Abstract

In late imperial St. Petersburg, a mounting cemetery crisis exposed the city’s unstable, saturated ground as a political and ecological threat. As burials overflowed and decayed into waterways, urban governance shifted its attention downward: away from air and buildings, toward the soil itself. In this paper, I will argue that the ground—long treated as inert infrastructure—became newly visible as a material and political actor. Central to this reorientation was the work of Vasily Dokuchaev, whose theory of soil as a dynamic, living system reshaped how the city imagined its environmental future. By reading St. Petersburg’s burial crisis through the agency of soil, the article rethinks how imperial cities confronted environmental breakdown not only in the air or the built form, but in the very ground beneath them