Soviet Plans, Capitalist Chemistry: Khimizatsiya and the Western Pesticide Companies in the Age of Poisons

This paper seeks to provide a decentred and transsystemic approach to the ‘contamination of the Earth’ by pesticides. It tackles connections, circulations and entanglements between the main Western agrochemical companies and the major authorities dealing with the ‘chemicalisation’ of agriculture in the Soviet Union in the Cold War period and beyond. This paper first outlines the development of the Soviet regulatory system for the adoption of pesticides emerging in the 1950–60s in the context of the Cold War. It then analyses how the major Western agrochemical companies started to operate in the Soviet Union after signing trading and R&D partnerships with Moscow during the era of Détente . The third and last part focus on Bayer’s activities in the Soviet Union starting in the 1970s, as a case study that looks at the corporate practices of influences during the late Soviet ‘chemicalisation’ on the one hand and ecological policies and contestations on the other. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .