there's not that much. I mean, literally, there's not that much space. So I'll leave it at that.

Mehmet: Yeah, sorry to jump in. You mentioned internal contradictions. I mean, we know the external contradictions. I mean, the empire versus the people or life in general. But the internal contradictions within Cuba, and then you mentioned also there were policy adjustments. Could you give some examples maybe? Because that sounds very interesting.

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: Sure. That's a great question. I'll try to remember as many details as I can.

Mehmet: People can always go back to the book, definitely. But just to give some examples, if you may.

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: Sure. Yeah. Some of it is actually beyond what Guillaume wrote as well, because he does not deal with the internal contradiction aspects, for example. I mean, there are several kinds of contradictions. Of course, they're already alluded to sort of like having to develop under circumstances of siege and how that plays into what kind of ecological principle or even social or communist principles one can even apply, you know. But some of the contradictions internally early on, for example, were how do you maintain, it's not too different from revolutionary Russia, you know, it's like, how do you keep your technical experts without, you know, sort of having to pay them more or somehow like having more carrots for them than for others, you know. That's an internal contradiction. Another internal contradiction, and it's not something that goes away, I must say. And then there's also the other contradiction that is related to the siege, the military economic siege from the US empire. And that is, you have all sorts of incentives that are given by these imperialists to have dissidents, their views being magnified way disproportionately. So that, you know, the 11th of July was a 2020. I can't remember which year it was, you know, this minor, you know, number of people and it's blown out of proportion and it sort of, it feeds into social tensions to create or widen existing contradictions between those who, you might, uh, be, uh, bearing a little bit more of the brunt of the blockade than others. Um, and that exists. I mean, there, you know, it's, it's not something that one can, uh, sort of pretend away. And, you know, President Díaz-Canel recognizes that, you know. Part of the contradiction is you can see also when one of the ministers, you know, came out with an assorted statement about people who are houseless. And she was immediately criticized. But that is a sign of some of the contradictions, you know, even within the party that have to be fought. So I'm just touching on a few things. And another thing is the contradiction between um the um within the farming sector more specifically you know the the land reform issue you know at first you know wanted a land redistribution to all the the peasants you know and so they finally could have land to farm uh on their own and it's not too dissimilar from the kind of contradiction that you see in the immediate aftermath of the of the russian revolution right so but then how do you coordinate all, all these, all these peasant units, you know, all these agricultural units, you know, run by small peasants. And that's where, you know, they have this collectivization process that also ran afoul of many of the peasants themselves. So that creates a contradiction, but it's an important one to undergo because that's, you know, if one wants to make comparisons in Tanzania, they weren't successful in making that coordination effort and it fell apart with the, Ujamaa movement, you know, as well-meaning as it was. And it also ran into some violent confrontations. But in Cuba, they were able to actually manage those confrontations and in a constructive manner so that, you know, most people became better off through the socialization of farming than through the, you know, sort of the dispensation of land to small concerns, small private peasant concerns. Anyway, so those are some examples. I hope that wasn't too long.

Mehmet: Thank you very much.

Erik: Thanks so much. That was great. I can answer to the Cuban situation as well as I know it, but to the ecology question, that was really good. I mean, the land question is, of course, state ownership of land makes it possible to allocate urban organic farms I mean the organoponico I was to have started only half a hectare or one hectare and it's ten times the size today Erik, what is an organoponico? Oh, it's an organic farm.

Mehmet: Thank you.

Erik: Thank you. And the collective work structure, which they use, is also organic. An important factor. And the education factor. The guy that showed us around was a metallurgic engineer by study. And so they were very... very well educated and i think that helped because they had to use so many creative solutions to like pest control or preparing the soils with the different worms and charcoal and yeah it was a it was an advanced process really

Mehmet: I'm glad that you mentioned sorry just a tiny comment about the ingenuity and the creativity of the people under imperial siege like that sort of reminded me of the engineers in the tunnels in Gaza that make crazy weaponry out of nothing almost or the bombs that fell on them and that didn't explode and so forth anyways go ahead Henry

Henry Hakamaki: No, it's on the same point, actually, of creativity and innovation. So I'm going to tie this in with a couple of other points that I would have said, although Salvatore really nailed that last answer, I must say. He took a lot of the things that I would have said, but he put them much more eloquently than I would have. But turning back to the special period for just a moment. It's important that everybody understand how brutal the special period was. I mean, it's this unplanned event which causes an experiment that is imposed by an internal shock where overnight Cuba loses over 80% of its trade. Imports of oil, chemical fertilizers. And we've talked about, you know, they can only grow certain things on the island in the first place. And I'll talk in a little bit about what the situation was like fertilizer-wise before that time. But, you know, they lose their... They lose their chemical fertilizers from the Soviet Union at that point as well. They lose food imports from the Soviet Union. You know, they lose over 80% of their trade overnight. And at that moment, if you're somebody who's living in Cuba, you have two choices, collapse or innovate. And of course, it's easier to innovate if you have a structure in place in terms of an educational structure in place where people are well-educated. If you have a structure in place of healthcare where people are able to be taken care of if they're sick or injured. But at this point, ecology became a necessity for survival as well. Ecology itself. However... And this, I think, is the critical socialist distinction. The response was not the chaotic devolution into peasant subsistence that you would have seen in a capitalist society where all of these things collapse overnight. Okay, well, back to peasantry we go. Instead, we have a planned, scientific, mass-mobilized conversion to agroecology. the state, while retaining control of the means of production and also creating and then maintaining this highly educated population, completely redirected resources and knowledge overnight, essentially, because they understood the criticality of this moment. It decentralized agriculture even more at that moment. It promoted these organoponicos, invested in renewable energy. We haven't talked about how advanced the Cuban push for renewable energy has been since the special period, but it really is beyond what you would expect given the means that they have and given the constraints that are put upon them. The crisis is what forced the issue, but it was the socialist structure that allowed for a coherent, national, innovative response, successful response. Ecology stopped being a choice for the people and it became the very material basis for continued national sovereignty and social development. Now, just one other point, I guess, before I turn it back over, which is that I mentioned fertilizers and I know we talked a little bit about what it was like before the special period. So looking back just before that, the Cuban developmental model was different. Now, that's an obvious statement, right? Because we just talked about this forced innovation that pushed them towards agroecology, but the model was different fundamentally. Being heavily integrated into the Soviet bloc, Much of the developmental strategies mirrored the Khrushchev and post-Khrushchev shift towards chemicalized monoculture agriculture. It wasn't the model of sustainability that we're talking about in this post-special period. That's not to say that it was... you know, these large plantation owners with sugarcane farms that we were seeing prior to the revolution, but that was still something that was being focused on for a developmental model. But even then, and this is the critical point, even then, the socialist foundations were being laid with universal education, a well-developed scientific infrastructure, a national health system. These were the human capital. and the institutional prerequisites that enabled the ecological turn so rapidly later when it was imposed upon them. And it was what allowed for the innovation to come from the people as well as from the state in order to navigate this almost insurmountable challenge that almost no other country in world history has had to face that dramatic of a cut in what was coming into it and what they were able to sell out of it. So the pre-1990s period shows that socialist development can have phases. And less sustainable models – it's not to say unsustainable models, but less sustainable models – can, if the socialist structure is present, provide the material and intellectual basis for a later conscious shift towards sustainability, which is a shift that, let's just be frank, is completely impossible under a privatized, for-profit capitalist system. We wouldn't see that if it wasn't for the system that was in place in Cuba.

Mehmet: Thank you. I mean, there's something that sort of pops in my head about this is that the caricature understanding of what socialism or a socialist state is, is like this caricaturized version of a super bureaucratic, super stale, very sort of heavy, clunky kind of thing. But then you have this example of Cuba where, as you explained, like in a matter of overnight, they like had to change everything but still sort of survive under the imperial siege. And they managed it. It's amazing. Like both the dynamism, the innovation, and as you mentioned, the sort of the stable foundations still in place untouched. It's incredible actually. And so diametrically opposite of what people would in the West, the indoctrinated liberal mind would think about what socialism is.

Erik: Yeah, thanks. You mentioned that it was a forced... They were forced to take this action. But I also believe that the ideological imperatives were there as well, even without the... the dire situation that they were in. Going back to...

Henry Hakamaki: I agree with you. I just want to underscore it was the impetus for that moment for it to happen rather than it being the only reason that they did that.

Erik: Yeah, they have sustainable thinking in other areas before. But... Also, the fact that different farms don't compete against each other makes them want to help each other with technical knowledge. And the farm I was at, they had like... They were selling seeds to households in the area or helping them with knowledge. They said there were 2,000 households in the area that were growing their own food. So they would be sort of like a hub to help them or to give them seeds or soil or whatever. And also the food would go to schools and hospitals in the first hand. So it played a very social role in society and not much went to waste, so to say. Yeah. We could move on to the second part, which is the Soviet Union. And Henry, you started talking about the Crucivite period, which is sort of what this book goes into. Yeah. Like their change from the early Soviet Union to this new lands policy, which was done when Khrushchev became head of state. What is the new lands policy and what does the book say about ecological or sustainable ideas in the USSR and what happened to it?

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: I was basically envious to take this up.

Henry Hakamaki: I can talk on it, but I know that you have a lot to say on it. I'll just start complaining later about true stuff. A small anecdote before Salvatore begins. Sorry for this interruption, Salvatore. I share an office with a historian, professor of history, and we have conversations pretty frequently. There's a lot of things that we have very... friendly conversations about, but ideologically he's very far away from me. So, you know, sometimes the conversations they're, they're all respectful. They're all friendly, but we do have quite a few disagreements. However, the new lands policy, he's, I'm not going to say his name because, you know, saying what he said might get him in trouble, but he said when Khrushchev proposed the new lands policy, he should have been shot and, So this guy, and I'm not saying that this guy is like a revolutionary pro-Stalin guy by any means. He's not me, in other words. But he and I agree on that to some extent. I might not put it quite in those words, but he did. He said he should have been shot. So Salvatore, I'll turn it over to you now because otherwise I'll be on that sort of level. Okay.

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: Yeah, I don't know. Shooting people is a bit too drastic for me, but I guess it depends on the circumstances. First, I mean, I wanted to, before I engage with that question, Errol, what you've witnessed and what you've related about Kuva is precious and it's fantastic. I hope you have the chance of spreading this knowledge that you've gained and experienced far and wide. With respect to the USSR, let's see, there's so much, I guess, that one could talk about, I just want to make sure that I'm going to be focused. Because with respect to continuity and rupture, and what changed and what did not change, I think it's important to, um, recognize the overall context, um, as well before going any further. Khrushchev was part of the same administration that he lambasted, uh, with the so-called not very secret speech. And, uh, and so, uh, the, that, that so-called speech, which was basically just, um, a bunch of, um, made up things and, uh, or aggrandized things was to signal a departure that was not really in existence. But, you know, so there is a lot more, I guess, display than actuality. So some things remained in place and were continuous. But what did not continue was...

Mehmet: I'm sorry to jump in, but a lot of our audience don't even know who Khrushchev came after. Yeah, exactly, who he came after. So it's like, sorry, but people don't know anything about Soviet year other than it was really bad or something like that. So...

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: of course yeah yeah sorry yeah well if i no no please no no nothing to apologize for indeed the reverse um taking much for granted so just the name stalin already you know um will elicit very negative reactions thanks to what we've been taught i guess from an early age in I grew up in Italy, but then the US sort of made it even more, I guess, strident, this treatment of the Stalin administration. Because it was an administration, it involved millions of people. That's one thing that I want to emphasize when everyone is talking about these Soviet governments, one has to understand them as collective entities. They're like involving millions of people working and struggling and, you know, with contradictions as well among themselves. And it's not a linear process. It's not monolithic, just like any society, you know, I feel compelled to say this stuff because that's exactly how the Soviet Union is depicted, even on the left, oftentimes. And that has really to go. If one is serious about history, one then is serious about the social aspect of this, which is more complicated. But yeah, so Khrushchev was part of the Stalin administration. And so I think the wider context was that the attempt to display a rupture there wasn't exactly a rupture with the entire infrastructure the party work it wasn't like that at all and there were also dissenters within the Khrushchev administration who certainly did not like the adventurism if I would call it that way and I would that was involved in that part of the administration headed by Khrushchev So with that in mind, one of the things that certainly was very constructive during the Stalin administration, and one could absolutely criticize a lot of what happened under the Stalin administration, of course, including the hundreds of thousands of people being executed for starters and all that, the forced labor and all that. So we're just going to emphasize ecological aspects, but one shouldn't be remiss about those other aspects as well. And there was a lot at stake during that time period, including the threat and then actualization of the Nazi invasion. So all of that has to be taken into consideration when considering environmental policy as well. The aim of the Stalin administration to create a very ambitious and complex planning for the management of resources, one of the main emphasis was afforestation or reforestation, depending on which region one is talking about. And that was a huge success to the point that it reverberates even to these days in terms of the amount of forest coverage that otherwise would not have existed without that administration's, you know, the so-called... The Great Plan for Nature. I can't remember the exact title off the top of my head.

Henry Hakamaki: For the Transformation of Nature.

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: Thank you. Exactly. You're welcome. The Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature. And indeed it was. And what's interesting is that what usually gets forgotten, including by Western Marxists, which is very curious, is that the concept of transformation is a dialectical process and that's how it was envisioned. You know, it's that whatever activities humans are involved in, they're transforming the environment. And by doing that, they're transforming themselves. So this plan was a transformation of society as well as the ecosystems involved. And so in any case, it was the protection of soils from soil erosion, especially from wind erosion. and also water erosion that was afforded by these very extensive shelter belts, meaning large swaths of forested areas, strategically located so as to reduce wind damage to soils. Also, was abandoned during the Khrushchev administration. And that was quite damaging, that abandonment, not just in terms of forays, but also in terms of preventing or reducing soil degradation problems. There was also an aridification problem to be combated. One of the things that sometimes also is omitted, actually most times it's omitted, is the basic physical geography of the USSR. I'm a geographer, so I pay attention to these things almost by a knee-jerk reaction. One quickly realizes that much of the USSR is prone to drought and And that even though you have extensive, you know, so very fertile soils, those are grasslands that kind of like the Great Plains in North America are very susceptible not only to drought, but to quick degradation once used because the organic material has to be replaced. And this is one of the things that was being accomplished under the South administration is the attentiveness to the organic matter in soil. And that soil was not being looked at as just, you know, sort of a nutrient supply for plants, but as a living body. It wasn't exactly stated that way, but that's how it basically, in practice, it was understood. With different terminology that now we either mistake for something else or we would have to retranslate.

Erik: So, Salvatore, was it like...

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: theoretically not 100 right but in practice it worked yes this is the irony of it's exactly a role yeah it's spot on um with respect to soil science i think he was actually also theoretically correct um even though but the knowledge was was not the level that we have today so that's you know so one can't fault a theoretical framework for it because many developments have been made since then. With respect, and I suppose we'll probably touch upon that later, with respect to genetics and other kinds of fields of study, then yes, it's even more applicable what you're saying. There are two aims for the Great Transformation, the plan. One was certainly environmental protection, but it was... combined with raising the possibility of stability for the water systems, the surface water systems, that would then enable two things to be accomplished. One is hydroelectricity. you know uh which you can't you know if you're gonna have a lot of sedimentation rates in the in the basins behind the dams you're not going to produce much electricity after you know a little while but you know this is something that they needed to do because they didn't have that many sources of electricity and um you know unlike other parts of europe or asia and um Compared to Asia, much more anyway. But the other aspect was with respect to irrigation. And, you know, if you have aridification problems or, you know... um droughts that come every couple of years or like maybe five six years you have to be able to retain that moisture and and to have that uh water recharge of the res of the uh the groundwater and the aquifers so you know that's another good reason to protect the forest and to expand them and by doing that however then also increase biodiversity and um and also um provided for uh i guess now in hindsight we would recognize the um meteorological value of it because if you have a lot more forest then you can have an improved hydrological cycling through the atmosphere and okay so those are aspects that were abandoned early on uh with the huschov administration and that was uh that was quite a negative impact Beside the fact of not going into lands that if you farm them, you're going to get into more trouble than it's worth, which is basically what happened with the new lands policy with Khrushchev.

Mehmet: What was the motivation? I mean...

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: There were several. Again, it's this attempt at rupture with the previous administration and to demonstrate that you could actually achieve things more quickly, more rapidly compared to the previous administration and also with respect to the rest of the world, particularly with the United States. Guillaume makes the point that this fixation with competition with the United States that is also behind this I think it was, but maybe to a lesser extent than maybe it's made out to be. I think it was more like an attempt to consolidate legitimacy through raising or having more success in producing more food than before. And it actually backfired. There's also the issue of the Aral Sea, the big salt lake in Central Asia that gets more and more destroyed through irrigation systems that They are expanded under Khrushchev, if I remember correctly, but they already pre-existed even in the Russian Revolution. So that's another thing that sometimes there's a mistaken view that looks at the Soviet Union as the culprit of the Aral Sea destruction. Maybe we can touch upon that. But certainly the New Lands Policy did not improve conditions with respect to the long-term fate of the Aral Sea. That was already getting... damage through climate change, most of which came from Western or industrial countries. The main culprits are there and they're not in the USSR, but they do have regional effects that are are global in nature, even though they have different kinds of outcomes, depending on which region we're talking about. But in any case, the other aspect, which was a disconcerting kind of rupture, was with the zapowedniki. Zapowedniki were these natural preserves, these ecological preserves that were set up even before the Russian Revolution, but under private tutelage, and there were just a handful of them, and they were completely contingent on what the aristocrats' whims were of the day. Under Lenin, then they have a statue, they're promoted, they are part of the state, and policies, they're integrated as priority. Even during the Civil War of the 1920s, this is the background to the Stalin administration, not only continuing the same policy, but expanding the area and the numbers of zapovedniki. Now, these zapovedniki, for those who are not familiar with these, these are not just any ecological preserves. These are areas that can be very vast. They're set aside for scientific study and also to serve as an ecological model to understand what kind of human impacts, what reverberations there are of human impacts in different kinds of biomes. And so you had every single biome of the USSR represented through the Zapovedniki. I mean, it's... It's hard to exaggerate the value of these ecological preserves that exist to this day, thanks to those efforts. Under Khrushchev, there was a diminution of the area of the ecological preserves and also the number of them. There was an incursion of logging into some of these ecological preserves to increase timber production. So there was quite a lot of damage. But I wouldn't say, again, this rupture, even just looking at the empirical data with respect to the extent of area of Zapovedniki and the number of Zapovedniki, this picks up after Khrushchev. Under Brezhnev in particular, they're expanded again and to a level that was not even seen under Stalin. So, you know, one has to be very careful about saying, you know, revisionism brings this and that. Well, it's a little bit more complicated story than that. And one has to look at the balance of forces at any one time within the USSR and also with respect to, what's going on with US imperialist activities against the USSR, which are constant, but also changing. And then, of course, the complex relationship with the People's Republic of China, the skirmishes of the late 60s and early 70s. All of these things also have to be looked at in order to understand the environmental policies within the USSR. I'm not going to go in that direction. Guillaume does not go into that in the book. I try to do some of that myself, but it's probably not. There's interest we can talk about a little bit more, but that would take us to a A very, very, very long conversation. So those are some of the aspects that certainly changed with that revision from Khrushchev. But there are also many things that did not change and that as a result of that were easily, or not so easily, but they were recoverable and they were recovered under the later administrations.

Henry Hakamaki: Yeah, I just have a couple of things to say here. Again, Salvatore, terrific answer. But about Zepa Vedniki, we still have them all over the place in Russia today. We've got a couple that are not that far away from where I am now. And just to underscore... what these are. So whatever country you're in, surely you have something akin to a national park. And the national park and these nature reserves similar to national parks would be the highest level of protection of nature that you would have in your respective countries. The Zapa Vedniki are at a level higher than that. In almost all of them, you cannot enter them under any circumstances unless you're a scientist. So for example, there's one that's Not far away from Kazan, actually, which is where I used to live. I still live in Tatarstan, but opposite side of it now. There's one that's just outside of the city of Kazan, and it's close to this tourist attraction monastery complex. But there's a Zapovednik that's right at the entrance there. You have to drive right past it to get to this tourist attraction monastery complex. I would say that it's less than every 50 meters. There are signs saying, do not enter. No walking, no bicycling, certainly no motor vehicles. Do not come in. At the greatest, 50 meters, for the entire duration of that road's length along the Zapovednik. And in addition, they have all kinds of security cameras on the trees that are on the perimeter of the Zapovednik to ensure that nobody will set foot in it unless they are an authorized person to do so. Now, there are some Zapovedniks. some of the Zapovednik you can go in under some circumstances so for example there is the largest swamp in the world is in western Siberia and it's bigger than Switzerland by the way we're talking about a gigantic swamp the whole thing is a Zapovednik There are restrictions on what you can do there, but you can do tourism there as long as you're very, very careful because it is just this massive swamp. Largest carbon sink in the world, if I remember correctly. Salvatore, am I right on that?

Mehmet: Yeah.

Henry Hakamaki: the Vesuvian Meyer. I'm pretty sure it's the biggest carbon sink in the world, in any case.

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: Not sure, but I want to look this up now.

Henry Hakamaki: Oh, it's great. I would love to go there. Let's go there sometime together, Salvatore.

Erik: In any case, most of this up... Henry, we're happy to promote your podcast if you want to have that discussion with Salvatore. I'm kidding. I'm sure you don't need...

Henry Hakamaki: But in any case, most of them you can't go into at all. So, I mean, we are talking about an extremely high level of protection. Now, with that brief aside, and there's a lot of them all across Russia today, even. There's a couple of things also that I wanted to just bring up that were mentioned in that last discussion. One of them was this mention of the Stalin administration at the beginning. And since you said that, Your listeners may not be familiar with all of the contours of Soviet history. I think it is worth mentioning this again. Now, when most of the listeners hear the name Stalin, they probably think totalitarian, authoritarian, one-man rule. He controls everything with an iron fist. Nobody gets to even say anything to him. This is the picture which is painted of him, at least. I mean, it's not the fault of the listeners if they do have this conception in their mind. That is what's presented to them. However, let's refer to our friends at the CIA for a moment, if we don't mind. I keep this saved on my phone for instances like this. So maybe the listeners don't believe Salvatore or I saying that the Stalin administration actually was an administration. There was... Many hundreds and hundreds of people who had significant amounts of persuasion within the administration had decision making power within the administration. And of course, there was many millions of people who lent their legitimacy to the administration as well. Now, maybe the listeners don't believe us on that. Now, listeners, if you don't believe us, would you believe an internal memo at the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA of the United States? Because I have an internal memo from the CIA. This was published March 2nd, 1952. Sorry, 53. That bit is smudged a little. Okay. So again, keep in mind, internal memo. This is not meant for me and you. This is meant for CIA officers discussing with each other, which in my mind is a pretty good indication it's what they're actually thinking at the time. It says, I'm going to read this verbatim, by the way. Go ahead. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team. And it seems obvious that Khrushchev will be the new captain. However, it does not appear that any of the present leaders will rise to the stature of Lenin and Stalin, so that it will be safer to assume that developments in Moscow will be along the lines of what is called collective leadership, unless Western policies force the Soviets to streamline their power organization." The present situation is the most favorable from the point of view of upsetting the communist dictatorship since the death of Stalin. Now, I do find it also ironic that they say communist dictatorship right after they talk about, well, there's collective leadership and, you know, he's the leader of a team and they understand broad support from the masses. But of course, this broad support from the masses and collective leadership is the definition of dictatorship, surely. Now, The CIA was saying this, and this is before this not-so-secret speech, which was also mentioned. And this not-so-secret speech, which is often called the secret speech, that's why we're making fun of this name, was at... Khrushchev went forth before the Soviet Central Committee and... made this declaration of all of the wrongs that Stalin did. And supposedly it was supposed to be this internal discussion of the wrongs of the Stalin years, and Stalin in particular as an individual. But of course, somehow this information that Khrushchev had presented made it into all of the press, including the Western press. Amazing how that happened. This delegitimization of Stalin then made it possible for Khrushchev to assert himself and to have this rupture with past policy. Amazing how that happens, right? But in any case, I did want to just make note of the CIA's views on Stalin as well. Now, turning towards the actual content of the book and these policies that we've been talking about, I just want to underscore what Salvatore had already said. I'm Rather, just to try to summarize it. So in this section of the book, which is focused on the USSR, we really look first at the early USSR period, 1920s through early 1950s, and saw that the USSR was an ecological pioneer. This is the point where they founded, really, the science of pedology. And I know that we said that they didn't have the understanding that we have today of soils. But guess what? They were the world's leaders in pedology. Of course, they didn't have the understanding that we have today. But there was not another country in the world that was anywhere near rivaling them in their rigor in studying soils and their understanding of soils, given what was known at the time. Sorry, jump in again.

Mehmet: That biology is science of soils then. Yes, yes.

Henry Hakamaki: So they established this network of natural reserves, the Zapovedniki. And it's not only Zapovedniki that were expanded dramatically. There are many other types of reserves that were also established and expanded at that time. But the Zapovedniki really are remarkable listeners. If you haven't looked them up before, you really should look them up. They pioneered agroforestry, soil conservation techniques. Salvatore did a wonderful job of explaining not only the how, but the why of that. But that is a critical thing and was absolutely essential for them to do under this great plan for the transformation of nature, combating drought through these forest belts, rational water management, or at least an attempt at rational water management for really the first time. This was driven by a dialectical materialist understanding of nature and the human relation as both part of nature and that which relies on nature, and a commitment to a long-term planned development. So when we turn to this question of what happened, that trajectory was ruptured. That was ruptured during the Khrushchev period. Under Khrushchev, the USSR abandoned that path. Now, as Salvatore discussed, there were various reasons for that. Part of it was this attempt to catch up with American capitalist productivity. Some of it was because Khrushchev was enamored in many ways with the agricultural sector of the I say this, it sounds flippant, but really just Google it sometime. Hruschov corn and go to Google Images and you'll find a lot of... I know, it sounds like a joke. I'm really not joking. Google Hruschov corn and go to Google Images and you will see when he took a tour of the United States, they brought him to these cornfields and the man looked like he saw love at first sight. I mean, really... I don't want to know what he did with that cob of corn in the evening. But, you know, anything is possible. Like, really, you should see the look on his face. He was very corny. I mean, maybe this is a corny conversation in general. Sorry. No, really, Google it, listeners. But also, of course, part of it was... an attempt at boosting productivity and making the Soviet Union look like a leader globally in terms of agricultural productivity. And they did this through stripping back many of these efforts that were put in place under the Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature. They moved towards this chemicalization of agriculture, which we didn't get to talk very much about in the last answer, but there was a massive chemicalization of agriculture The agricultural industry, massive amounts of chemical fertilizers, chemical pesticides that were used. Now, Salvatore is the soil scientist. I know I can speak on how these chemical fertilizers and pesticides, while boosting productivity in the short term, They fundamentally disrupt the balance within the soil. And Salvatore, instead of me going into it, if Salvatore wants to discuss this after I finish, he should be the one who does because it's literally his field of study. But this change was a fundamental ideological and political shift from a view where socialist development happens in harmony with and through the transformation of nature to this competition. It sounds like a capitalist-style competition based on short-term extractive yields, utilization of chemicals to ensure that we can boost productivity in the short-term, long-term sustainability, be darned. Salvatore mentioned some of the ecological catastrophes that come up during the late Soviet period. That's a long conversation. As he mentioned with regard to the Aral Sea, yeah, some of those processes started even during the Tsarist period. They started to ramp up in the early Soviet period. They really ramped up in the post-Stalin era. And then the final collapse took place after the breakup of the Soviet Union. It was not like the obviously occurring negative impacts on these natural phenomena like the Aral Sea happened. were seen by the non-brutal, non-communists that came in after the destruction of the Soviet Union and were reversed. No, those same processes were continued to be expanded that were forcing these degradations of large scales of nature, like, again, the Aral Sea. And it sped up until the Aral Sea was completely destroyed. I mean, completely destroyed. And that took place after the Soviet Union fell. So, This is a long-term process. That one, it really would require quite a bit more discussion to get to any sort of real understanding of what exactly, how exactly we should view the destruction of the Aral Sea, but... Suffice it to say for now that this narrow view that is often discussed of, well, the Aral Sea was destroyed by the godless communists. So, you know, communism is therefore terrible for nature. This is not only overly simplistic, but also misses that this process began under, you know, proto-capitalism, feudalism of the Tsarist era, most backwards capitalist country in Europe. and was accelerated and reached its conclusion in the shock doctrine era of hyper-capitalist post-Soviet Russia. If you don't at least take that into account, then yeah, you might believe what the... propagandistic narrative around how communism has affected the Eros Sea is. But I think that that's a good point for me to end on here. I don't know, Salvatore, if you wanted to mention anything about chemicalization of agriculture, because it actually is a pretty big part of the book, and we haven't really talked about it much yet.

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: Sure. I'll try to keep brief if that's OK. I mean, the emphasis. Thank you. Thank you very much. I mean, please stop me if it's getting too long. But, you know, you've touched upon this as well with with respect to what you saw in Cuba. You know, if you don't if you don't have the regeneration of organic matter, that that is highly problematic in terms of the long term consequences. of soil, I guess one can call it soil health, meaning the biodiversity, the number of life forms in soils will be reduced, the biodiversity above ground can also be negatively affected and usually is. And of course, the amount of productivity then becomes contingent on this import of nutrients called agrochemicals. And so that's one aspect. And, you know, Earlier than Khrushchev, the thought was about focusing on the organic and structural aspects of a soil and to maintain it. How do you maintain soil structure? You need to have organic matter that is replaced every year. And if you don't do that, then the soil can be more easily eroded and degraded in other ways. And that, of course, will then undercut production of crops as well eventually, unless you keep putting in agrochemicals. and use herbicides and other kinds of chemicals to maintain a monocrop kind of, a single crop kind of production system. So that is a really unfortunate aspect and the long-term consequences. But despite that, I did want to add that then soil conservation came back under Brezhnev. And ironically, through exchange with Canadian scientists and policy makers, of all things, They were learning from each other. It wasn't a one-way process by any means. Because one of the things that is also sometimes forgotten, including within soil science circles, is that even the classification of soils was at first derived from the Russian classification system and the Soviet classification system. So that's how important Soviet soil science has been to, not just to the US, but to the world, I mean, in terms of developing the understanding of soils. In any case, all of that is not erased by a single administration at all. There's a long tradition of soil science in the Soviet Union and it's maintained. And then when policies are changed, it doesn't take much for them to return to the fore in constructive ways as they did eventually. The agrochemical aspect component continued through the 80s for similar reasons as, I guess, under Khrushchev. But there was also an expansion, an introduction expansion of organic farming. that oftentimes is not discussed, which also happened, especially by the 1980s in the USSR. And there's also one other aspect that sometimes is forsaken, oftentimes it is, until it's realized that it's of crucial importance to people's lives, and that is the organic, basically, fundamentally, by default, organic production systems that occur in the small plots at the household level. which is actually how the majority of Russians survived the onslaught of privatization and hunger, widespread hunger that was inflicted on the population in the 1990s was exactly through that Soviet system that would kind of combine like agrochemical intensive agriculture with basically by default organic methods at the household level in terms of producing food that was part of household consumption. So I'll end it with that.

Erik: Thank you both. That was a lot to digest. I'm glad we have it recorded. But a lot of great points. In Sweden, we have a lot of these issues with soil erosion, with two big fields and not enough trees surrounding them, especially in certain areas. I remember my my laundry became brown after a windy day on the, uh, flatlands, uh, because of the, yeah, naked soil and, uh, hard winds just blowing it out to the, to the lake. and, uh, great. Uh, I have a little tangent, but I recently saw a mini documentary about architecture in the Soviet Union. And this episode was on the revisionist period. And one thing that struck me was Before the revisionist period, there was this optimal city size that was 50,000 to 1 million. And if it was smaller than 50,000, they would develop the city because then they could have like schools enough or a hospital or culture. It was deemed too small to have essential stuff there. And over a million, it would be overcrowded. And so they would put industry somewhere else or move it to smaller places. So this to me is also a proof of sustainable thinking. And after... the Khrushchev time this idea was abandoned as well as the architecture of socialist realism was abandoned so this led to I mean the second chapter is to me a counter history and Many of the things that we hear about the Soviet Union is taken from a small part or a small part in time and then projected over the 70 years of its history, which then really paints a false picture. But you mentioned dialectical materialism, Henry, which is also the philosophy of Marxist-Leninism. So we could move on to the third chapter, which is, let me see, it's called Dialectical Materialism, Break or Boost for Agrobiology. It's a bit nerdy, but I read it as a polemic between two schools, like a Western school and an Eastern school, so to say, within evolution theory. And this polemic is then exaggerated by other factors, like I mentioned the West versus the East, capitalist or communist or bourgeois philosophy versus dialectics. And so they become very politicized and become representations of the ideological battle in the Cold War. So we start to miss the science of it all. Can you, in layman's terms, explain this third part?

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: I just have to break for just a little less than a minute. I'll be right back.

Erik: Sorry, I muted myself. No problem. Henry, maybe you could talk about this part a bit.

Henry Hakamaki: Okay, I can try. So as you said, part three is pretty nerdy. It's much nerdier than the other parts of the book. And I think that saying that it is a polemic in many ways is also quite accurate for what it is. So part three really is asking the question, what is the best way to understand life and evolution? Using the contrast of these two views, which, you know, you were kind of talking about as well. There's the standard Western genetics-based view, which had dominated at that time, continues to dominate today. And which also saw life as a sort of computer program. Genes, it's just these letters. They're fixed, they're passed down. The only way that they change is random accidents, which mutations. And everything that we need to know about life on Earth is completely coded into these letters, which we can then, if we have the ability to sequence them, we can look at them. Now, of course, they didn't know that sequencing was going to be possible at that time. They didn't know what the structure of DNA was like at that time. But this idea of Mendelian genetics, inheritability through genes, was present. Then there was the Soviet Maturinian view, which is often associated with this character, which I'm sure we're going to talk about quite a bit, Trofim Lysenko. which argued that organisms interact deeply with their environment, that these interactions can lead to inherited changes. Lysenko at the time, so again, he was associated with this latter view that this interaction with the environment can influence the way that genes then are expressed and And I say expressed. Of course, they didn't know about gene expression at the time. But again, I don't want to get too nerdy here. I know I studied genetics. That was one of the fields that I was working in. So I don't want to get like way deep into the weeds here. But okay, I mean expressed not in the genetic sense, but expressed as in shown. So at... After Lysenko's time and up to today, Lysenko is rejected as a pseudoscientist completely. He took these ideas of Lamarck, which if the listeners don't remember Lamarck from high school biology classes, he was the guy who said that, you know, over the course of a generation, an organism can gain some adaptations in itself because it has the necessity to. So the classic example is Lysenko. You take a giraffe. Giraffe has a short neck. Trees are tall. Giraffe keeps stretching its neck every day to try to reach the leaves. And over time, its neck is going to get longer and longer. And then, you know, its offspring are also going to have longer necks. That's the oversimplification also of the Lamarckian view. But this is how... The Miturinian view is also usually viewed by people in the West, although there is a distinction between the two. Again, I don't want to get too deep into the weeds on this specific point because I know that it's not the point of our conversation today. But do understand that the idea of the Miturinian view, the Soviet view, associated it with this Lamarckian view, but there is a distinction between the two in reality. But Lysenko was rejected as a pseudoscientist who believed in these Neo-Lamarckian ideas. However, As Swing argues in Chapter 3, and as more and more people are coming to recognize today, and sadly, there is an ideological component as to why people aren't able to easily see that this is the case, but more and more people are seeing that this new science of epigenetics Now, I should probably pause for a moment and explain what epigenetics is for the listeners who haven't studied genetics. When you did study genetics in school, they told you, you know, you have these four bases on your DNA, A, T, C, G. These group into three bases that are genes. They code for different things. Some of them don't code for anything, but most of them code for proteins. And what genes you have tell what proteins are going to be produced. And those proteins then make you. This is the view that they give you in school, right?

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: In the last...

Henry Hakamaki: I guess at this point, it's about 30 years, really. There has been an understanding that that is not the entirety of the story. These genes can be differentially expressed. Now, when I say expressed, I am talking in genetic terms. So what I mean by that is not every gene is expressed all the time, which is to say that and I'm going to simplify it as much as possible. Not every gene works all the time. Not every gene makes its protein that it codes for all the time. It doesn't make it in every situation. Different factors may play into whether it's doing that or not doing that. There may be times in your life where that gene is expressing, and there are times in your life where it's not expressing. Now, of course, not all genes do this, but there are genes that are differentially expressed. The epigenome. is this concept of the things that are associated with your genetic code, which are not the genetic code itself. The things that control what is being expressed, what's not being expressed, how we study this will help us understand why two people who have the same, obviously they can't be exactly the same, but they have two sections of their genome that are quite similar, why these people will have different outcomes in life if one is a smoker and one is not. If one lives in a cold climate, one lives in a hot climate. There are differences. Why is that? We can't see it in the genes themselves. And that's this idea of epigenetics, that the environment causes this differential expression of the genes that you do have. So it's not to say that the genes don't do the thing that they're doing. It's that the environment can play a factor. And so in this way, if we understand epigenetics and my oversimplified explanation probably was incoherent. So do feel free to have me clarify anything because that was my attempt to simplify it as much as possible.

Erik: Because what I'm fishing for is sort of the... genetics and biology has been politicized and weaponized through history from all different sides really but so having an understanding understanding or you can explain as much as you need to to just so we can get to this politicization or weaponization.

Henry Hakamaki: And the question is... Can I just add the...

Mehmet: So the other sort of end of the spectrum could probably be... I mean, I know very little of this, but the selfish gene by Richard Dawkins, like the sort of the neoliberal end of things. If we sort of connect biology and politics that way, maybe, that's the other example that's prevalent in the West still.

Erik: Or the fascist one where they would use genetic explanations for why some are better than others.

Henry Hakamaki: Absolutely. And we see that today. I mean, people do that today. Heck, if we're looking at current events... We just saw an email between Jeffrey Epstein and Noam Chomsky where he said that it's genetically proven that people of African origin, whether they're in Africa, whether they're African American, whatever, they have a genetic disadvantage when it comes to intellect.

Mehmet: Wait, he who? You have to explain he who.

Henry Hakamaki: Epstein said this to Chomsky. And Chomsky, in his response... It was part of a longer email. Chomsky was telling Epstein that his ideas were quite interesting, but it is notable that he didn't try to refute what he said. He didn't agree, but he also didn't try to refute it. Again, I'm just telling listeners to Google things. I saw this in the... I've been looking at some... of the documents through some channels that I'm on. And of course, when you see Jeffrey Epstein, Noam Chomsky, you read what the correspondence was between them. And that one stood out where Epstein was telling Chomsky that, yeah, you know, these African people of African origin, they have this genetic disadvantage intellectually. And Chomsky does not just tell him that. Okay, let's take a step back here for a second. But anyway, I don't want to get too sidetracked with current events and, you know, Noam Chomsky. But in any case, to get back to the point I was trying to make when I got a little bit sidetracked with the epigenetics talk. If we understand that the study of epigenetics, which is broadly accepted, I mean, everybody accepts that epigenetics is a thing. We're not talking that this is only socialist scientists in China who are believing in epigenetics. No, the Western scientists are at the forefront of the study of epigenetics. Epigenetics tells us the environment plays a factor in gene expression. And in this way, we can understand that even though he didn't understand epigenetics as such, Lysenko was partially right. and in many ways, importantly, correct. The environment can cause heritable changes. And I forgot to mention, your epigenome also can be passed on to your children. A smoker who is affecting their epigenome that epigenome, parts of it get passed on to the children as well. So even if the child never smokes, they would have these epigenetic changes, at least some of them, that had been committed by the parent. We have this whole sins of the father thing, idea turns out epigenetics says that there's actually something to that at least when it comes to you know vices in your life i mean to connect i have another very sorry one one example that i think would be very interesting for you i had a friend in my undergrad who was doing research that was not focused on epigenetics but it was totally connected with epigenetics she was a She was at the public health program, nursing and public health program at the university and a Palestinian American. And I was in the Honors College in my undergrad university. And in the Honors College, we all have to do undergraduate research. And her research was extremely interesting. I would love to know if it's ever been published anywhere or if it was only presented at our university's conference. Because what she looked at was, and it's a very specific thing, but you'll see why it's connected. The Age of Menarche. in conflict zones so menarche is the age it's the time of the first period for a girl when they start to menstruate and so the age of menarche would be the age where they have their first period and she looked at what that age was in different places around the world and factored in things like socioeconomic status. She factored in things like family history. And then she crucially looked at whether or not that place was in an area of conflict. And of course, one of the big areas that she was looking at was Palestine. And what she finds is that the age of menarche was dramatically changed in young girls who hadn't yet reached that age where they had experienced menarche and were living in a time of conflict or starvation or something along those lines. They would then have a disrupted age of menarche. But here's the interesting part. Their children also had disrupted ages of menarche, even if their children were born in a time that was at peace and there was no food deprivation. Their daughters would have a disrupted age of menarche. Now, she was not in the field where she was studying epigenetics, so she may not have known the why the children of people who grew up in a conflict area were having this disruption as well. But epigenetics is almost certainly the overriding factor here, if not the only one. There can be many environmental factors at play, but epigenetics certainly is a large factor here. That's something that we wouldn't have understood in the past, you know, before the study of epigenetics, but it is directly related with how genes are expressed because that is something that is coded in your genes and is affected by your environment. I know you had a question. I'll stop here for a moment.

Mehmet: No, I was just actually going to give an example of how starvation in Palestine, the starvation siege, is affecting future generations. And there has been articles about that. And that's also an example of eugenics. But you were already talking about that.

Henry Hakamaki: Yeah, yeah. I mean, this was a very hyper-specific example where she was looking at the age of menarche because it was what her research was on specifically. But there's numerous impacts that, as you said, have been published on in terms of physiological impacts of starvation, physiological impacts of simply living in a conflict area. And those things are not all, but many of them can be passed down through these epigenetic changes, which are passed on to the next generation. So environment can cause these heritable changes affecting how genes are expressed without changing the genetic code. So the part here, argues that the dialectical materialist method, seeing everything as an interaction, motion, contradiction, is a better tool for biology than the mechanistic, rigid view of traditional genetics, which has been held by the West since Mendel's time, and even into the era where we understand that epigenetics is a thing, is still utilized to discredit Lysenko, discredit Soviet genetic science, because of the ideological aspect of it. They understand that epigenetics is a thing, but they still utilize this mechanistic understanding of traditional genetics, which they know is not the case anymore. They still utilize this argument against Lysenko, specifically Soviet science more generally, because of the ideological component. So understanding this helps us understand ecology as a dynamic system. It helps us understand genetics as a dynamic system. It's not a machine.

Erik: Right. Beautiful. I... I mean, science is always somehow politicized or how we understand what gets funded and what doesn't get funded, what gets published and what doesn't. So politics have a huge role in that. I remember a Guerrilla History episode where you talk about the political economy of dinosaur fossils. It was very interesting.

Henry Hakamaki: Yeah. I'm glad you listened to that one.

Erik: Yes.

Henry Hakamaki: So, but... Yeah. Welcome to Nerd Hour. Sorry. There's one small point I forgot to mention, if you don't mind. Please. I'm sure in my last answer sounded like I was trying to totally vindicate Lysenko. That is not what I was trying to do. So Lysenko did make, and it's worth mentioning, Lysenko did make many mistakes. His knee-jerk dogmatic rejection of Western genetics was a mistake. Now, did he come to a valid understanding of how things actually worked in effect? Well, in many ways, yes, but it was a mistake to discard many of the views of Western genetics. His personal role was problematic. His but his intuition had merit. And so I don't want to make it sound like Lysenko is completely vindicated. We need to go back and study Lysenko's writings and teachings to have a better understanding of how science works. Lysenko was looking at this from an ideological lens as well. He was looking at it in terms of Mendelian Morganist genetics is bourgeois, fatalistic, disconnected from agriculture because of the ideological component. Now, his reason for that is wrong, but his understanding that there is an environmental factor at play, his intuition of that is correct. So we're not exonerating everything that we did. We're not saying that he was absolutely correct. But this, on the other hand, Absolute dismissal of him as a complete pseudoscientist without any merit is also absolutely incorrect.

Erik: I don't read the third chapter as a reclamation of everything Lysenko, but it's more a reclaim of dialectical materialism within scientific understanding. It's very interesting, but English is not my first language, so it's a bit difficult. Thank you a lot for that explanation.

Henry Hakamaki: I hope it was coherent.

Erik: It was great. Do you have anything, Mehmet, we should ask? Or Salvatore, do you want to add anything to this third part?

Mehmet: Let's begin with that.

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: Sure. Sorry, go ahead.

Mehmet: Let's just begin with that.

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: Sure, okay. Well... I mean, the thorough treatment given by Henry is fantastic. And so there's very little, I guess, to add to that. Perhaps what I would like to make sure that people understand is that in so-called You have scientists who get marginalized, even arrested for what they study. So, you know, that's something. And you alluded to the funding aspects of the systematic ways in which certain kinds of organizations, Research questions are not even asked. And then certain kinds of questions which are completely irrelevant to anything even remotely constructive socially like IQ. are promoted and funded. And then you also have all those researchers who are very active in the weapons industry, in the chemicals industry, to have more chemicals that are otherwise not very useful, but they're very useful for making profits. So all of this also needs to be considered. Lysenko is touted as a big example of the evils of socialism, But actually, it's just one example, and it's rare. Whereas in capitalism, it's an everyday occurrence. This is something that oftentimes, you know, gets lost. Okay, so having said that, contextualizing it, I would highly recommend, because dialectical materialism is not a very straightforward kind of conceptualization or framework of analysis, you And how that even relates to the work in the biophysical sciences, it's something that I've pondered over and I've written about for a while. And it's not exactly systematically discussed in Guillaume's book, although he does quite a lot of that. And he does more in this book that just came out that I was looking I had the privilege of receiving from Guillaume, but it's only in French so far, which is like escaping progress. So this is also a rather thorough overview of a lot of the... of a lot of kinds of approaches, frameworks out there that are bourgeois in character and are attempting to replace a Marxist worldview and so seeing how those kinds of frameworks falter in many ways and how a dialectical materialist view is very important to maintain and to apply to things like the concept of transhumanism, gender, biodiversity, artificial intelligence, climate change and all that. So, He goes much more thoroughly into that. In 1985, there was a book that really eventually was extremely influential for me. And that was The Dialectical Biologist by Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin. I would highly recommend people reading it because maybe to give a brief rundown, they go through... It's not actually an... a completely cohesive book. They're really like a bunch of essays or publications through the late 70s, early 80s. Richard Lewontin, I believe, was a geneticist by training, I'm trying to remember, and Richard Levins was a biologist, but also rather well-versed in agricultural aspects and breeding and things like that. So he often went to Cuba, by the way, Richard Levins. And their understanding in terms of how to apply dialectical materialism to let's say biology i guess it's kind of purposed into what we're talking about um and basically is and they also have a chapter on lisenko that i also highly recommend um you know aside from guillaume and guillaume also in his latest book that i showed you just now also goes into lisenko much more thoroughly as well and it's it's a really great treatment as well there um in terms of how to understand what happened during that time period and contextualising it in a wider set of social conditions. But with respect to the dialectical biologists, Dialectical materialism is really important. I think it was already touched upon by Henry in different ways when explaining genetics. But you have co-determination. It's not like a one-way process. When organisms exist, they also change the environment in which they're in, and then the changed environment changes the organisms. Epigenetics is one way of understanding this in some respects. There's also a tendency in a lot of science to be reductionistic, to... um look at the um you know what happens in society has been reducible to genes which is what you know what was being uh responded against you know by marxists during the 1930s 40s and 50s we know what that leads to it's direct relation to nazism right so so there's a reason why you know that kind of genetics is so dangerous ideologically but also in terms of medical practice, malpractice. And so to view instead genes as part of a wider whole and the processes of how genes form and how they express themselves as having mechanisms that are rather different from how people interact with each other or how insects interact with each other. Those are different kinds of levels of analysis that are not reducible one to the other. You cannot apply the same principles of particle physics to how an ecosystem works. Podolinsky, one of the reasons why Engels and Marx did not really care for his theory about the energetics of labor time is because it was reductionistic. It reduced labor time to just a bunch of energy exchange. It doesn't work that way. It's not a thermodynamic principle alone. Although thermodynamics are involved and genes are involved and all that, but our labor time and social relations cannot be reduced to those things. And likewise, we cannot reduce particle physics to social arrangements either, vice versa. Social processes are very different from particle physics. So let's just give some concrete examples about the problems with bourgeois kinds of thinking. and not dialectical materialist thinking. And also rejecting the notion that science is outside of the society in which it's developed. And that's also what's important about dialectical materialism, is to understand science as always part of the process, predominant kinds of social relations in a society. And so it influences the rest of society as well as the rest of society influencing it in everyday practice, what kind of questions are raised, what kind of research is pursued, etc. So those are some ways in which I remember from the dialectical biologist And in part, what Guillaume also goes through is how to relate dialectical materialism to biology, to genetics in particular, to environmental science and so on. I hope that's clear. I hope that's useful as an intervention. Thank you. Thank you.

Erik: Thank you, Salvatore. I've been meaning to get that book for my brother who's studying biology, so to get him into the right track. But this book was also meant as a present for him, but I ended up reading it instead.

Mehmet: we can always gift it to him after yeah yeah no eric eric eats the books he reads so yeah we'll give you another copy i actually have uh a i don't know a sidetrack kind of question but okay so we we talked about uh soviet right quite a lot in this episode and we talked about sort of I don't know, droughts, famines, and the like. I'm pretty sure some people, not everyone, but some people will think, oh, but Holodomor. And I know, Henry, you've talked about it somewhere else. So can you just... I'm putting you on the spot, I'm sorry. But you don't have to run through a 30-minute explanation, but just a summary and where people can find more about it. Because, I mean, it's actual, like, it's very... People talk about it still in a very specific way. So I think it would be good to just put a pointer there as well.

Henry Hakamaki: Yeah. So... Yeah, slightly putting me on the spot. Not that I can't speak on it, but you know, it's one of those topics. So... The so-called so-called Holodomor. And I say so-called not because there wasn't a famine, but I find the usage of a Ukrainian word when Kazakhstan was hit much harder to be strange in the first place. We could just say the great famine of, you know, 31, 32 years. So there is this conception of the famine that took place as being a constructed famine in order to disproportionately hurt certain nations, and I mean nations as in peoples, within the Soviet Union more than others. Of course, the group, like I said, that is the most vocal about it being the Ukrainians, but the Kazakhs were hit much harder in that time. But the idea was that this was a constructed famine. It was an intentional famine, as it's often put. There are no documents that show that there was any intentionality with it. It's important to understand that drought and famine are things that happen and happened for centuries before that time. And when I say they happened, I don't mean like every hundred years there was a great famine. As Salvatore mentioned earlier, there was large droughts and famines that would occur every five or six years. It was a cycle. Now, what I think might be an interesting point for the listeners is these famines and droughts were occurring every five or six years for centuries. But guess when the last one was? It was the one of 1931, 1932. There was no large-scale famine. There were, of course, small-scale famines. There were, of course, droughts that took place afterwards where the food... supply was disrupted in some ways but if we're talking about large-scale famine at the scale that we had seen not only in 3132 but also every five or six years preceding that there was not one at that scale that has occurred since then that doesn't mean that there was wasn't food shortages of course there was uh you know massive food shortages just after the fall of the soviet union as well but in terms of that that cyclical famine that was it that was it Now, were there mistakes that were made? Certainly there was mistakes that were made. If you look in the documents from the archives of the Soviet Union, you will find them saying as much internally that there was mistakes being made in terms of acts that they were trying to carry out to ameliorate the impacts of the famine, to ameliorate the famine writ large. There were mistakes. They admitted it to each other. They knew that there was mistakes. But in terms of intentionality, there never was any. There's no documents that claim any sort of intentionality. There was no documents that show that there was any intentionality of the famine in general, of harming people disproportionately relative to other people. There was no intentionality in the archives. And furthermore, there have been some very analytical books which have come out in recent years, and I'm drawing a blank on the name of the author, which I know Salvatore is going to come up with. There was two authors who put together a book that was a study of this period, and I am drawing a blank on the names of these two authors. Do you know who I'm talking about off the top of your head, Salvatore?

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: Yeah, I'm drawing a blank as well. J.R. Getty was involved, by the way, in that study. I think it was a monograph issue of contemporary history, but I'm trying to...

Henry Hakamaki: It was part of a series. They had a series of, like, I don't remember, 11 books that came out on the Soviet Union.

Mehmet: If you can't find it later, we can definitely put it on the description later.

Henry Hakamaki: One volume of it was entirely devoted. And I mean, it's an extremely analytical work. that is looking at were the causes of the famine man-made? And the answer is not more than any of the previous famines. If anything, most of the things that had been done, which caused previous famines to happen when they did, had been eliminated at that point. The natural, the situation climatically at that moment was terrible. There was mistakes that were made, but in terms of precipitating it, no. In terms of response, were there mistakes? Yes. In terms of intentionality, no. They went through documents. They went through climatic data. They went through the documents of the dead, and they found mistakes. They found no intention. They found no man-made component to this. So when we see continued claims after very analytical works that have been put out that refute this conception of an intentional man-made famine that is targeting certain people, we know that that's ideological. Because even extremely conservative scholars of the Soviet Union The conservative scholars who are respected for their analytical rigor also concede that it was not a man-made intentional famine that targeted certain peoples. For example, Conquest, Robert Conquest, conservative scholar of the Soviet Union. He is not a socialist by any stretch of the imagination. He would, you know, he's dead, but he would come out of the grave and kill himself and fall back into it if you called him a socialist. You know, he's that kind of guy. But he is a very rigorous scholar. I mean, we can disagree with him and we do ideologically, but he is a rigorous scholar in terms of digging up the documents, in terms of having an analytical framework that he carries out. And he found the same, that it wasn't an intentional famine, that there were mistakes, but it wasn't an intentional famine. So, you know, I'm kind of going to keep beating that drum that when we look at it, we have to look at it not only in terms of In isolation, what was done that precipitated it? Well, climate was one. They didn't really have control over that. And there were mistakes that were made, but mistakes that were understandable and that there was justifications given for. There was no intentionality. That's if we look at that famine in isolation, but also taking a longer duray view of what the situation historically was like vis-a-vis drought, vis-a-vis famine, and understanding that this is something that had happened cyclically on a very regular basis throughout history in these exact regions, and that it ended cyclically. Again, in large part, with a few exceptions here and there, where there was smaller scale droughts and famines. But that cyclical nature was disrupted and broken at that point. Why is that not something which is discussed when it comes up to this conversation as well? So, you know, there's a lot of things that should be talked about, but really the basic notion is that if you hear that narrative that it was an intentional genocide through famine... Nobody that's actually serious about the scholarship, whether they're socialist or not, actually has any belief in that.

Mehmet: So you shouldn't either. Sadly enough, I've seen this repeated in pro-Palestine circles. Oh, the genocide. So Holodomor is also a genocide. Do not deny it, whatever. Yeah. But besides that, so can we safely say that it can't be used as an argument or as an evidence against the Soviet ecology that, oh, see, but it failed because Holodomor?

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: Well, it'd be interesting to use it that way since there are plenty of occasions in so many countries where you have very deadly famines that have occurred. Of course, there's the 1944 famine that was actually induced by by the British in India and also in Ireland. So should we say that any sort of Ecology that comes out of Britain is suspect. And of course, to be completely not taken seriously, we should say the same thing about US-imposed famines on Native Americans over and over again, which were actually induced famines to kill them off. Like, for example, with the destruction of the buffalo in the Great Plains. That was a policy of destroying the food base to annihilate Native Americans. So should we say that... Any sort of ecology that comes out of the United States, any sort of science that comes out of the United States is to be dismissed. So, I mean, that's one way of thinking about it. It's really... um, kind of picking and choosing, uh, being very selective with respect to evidence. But the other thing, yeah, it's, it's to contextualize. And Henry was, was, uh, you know, getting at that. I, I just reminded myself of Davis and Wheatcroft and their, their book, the years of, that's the book that I was talking about Davis and Wheatcroft. I put that in the chat. So, uh, yeah. And, um, and that's a really important book. It's, uh, it's coming out of, uh, not just one or a couple of historians, but there are quite a number of historians who look at all the empirical evidence. You know, to claim that it was a genocidal act and put it with the Palestinian cause is, frankly, it's beyond the pale. But I see it in my own college as well, people, you know, making those claims. I would say, well, yeah. Okay, so we have... that if you want to make that analogy, well, why don't you do it with the United States? Because that's the perpetrator over and over again in so many societies. Well, then, you know, whoever, you know, the Germans should make the, you know, should also be shamed equally for their system because of the NAMA and, you know, using basically And then talk about drought conditions, but basically chasing people away from their food source to kill them off. So there are many ways, I guess, of struggling against this kind of false analogy. But even on its own merits, if one looks at the Holodomor, even on its own terms, one has to explain how is it possible that not only that, yes, there are millions of Ukrainians who died and millions of Ukrainian communists who died of hunger. And how does that explain? And how is it explained also the fact that you had many Ukrainians who complied with the requisition of food? And how can you explain that you had also millions of Russians who were affected and many of them died, not only the Kazakh, but also the Russians themselves? And then how do you explain the fact that Khrushchev, as a Ukrainian, even came to power if you had a racist institution that tries to annihilate Ukrainians? There are just so many things that just cannot be explained through that kind of discourse, even on its own terms. So that's one other way in which one could take it. But frankly, it's just to make of a tragedy... something that is useful for Ukrainian Nazis is so despicable because that's basically what that was a propaganda that was started. I don't know if you know the history of the, of that, um, that kind of claim. But it comes out of the ultra-nationalist Ukrainians, the ones that allied with the Nazis. That's where that discourse starts. That's where the propaganda starts from. And then it's taken up by these people who obviously don't know even their own history, if they're Ukrainian, if they're taking this up as a gold standard of sorts. But again, this is not because this will quickly degenerate into name calling because it is not to suggest that the Stalin administration acted properly. It is to say, no, they acted most improperly. There was also a near civil war because you're basically dealing with trying to have people fed while you had a lot of peasants who wanted to keep the food and the profits to themselves. So that's an actual struggle. So there was a lot of improper way, a lot of mistakes, but I would say just sometimes just straightforward wrong policy for that time period. One could also argue that. But then one would also have to understand that you had 10 years of basically civil war, world war. You had a destroyed infrastructure. And so you were always going to be very vulnerable to even the slightest kind of drought conditions in those kinds of situations. in which many countries to this day have that problem. Once the Soviet Union industrialized, you have no more famines. How is that possible? How is it possible that basically really the last, I guess one could call the famine was in the 40s, but that was induced by the Nazi invasion and basically destroyed the food base of hundreds of millions of people, literally. um and uh you know but one would have to explain if the soviet union was so evil you know how is it possible that there were no famines after that for the first time in russian history no famines you know ever again that you know already is a testament to the soviet policy being correct in itself so in any case one could argue many different ways and um But it is upsetting to see that analogy being made against an actual genocide on Palestinians. And that's most offensive.

Henry Hakamaki: And it's again, I want to say the name of that book again for the listeners. So it was part of a seven part series. The title of the series, in case anyone is interested, is The Industrialization of Soviet Russia. And it's R.W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft is the authors of it. This book that Salvatore and I are talking about is volume five, The Industrialization of Soviet Russia, The Years of Hunger, Soviet Agriculture, 1931 to 1933. So if you're interested in this question in particular, that is the book to look for. We'll have that in the description.

Mehmet: Definitely. Great. Thank you. And I'm sorry about the curveball, but it popped in my head.

Henry Hakamaki: Oh, I'm happy to talk about anything. That's fine.

Erik: Yeah, thanks. I mean, history is being weaponized as propaganda, and it's very important that we're very particular about what we are talking about so it doesn't get this sweeping sweeping claims that the whole of Soviet Union or everything about this everything about that and We are specific when we are trying to refute these claims or have an honest discussion about history or even ecology or science. And we know that they can be weaponized. And that is very important to have with you. thank you Henry and thank you Salvatore this was very interesting and I hope a lot of people find it interesting and they get the book and yeah is there anything you'd like to add as a sort of ending note what do you want people to do with this knowledge or in general around these issues

Henry Hakamaki: I think that getting involved in these sorts of discussions is what we want people to do. But also just as a note for the listeners who may not be familiar with Iskra Books, you did mention earlier that all of Iskra Books' books are available for free as PDFs. You can download those at iskrabooks.org. However, I will also just mention that Iskra is a volunteer-run nonprofit publishing company that publishes radical communist texts, including the one that we talked about today. So if you have the financial ability to do so, purchasing the book allows Iskra to continue making new books. uh if you don't have the financial means of course download the pdf getting the knowledge out there is of course the primary thing that we try to do but if you do have the ability to purchase the book you can do that through iskerbooks.org or through our friend's bookshop in sweden exactly located in sweden i see i see a few more and in his hands right now nice

Mehmet: I will definitely email fredhetana at gmail.com. I didn't know that Eric had this going, so I will definitely get something from him.

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: Salvatore, go ahead. From my end, yeah, sure. I mean, if one is a practicing scientist, I would highly recommend that in terms of understanding... what one contributes to in terms of wider society, but also in terms of an anti-imperialist struggle. From theoretical physics all the way to microbiology and whatever else, that this reading could be useful in terms of understanding the wider context into which one is placed and what one is contributing to. And also to think about the importance of joining an organization in order to fight against and struggle against, ideologically as well as in terms of building movements, struggling against a bourgeois conception of nature, which is also a basis for imperialism in many ways. Because you have the sort of environmentalism that is, talk about weaponization, that historically has been used in order to commit genocide on Native Americans to establish national parks, for instance. notions of population growth as the main source of environmental destruction, which it's not. And that's a code word for annihilating racially minoritized people. So there's a lot of imperialism that is inbuilt in a certain kind of environmental movement that does not take up communism as what they should be championing. So for those reasons, I think those connections are very important. For those who are impassioned by environmental issues, they should certainly be aware of these connections. And other than that, I can't thank you, Eric and Mehmet, enough for your generosity, for inviting us and for your fantastic conversation and excellent pointed questions and sharp analyses yourselves. And the other thing I want to add is Falestin Horra. Because we're still in that struggle. We still have to defeat the Zionist entity. And we're not going to defeat it by the fake environmentalism of the Israeli state at the expense of the Palestinians in Addifa and Gaza. And the destruction of the environment and peoples in Palestine. So, Palestine horror. Thank you.

Mehmet: Thank you very much. This was an amazing episode for us. And I've learned so much. You both are extremely great teachers. So thank you very much for being very educational. I mean, I will definitely listen to this again and again.

Henry Hakamaki: It'll take you a while to listen again and again.

Mehmet: This was a long one. I do listen in 2 plus X.

Henry Hakamaki: Okay. Not you, though.

Mehmet: You do speak very fast.

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro: I wish I had that skill, Mehmet. It's a wonderful skill to have to be able to listen at two times the speed.

Mehmet: It takes time.

Henry Hakamaki: It takes time to save time, I guess. Thank you so much. Erik, is there anything else you want to add?

Erik: Yes. For our listeners, donate to Palestine through Samir Project or Lifeline for Gaza and look at the description. You'll find a lot of good stuff there.

Mehmet: Exactly. Buy books from Erik. Yeah, do that. I will. Alright.

Erik: Thank you very much, Henry. Thank you, Salvatore.

Mehmet: This was my pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. Take care. See you soon.