Agricultural Academy 2006 (Pushkin)

Once in August 2006 I was walking in Pushkin town and looking for something interesting to take picture. Occasionally I entered the Agricultural Academy territory. Only a small department of the academy is located in Pushkin, but it occupies unique buildings and territory. There are three buildings, built during tsar times (about 200 years ago). The buildings are built in English style, and all of the materials were brought from England! They are surrounded with beautiful English garden with lots of trees and paths. There are several green houses left from those times.

And as it is often happens in Russia everything this is in terrible condition: bricks of the houses are broken somewhere, stained-glass windows broken or replaced with regular glass, wooden details are rotten, clock on the tower of one of the buildings does not work for years.

There I met very interesting person. He is chief scientist of Russian Academy of Plant Cultivation/Growing (I do not know proper English term for the Russian name of this institution). To make it more clear: chief scientist is also a translation of Russian job name, it is not the highest position at the academy, but quite high. He also told me his numerous scientific ranks, but there were so many of them that I could not keep them in my mind.

So Vladimir was so kind to let me in to the green house he was working in and told me a little about his job. At that time he had a order for creation of new sort/king of grain with certain properties. He worked hard to get this order, but this should bring him some money, and he was quite pleased with it.

Now Vladimir works alone in the whole big green house and does all kinds of work: woodworking, watering and so on. But it was not always like that. He said that during Soviet times there were lots of people serving the green houses, and the job of the scientist was to do science — he was coming in white smock/uniform, making notes, checking parameters, analyzing the results. At those times the green houses were fully automated, they had light, temperature, watering regulation and were suitable for growing vegetation during the Winter, when nights were long, and the temperature could be lower then -30C (-22F). Unfortunately nowadays the green houses looks as abandoned as the rest of he buildings.

I am afraid that such situation is typical for most brunches of Russian science. I was really impressed how Vladimir was talking about his current project, there was no even a little bit of doubt in his words. He was absolutely sure what to do and that he will get the result. For me it is absolutely unreachable — how to create a new sort of vegetation, but this man was talking about it like he was doing it every day (and he was/is!).

It is often happens that good, useful and benefitable inventions remain unclaimed/unused. Vladimir also worried about the future of the results of his work. He said some people sell their work to foreign companies and get money, but he did not want to do like that. He thought the results of his work could help Russia to become more independent from other countries, more people could get a job and so on. Vladimir is a real patriot scientist and I do respect him for this very much. If our country encourage such people and use the results of their work, we could significantly improve our standard of living.

OK. Now about the pictures. First I had a color slide film in the camera, but when it was over, I decided that some of the pictures would be nice looking on black and white film. So I did the second circle around the territory of academy and took some pictures, using black and white film.