Richard Schröder

Richard Richardovich Shreder was born in Moscow on 15 October 1867. His father, Richard Ivanovich Shreder, was a well-known horticulturist and a professor at the Petrovsky Agricultural and Forestry Academy. After gymnasium Richard entered the natural sciences department of the physics and mathematics faculty of Moscow University in 1887 and graduated in 1891 with a first-class diploma; in the mid-1890s he also finished the Petrovsky Agricultural Academy.

From 1895 to 1900 he was an assistant in the department of private agriculture headed by D. I. Pryanishnikov and wrote articles for an agricultural encyclopedia. In 1900 he passed his master’s examinations, became a privat-docent of agronomy and was sent abroad, where he studied plant physiology under Professor Pfeffer in Leipzig and the physiological chemistry of plants under Professor Schulze in Zurich.

At the end of 1902 the Ministry of Agriculture appointed him head of the Turkestan Agricultural Experiment Station, opened in 1898 in the village of Achchi, sixteen kilometres from Tashkent. He ran it until his death, for 42 years. His first task was to master Uzbek and learn the local farming methods. The station began by testing cotton varieties and in time took up grain crops, fruit growing, viticulture and climate observation.

Shreder collected and tested more than a thousand local wheat samples from Central Asia and introduced a high-yielding irrigated winter wheat, variety no. 584. Material gathered at the station in the early 1920s led to the early-ripening cotton variety no. 1306, named “Shreder”, which carried cotton growing north into Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Transcaucasia. The station tested over two hundred varieties of apple, pear and other fruit and studied grapes.

He also worked to spread knowledge: he founded the first farming journal in Uzbek, “Dehqon”, edited the Russian-language journals “Turkestanskoye selskoye khozyaystvo” and “Turkestanskiy zemledelets”, and published about 250 works, nine of them books and booklets. In 1904–1918 he presided over the Turkestan Agricultural Society, visited the United States in 1911 and in 1912 gave a report on Californian fruit growing. In 1918 he took part in founding the People’s University in Tashkent and became the first dean of its agricultural faculty; in 1921–1928 he headed the department of private agriculture at Central Asian State University.

In 1927 (by some sources 1924) he was given the title Hero of Labour of the Uzbek SSR; he received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour of the Uzbek SSR (1928) and of the USSR (1939), and in 1940 the large gold medal of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition. In 1935 he was elected a full member of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences and became a Doctor of Agricultural Sciences, and in 1943 a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR. In 1938 he was elected a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Uzbek SSR.

Richard Shreder died in Tashkent on 27 April 1944 and was buried in the Botkin Cemetery. The experiment station was named after him in his lifetime, in 1939, on the 35th anniversary of his work in Central Asia; in 1947 a fruit and berry institute named for him was formed from it. Some grape and apple varieties bred at the institute bear his name, and in 2003 he was posthumously awarded the Order «For Outstanding Merit» (Buyuk xizmatlari uchun).