Chapter 13 investigates the road as a literary device, a metaphor (the “road to communism”), and a material reality. It argues that Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue can be read as a picaresque; the time–space of the road structured the chance meetings, incidents, and accidents that occasioned the collective narrator’s satirical survey of the world. Although Odnoetazhnaia Amerika deviated from the traditional picaresque, turning its gaze on the Other, rather than the rogue’s own society, it nonetheless offered an implicit critique of the Soviet “road to communism.” This was nowhere clearer than in the writers’ description of American highways; for readers familiar with Soviet roads, the contrast with the Soviet Union’s obviously inferior network of roads and roadside amenities would have been obvious.

The critical importance of tobacco to the Zimbabwean economy is reflected by the profoundly flattering epithets deployed over the years to describe the crop: ‘leaf of gold’, ‘most promising weed’, ‘crucible’, ‘lifeblood’, ‘golden lining’. Tobacco is situated at the nerve centre of the body politic, central to the country’s political economy. Zimbabwe is the largest producer of tobacco in Africa, and the fifth largest producer of flue-cured tobacco in the world after China, Brazil, India and the United States.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal both get mixed reviews in song. The Dust Bowl hits the middle of the country, bringing to the fore not only Woody Guthrie and “Sis” Cunningham but also a stable of lesser-known “Dust Bowl Balladeers.” The Harlan County Wars continue in Kentucky, and the balladry proliferates. Sit-down strikes rock Detroit, and their songs resound. “We Shall Not Be Moved” becomes a Spanish-language anthem, and Rafael Hernández Marín sings of Puerto Rico’s Ponce Massacre. Abel Meeropol takes on lynching with his masterpiece, “Strange Fruit,” and Lead Belly damns the racism of the nation’s capital with his “Bourgeois Blues.” The Popular Front resurrects Lincoln as a working-class hero in song, and the fighters of the Lincoln Battalion in Spain march to their own battle tunes. The arenas of musical theater, dance, classical music, and jazz also become battlegrounds with Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, Harold Rome’s Pins and Needles, William Grant Still’s Lenox Avenue, Helen Tamiris’s How Long, Brethren?, Langston Hughes’s Don’t You Want to Be Free?, and John Hammond’s From Spirituals to Swing concerts. Marian Anderson transforms “America” from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and Paul Robeson sings a “Ballad for Americans” from coast to coast.

This chapter explores the agricultural settlement of the Great Plains by outsiders, including Germanic peoples from the steppes of the Russian Empire, the demise of the way of life of the Plains Indians and the transformation of the plains environment, culminating in the Dust Bowl.

The Introduction indicates that the book explains how and why aspects of agriculture in the Great Plains of the United States have, perhaps unexpected, roots in the steppes of the Russian Empire/Soviet Union. It introduces the environments and environmental histories of the two regions and the transfers of crops, agricultural sciences, and techniques from the steppes to the Great Plains that are analyzed in the main part of the book. It outlines the book’s sources and methodology and its contribution to the historiography.

In 1934, the US federal government launched a project to plant shelterbelts of trees across the Great Plains to protect the land from the drying and erosive force of the wind during the Dust Bowl. There were initial hopes that the belts would moderate the climate of the region. The decision to launch the project was based, in part, on Russian experience of forestry and shelterbelts in the steppes that dated back to the early nineteenth century. One of the conduits for Russian and Soviet expertise was a Russian–Jewish émigré, Raphael Zon, who was the director of a forestry experiment station in St. Paul, Minnesota. This chapter analyzes: Russian experience of forestry and shelterbelts in the steppes; American forestry in the Great Plains before the Shelterbelt Project; and the transfer of relevant Russian experience, and Russian trees, to the United States.

This second chapter on Shelterbelt Project explains that it was launched in the summer of 1934 to address the Dust Bowl, but also because the Forest Service was seeking to get access to New Deal relief funds to make up for the cuts in its research budget. Raphael Zon in St. Paul, Minnesota and Edward Munns in Washington, DC, drew on Russian and Soviet studies to convince the president to approve their plan. Zon and his colleagues also drew on Russian studies in preparing a technical manual for the project. Zon fell out with the project’s administrative director, Paul Roberts in 1935. Thereafter, American experience played a larger role in the project, until it was brought to an end in 1942.