The brave World War 2 botanists who starved to death to save life-giving seeds | World | News

In the late summer of 1941, German troops surrounded Leningrad – the Russian city now known as St Petersburg – with a plan to starve its population into submission. So began the longest blockade in recorded human history.

By the most conservative estimates, the siege of Leningrad would claim the lives of approximately three quarters of a million people – four times the number that died in the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined.

Most would die of starvation.

Yet unbeknown to many of Leningrad’s citizens, the world’s first and largest seed bank was situated in the middle of the city, just off St Isaac’s Square. The converted palace building held around a quarter of a million seeds that had been collected from every continent in the world by the seed bank’s founder, the explorer Nikolai Vavilov.

Since its founding in 1921, the seed bank had become world famous. A British journalist had described it as a “living museum… unrivalled in completeness by any other collection in the world”. Many scientists had started to refer to the project simply as “the world collection of plants”.

These were not just any seeds. The botanists believed they could be bred into heartier, disease-resistant and more productive varieties suited for harsh climates, therefore changing the future of food production and preventing famines, like the ones that had plagued their countrymen before.

As the siege ring had closed around the city, attempts to evacuate this priceless collection had failed. The previous year, the secret police had arrested the seed bank’s director, Vavilov, on falsified charges of espionage.

The botanists had been left leaderless. Now, as German troops approached the city they were left to defend the collection, not only from the German bombardment, but also from the temptation they each felt to eat the seeds and ease their hunger pangs.

Two of the botanists, Abraham Kameraz and Olga Voskresenskaya, travelled to the suburban town of Pavlovsk, where hundreds of rare potatoes had been planted in one of the seed bank’s experimental farms.

Throughout August 1941, they dug up the potatoes, placed them in burlap sacks and returned with them to the Institute, while under fire – until the military truck drivers refused to take them anymore.

On his final rescue attempt, when the forward edge of the battle was now just a ten-minute walk from Pavlovsk’s town centre, Kameraz was knocked unconscious by the blast of artillery fire. When he came to, he returned to the seed bank by foot, carrying the potatoes on his back.

During the surrounding of Leningrad, few supplies reached the city and the food in people’s cupboards ran out. At the city’s central markets, people would exchange a gold watch for a fistful of turnips, or a Persian rug for a chocolate bar, an engagement ring for a pound of bread.

A young mother of two small children pinned an advert to a post near the bread shop offering her gramophone in exchange for bread. A soldier turned up at her apartment the following day to make the trade. When the bread was gone, she advertised her precious sewing machine.

And as time passed, Leningrad’s people faced increasingly traumatic decisions. Families, unable to survive on the crumbs salvaged from the grooves of their dining tables, began to eat beloved pets, swapping their animals for their neighbours’ to ease the torment. At the Physiological Institute, famished scientists ate Pavlov’s renowned dogs. Police officers butchered their service animals.

Pigeons disappeared from St Isaac’s Square. For one eight-year-old boy, the box of Christmas tree decorations was no longer a trove of delightful trinkets but a potential source of food. He and his sister rifled through the box searching for the previous year’s walnuts. “Their insides were dry and shrivelled, but we ate them,” he recorded. “I can’t say that it cheered us up, it was just a way to pass the time.”

As the winter of 1941 set in, one of the coldest on record, staff at the Plant Institute began to debate whether they should start to consume some of the collection of seeds held in 120,000 tins in the building.

The botanists received an official telegram urging them to “spare nothing to support people”. But they were resolute in their choice to abstain from eating the collection, feeling its scientific importance to be greater than their individual desire to survive. Every researcher there understood that the seed bank’s purpose was in part to provide a buffer against famine.

“The war will be over one day and that’s when we’ll be held to account,” Dr Nikolai Ivanov, the 39-year-old botanist who led the group, told his colleagues. “They’ll ask what right we had not to protect the collection.”

In the winter of 1941, mice and rats came to the seed bank in their thousands. The closure of grocery stores and canteens had made the animals desperate, while the absence of cats and dogs had made them bold.

Ivanov and his colleagues built rudimentary traps – large cages baited with scraps – while they also filled any holes in the walls and skirting with shards of broken glass and dustings of arsenic powder. Each day the cages would be filled with writhing, starving rodents, which they removed from the building to bludgeon, unable to eat the meat lest the animals had touched the poison.

The lids and sides of the seed containers had two round holes, and the insides were covered with thin gauze to allow the seeds to breathe. The rodents chewed at the meshing, widening the openings until they could reach the specimens inside.

Rudolph Kordon, the Institute’s apple expert and chief keeper of the collection, suggested removing the seed containers from the shelves and tying them into bundles, so the meshes were pressed against one another to prevent access. The tied bundles could be hidden under metal roofing sheets, through which even the most determined animal would be unable to chew.

Preparing the seeds for long-term, vermin-proof storage proved laborious. In cold rooms, with swollen fingers, the work was painstaking.

“After the war is over, our country will need these seeds more than ever,” Ivanov would often say, to inspire his colleagues. The team conducted the work in semi-darkness, in cold rooms with broken windows.

On damp, frosty days, the columns of St Isaac’s Cathedral would gleam from hoarfrost, which also coated the metal boxes in the seed bank. When the task was complete, the staff had tied together a hundred thousand boxes, spread across 40 of the Institute’s rooms. Finally, they locked the rooms and sealed the doors.

By December 1941, the botanists themselves had begun to perish. On Christmas Day, Ivanov went to check on the seed bank’s groundnut expert, Alexander Shchukin, whom he had not seen for several hours.

He opened the door and found Shchukin seated motionless in his desk chair. Ivanov ran to his friend and shook his shoulders. But Shchukin’s body was already stiffened and cold, one hand locked in place on his chest. As he attempted to loosen Shchukin’s arms, a packet of almonds fell onto the desk.

The botanist had died while clutching specimens that, had he eaten them, could have saved his life. At least 19 of the botanists died similarly.

In June 1945, following the declaration of peace, scores of foreign scientists attended celebrations held in Moscow to mark the 220th anniversary of the Academy of Sciences. There, members of the British delegation learned that the seed bank’s founder Nikolai Vavilov had died in prison.

When they returned home to their country, the British scientists Sydney Harland and Cyril Darlington co-wrote an obituary, published in the November issue of the journal Nature.

After outlining Vavilov’s accomplishments, Harland and Darlington turned their attention to the fate of the collection Vavilov had amassed.

“When Leningrad came to be besieged,” they wrote, “the residue of his collections was eaten by the famished people.”

When Ivanov and his surviving colleagues read the obituary, this dismissive aside both wounded and infuriated them. To see their efforts and those of their perished friends misrepresented was indescribably painful.

Ivanov issued an invitation for Darlington to visit Leningrad and see for himself the evidence. When Darlington arrived, Ivanov led the Englishman through the dark corridors and into the rooms to which, by now, the collection had fully returned. On the shelves sat rows of tins that a few years earlier the staff had bound together, away from ravenous vermin and their own temptations.

“We showed him that the collection was saved almost to the last seed,” Ivanov recalled. Embarrassed, Darlington apologised for repeating the error from a BBC broadcast. Nobody in England, he explained, could have believed the collection had survived while its custodians and their city starved.

The botanists’ sacrifice was meaningful.

By 1967, 100 million acres of Russian agricultural land had been planted with seeds derived from the Institute’s collection. By 1979, that area had almost doubled. Today, 90% of the seeds and planted crops held in St Petersburg are found in no other scientific collections in the world.

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