We can’t wait for favors from Mother Nature

“We can’t wait for favors from Mother Nature” is the opening clause of a Michurin formula that the historian uses to name a Soviet doctrine of human dominion. Joined to its conclusion, “we need to take them from her ourselves,” the expression turns nature into a withholding provider and human beings into claimants entitled to take what they want. The historian presents that entitlement as more than confidence in human ingenuity: it is a license to impose human will on the world.

The Formula and Its Meaning

The historian places the formula within a “particular Soviet form of paganism,” which cast man as the crown of creation and treated control over the world as his right. The maxim gives this hierarchy a practical imperative: do not wait for nature to yield; take from it. Its language of favors makes the relationship sound like an exchange, while its command to take establishes the one-sided power underneath that appearance.

The formula was, the historian says, an attempt to teach people qualities they did not naturally possess. That qualification complicates its confidence. The slogan does not merely celebrate an existing human capacity; it prescribes a way of acting, training people to overcome restraint and regard the world as available for their use. The historian connects that instruction to a psychology of oppressors.

Human Dominion and Oppression

The expression’s significance lies in the connection it makes between mastery of nature and habits of power. The historian’s account does not treat domination as a neutral technical achievement: the belief that people may do anything they want to the world belongs to a broader moral and historical disposition. The language of taking from nature becomes an emblem of a society accustomed to making claims over what it does not own.

To test contemporary professions of religious belief, the historian sets them against the Gulag, the jail cells of 1937, Party meetings in 1948 where people began denouncing cosmopolitanism, and the destruction of old churches under Khrushchev. The point is not that the formula itself explains these events, but that declarations of faith do not erase a history shaped by coercion. The historian calls the contemporary subtext of Russian religious belief sly and false, then sets church candles at Christmas beside the bombing of homes in Chechnya and the removal of incinerated Russian tank drivers with shovels. The juxtaposition carries the formula’s logic beyond its literal object: reverence and violence coexist, while the language of moral renewal remains untested.

A Demand for Historical Reckoning

The historian’s question is whether people can reconsider their entire history with the intellectual courage shown by Germans and Japanese after the war. The expression consequently stands inside an unfinished reckoning, not as a slogan offered for approval. Its confident instruction to take from nature is set against the harder demand to examine the habits of domination that such certainty may conceal. In the historian’s closing contrast, public energy goes to the market, vouchers, checks, and barely surviving, while people’s souls are abandoned. The formula’s call to seize what is needed thus resonates as both a description of inherited power and a warning about what remains unexamined.