This project investigates rural futurisms: the aesthetic, political, and utopian visions of rural-led development in early Soviet literature and culture that countered the Bolsheviks’ urbanizing vision of modernization. In the Russian cultural sphere, modernity was often seen as a forced imposition by the state of foreign (Western) values and practices upon a “backward” country identified with the soil and its peasant people. Seen from within this longstanding framework, the early Soviet period brought modernity to the countryside from the industrializing cities, in the form of successive policy campaigns that often produced catastrophic consequences. Consequently, the scholarship on early Soviet literature tends to present rural writing from this period as a preserve of largely passive resistance to modernity by self-styled peasant poets like Esenin or “Scythian” novelists like Pilnyak, on the one hand, and of increasing acquiescence to Stalinist imperatives on the other. Yet, agrarian futurisms gave rise to some of the most radical visions of environmental and social futurity in the 20th century, which are moreover newly relevant in the 21st. Accordingly, the main research question of my project is: in what ways did rural futurisms in postrevolutionary Soviet culture suggest more sustainable environmental, social, and political relations than those actually pursued by the Soviet state—or by the capitalist West?