The Cow, or Care for Communism

This article offers a reading of Andrey Platonov’s short story The Cow (1938) through the lens of social reproduction theory and practical manuals on livestock care, situating the analysis within the context of Soviet animal husbandry from the 1920s to the 1940s. Platonov, a Soviet writer who deeply reflected on collectivization and the building of communism in relation to nature, as well as a practitioner – land-reclamation specialist, and engineer – is today being widely reconsidered from an ecological perspective. In this work, I aim to complicate the discussion of Platonov’s ecological poetics by turning to agricultural practices of care toward different beings. Accordingly, I refer to practices that took shape in the first half of the twentieth century, before the emergence of the concept of “animal welfare,” and went hand in hand with the communist ideal of liberating all exploited workers, regardless of their gender, race, or species.
By considering The Cow as a vivid bifurcation point between socialist animal-care practices and communist ideology, and reading the text through the agrobiological discourse of brochures advocating care for all beings, both classed and classless, I develop a critical analysis of the relationships among the story’s characters. My approach extends the material-discursive and biopolitical dimensions of Platonov’s work, especially in relation to care, caregiving, and the construction of a new communist society envisioned to include both human and nonhuman proletarians. To trace the cow’s ambiguous position as a being that is neither fully human nor fully animal but inhabits a liminal space between nature and culture, I engage with the intersections between Platonov’s texts and the concepts of the animal (Jacques Derrida), the Other (Emmanuel Levinas), and communitas (Roberto Esposito), exploring more broadly the possibilities of care for the nonhuman.