O. Yu. Elina

The article analyzes the influence of World War I on the study and development of artificial fertilizers in Russia. It begins by discussing the major reasons for the negative attitude toward fertilizers that was common in the late 19th century not only among the country’s landowners and peasants, but also among its scientists. The scarcity of agricultural experiments with fertilizers, the poor development of domestic agrochemical industry, and the high prices for imported products, coupled with the popularity of alternative approaches to increase soil fertility, made Russia lag far behind the leading agrarian countries in the use of mineral fertilizers. Things started to change by the turn of the 20th century, when the Ministry of Agriculture launched a policy that promoted the development of agricultural sciences in general, and agricultural chemistry in particular. This policy was made manifest in the Commission on Phosphates, established in 1908 for the three basic purposes: to investigate raw materials for the production of fertilizers, to stimulate their agronomic study, and to develop technologies for their large-scale production. For a number of years since its establishment, however, the Commission made no big progress in the field, although it listed a number of prominent scientists dedicated to its mission (such as Dmitrii Prianishnikov, Iakov Samoilov, and Ergard Britske). As the article shows, it was the outbreak of World War I that suddenly created a powerful stimulus for fertilizer research in Russia. Known among the students of Western European history as the “Chemists War” (especially in the case of Germany which had a well-developed nitric industry), World War I has hitherto attracted little attention among the historians of Russian science. The article sheds a light on this neglected issue, demonstrating a specific Russian “symbiosis” between military industry and agricultural chemistry dating back to the war period. The numerous factories of explosives that emerged in Russia in those years produced vast amounts of waste products; modified, they could serve as fertilizers. Indeed, Russian scientists and engineers successfully employed these by-products to produce new brands of agricultural fertilizers. In 1915, the country saw the creation of the Public Committee for Support of Fertilizers. Thanks to its activities, the new fertilizers were introduced into agricultural practice as early as in the days of World War I. Eventually, the Committee gave birth to the Institute of Fertilizers, one of the first research establishments founded by the Bolshevik government. As the article indicates in conclusion, even the project of “chemicalization of agriculture,” usually described as a revolutionary endeavor of the new Soviet power, was firmly rooted in the symbiosis between military and fertilizer industries established during World War I.