July, 1988

My foray into the USSR last October was unlike the adventures, hardships and triumphs of classic plant explorers. There were no camel trains, tent camps or thieving servants but comfortless airplanes, icy hotel rooms and tightly staged farm visits as our impediments. Worse still, there was no way to explore freely beyond any city limits nor to walk freely around the orchards and gardens on the collective and state farms we visited.

Fortunately, the botanical gardens of the USSR are as dedicated to the collection of useful plant species as to taxonomic exercises. At Tashkent in Uzbekistan, about 250 miles north of the Afghan border, we found the Botanic Garden just a taxi ride from our Intourist hotel. The uniformed, armed guards inside the entrance gates seemed surprised by two foreigners walking in and past them with just a friendly smile. One of them ran after us and said something, probably where we thought we were going. My only reply, rolling the "r", was "Director Rusanov". He was the botanist who had conceived the gardens and built them up since 1951. (I had done my homework.) The guard began to say something; then switched to sign language: Rusanov was dead and gone; it was all right for us to continue.

We found groves, now called florascapes, of wild trees typical of this Central Asian centre of origin of many familiar fruits. We walked along and through thickets of apple, pear, quince, apricot, almond, plum, walnut, persimmon, mayhaw and other unrecognized trees. Among the wild shrubby apples, we discovered veritable miniature replicas of Golden Delicious, Jonathan, Antonovka and Golden Russet, all with a crude crab taste. First the guard stayed behind us; then, after exchanging signs, smiles and mutually understood words, he turned into our scout and led us on a taste tour to many ripe and overripe fruits and nuts hidden in bush and thicket.

The farmers' market at Tashkent had an oriental informality about it. The vendors were mostly Uzbek men wearing on their heads what looked like inverted quart berry boxes, black with silver piping. In artless displays they offered pears, quinces and, quite naturally, apples. The fertile land to the northeast was already known to Genghis Khan as Alma Ate, the "father of apples". I had so looked forward to meeting new, interesting varieties here in Central Asia, the fountainhead of many of our fruits. What a let-down it was to see Golden Delicious from West Virginia, White Rosmarin from Tyrol, Kandil Sinap from Turkey, Wood's Greening from New Jersey (hiding under its Russian alias Simirenko), and the familiar Pan-Slavic Antonovka. It's true there were two unknown or, rather unrecognized varieties, one of them since identified as Prozevskoie, a common culinary apple. The other one was pale yellow with many lenticels and looked vaguely familiar. Its name Belfler Jelti, translates into another original New Jersey variety, the Yellow Bellflower. There were many displays of Barlett pears, spelled Vilyams after the original English name, and some beautiful Boscs from Belgium, golden yellow, with hardly any russeting.

Fruit is grown on collective farms, state farms and in home gardens. Collective farms are usually former villages where a family still owns its home though not the ground it stands on. The size of their home garden depends on the family size. Any surplus may be sold on the free market. A collective farm is usually a mixed farm and may have production orchards. A state farm is a factory-like agribusiness. One just works there and lives in farm-owned quarters that run from shacks in the South to highrise apartment blocks in the North. State farms usually produce just one commodity. We visited one producing tomatoes on 60 acres under glass. Both types of farms are run by card-bearing agriculturists with political commissars as deputies.

At Baku in Azerbaijan on the southeastern edge of the Caucasus we were invited to visit a state farm growing semi-tropical fruit. It was a lush oasis on land reclaimed from the Caspian Sea and surrounded by oil derricks. Here we were introduced to what turned out to be the standard hospitality pattern. The time assigned to a visit is split up roughly like this:

50% Welcome address with praises for the political and social system; paraphrases on Lenin's sayings; claims of ever-rising farm output, love of peace and utter preparedness to defend the Motherland.

10% Question and answer period. Many of our specific questions drew

either guarded generalized replies or lectures on irrelevant side issues.

25% Guided tour of kindergarten, community hall with choir presentation

or Cossack dance demonstrations, living quarters, gymnasium, general store.

15% Visit to the farm proper, orchards, barns, greenhouses, all with

strict path control. There is no opportunity to talk to workers. Lagging behind was vociferously branded as lack of discipline.

No wonder then that we saw more of the fruits of the regions at farm markets and learned more from vendors than from official crop specialists on staged farm visits. We could see the far extending orchards and vineyards of the tropical fruit farm but were only taken to a few rows of jujube (Ziziphus jujuba Mill.) The bushes were loaded with fruit and the farm director and guide encouraged us to taste the sweet and juicy brown red fruits that looked like small pecans. Then we had run out of time and, passing by a planting of decrepit almond trees, returned to the village. All production from this farm is shipped to state-run jam and juice plants and wineries.

Our next visit was to a collective farm in the picturesque southern foothills of the Caucasus near the border of Georgia. It was the cleanest and best maintained village we were to see on our trip. Its pride was the recently built community palace with a ballroom whose style and decor would have thrilled Empress Josephine. We also witnessed a drill practice of the kindergarten population conducted by state employed teachers. It smacked of pre-military conditioning. The high elevation of the farm allows growing apples, mainly Golden Delicious, spur types of Red Delicious, Jonathan, Simirenko, Kandil Sinap and White Rosmarin. I wondered why they would grow commercially the easily bruising Kandil Sinap. The response was a lecture on the Wooly Apple Aphid (Eriosoma lanigarum), evidently a major endemic pest of the region, to which Kandil Sinap and White Rosmarin are resistant. Similarly, Simirenko was said to be resistant to a leaf roller but I could not find out the species.

The following day we met the same varieties at the Baku farmers' market. The place was a veritable cornucopia loaded with quinces, pomegranates, apples and persimmons. Less conspicuously, we saw grapes, pears, passion fruit, figs and citrus, mainly Satsuma mandarins, lemons and venerable looking citrons. Display pyramids, meticulously built up with pomegranates or kaki persimmons, added an element of refinement to the colourful market. The quantities and kinds of quinces offered made me wonder if there were any that could be eaten raw but a couple we tried were just as hard as Western sorts. The next day I saw working girls at a carpet manufacturing collective having a quince break. One of them must have noticed my curious glance and graciously offered me a quince, refusing to accept anything in return. The outer 3/4 inch or so was very palatable, much more than that of Western kinds but probably less so than the reportedly tender Persian Sugar Quince. Or was this one, considering that oil rich Azerbaijan had been taken from Persia only a few generations ago?

Just north of the Caucasus near Krasnodar is the 40,000 acre collective farm Kalinin with several hundred acres in apple orchards. There we encountered some official changes in apple nomenclature: Red Delicous which previously on our trip had always been pronounced more or less the English way and phonetically spelled accordingly, was here called Red Superb (Prevoshodnoe Krasnoe). The name of its darker sport Starkrimson, introduced and patented in the USA, had been restructured to Krimstarson, highlighting the Russian name of the Crimea, about a hundred miles to the west. We found Mutsu, which already has the British alias Crispin, endowed with a Russian one meaning Green-Gold. Golden Delicious which even the Uzbeks had written as it sounds was de-anglicized to Pear Apple (Yabloko Gruma).

The head of Kalinin was a friendly and somewhat pompish chap with Hammer & Sickle pin and tie-tack who did his best to flabbergast us with the farm's social facilities including a park with a fountain and a well stocked zoo. I asked how they decided on which apple varieties and rootstocks to grow and learned that the farm has no say in this. The young trees are supplied by a state nursery according to specifications of a central fruit planning authority. As we drove by well cared for orchards, but never stopped, I enquired somewhat perfunctorily why the tree trunks had been whitewashed. I expected the answer that this will minimize heat absorption during sunny winter weather. Instead I was lectured on the importance of preventing pests from crawling up the tree and damaging the People's property. I pointed out that the concrete lamp and utility posts were protected the same way and got a perplexed look. It took a couple of minutes before the reaction came: it was done to make the People's property look good. Somehow I doubt the interpreter's accuracy.

At lunch time we were offered gorgeous Jonathan apples for dessert, urged to fill pockets and bags and given a box full to take along on our way back to Krasnodar about 80 miles away. I had never met nor grown such well-sized, perfectly flavoured Jonathans. The next day on a stroll through the city we watched people, mostly mother types and seniors, eagerly lining up at a state fruit store to buy what looked like green culls of Golden Delicious, the only commodity in the store. We also lined up to buy some, mainly to confirm their identity but gave up our place when we saw how few apples were left. Shortly afterwards the queue dispersed quietly.

Later on, landing near Kiev some 500 miles to the northwest, the airport appeared to be built amid orchards. They framed many miles of the highway to the city. We found a colourfully decorated modern farmers' market with a neat display of all kinds of fruits including pomegranates, kaki and citrus from the South. Apples were offered on flat trays or arranged in pyramids on both plates of blue balance scales, of which each vendor seemed to have a supply. Here Red Delicious and Golden Delicious were labelled with both their original American and their new Russian names. Other varieties in good supply were McIntosh, Lobo, Cortland, Simirenko, Antonovka, Omsk Anis and Fantasia, a Polish apple, offspring of Canadian parents, McIntosh and Linda.

A puzzling thing happened on the way through the fruit section. When an elderly vendor saw me getting my camera ready he whispered something to his younger companion who then swiftly pulled down the sign in front of a scale loaded with beautiful yellow Antonovkas and started past me. It happened so fast that I had no time to decipher the inscription. On either side of his stand other vendors behaved normally, smiled when their pictures were taken and offered us fruit to taste. Prices ranged from $1.40 per lb for the highly polished better looking kinds to 60› for "D" grade apples of undefinable variety.

Selection and variety were well reduced on our next stop farther north at Minsk. Much of the farmers' market was occupied by people selling used clothing and housewares. The vegetable section was bare but in the fruit section the familiar pyramids of pomegranates and kakis stood out. The only other fruit were mediocre looking Lobos, Anis and Antonovkas with their blemishes turned away from the consumer. Still farther north, at Leningrad, the only apples available were undersized, scabby and bruised Kandil Sinaps and Jonathans at 80› a pound.

The conclusion that most of the winter apples grown in the USSR originate elsewhere, mostly in the USA, is unavoidable. Others like Anis and Antonovka go back to the time of the last czar's grandfather. One wonders then where the celebrated creations of Michurin and other Soviet fruit breeders are. They were to make Soviet fruit science the envy of the World. While this did not happen, we should remember that all our early apples either originated in Russia or have some Russian parentage. Yellow Transparent, Duchess, Tetofsky, Red Astrachan and Alexander were brought to us by more successful apple hunters over a century ago.