In March 1921, the world-famous botanist and geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was named director of the Bureau of Applied Botany and Plant Breeding, which was located in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg, Russia) and devoted to the study of plant life. He initiated an ambitious plan to develop the world’s first seed bank, which he promised would be “a treasury of all known crops and plants” that would produce super crops that could alleviate global famine.
Award-winning author Simon Parkin vividly relates the tragic yet inspiring story of Vavilov and his team’s dedication to the project in The Forbidden Garden: The Botanists of Besieged Leningrad and Their Impossible Choice. By 1934, Vavilov’s pioneering effort had opened over 400 research facilities around the Soviet Union. The seeds, “stored in packets and filed for safekeeping in the wooden drawers that lined the seed bank’s dozens of rooms,” were irreplaceable; in some cases, they had been harvested from crops now extinct due to human activity. Vavilov recruited and trained a staff that understood their worth and felt a “keen sense of responsibility.”
In August 1940, Vavilov vanished. And in June 1941, German troops invaded the Soviet Union. Leningrad’s industrial factories gave the city strategic importance, and as the birthplace of revolutionary Communism, it “symbolized all that Nazi ideology opposed.” Hitler decided to “starve it into submission.” Without support from Stalin’s government and unable to move the seeds, the Plant Institute staff and others in the city lived and died through 872 days of siege.
The remaining staff now faced a moral question. “Eat or abstain?” Parkin writes. “Is any sacrifice justifiable in the name of scientific progress, or to protect one’s research? What responsibility did the botanists hold to the survival of future generations? . . . There is no doubt that the quarter of a million seeds, nuts and vegetables in the building . . . could have prolonged the lives of the botanists and, beyond that, the public.” A new director encouraged them to eat the collection, but, committed to their mission, they refused. Using the diaries and letters of the botanists, as well as later-recorded oral histories, Parkin paints a suspense-filled record of this harrowing time in history.
