Viktor Grebennikov

Biography

At Krasnoobsk near Novosibirsk, in the museum of agroecology and nature conservation that Viktor Grebennikov set up in 1976, insects hang on the walls enlarged hundreds of times. For these “macro-portraits” he used paper, ink and paint, and besides them metal, glass and plastic. The museum also holds his stereo blocks, sets of glass plates through which a beetle can be examined from every side, and three-dimensional casts of plants. Its main exhibit is the spherorama “Virgin Steppe”: standing inside it, the viewer seems to be in the middle of untouched steppe.

The author of this whole display had no higher education.

He was born on 23 April 1927 in Simferopol, the son of a mechanic and inventor, also self-taught, and a noblewoman. He made his first observations in the large green courtyard where the family lived. As a schoolboy he already drew insects with confidence, pored over books and microscopes in the zoology department of the university, and worked through the reserve collections of the Crimean Museum of Local Lore. At the local plant protection station he helped release trichogramma in the orchards, a tiny insect used to protect plants from pests. He learned to type before he learned to write by hand. In the autumn of 1939 the family left for Tashkent, then for Isilkul in Omsk region. There he finished school in 1944 and worked as an assistant entomologist at the district malaria station. He watched the sky as well: in 1946 the Astronomical Circular of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR published his note on the radiant of the Lyrid meteor shower.

In 1947 he was working as a clerk in Miass, in Chelyabinsk region. By his own account, he was going hungry and saving for a ticket to Ashgabat, where a post awaited him in an astrophysics laboratory, and with a drafting pen he redrew several bread coupons so that he could sell the bread. He was charged with the entire overspending of bread in the town, and the sentence was twenty years in the camps. He served his term in the southern Urals, nearly died of exhaustion and survived because he painted propaganda displays. In July 1953 he was released under an amnesty and his conviction was expunged. Later he described the camps of Miass, Chelyabinsk, Karabash, Kyshtym and Uvildy and illustrated the account with his own drawings; in 1990 the magazine Nauka i Zhizn (Science and Life) published his autobiographical article “My Universities”.

After the camp Grebennikov worked as a commercial artist in Gorky (1953–1955) and in Isilkul. The drawing club he ran at the Palace of Pioneers there grew into an art school, the first in Western Siberia; he became its director and a teacher and left twelve years later. In 1968 his first book, “A Million Riddles. Notes of an Entomologist”, came out in Novosibirsk. In the early 1970s, on his own initiative, he set up a reserve for insects on a stretch of forest-steppe near Isilkul; the area is now listed among the protected territories of Omsk region as the Isilkul Relict Forest-Steppe.

From 1976 he lived in Krasnoobsk and worked as a junior researcher at the Siberian Research Institute of Arable Farming and Agricultural Chemicalization. His main subject was wild pollinators, solitary bees and bumblebees. While studying megachilid bees he exchanged experience with the Canadian scientist Gordon Hobbs; at his request the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture bought cocoons of these bees in Canada, bee farms were built, and Grebennikov worked out a method of breeding them to pollinate alfalfa. His micro-reserves for insects appeared around the settlement. In 1980, together with his son, he held the First All-Union Conference on attracting and breeding wild pollinators in Krasnoobsk. Books followed one after another: “In the Land of Insects. Notes and Sketches of an Entomologist and Artist” (1979), “My Amazing World” (1983), “Bumblebees, Pollinators of Clover” (1984), “Secrets of the Insect World” (1990). Exhibitions of his work were shown at the 8th International Congress of Plant Protection in Moscow in 1975, in the Omsk, Novosibirsk and Kemerovo regions, in Leningrad and in Simferopol, and in May 1976 the newspaper Za Nauku v Sibiri wrote about his exhibition at the House of Scientists in Novosibirsk. In 1984 Vasily Peskov filmed him for the television programme “In the Animal World”.

From the mid-1980s Grebennikov wrote more and more about what he called the “cavity structure effect”: in his view, cellular constructions such as honeycombs give off special waves. In 1985, together with V. F. Zolotarev, he filed an application for the registration of a discovery. Later he claimed that he had built a flying machine from beetle wing cases and flown it over Novosibirsk at night; when this happened is hard to say, since both 1988 and 1991–1992 are given. He produced no proof, his photographs, he said, did not come out because the camera shutter jammed, and scientists rejected these claims. They are set out most fully in the book “My World”, published in Novosibirsk in the late 1990s in an edition of three thousand copies. To my mind, the best thing in it is his own drawings of insects.

An Honoured Ecologist of Russia and a member of the International Association of Bee Researchers, the Socio-Ecological Union and the Siberian Ecological Fund, Grebennikov died on 10 April 2001. A separate room in the district museum of local lore is devoted to him.