Michurinsk, Russia
Jacobi’s Stay in Michurinsk: ca. September 5-8 (?), 1932
Once Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan came into effect in 1928, Russia’s rural farms became collectivized, and in the 1930s, the USSR began renaming towns to evoke in the peasant masses a sense of unifying, national pride.
The city of Kozlov, located around 250 miles (400 kilometers) southeast of Moscow, was renamed Michurinsk in 1932 after the plant geneticist Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin (1855-1935), who lived and worked there. Michurin became a national hero for his work in crop breeding, especially for developing fruit trees capable of withstanding Russia’s harsh climate (Bursa 172). With government support, Michurin’s humble nursery became a vast fruit plantation. Since the early 1930s, the city of Michurinsk has been an important center for agricultural research and production, as well as for industrial fruit growing, in Russia.
Jacobi's photographs from Michurinsk focus on Ivan Michurin and his research; cotton, strawberry, and onion cultivation; "plantations of rice, soybeans, castor oil"; "a fruit tree nursery in a former monastery"; and portraits of people--scientists and workers--whom she encountered (Daybook Sept 5-8, 1932).
Contributor: Tara Landers
Works Cited:
Bursa, G. R. F. “Political Changes of Names of Soviet Towns.” The Slavonic and East European Review, April 1985, Vol. 63, No. 2, pp. 161-193.
Goncharov, N. P. and Savel’ev, N. I. “Ivan V. Michurin: On the 160th Anniversary of the Birth of the Russian Burbank.” Russian Journal of Genetics: Applied Research, 2016, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 105-127.
Jacobi, Lotte. Daybook. Lotte Jacobi Archive, Milne Special Collections and Archives, University of New Hampshire Library, Durham, NH, Box 33, Folder 1.