Abylay Stambayev is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at the University of California Santa Barbara, studying the social and environmental history of modern Central Asia. His dissertation project examines how a regime of industrial pastoralism transformed relations among humans, animals, plants, and ecosystems on the Kazakh steppe from the 1930s to the present. Rather than focusing exclusively on humans, the project follows a diverse set of actors in the making of the steppe ecosystem: grasses and shrubs, bees and rodents, sheep and parasites, shepherds, scientists, and state officials. This research draws on a wide range of sources, including materials from three national and two regional archives in Kazakhstan, village prose and folklore, oral histories and ethnographic observations. These sources illuminate how Soviet officials sought to discipline nature and labor, how scientific expertise and bureaucratic decisions were informed by indigenous pastoral knowledge, and how the steppe ecology constrained ambitious plans to maximize productivity.