Transforming Nature

    Ivan Michurin: 1855-1935

given his social origins, one would not have expected the Soviet authorities to recognize the horticulturalist Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, and one certainly would not have expected them to place him on the exalted pedestal this father of Soviet Darwinism occupied by the end of his life.

First, there were the noble ancestors, and even though they were from the lower nobility and not particularly wealthy, they were still members of the “exploiting class.” Second, there was the familial estate, and although it was relatively small and acquired with tremendous effort, it was nevertheless “private property.” Third, there was the Order of St. Anna awarded to Michurin by the tsarist government. Finally, there was his maniacal focus on simple fruit growing – not heavy industry, not building factories or even increasing wheat yields, simply the cultivation of orchards and the breeding of new sorts of fruits and berries. Given all of the above, one might have expected that, at best, the Soviets would ignore Michurin, and, at worst, they would destroy him along with his countless seedlings and apple varieties.

Michurin, born in 1855, was 62 at the time of the Bolshevik revolution, and he welcomed it from the start, immediately expressing a desire to serve the workers’ and peasants’ state through his experiments. But there were hordes of such naïve idealists and most of them were swept away by the very government they pledged to serve. But not Michurin. With every year he grew more respected, received more and more Soviet medals to go with his tsarist order, and was increasingly quoted and held up as an example. A Michurinist movement was created, cities and villages were named after him, and in the end he became a truly iconic figure.

Michurin’s biography reveals traits that must have appealed to the new authorities: a fanatical devotion to his work; a desire to overcome any obstacle in developing Russian agriculture; years of poverty, during which he expended all his strength, all his energy, on working his land; conflict with the church; and his decision not to accept any of the numerous invitations from scientific colleagues in America, including before the revolution, to continue his work there.

But these traits were not unique to Michurin. What set him apart? The first thing that comes to mind are his famous words, “We should not wait for nature to do us favors; our task is to take from it what we need.” It is a line that sums up the essence of Michurin’s experiments. This strange self-taught horticulturalist channeled his lifelong enthusiasm into breeding new, more successful varieties of fruits and berries. For the sake of this cause, he and his family almost starved to death, lived first in a hut, then in a shed, then in a tiny house they built with their own hands. For the sake of this cause, they spent virtually all their time in the company of other horticulturists.

Michurin relentlessly researched selection, believing that the crossbreeding of different plants – even plants that were not necessarily close to one another but, in some cases, were “distant relatives” – could lead to amazing breakthroughs in horticulture. Today it is clear that, while some of Michurin’s experiments were very successful and others were dead ends, he made significant contributions to the science of selection.

During his early career in horticulture he expressed disdain for the experiments of a strange German monk by the name of Mendel who had discovered some obscure laws governing the transmission of traits through inheritance. He was later convinced by the great biologist Nikolai Vavilov that the laws of genetics could not be ignored and he began to factor them into his experiments. But what the Soviets saw in Michurin had nothing to do with real science.

The introduction to a collection of articles by Michurin that came out after his death states: “I.V. Michurin laid the foundation for a new science, the science of managing the development of plants through breeding. In his scientific career, Michurin followed completely new paths unknown to science before him. He used cultivation breeding methods to create new forms of fruit-bearing plants. Michurin took a scientific approach to the cultivation of hybrid seedlings, eliminating undesirable features and developing desirable ones.”

Here is what the government liked most – the notion that plants can be cultivated and forced to grow in accordance with the needs of people, the needs of the government. What a prospect! The author of the introduction continues:

This is the most important thing that Michurin taught us. And it is not surprising that this was the thing most fiercely resisted by the bourgeois, reactionary Weismannist-Morganist school of biology.* Weismannists and Morganists deny that the features and properties acquired by plants or animals in the process of their lives can be passed down through inheritance. Reactionary science claims that you cannot change and improve plants and animals to suit the needs of humans. Such assertions are pseudo-science. They are based on belief in a divine principle in the development of the world, on the idea of man’s passive adaptation to the laws of nature. This belief disarms scientists and practitioners in their struggle to change the nature of plants and animals and inhibits the development of science and agriculture. This cannot be called science. Michurin’s teachings open up unlimited vistas for biology, especially given the conditions of our Soviet country, given the conditions of the collective farming system.

The Bolsheviks, who were themselves conducting a vast experiment on the entire country, could not fail to appreciate the boldness of Michurin’s attempts to alter the fruit varieties created by nature itself. Like all utopian fanatics, the Bolsheviks associated the transformation of society with changing the very essence of man and nature. Even in the 19th century, the socialist Charles Fourier rapturously predicted that under communism the seas would turn to lemonade and harmless anti-lions and anti-whales would appear on earth.

A quarter century after Michurin’s death, the Communist Party adopted a program predicting the transformation of human personality and the elimination of any distinction between city and country or physical and mental labor. A decade and a half later, a new project emerged: to change the course of northern rivers in order to irrigate the deserts of Central Asia. Nobody stopped to ponder the damage this would do to the ecology of Northern Russia, it was just so thrilling to turn rivers around and make them flow to the south. How better to demonstrate the greatness of humankind?

The mild-mannered horticulturalist – a person completely devoted to his orchards and biology experiments – started to be placed among such great transformers of the planet, creators of heaven on earth. To help him fit the right mold, biography after biography repeated the tale of how, before the revolution, a priest in the town of Kozlov had accused Michurin of “turning God’s garden into a brothel.” What better Bolshevik credentials could there be? Michurin had challenged religion! In fact, there is no evidence that Michurin had the slightest inclination of doing anything of the sort. He simply believed that “Using plants in the form in which they exist in nature can bring little benefit. They have to be improved, remade, endowed with useful qualities, and their negative properties have to be eliminated.”

Who would argue with this? If plants had not been improved over the course of centuries, we would not today have bread, olive oil, or wine. But how wonderful it was to transform a rather eccentric old man into a hero of atheism who, with the help of the Soviet government, would bring nature to its knees. This image took hold after Michurin’s death, when the crazy theories of Trofim Lysenko gained ascendance, the great Vavilov was sent to prison (where he starved to death), and an entire generation of serious biologists were deprived of the ability to practice their science. It was then that the image of the “great Michurin” was implanted in the public consciousness. He was portrayed as someone who had discovered what wonders human reason could achieve, especially if that reason was armed with a knowledge of Marxism-Leninism.

In 1944, when film director Alexander Dovzhenko began to write the script for Life in Bloom (Жизнь в цвету), he intended to produce a film about a dreamer living amidst splendid orchards and bringing beauty and joy into people’s lives. The film was produced in color, a rarity at the time, and its exquisite camera work turned out striking images of flowering orchards, bright fruits, and an eternally bountiful earth. But such a dreamy and handsome Michurin was of little use to the powers that be. The film had to be almost totally redone, with the insertion of apocryphal episodes depicting Michurin’s “relentless fight” against genetics, a pseudo-science and the corrupt handmaiden of capitalism  (as opposed to Michurin’s own hybridization theories). Even the title was considered too romantic. In 1948, the film opened under the simple title Michurin. Its creator was recovering from a heart attack at the time, experienced after the stresses of seeing his film butchered by the censors. It seemed that Michurin, the opponent of genetics and transformer of nature, held a secure place in the communist iconostasis. But something about it rang false. This must be why so many jokes appeared mocking the “great horticulturalist.”

Michurin is asked a question.

“You say that if you cut off a horse’s tail and then cut off the tails of his offspring and so forth, this will create a new breed of tailless horse?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Then why are women still born virgins?”

Or:

A drunk is walking home one evening and reaches a bus stop. Leaning against a tree he looks up and sees a streetlight swaying amidst its upper branches. Impressed, the drunk exclaims, “Wow, Michurin. That’s really something. Who woulda’ thought?”

And finally, a joke that loses something in translation, but is perhaps the most telling:

It was apparently Michurin who invented barbed wire, since he crossed a grass-snake (уж) with a hedgehog (ёж).