In the Name of the Great Work

Beginning in 1948, the Soviet Union launched a series of wildly ambitious projects to implement Joseph Stalin s vision of a total transformation of nature. Intended to increase agricultural yields dramatically, this utopian impulse quickly spread to the newly communist states of Eastern Europe, captivating political elites and war-fatigued publics alike. By the time of Stalin s death, however, these attempts at transformation which relied upon ideologically corrupted and pseudoscientific theories had proven a spectacular failure. This richly detailed volume follows the history of such projects in three communist states Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia and explores their varied, but largely disastrous, consequences.