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Abstract
This dissertation examines the transformation of the Kazakh Steppe from a nomadic pastoral landscape to an industrial agricultural system between 1891 and 1964, focusing on the changing relationships between scientific knowledge and environmental policy. Through the concept of "steppe epistemologies"—coherent ways of understanding the relationships between soils, plants, animals, and humans—I trace how different approaches to ecological knowledge shaped successive waves of environmental transformation that ultimately destroyed the material foundations of nomadic pastoralism. The study analyzes three distinct periods characterized by different relationships between scientific knowledge and political power. The late imperial period (1891-1928) was dominated by Vasily Dokuchaev's holistic soil science, which understood the steppe as an integrated ecosystem of geological and biological processes. This "Dokuchaev epistemology" paradoxically enabled both Russian agricultural settlement and the scientific validation of nomadic pastoralism, as Dokuchaev's research suggested that centuries of grazing had enriched the region's renowned chernozem soils. The Stalinist period (1928-1953) developed a "dialectical-materialist epistemology" that emphasized the interdependence of soils, plants, animals, and human labor within socialist agricultural systems. Despite the catastrophic violence of collectivization, scientists like Trofim Lysenko and Vasily Vil'iams articulated theories of agricultural production that recognized ecological relationships, though these were never fully implemented due to labor shortages and political priorities. The Khrushchev era (1953-1964) represented a qualitatively different approach: the abandonment of ecological epistemology in favor of economic and political imperatives. Motivated by Cold War competition, urban consumption demands, and chronic food shortages, Khrushchev's Virgin Lands Campaign treated the steppe as an empty economic resource rather than a complex ecosystem. Paradoxically, this anti-epistemological approach coincided with unprecedented scientific research on steppe environments. However, this knowledge production occurred after fundamental policy decisions had been made, serving to legitimate rather than guide environmental transformation. The dissertation demonstrates that this abandonment of ecological thinking enabled the most destructive and irreversible environmental changes in steppe history. The systematic replacement of native grasslands with grain monocultures, the displacement of indigenous livestock breeds with imported industrial animals, and the spatial separation of crop and livestock production created what Marx called a "metabolic rift"—a fundamental disruption of the cyclical exchanges between human society and the natural world. These changes accomplished what neither imperial conquest nor socialist revolution had achieved: the final destruction of nomadic pastoralism as both an economic system and a way of inhabiting the more-than-human world. Drawing on extensive archival research in Kazakhstan, the study treats scientific publications not merely as technical documents but as sources for understanding changing epistemologies of human-environment relationships. The analysis combines environmental history with the history of science and imperial studies, showing how colonialism operated through the transformation of biological relationships rather than simply through administrative control or demographic change.