In this article, Diana Mincyte looks at subsidiary farming during the years of intense collectivization and political repressions in Soviet Lithuania, 1948-1953. Through an analysis of how peasants imagined, experienced, and interacted with their environments, Mincyte constructs agricultural labor as a site through which Lithuania's peasants negotiated their relationship to the state and nature. She argues that because the peasants’ physical survival during this period depended solely on the harvests from the farms, the peasants constructed themselves primarily as subjects of land and nature, rather than as citizens of the Soviet state. Instead of focusing on how individuals reinvented themselves according to the ideologies of the New Soviet Man/Woman, the environmental approach she develops here shows that creative agricultural labor played a significant role in the processes of building socialism in Lithuania's villages.