flâneur

White Gold in Red Soil - Offrange

ambrook.com · 1,524 words · saved by 1 readers

The early Soviet Union transformed vast swaths of Central Asia to grow cotton. They asked for help from American scientists whose ancestors had spent their lives picking it.

The early Soviet Union transformed vast swaths of Central Asia to grow cotton. They asked for help from American scientists whose ancestors had spent their lives picking it. At the tail end of the Cold War, a Russian journalist came to interview Joseph Jepthro Roane about his time developing cotton seed strains in a fledgling Soviet Union. During her visit to Roane’s clapboard home in the (coincidentally named) Kremlin, Virginia, she met Roane’s adult son. So the affable journalist asked the middle-aged man—innocently, and unknowingly—for his name. “‘Joseph Stalin Roane, he said, obviously…

saved by

related reading