Soviet Pomegranates

and the rest of the 20th century

I want to tell you about the Soviet pomegranates, and the man who tended to them in the far reaches of what is now Turkmenistan, and how he loved these trees (yes, that is the word). But first, there is the matter of the 20th century.

In its heart, World War II killed so many people that we do not know how to account for the vastness of the suffering. What is often remembered as a triumph in the U.S. cannot be compressed in the same way for the Soviet Union. 10 million Soviet soldiers were killed, and something like 25 million of their people died.¹

In Leningrad alone, 1.5 million people perished from war and famine. And then there were those who somehow lived through those years, and had to go on living, people like Gregory Levin, and his mother.

“Permit me to introduce myself,” Levin wrote in his memoir, Pomegranate Roads. “I am Gregory Moiseyevich Levin. I was born in Leningrad in January, 1933. My Jewish name is Girsha—its variants are Girsh, Gersh, Gershon, Gershom. In Hebrew ‘Gershon’ means ‘an exile.’ I have been given a somewhat symbolic name.”

During the war, his father was killed. His mother fell ill with scurvy. Levin gathered pine needles and nettles and dandelion roots to help her. Horrors surrounded him. “I remember during artillery fire, a young girl leaning tightly on her boyfriend or companion when the shells were flying over our heads,” he wrote. “A woman’s body on a stretcher was carried past us, and instead of a pelvis, the body had ragged bloody flesh. I remember at early dusk, a dying man on the ground trying to take food cards from another dying man.”

That was his childhood. In the grim adolescent years that came after, he lived in a single room with his mother, who worked 16 hours a day at a factory. A poem by Leningrad poet Alexander Kushner always stuck with him: “One does not choose one’s times, one just lives in them and dies.”

And yet, as he recalled, “I already had my own world inside myself,” a world filled with plants. He dreamed of becoming a scientist. And he would become the foremost expert on pomegranates within the Soviet empire from his perch just north of Iran. His botanical finds from the pomegranate forests of central Asia would make their way around the world. His individual story, too, would find an audience, thanks to one woman from Sonoma, who heard a segment on the radio one day, and became obsessed.

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First, let me tell you that in my front yard, I have two tiny pomegranate trees that I got from Berkeley Hort. Grown by Dave Wilson Nursery, they are the variety Parfianka, and on the little plastic label looped around their spindly trunks, it is written, “Dr. Levin selection.” You, too, can propagate Levin’s life work.

You have to imagine Gregory Levin at the outset of his career. He’d worked his way through the Soviet academy and finally gotten an assignment at the agricultural research station in Garrigala (now usually spelled Kara Kala), Turkmenistan, a tiny town along the Sumbar River nestled into the Kopet Dag mountains. Television would not arrive there until 1980. Even in 2024, this is a remote, remote place.

Deserts and mountains surrounded him, but their valleys were the native range of the pomegranate, which captured Levin’s heart. He would make expeditions searching out new specimens, cultivating cuttings in Kara-Kala, and studying the incredible diversity of the fruit. His book details these adventures across Soviet central Asia. This was old-school travel, requiring toughness, social finesse, and an eye for the landscape. And this is an old-school book, filled with digressions and little observations about punicology. You get the sense you are staying at Levin’s house, being regaled with stories over a series of tea-drinking sessions. Would you like to hear theories of pomegranate domestication? Of course you would. How about this one cemetery in the Chandir River Valley? Yes, that, too. And the great Soviet academician Nikolai Vavilov? His story is essential, of course.

This was a life structured by the great powers of the 20th century and the botanical realities of Punica granatum. Levin began his work on pomegranates in 1964, and over the next 40 years, gathered over 1,000 varieties. A monument of germplasm. No comparable collection has ever been assembled anywhere else in the world. Levin remembered the research station as “a tiny oasis in the spiritual wasteland of our Soviet times.”

But the Soviet era came to an end, and when the Soviet Union fell, support for scientists collapsed. The new post-Soviet countries rarely provided the kind of funding the botanists needed for their work. “Gone were the expeditions. Publications ceased,” Levin wrote. “Many of our scientists and researchers passed away—let us hope to a better world—or were fire/forced into retirement.”

Over the 1990s, the bizarre and wildly corrupt authoritarian government of Turkmenistan starved Levin’s work of funding. The research station fell into disrepair. “It was unbearably painful to witness the collections perishing, dying. I had given 40 years of life to create and study them. On the threshold of my fourth quarter of a century, my face and body carry the traces of my past life, the inevitable abrasions and lacerations,” Levin concluded. “Wherever I am in this big and stormy world, Garrigala will be with me forever.”

Levin adopted a survival strategy: dispersal. He sent scores of pomegranate cuttings to a research center in Israel and also to UC Davis. The cultivars now form the core of the Davis collection, and continue to grow and thrive.

The story could have ended there, a remarkable botanical and agricultural contribution known only to pomegranate growers and agronomists.

But as it happened, Barbara Baer, a Sonoma County writer, rescued his narrative. She heard a snippet of it on public radio (!) and resolved to go to Turkmenistan and see the native terrain of the pomegranate. Eventually, she tracked down Levin, solicited a memoir for him, had it translated, and published it as Pomegranate Roads through her small publishing house, Floreant Press.

What an act of kindness and generosity! Imagine Levin, living in a small apartment towards the end of his life, receiving an email from this person in Forestville, California, which enables his life work to emerge back into the public realm, a crucial companion to the living plants in the Davis collection. It is a rare and mysterious work, emerging from a time and place that is now entirely lost. And like a rare pomegranate that evolved in specific and strange conditions, it has unusual gifts to offer those of us living in our world. I could not recommend this book more highly or appreciate its strange textures more.

Levin experienced the worst of the 20th century, and for him, pomegranates were a salve, a fascination, a conduit to deep biological time. “Life is short, problems are innumerable,” he wrote, “but the horizons of the unknown are wider yet.”

Yes, I know it seems that our world is filled with death and destruction. And it is. At the same time, it is important (to me, at least) to consider how much peace activists have achieved. Perhaps, as some cynics say, nuclear bombs have kept powerful nations from killing everyone on Earth for fear of inducing nuclear armageddon. But it’s not only that. As horrible as things have been in Gaza, in East Africa, in Ukraine, in Central America, in Haiti, in Syria, in Iraq, in Afghanistan… The forces of peace have reduced the scale of suffering across the world tremendously, and that achievement should not be forgotten.

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© 2024 Alexis C. Madrigal
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
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