The History of the Establishment and Development of the Nursery
Answers to the Questions of the Editorial Board of the Journal For the Marxist-Leninist Natural Science!Results of My Sixty Years' Work and prospects for the Future
The Acclimatization Stage
The Mass selection Stage
The Hybridization Stage
My Achievments
Two Worlds--Two Possibilities
How the Work I began Should Develop
The History of the Establishment and Development of the Nursery
Source: I. V. Michurin: Selected Works, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1949. First Published: Khozyaistvo TsChO, 1929
At the first possible opportunity, as far back as 1875, when I entered the service of the Ryazan-Ural Railway, I began to spend all my free time and all the money left over from my salary on gardening.
After thirteen years (from 1875) of comprehensive theoretical and practical study of plant life, and especially of practical horticulture, of its needs in Central Russia, after a special tour of inspection of all the better-known orchards and nurseries of the time, and after personal tests of the qualities of fruit plants suitable for cultivation in the central and northern parts of European Russia, I arrived at the conclusion that our standard of horticulture was extremely low.
The assortment of plants was extremely poor and, in addition, it was corrupted by various semi-cultivated and sometimes altogether wild forest trees. At that time the most widely cultivated of the varieties of tolerable productivity were: apples--only Antonovka, Borovinka, Skrizhapel, Anis, Grushovka, etc.; pears--Bessemyanka, Tonkovetka, Limonka; sour cherries--Vladimirskaya and its seedlings; plums--various seedlings of damson and blackthorn.
Only rarely did one find in our apple orchards a sparse scattering of a few varieties of foreign origin (Reinette, Calville). There were no winter varieties of pears at all. As for sweet cherries, apricots, peaches and grapes, all these species of fruits were only rarely met with in hothouses and no one ever thought of cultivating them in the open ground. Under the conditions prevailing at the time, and with this kind of an assortment, there could be no hopes of orchards yielding anything like considerable profits. Yet the annual import of fruit from the South and from abroad cost the central and northern regions of the country many millions of rubles. It was clear that if we were to examine the established varieties of fruit plants in each region (Northern, Central European Russia, the Urals, Eastern and Western Siberia, the Caucasus and Central Asia) from the standpoint of profit yields and ruthlessly eliminate all varieties which proved unprofitable, then the list of remaining really profitable plants would prove a very small one indeed.
It became obvious that there was an imperative need to add new and better varieties. However, in doing so it was important not to repeat the mistake made by earlier horticulturists, who vainly hoped to acclimatize foreign varieties, but to produce from seeds our own new, improved hardy varieties for each separate locality. These were the ideas that prompted me to establish, in 1888, a nursery for the express purpose of producing new, better and more productive varieties of fruit-bearing plants. At first I endeavoured to achieve this goal by cultivating and selecting seedlings from the seeds of the best native and foreign varieties. But the results I obtained convinced me, in the end, that this method did not produce a sufficient degree of improvement in the new varieties. It turned out that the choice seedlings of the best local varieties were only slightly superior in quality to the old varieties, while the majority of seedlings from the seeds of foreign varieties were not hardy enough and perished from frost.
I had to resort to hybridization, i.e., cross delicate foreign varieties selected for high productivity and good flavour with our local hardy strains. This enables the hybrid seedling to combine the qualities transmitted to it by heredity from the crossed parent plants--the beauty and improved taste of the foreign varieties with the endurance of our local frost-resistant plants.
Then, in the subsequent years, by practical experimentation the best methods for achieving the aims set were worked out. Along with this, definite techniques were acquired in applying a suitable regimen in training seedlings of new varieties (a detailed description of varieties will be found in the first volume of my works, published by the Novaya Derevnya Publishing House).
In 1900, when it was found that the new variety seedlings must be trained on lighter soil, I had to move the nursery to a new site six versts away, where the work continues to this day. Over two hundred new varieties have been produced, many of them in no way inferior to the best foreign strains. Their profit yields are from two to ten times as high as that of the old varieties.
In addition, a complete set of wild kindred plants necessary for hybridization has been acquired from foreign countries and from all parts of the Soviet Union. At present the nursery does not require any material from abroad; it has all the cultivated and wild species and varieties of plants it needs. This I consider to be one of the nursery's outstanding achievements, for now it has its own Reinettes, Calvilles, winter pears, sweet cherries, apricots, Reine Claudes, sweet chestnuts, walnuts, black gooseberries, Caucasian pshat, large-sized raspberries, blackberries, the best varieties of currants, early-ripening melons, attar roses, frost-resistant, early-ripening varieties of grapes, yellow cigarette tobacco and many other new species of plants useful in agriculture.
Experiments have recently begun in methods of propagating fruit plants by cuttings, layers and, finally, by rooting the leaves alone.
We are beginning to cultivate new species of plants, never be fore grown in our localities as, for instance, apricots, almonds, four kinds of Actinidia and red acacia. In addition, over two hundred specimens of the newest varieties of trained and selected hybrids of the species enumerated above are now being tested. Their number increases from year to year.
By order of the Government the foundation was laid in 1921 for a propagation division of the nursery. We started with a plot of two hectares formerly belonging to a monastery and in the course of seven years, thanks to the efforts of Comrade Gorshkov, the head of the division, it had gradually expanded to 158 hectares in 1929. This area is distributed as follows: 22 hectares--orchards, 26 hectares--nursery and seedling school, 44 hectares-truck garden, 11 hectares--farm crops, 3.3 hectares--experimental plot, 49 hetares--wooded park, 3.3 hectares --unused land, one hectare--buildings and 37 hectares--ploughland for a new nursery. The division includes a museum demonstrating the achievements of my work.
In 1928, the grafted fruits and berries supplied to all parts of the Soviet Union was in excess of forty thousand. Two hundred thousand specimens were grafted in 1928 and vet it is absolutely impossible to meet the overwhelming demand for plants. Up to one hundred requests are received by mail in a single day. Hardly one-tenth of the orders received are filled. This is due, on the one hand, to the shortage of materials available for distribution, and also--and this is the main reason--to the fact that demands come from places with utterly unsuitable climatic conditions. Requests come in from the Transcaucasus, Northern Caucasus, the Crimea, the Transcaspian region, Kazakhstan, the Urals and Siberia, from our western border regions, from localities in the extreme north of the European provinces, etc. But the new varieties I have produced in Tambov Province can be grown to full advantage only in Tambov and neighbouring provinces under the climatic conditions to which they are accustomed. In the far South their dualities will not show up to the best advantage. In the North, on the other hand, they may suffer from harsh climatic conditions. Consequently, only a very limited number of orders from these areas can be filled, and only by way of experiment.
Answers to the Questions of the Editorial Board of the Journal For the Marxist-Leninist Natural Science!
Source: I. V. Michurin: Selected Works, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1949. First Published: Proceedings of the Michurin Plant-Breeding and Genetics Station, Vol. II, 1934
Question One. My evaluation of the present state of science in the Western countries and in the U.S.S.R. is as follows: The economic crisis that has spread all over the Western countries and has shaken the entire basis of capitalism could not but affect the field of the natural sciences as well.
If in the Western countries during the period preceding the crisis very little was done as concerns the production of new improved fruit-plant varieties, all the more now, under the conditions of the most severe crisis, no work whatever is to be expected in that direction.
Both in the foreign press and in our Soviet press, my work has been frequently compared with that of the American fruit grower Luther Burbank. I consider this comparison a wrong one. My methods of work are different from those of Burbank, as it was already pointed out long before the Revolution by those American professors who used to visit my nursery systematically every year. The same is also true as regards the organization of work of other private workers in this field in Western countries as well as of the state experiment stations, among which hardly any can he found that would work exclusively on originating new improved fruit-plant varieties.
On examining catalogues of horticultural plants either of the American or of the West-European fruit-trade firms it can be seen that over a period of several decades there were hardly ten new varieties accepted for sale. The question arises, where are those many thousands of new varieties claimed to have been originated both by Burbank and by all the other foreign fruit-plant breeders, about whose work so much and so frequently has been written in the foreign press and in our Soviet press as well? Apparently much of what has been described either existed only in the authors' imagination or proved to he unsuitable for practical purposes. This is only to be expected because the conditions of life under the capitalist system weigh upon the actions of workers in every field in the Western countries. Almost any activity in those conditions is confined to making profit; moreover, a small group belonging to the ruling class appropriates almost all the products of the labour of the working masses.
An entirely different state of affairs is to be found in the U.S.S.R. under the Soviet Government, after the beneficial abolition of classes. Here in the U.S.S.R. everything is based on the aspiration to increase by all means the prosperity of the working people. Thus, in our country such great attention has been drawn to the development of fruit growing that in the nearest future vast territories of our Union will be occupied by wide uninterrupted stretches of orchards-fields each having a total area of several thousand hectares. This unprecedented impetus towards the development of fruit growing in the U.S.S.R. could be brought about only by the October Revolution that released the hitherto fettered productive potencies of the earth and gave the power to the proletariat--the most progressive class of the socialist society.
How magnificent and alluring are the prospects of development of scientific research in the U.S.S.R. can be illustrated sufficiently well by just one typical fact: before the Revolution I worked all alone without receiving a single kopek for the development of my enterprise from the autocratic tsarist government, while at present a number of institutions have been established on the basis of the results of my fifty-nine years' work. These are the plant-breeding and genetic research station named after me, a horticultural college, a research institute, a school for fruit growing and a state orchard farm of five thousand hectares.
Owing to the generous help of the Soviet Government the very pace at which my work progresses has changed so profoundly that during the single year of 1932 I succeeded in performing the same amount of work as during the whole of the preceding decade.
After the Second Five-Year Plan is fulfilled the tempo of work on improving fruit-plant varieties and on producing new varieties will be still further accelerated. In addition to all that, I should like to call attention to the fact that the unexpected occurrence of new elements in the chemical composition of the flesh of certain hybrid apples--elements that are normally never present in the flesh of the different pure apple species--makes it possible to presume that in the course of the future large-scale hybridization work, such varieties will be obtained the fruits of which will prove to be useful in curing certain human diseases.
Question Two. My views on the interrelations between natural science as a whole and my specific branch of it on the one hand and philosophy on the other hand are as follows.
Science, and its concrete branch--natural science--in particular, is inseverably bound up with philosophy; but since man's world outlook manifests itself in philosophy, the latter is, therefore, a weapon in the class struggle.
Partisanship in philosophy is the chief orientating factor. The structure of things determines the structure of ideas. The progressive class, as the proletariat has proved itself to be, is the vehicle of a more progressive ideology; this class is creating a unified and consistent Marxist philosophy. By its very nature, natural science is materialistic, materialism and its roots lie in Nature. Natural science spontaneously gravitates towards dialectics. To understand the problems of natural science properly one must understand the only true philosophy--the philosophy of dialectical materialism.
Question Three. Only on the basis of the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin can science be fully reconstructed. The objective world--Nature--is primary; man is part of Nature, but he must not merely outwardly contemplate this Nature he can, as Karl Marx said, change it. The philosophy of dialectical materialism is an instrument for changing this objective world; it teaches how to actively influence Nature and how to change it; but only the proletariat is capable of consistently and actively influencing and changing Nature--this is what the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin--those unexcelled titanic minds--tell us.
The practice of socialist construction in the U.S.S.R. has raised a series of new colossal tasks that only the proletariat is capable of fulfilling. The proletariat has proved this by its deeds. The Soviet scientists have to face the most urgent problems raised by the construction of industrial plants, state farms, collective farms on an enormous scale. These problems could be solved only in the land where Socialism is being built and only with the aid of the philosophy of dialectical materialism elaborated by Lenin on the basis of the principles of Marx and Engels.
Question Four. What is my opinion of the possibility of applying materialistic dialectics to horticultural science and in what ways can this be done?
I must say that I have spent all my life in the orchard and on the garden beds. During my life I have made a great many observations and studies of plant life. I have discovered hosts of new facts that still await their theoretical significance to be investigated by science. Those facts must certainly be thoroughly elucidated and investigated in detail from the theoretical standpoint. Here is where the help of materialistic dialectics as the only true philosophy of consistent materialism is needed.
Quesion Five. What are the principal theoretical problems as regards the improvement of the qualities of new fruit-plant varieties that require the most urgent investigation?
In my opinion the most urgent is the problem of accelerating the initiation of fruiting--making fruit trees begin to bear at an earlier age. Next comes the problem of creating new plant species more useful to man by means of interspecific hybridization. Then, I repeat again, a problem of major importance which should be tackled not by individual scientists, but by the united efforts of all scientists is the finding of ways and methods of introducing into the chemical composition of the fruit's flesh chemical elements hitherto unusual in the plant, but that are of great value to man.
Results of My Sixty Years' Work and prospects for the Future
Source: I. V. Michurin: Selected Works, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1949. First Published: Transactions of the I. V. Michurin Plant-Breeding Station, Vol. II, 1934
Now, when our great country has entered the period of Socialism, when Socialism has become tangible not only in the spheres of economics and culture, but also in science and technology, and when the time has come for the most extensive application of scientific knowledge in practical work, it is a pleasure for me, who has devoted some sixty years of effort to attaining a constant improvement of fruit and berry plants, and to producing absolutely new varieties of plants, to tell the working masses and the men of science about how I worked, what results I have attained and what the prospects are in the work of breeding new varieties of fruits and berries.
I am described as a spontaneous dialectician, an empiric, a deductivist. Without entering into a discussion about the correctness or incorrectness of these epithets, I consider it my duty to say the following in this brief review of my activities. I began my work in 1875, at the dawn of Russian capitalism when survivals of serfdom still existed. At that time not only was there no science of genetics (even, now it is only in the formative stage)--a science which should be organically associated with plant breeding--but there was no such thing as scientific horticulture in general (a chair of horticulture was first founded in 1915), and all Russian science was regimented by Tsar Alexander. In short, I had no precedent in the organization of scientific breeding of new varieties of fruits and small fruits. Nor could I draw upon earlier, more or less serious experimentation, by others.
The one thing I saw was the unusual poverty of Central Russian horticulture in general and, in particular, the poor assortment of plants, as compared with other countries and our own South.
It pained me to observe the sad state of our horticulture, considering the exceptional importance of this branch of agriculture. I came to the conclusion, at the time, that horticulture in Central Russia, and particularly in Northern Russia, had not advanced a single step since time immemorial....
What have we in the orchards of the vast areas of Central Russia?--I asked myself. Everywhere you saw only the traditional Antonovka, Anis, Borovinka, Terentyevka and similar antediluvian varieties of apples. There were still fewer pears, sour cherries and plums--only such old favourites as Bessemyanka and summer Tonkovetka pears, Vladimirskaya sour cherries and semicultivated sorts of damson and wild blackthorn.
Only rarely did one find orchards that could boast of a few varieties of Reinette apples of foreign origin, and in very insignificant quantities at that. The organisms of these plants had been exhausted long ago; they had become frail and sickly and had lost their resistance powers, with the result that the plants became an easy prey to disease and were plagued by pests for long periods.
The sorry picture of Russian horticulture in those days evoked in me a painfully acute desire to remake all this, to influence the nature of plants in a different way, and this desire was embodied in my own principle, now universally known: "We cannot wait for favours from Nature; me must wrest them from her."
I made this the basic principle of my work and am guided by it to this day.
However, having no precedents that I could follow in my scientific research, I was compelled, in the early stage of my work, to act by intuition and, somewhat later, to resort to the deductive method.
I set myself two bold tasks: to augment the assortment of fruits and berries in the central regions by adding high-yield varieties of superior quality, and to extend the area of southern crop cultivation far to the North.
But it was some time before I accomplished these tasks. I should point out that there are three sharply outlined stages in all my work.
The Acclimatization Stage
In the eighties of the last century a pseudoscientific theory about the acclimatization of plants, propounded by the Moscow scientist Dr. Grell, was current. The substance of this "theory" was that in order to augment the assortment in the central regions it is necessary to take southern plants and gradually adapt them to our climatic conditions. And despite the fact that this method was fallacious, I chose it for lack of any other. The fact that the acclimatization of plants is, in essence, altogether unscientific was still unknown to me at that time.
In procuring plants from abroad--from the South--I expected that these foreigners would grow and bear fruit in our part of the country. But these experiments were not successful for the plants perished from frost in the very first winter. True, some specimens did bear fruit, but in the end they perished, too, or proved impractical for cultivation in our parts.
After this failure I employed another method; by means of grafting I attempted to bring the South to the North, believing that the southern varieties grafted on to our frost-hardy wildings would adapt themselves to our climate with greater rapidity, and that their seeds would produce seedlings from which, after being exposed to the influence of various factors, new improved varieties might be selected. But alas, here, too, I met with failure; all of my seedlings were killed by the frost during the first winter.
For ten long years, patiently suffering the grave consequences of fallacious methods, I got hundreds of adverse results but did not abandon my work and continued to try out one method after another.
The Mass selection Stage
This stage is also the first stage in breeding new hardy varieties for each separate locality. This I tried to achieve by training and selecting seedlings from seeds of the best native and foreign varieties. However, it soon became evident that seedlings selected from the best local strains possessed only slightly higher qualities than the old varieties, while seedlings produced from seeds of foreign plants proved, in the majority of cases, too frail.
The Hybridization Stage
In my subsequent work I chose pairs of parent plants from among the best local varieties and crossed them artificially, but again the hybrids thus derived fell short of the required standard. Next, I crossed our local plants with southern varieties, but while the varieties produced in this way yielded better-tasting fruits, in the majority of cases they could not keep through the winter. In my opinion, the properties of our local varieties of fruit-bearing plants in most cases dominated over the properties of southern plants, for our varieties originated in our localities and have grown there for hundreds of years, while the southern sorts are "newcomers" in our parts.
And so after that I struck an absolutely correct path, one at which science has arrived only in recent gears--I began to cross races and species of plants of distant habitat.
Under this method the chosen pairs of parent plants were placed, in our part of the country, in an environment to which they were unaccustomed. The offspring of such crossbreeds were most adaptable to our climatic condition and produced a more favourable combination of qualities, one that approximated the requirements I had set. As a result of such hybridization, the southern plants transmitted to their offspring flavour, size, colour, etc., while the wild frost-resistant species contributed their endurance to our severe winter frosts.
My Achievments
Following this, I proceeded to procure for my nursery plants from practically every part of the globe. By the October Revolution the nursery had approximately eight hundred species of initial plant forms. There were pants here from North and South Dakota, Canada, Japan, Manchuria, Korea, China, Tibet, India, Pamir, Indonesia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Crimes, the Balkans, the Alps, France, England, the tundra regions, etc.
When in 1919 my nursery was placed under the supervision of the People's Commissariat of Agriculture of the R.S.F.S.R., it contained the following new varieties of fruits and small fruits, industrial crops and melons which I had produced:
| Plant | Number of Varities |
| apples | 45 |
| sour cherries | 13 |
| sweet cherries | 6 |
| almonds | 2 |
| grapes | 8 |
| raspberries | 4 |
| gooseberries | 1 |
| Actinidia | 5 |
| mulberry | 2 |
| tomatoes | 1 |
| nuts | 1 |
| cigarette tobacco | 1 |
| pears | 20 |
| plums--Reine Claude and blackthorn (dessert) | 15 |
| apricots | 9 |
| quince | 2 |
| currents | 6 |
| blackberries | 4 |
| wild strawberries | 1 |
| ashberries | 3 |
| white acacia | 1 |
| attar roses | 1 |
| melons | 1 |
| lilies | 1 |
| Total | 153 |
In my further work I managed to evolve a number of methods with the help of which I obtained outstanding varieties, frost-resistant not only in the Central Black-Earth Belt, but also in the Ivanovo Region and even further north, and in Siberia.
At the present time the assortment I have cultivated contains over three hundred varieties and represents a substantial basis for the socialist reconstruction of fruit and berry cultivation not only in the European, but also in the Asiatic part of the U.S.S.R. and in the high-altitude areas of the Caucasus (Daghestan, Armenia).
Two Worlds--Two Possibilities
I have survived two tsars, and for over sixteen years now I have been working under a socialist system. I have entered another world, one diametrically opposed to the former. An abyss separates these two worlds.
That this is so may be seen from the following. Under tsarism, throughout my many years of work to improve the breed of fruiters, I received neither remuneration for my labours, nor, moreover, subsidies or grants from the tsarist exchequer.
I carried on my work the best I could on my own means, gained by my own labour. I struggled constantly against poverty and endured all manner of hardships in silence, never petitioning assistance from the government.
Several times, on the advice of eminent horticulturists, I submitted memoranda to the department of agriculture. In them I tried to explain the great importance and necessity of improving and replenishing our assortments of fruit plants, but nothing ever came of my memoranda.
I welcomed the October Revolution as historically necessary in its justice and inevitability, and I immediately appealed to all honest agricultural experts to come over to the side of the Soviet Government and unreservedly take the path of the working class and its Party. And to those who argued that "it is better to stick to the tried and tested, rather than strive for the new and the unknown" I replied, at the time, "You cannot cling to a part when the whole is rushing irresistibly forward." As early as 1918 I entered the service of the People's Commissariat of Agriculture and in 1919, with my fullest and sincerest consent, my nursery was declared state property.
Hardly had the Civil War come to an end when no other than Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, whose memory we all revere, gave his attention to my work. In 1922, on the instructions of Vladimir Ilyich, the work I was doing was expanded to unparalleled dimensions. Outstanding leaders of the Communist Party and the Government, headed by Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the U.S.S.R. and of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, took an interest in my work. Mikhail Ivanovich paid two visits to my nursery.
I received three awards from the Soviet Government. At the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in 1923, I was honoured with the highest award--a certificate of the Central Executive Committee of the U.S.S.R. In 1925, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of my work, the Government decorated me with the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, and in 1931, when horticulture was being reconstructed along socialist lines, I was awarded the Order of Lenin.
On the basis of my achievements the Government established a number of specialized institutions and schools catering to the entire Soviet Union and bearing my name: a scientific research institute of horticulture, a plant-breeding institute, a technical school, a workers' high school and an experimental centre for youngsters. The purpose of these institutions is to train agricultural experts with higher and secondary education. There is also a combined state farm and orchard of five thousand hectares that has been named for me, and, lastly, the city of Kozlov has been renamed Michurinsk.
Thus, by the will of the Party and the Government, the small nursery, confined to a tiny plot before the Revolution, has been transformed into an all-Union centre for research in fruit growing and plant breeding.
My feeling of solitude disappeared after the Revolution. I have a number of assistants who have done much to facilitate my work and have devoted a great deal of strength and effort to the organization and development of our all-Union research centre of fruit growing and plant breeding. They have earned my profound gratitude and respect.
How the Work I began Should Develop
The future prospects of my work have been outlined by the Government in its decisions of November 23, 1923 and May 13, 1931. These decisions point out that "the outstanding achievements of I. V. Michurin in the production of new high-yielding varieties of fruits and small fruits for the central regions of the U.S.S.R. are of enormous importance for the socialist reconstruction of horticulture and for heightening its technical level. The development of large-scale state and collective farms, the planned distribution of varieties and scientific cultivation methods create unprecedented opportunities for the extensive substitution of new, improved varieties for local low-yielding varieties."
The work which I have been doing or sixty years is inseparably bound up with the masses; it is their cause. But in order that the mass of the people might more quickly, and with the greatest possible benefit, take advantage of this work, the following effected :
1 I think that the period of popularizing my work is over; it is no longer a matter of propaganda, but of making practical use of my achievements. Yet, the propagation and study of my varieties in various climatic zones is anything hut satisfactory. Though I am in touch with thousands of kolkhozes and kolkhozniks, I feel no contact whatsoever with the regional and district agricultural administrations whose duty it is to disseminate my varieties.
There is a very large and ever increasing demand from kolkhozes for my varieties but, contrary to Government decisions, the local cultivation of stock is conducted on an insignificant scale.
It seems to me that the work of putting my achievements to practical use should be placed under the control of the political departments of machine and tractor stations and state farms.
2. The further development of breeding fruit an small-fruit plants requires regular expeditions to procure new specimens. In my research of the wild flora of the Far East I proved the importance of this aspect of the work and raised it to a scientific level.
3. Since our goal is not only to explain the world, but to change it so that it may better serve the needs of the working people, I regard plant breeding as a powerful instrument of our contemporary society, engaged, as it is, in the construction of Socialism. This instrument can help us master the nature of plants. That is why I think that instruction in plant breeding should be introduced in all agricultural schools, from primary schools to colleges.