Somewhere in the sky above, the mosquito drone of a plane’s propeller neared. Since Abram Kameraz had begun to commute by train from Leningrad (now St Petersburg) to the suburban town of Pavlovsk earlier in the summer of 1941, attacks by enemy planes had become a frequent cause of delay. Through the carriage window, Kameraz saw the road was littered with bodies. These men, women and children had been killed by German planes which had strafed and bombed the crowds of refugees as they fled towards the city. As Kameraz caught the silhouette of a German Stuka cresting the horizon, the driver stopped the train and ordered the passengers to run to a nearby ditch for cover.
Kameraz, 36, was a potato specialist, one of about 50 botanists who worked at the Plant Institute, the world’s first seed bank, situated off St Isaac’s Square in the centre of Leningrad. The institute’s potato collection contained 6,000 varieties, including many rare cultivars – the largest, most diverse potato collection yet gathered in history, a crop of inestimable scientific importance. And right now, hundreds of delicate South American specimens were planted in sheds in the fields on the outskirts of the city, in the path of the advancing German army.
Throughout August, Kameraz and his colleague Olga Voskresenskaya had made regular trips back and forth between Leningrad and Pavlovsk. But after the enemy planes fired on the trucks carrying potatoes near the Pulkovo Heights, the military drivers had refused to take them. So, Kameraz had decided to stage today’s reckless final rescue attempt alone. Every potato he could save and return to the seed bank in the city centre increased the chances of preserving his important work.
It was evening by the time Kameraz reached the Red Ploughman, one of dozens of field stations operated by the main seed bank. He found it abandoned. The lab technicians and farm workers had all fled, leaving the potatoes untended inside cubicles that could be wheeled into place on wooden rails, to encourage growth among varieties used to different climes.
Kameraz opened the sliding doors on one of the sheds housing Chilean samples, to allow the light in. Then, one by one, he took each plant from its pot and gently tapped the soil free, checking to see which specimens were sufficiently mature to bear the stress of transport. He wrapped a potato in parcel paper, and placed it into a sack, ready to be slung on his shoulder for the return journey to Leningrad.
Kameraz heard the shudder of nearby artillery fire. The forward edge of the battle was now just a 10-minute walk from Pavlovsk’s town centre. Kameraz took cover inside one of the plywood sheds. As the sound of explosions drew closer, he wondered if these were to be his last moments. After a while, however, he grew accustomed to the noise. He tuned out the sound, opened the shed door, then gingerly resumed his work.
He moved carefully from shed to shed, checking and bagging the plants. Then there was a sudden flash, followed by black silence.
* * *
The Plant Institute had been established in a former palace in Leningrad’s Herzen Street nearly 20 years earlier by the renowned scientist and explorer Nikolai Vavilov. In the 1920s, Vavilov and his young staff began to travel the world. They collected rare seeds, tubers, roots and bulbs and brought them to the seed bank to be sorted, catalogued and stored.
The mission was urgent. Everywhere conflict, natural disaster and the destruction of habitat threatened to make certain types of plant extinct. Once destroyed, these specimens and their unique characteristics would be irretrievably lost. The extinction of unexamined plant varieties could mean the loss of world-changing medicines, or super-crops that could provide security against famine.
The idea of a seed bank was novel, and the long-term value of a repository of genetic plant material yet to be fully understood. Some viewed Vavilov’s project as an eccentric waste of time and money. But by 1933, the botanists had collected at least 148,000 live seeds and tubers.
The seed bank had become world-famous. As a journalist for the Times wrote that same year, it was a “living museum … unrivalled in completeness by any other collection in the world”. Scientists had started to refer to the project simply as “the world collection of plants”. Vavilov’s pioneering work was recognised internationally, and he was elected a member of the Royal Society of London. But fame brought Vavilov into the spotlight of Stalin’s regime: the Soviet leader was wary of his collaboration with westerners. His research came under attack, and he eventually decided to resign from his post as the seed bank’s director.
This decision, however, was not enough to save him. During a seed-collecting expedition to Ukraine in August 1940, Vavilov was bundled into a black sedan by four agents for the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB. He was imprisoned in Moscow, where he underwent a gruelling series of interrogations. Eventually, he was forced to make a false confession. On 9 July 1941, Vavilov was found guilty of spying for the British government and sentenced to death.
* * *
In June 1941, a few weeks before Vavilov’s trial, Germany had invaded the Soviet Union. After Vavilov’s arrest, much of the work of running the seed bank had been assumed by Dr Nikolai Ivanov, a 39-year-old botanist who supervised Kameraz’s potato rescue attempt. On the morning of the invasion, Ivanov set out from his home and headed the seed bank to which he had dedicated his career. He strode through the tall wooden doors at the entrance to 44 Herzen Street, a rabbit warren of shadowy corridors.
Inside the institute, time appeared to flow differently. This was a place of profound stillness. Something of the essence of life had been captured and stored in these rooms, genetic material that had outlasted generations of human conflict, cycles of politicians, successions of tsars and recurring battles for territory and resources.
For all the magnificence and history held within these walls, the institute’s rooms were poky. Shelving units clad the walls, laden with identical-sized metal containers – about 120,000 in total – each labelled with a string of numbers used to identify the specimens held within. The tins sat like miniature bunkers. They contained treasures that had been carried hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to Leningrad. There was naked-grained barley found on the plateau that borders Turkestan, India and Afghanistan; wild perennial flax picked from Iran; orange and lemon pips collected on the road to Kabul; radishes, burdock, edible lilies and chrysanthemums from Tokyo, and sweet potatoes from Taiwan.
Ivanov was not immediately concerned for the collection. He could not imagine the Nazi invaders would ever make it as far as the outskirts of Leningrad, let alone here to the heart of the city. And even if an army were to storm these rooms, what soldier would understand the value of the little packets?
Across St Isaac’s Square, Ivanov’s friend Prof Iosif Orbeli, curator of the Hermitage Museum, had already acted. Moscow had failed to return his calls, so he had made an executive decision. The evacuation of the museum would begin at once. He ordered every employee to begin removing the most precious paintings from the walls, ready to be placed in the steel-lined vaults that housed the museum’s collection of Scythian gold. Researchers, security personnel and technical employees all helped with the packing.
Two weeks after the invasion began, the first trainload of the Hermitage’s treasures left the city. The train comprised 22 freight wagons. The most valuable items were stowed in an armoured carriage, guarded at either end by anti-aircraft guns. Ivanov watched the evacuation of the Hermitage treasures with dismay. Leaderless and all but abandoned by the state, the botanists at the Plant Institute did not know what they were supposed to do with their own treasures.
In the middle of July, the city’s leaders introduced the first ration cards for bread, butter and other essentials: about six slices of bread per day, and a pound of butter per month. Soon, such meagre rations would seem like riches.
In Berlin, Hitler had told his military chief of staff that Leningrad was not merely to be attacked but was to be rendered “uninhabitable”. By razing the city, the German army would eliminate the symbolic centre of Bolshevism and nationalism. But there was a practical benefit to Hitler’s scheme, too: by reducing the number of people living in Leningrad, the German army would be spared “the necessity of having to feed the populations through the winter”. The plan was simple: surround the city and starve its population into submission.
At the end of August, Ivanov finally received word that the Plant Institute was to be included in what would be the final set of industrial enterprises and institutes to be evacuated from the city. About 100 institute staff and their families would be taken by train along with the seed collection to a small town in the central Urals, close to the Hermitage’s safely stowed artwork.
Any sense of elation was soon tempered, however, when staff learned they had been allocated just two standard carriages and an open-top freight car. The staff felt anger and disappointment: after they’d patiently waited for weeks, the carriage would only provide enough room to evacuate a fragment of the institute’s 120 tonnes of seeds.
To increase the number of seeds they could evacuate, the group devised a plan: each passenger would take an allocation of seeds in their hand luggage, a soft parcel weighing no more than 2kg and containing as many as 100 different seed varieties.
On the morning of 25 August, Ivanov and the other staff who had elected to remain in the city made their farewells to those who had chosen to flee.
The direct Moscow-Leningrad railway track was blocked, so all trains had been re-routed to the east, through the station town of Mga. The botanists felt the sway of the carriage as the driver periodically accelerated then braked for unknown reasons, while following the Neva river eastwards. On the outskirts of Leningrad, the countryside already bore the pock marks of war: craters either side of the tracks filled with water, splintered telegraph lines, earth scorched by explosives, trees snapped and uprooted.
On 30 August, German forces captured Mga, and closed the final rail link from Leningrad. At dawn, evacuees from the seed bank, whose journey had been slow and faltering, were awoken by a sharp jolt. Some passengers opened the carriage doors and began to walk along the track towards the front of the train to find out what was happening. There they found a wounded Red Army sergeant, his bandage soaked with blood, addressing the driver.
“The Nazis have taken Mga,” the man said. “The track is blocked. Turn around and take us with you.”
More than 2,000 goods vans and cars loaded with the property of many of the city’s enterprises and offices now cluttered the tracks. The evacuation had failed. The institute staff and their families would have to return to Leningrad, leaving the double-walled boxes of seed samples and important documents forsaken on the sidings.
* * *
By the time Abram Kameraz regained consciousness, in the field where he had been collecting potatoes, German forces had reached Leningrad’s suburbs. He checked his body for injury, then looked over the spilled sack to ensure the potato specimens had not been damaged in the blast. Finally, he got to his feet, hoisted the sack on to his shoulders and made his way to the railway station, hoping there might still be a train to return him and his final haul to the city centre.
When Kameraz finally reached the Plant Institute, he received a hero’s welcome from Ivanov and his colleagues. Kameraz had succeeded in saving at least one specimen of every variety of potato held in the institute’s collection. Now, the botanists divided the potatoes into three duplicate sets. One tuber of each variety was placed into a drawer in the building at 44 Herzen Street; another two were moved into the cellar of 42 Herzen Street. If bombs or fire destroyed one crop, perhaps the remainder would survive.
In early September 1941, Hitler’s troops began to shell and bombard Leningrad. Young musicians from the Leningrad Conservatory would stand among the columns at St Isaac’s Cathedral, close to the seed bank, to listen for the approach of engines. At night a pilot would drop a parachute flare that illuminated the roofs of the Plant Institute and the other buildings around St Isaac’s Square. Shortly thereafter, the waves of Junkers bombers would begin their approach towards the light.
At the sound of an impending attack, the on-duty manager at the seed bank would open the logbook, ready to record the time. Whenever an incendiary bomb landed on the institute roof, four on-duty staff members would be ready to race out. Using a pair of pincers, they would grab the smoking cylinder and fling it down into the courtyard below, where another staff member was stationed by a pile of sand. The incendiary would hit the asphalt with a cloud of sparks, and the colleague at ground level would roll it across the yard and bury it in the sand, which would boil from the 1,000-degree heat.
Staff at the seed bank recorded the attacks, which could last as long as 18 hours at a time, in a logbook. In total, 108 incendiaries landed on the seed bank roof. The intensity of the bombing and shelling exerted a severe psychological strain on the Plant Institute’s staff, some of whom began to question the wisdom of guarding a collection of seeds when so many human lives were at stake.
After a particularly intense raid, one staff member implored Ivanov to destroy the collection, research papers and archives to prevent them from falling into enemy hands. “We should mix the seeds together, then burn our papers in the stoker,” she begged.
“The rest of the institute gave short shrift to such faintheartedness,” Ivanov recorded.
* * *
The winter of 1941 proved especially brutal. Temperatures began to drop to below -40C, at which point the hairs in your nostrils freeze and your breath turns to a cloud of crystals that tinkles to the ground with a sound Siberians call “the whispering of the stars”. The army was at the gates, but in no hurry to invade a place that with each passing day became weaker and more desperate.
War now left its mark not only as craters beside the road, but as intimate bruises, blotches and hollows on the skin. Malnourishment robbed Leningrad’s citizens of bodily form and sex, turning men and women into androgynous spectres, their limbs protruding as bones, every gaunt face a stranger in the mirror. Mothers began to divide their daily ration into smaller portions, giving it to their children throughout the day to create the illusion of plenty. Others stole food and hunted stray animals. In the most extreme cases, desperate people resorted to cannibalism.
The siege wiped out any sentimentality towards animals. At the Physiological Institute, famished researchers ate Pavlov’s renowned dogs. Police officers butchered their service animals. Pigeons disappeared from St Isaac’s Square. Families, unable to survive on the crumbs salvaged from the grooves of their dining tables, ate beloved pets.
For Ivanov and his colleagues, the loss of Leningrad’s domestic animals had secondary effects. The seed specimens stowed in their tin containers and arranged in orderly rows in the buildings’ secure rooms could withstand the cold. But a different sort of threat arrived. Each day, Ivanov and Rudolf Kordon would unlock the doors, open the cabinets where the tins were stacked and check the condition of the boxes. During one routine inspection, Ivanov was examining the containers when a rat jumped from a shelf on to the floor in front of him. Cornered, it threw itself at Ivanov and bit his leg. The scientist hurled the rodent off himself, afraid he might catch hepatitis. If vermin could enter the locked rooms containing the priceless collection, the seed bank had a major problem.
The mice and rats came 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 – and 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 prioritised the wheat collection, stowed across more than 20,000 boxes, which would be critical for making flour in the future. Then they worked their way through the rye, oat and barley collections, followed by maize, millet, sorghum, buckwheat, peas, and 1,500 other boxes containing assorted varieties of legumes. Finally, the staff tied up the tins of vegetable seeds and of industrial and forage crops. Seeds gathered from unsorted drawers were put into some 2,500 metal boxes.
“The entire job was carried out in semi-darkness in cold rooms with broken windows,” Ivanov recorded. On damp, frosty days, the columns of St Isaac’s Cathedral would gleam with hoarfrost, which also coated the metal boxes in the seed bank. When the task was complete, the staff had tied together 100,000 boxes, spread across 40 of the institute’s rooms. Lastly, they locked the rooms and sealed the doors.
Unable to reach the seeds, the rats began to chew loose documents to shreds, and gnaw at the wooden legs of the scientists’ desks. Slowly, their numbers began to decline.
* * *
Throughout the autumn of 1941, a few dozen Soviet aircraft succeeded in delivering food supplies each day, but these provisions fell far short of the requirements to feed even a fraction of the 3 million people trapped in the city. As trams began to run more infrequently, then not at all, some of the department heads moved into the building to avoid having to expend valuable calories traipsing through snow from their homes.
By December, the health of Ivanov’s colleague Aleksandr Shchukin was failing. The botanist’s skin had dried and blackened, his nose sharpened. When his hands became swollen and clumsy, he no longer shaved, fearing he might cut himself and never stop bleeding. Twice Shchukin fell while climbing the steps to the front doors of the institute.
Fifty-eight, shy and polite, Shchukin had studied, lived and worked in Leningrad his entire life, becoming an associate researcher of the collection of industrial and forage crops at the seed bank, and an expert in groundnuts. Since the invasion, he had steadied himself with ritual and routine. He would arrive at the seed bank promptly each day, five minutes before he was due to start work. He would hang his overcoat and galoshes in the cloakroom, then disappear into his study until lunchtime.
Vadim Lekhnovich, the botanist charged with keeping alive the potato collection stowed in the seed bank’s basement, found hope in his responsibility. “During the blockade, people died not only from shells and hunger but also because of the aimlessness of their existence,” he later reflected. “In the most direct way, our work saved us. It invested us in living.”
The seed bank’s staff held on to the importance of their task: to guarantee food security, if not for themselves then for those who followed them. Still, in the depths of winter it had become almost impossible for Shchukin and the other botanists to maintain their work schedules.
Herzen Street was a strategic route along which Red Army troops and munitions required constant access, and responsibility for maintaining the road outside the building fell to the seed bank’s staff. Each day those with the strength to do so cleared snow and garbage, collected meltwater and broke up and removed ice.
On 25 December, as news of an increased ration spread through the city, Ivanov went to check on 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 Ivanov attempted to loosen Shchukin’s arms, a packet of almonds fell on to the desk. The botanist had died while clutching specimens that, had he eaten them, could have saved his life.
Throughout December and January, more than a dozen of the botanists succumbed to starvation. Weeks earlier they had collectively decided they would not consume any of the seeds. Now, everyone’s commitment to the plan and resolve to uphold it was privately tested to the extreme. In thousands of tins sat packets of nuts and seeds that could be tapped into open palms and consumed by the handful. Almost everything was edible, and the quarter of a million seeds could have been eked out to sustain the botanists for months.
And yet to consume these specimens would, for the scientists, feel like a betrayal of the past two decades’ worth of effort, and the thousands of miles that their imprisoned leader, Vavilov – who like many his colleagues would starve to death before the war ended, his death sentence having been commuted to two decades’ hard labour – had travelled around the world. The botanists had been faced with this ultimate and fundamental dilemma: to save a collection built to eradicate collective famine, or to use the collection to save themselves.
“It wasn’t difficult not to eat the collection,” Lekhnovich later said. “It was impossible to eat this, your life’s work, the work of the lives of your colleagues.”
* * *
In the new year the remaining staff received a telegram from the acting director of the seed bank, who had left Leningrad several months earlier. The telegram read, simply: “Spare nothing to support people.”
The message was clear: nobody would begrudge the scientists if they chose to consume the remaining stocks of seeds. Spring, with its new shoots and revived hopes, was close; some of the collection could be spared to ensure the survival of the faithful few, so that, come its arrival, they might oversee the planting and help revive the city. The remaining staff rejected the notion, however. “The war will be over one day and that’s when we’ll be held to account,” Ivanov told his colleagues. “They’ll ask what right we had not to protect the collection.”
Eat or abstain? A simple choice that masked a clutch of complex, even taboo questions: 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? What was the correct course of action when that responsibility plainly sat at odds with their obligation to the living?
There is no doubt that the 250,000 seeds, nuts and vegetables in the building – some of which, by Ivanov’s own admission, were probably no longer viable to germinate – could have prolonged the lives of the botanists and, beyond that, the public. Equally, every scientist in the building understood that the seed bank’s purpose was in part to provide a buffer against famine caused by plague, pestilence, floods or, most pressingly, war.
Even if the surviving scientists weighed their options together, or brokered disagreements about the ethical course, none recorded these conflicts or later recalled them. Dissent was either a personal matter or a private debate.
This much is certain: one of the botanists composed a response to the director that made plain the scientists’ final choice: “All our efforts are being directed towards preserving the collection. Any other questions are of secondary importance.”
The story of the Plant Institute is a tragedy. At least 19 staff members gave their lives to save the collection. But it is also a tale of triumph. In the spring of 1942, the scientists helped organise the city’s mass growing programme, where every inch of public green space was used to cultivate food. They helped produce posters to aid citizens in identifying which wild plants were edible, and Kameraz’s colleague, Olga Voskresenskaya, gave lectures to amateur growers, instructing them on how to propagate potatoes from seedlings, cuttings, grafts, sprouts, potato eyes and even peelings.
The sacrifice of those botanists who died was meaningful. The siege ended, and then the war. By 1967, 40m hectares 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.
After the war ended, the British scientists Sydney Harland and Cyril Darlington co-wrote an affectionate obituary for Vavilov. “When Leningrad came to be besieged,” they wrote, “the residue of his collections was eaten by the famished people.” This dismissive aside wounded and infuriated the botanists who had survived the siege. 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 him through the dark corridors and into the rooms where the collection was held. Embarrassed, Darlington apologised. Nobody in England, he explained, could have believed the collection had survived while its custodians and their city starved.
This is an edited extract from The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad, published by Sceptre on 14 November. To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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