The Seeds They Would Not Eat: Leningrad's Starving Botanists

Bölüm metni

While seven hundred thousand people in the city were starving to death, tons of rice, maize and potatoes sat in the basement of a single building. The men who kept watch in that basement starved to death too — without laying a hand on the sacks. To them those seeds were not food; they were the bread of the world that would come after the war.

While seven hundred thousand people in the city were starving to death, tons of rice, corn and potatoes sat in the basement of a single building. The men who stood guard over that basement starved to death as well — without ever laying a hand on the sacks. To them those seeds were not food; they were the bread of the world that would come after the war.

Picture a library. It has shelves, it has catalogue cards, it has numbered boxes. But not one book in this library is made of paper. Each one is a handful of seed. Some of it wheat, some barley, some a potato tuber, some a mountain oat whose name you have never heard. On every box it is written where it came from: the Andean slopes of Peru, the highlands of Ethiopia, the dry valleys of Afghanistan, the rice terraces of Taiwan. And every book in this library is alive. Put it in the right soil and it is born again.

The man who built this library was called Nikolai Vavilov. He was born in eighteen eighty-seven in Moscow, the son of a father who had been a village boy himself before becoming a merchant. The childhood stories his father told always came back to the same thing: famine. The famines of the Russian countryside that returned at intervals, emptied villages, drove people to eat grass. Vavilov gave his whole scientific life to a single question. What has to be done so that it never happens again?

The answer lay somewhere that sounds entirely obvious to us today, but that nobody at the time was thinking about on this scale: in diversity. Vavilov knew that a single variety of wheat sown across a field was fragile, however productive it might be. A new disease, a new insect, a drought lasting a few years could wipe that variety off the face of the earth. But peasants all over the world had spent thousands of years sifting and selecting, keeping the varieties that endured in their own valleys, in their own climate. Somewhere out there was a rye that stood up to the frosts of Siberia. There was a barley that could take salted soil. There was a wheat that never caught rust. Find them, bring them together, and you would hold a gene pool capable of saving the agriculture of the future.

What is more, Vavilov also described where these seeds were to be looked for. According to the theory he developed on the origin of cultivated plants, every cultivated plant had certain centres on the globe where its diversity was most concentrated; those were the places where that plant had been domesticated. To this he added an idea he called the law of homologous series: the tendency of related species to produce similar variations. This gave the botanist a kind of power of prophecy. You could say in advance that a trait you had seen in one species might be found somewhere in its sister species too. When he set out this idea at a congress in nineteen twenty, the reaction of the scientists in the hall was this: biology has finally found its own Mendeleev.

And then he picked up his suitcase and went out to collect the world. He went to Iran, to Afghanistan, to Ethiopia, to Japan, to Korea, to Mexico, to Brazil, to Algeria. There were mountains he crossed on the back of a mule, borders he crossed at the risk of arrest, nights he spent shaking with malaria. Over the course of his life he went on a hundred and fifteen collecting expeditions and brought back material from sixty-four countries. Every time he returned the suitcases were full of seed; and on every seed packet, in that small, neat handwriting, was written where it had been taken, at what altitude it grew, what name the peasant had given it.

This treasure was gathered in Leningrad, in an old ministry building looking out over Saint Isaac's Square. The institution bore the name All-Union Institute of Plant Breeding; let us simply call it the Plant Institute. At the far end of the square stood the golden dome of the cathedral; inside the building, in rooms running the length of the corridor, in wooden drawers, in tin boxes, in thick paper envelopes, sat the largest seed collection in the world. By nineteen forty the number of samples on the shelves had reached two hundred and fifty thousand. At that date there was nothing like it anywhere on earth. America had collecting programmes, so did Germany; but none of them was on this scale, this systematic, this meticulous.

And it was not a museum. The institute was obliged to keep the collection alive. Seed does not live forever; within a few years it loses its power to germinate. So every sample had to be put in the soil at set intervals, harvested again, renewed. That was what the experimental stations set up across the country were for; the station at Pavlovsk, south of Leningrad, had been opened for exactly that purpose in nineteen twenty-six. Which means that those drawers in the building were in fact the heart of a giant, constantly turning agricultural machine. Dozens of botanists, agronomists and technicians had given their lives to a single group of plants. One concerned himself with nothing but oats. One with nothing but rice. One with nothing but groundnuts. One of them, the man who held tens of thousands of potato samples in his care, believed that the potato was the second thing after bread for humankind; because that was what Vavilov had told him.

These people were the guardians of the largest seed collection in the world. A few years later that sentence would stop being a figure of speech.

The cracking of the world Vavilov had built began not in the field, but at the lectern.

In the late nineteen twenties a name rose in Soviet agricultural circles: Trofim Lysenko. He was an agronomist working at an experimental station in Azerbaijan, thin on academic training but bold in the field. His fame came from the claim that by soaking seed before sowing and holding it in the cold, winter wheat could be adapted to spring. The method itself was not new and its effect was limited; but Lysenko's presentation was new. He spoke not in the language of the laboratory but in the language of the peasant. He did not promise years of crossbreeding work; he promised harvests that would multiply within a few seasons.

For an administration wrestling with the famine that had followed collectivization, an administration that wanted results, this was exactly the voice it had been waiting for. As Lysenko rose, his claims grew with him. He argued that acquired characteristics passed to later generations, that the environment could directly knead a plant's heredity. This ran against everything genetics had accumulated up to that day. But Lysenko did not conduct the argument on scientific ground. He declared genetics a bourgeois science: abstract, cut off from the people, foreign. He put not his opponents' ideas but their loyalty under question.

Vavilov supported him at first. He thought it natural to open a door to a young, eager researcher; for a few years he gave his work room. But as Lysenko's claims stopped being testable and turned into a system of belief, Vavilov began to push back. At one plant breeding congress after another the two faced each other. Lysenko accused him of being a Mendelist-Morganist, that is, of serving an imported and harmful science. At a meeting in nineteen thirty-nine Vavilov spoke that famous line of his: we shall go to the pyre, we shall burn, but we shall not renounce what we believe.

This was one of the most dangerous sentences that could be uttered in the Soviet Union in the year nineteen thirty-nine.

The ring around the institute had already begun to tighten in those years. Some of Vavilov's close colleagues were arrested in the late nineteen thirties; some were sent to the camps, some never came back. Inside the institution a machinery of denunciation was at work; his expeditions abroad were spoken of as possible espionage, and his correspondence with foreign scientists went into the files.

On the sixth of August, nineteen forty, Vavilov was doing fieldwork in the western territories the Soviet Union had newly annexed. A van caught up with him out in the open country. He was told there was urgent business in Moscow. When his companions came back to camp that evening, his bag and the plants collected that day were still lying there.

His interrogation lasted eleven months and ran through more than four hundred sessions. The accusations packed into the file were built around sabotage against the country and collaboration with foreign intelligence; not one of them had any connection to the truth. In the summer of nineteen forty-one he was sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to twenty years' imprisonment. In the autumn of that same year, as the Germans drew closer to Moscow, he was transferred to the prison in Saratov.

It was his cellmates who told the rest. In those cells, where nobody had anything left to say to anybody, Vavilov had begun to teach. Genetics, plant geography, the history of world agriculture. A course of more than a hundred hours, with no blackboard, no books, no paper. The man who had built the largest seed collection in the world could now pass on only what was in his memory.

The building in Leningrad, meanwhile, had been left headless. Its founder's name could no longer be spoken; the logic by which he had arranged the shelves, which expedition corresponded to which drawer, why the collection mattered so much, now lived only in the heads of the people who worked there. And those people knew perfectly well what it meant to stand by that collection in a country where the founder of their own institution had been taken in as a traitor.

A year later, the meaning of standing by it would change once more.

On the twenty-second of June, nineteen forty-one, Germany attacked the Soviet Union. The armies on the northern front advanced quickly through the Baltic, and at the end of their route stood Leningrad.

In the city the children were evacuated first, then factories began to be dismantled and carried east. The institute saw the danger too and applied for the collection to be taken out of the city. But in the first months of a war, on an evacuation list where tank factories and artillery ammunition were queueing up, hundreds of heavy crates full of seed were nobody's priority. The answer was slow in coming. Then there was no longer a door left to answer it.

On the eighth of September, nineteen forty-one, German units cut the last land corridor south of Lake Ladoga. Every road into Leningrad was closed. Inside the city were more than two million people, the largest seed collection in the world, and a steadily shrinking stock of food.

In those same days one of the city's main food depots caught fire in a bombardment. Flour, sugar and oil burned in the blaze; the melting sugar soaked into the ground. The following winter people would dig up that earth, fill jars with it and sell it as sugared mud.

The bread ration melted away within weeks. By November those in heavy labour were getting two hundred and fifty grams a day and everybody else a hundred and twenty-five. What is more, there was less and less flour in that bread; cellulose, bran waste, linseed cake, whatever could be found went into the dough. In December the temperature fell below minus thirty. Water pipes burst, the electricity went out, the trams froze where they stood. People began carrying water by the bucket from holes cut in the ice of the river Neva.

The building on Saint Isaac's Square entered that winter unprepared. The glass had long since gone with the pressure of the bombardments; they closed the windows with plywood and boards. There was no heating. Breath fogged in the corridors. The staff moved the most fragile parts of the collection into the inner rooms of the building, to the points furthest from any window; they raised the boxes off the floor and locked them into metal cabinets.

Because cold and damp were not the only enemies of the seed. As the city's every store of food ran out, the rats got everywhere with an unbelievable hunger. The people at the institute saw the rats knocking boxes over, gnawing through paper envelopes. They tied the boxes with iron bars, insulated the feet of the cabinets, and in some rooms spent the night banging on tins to keep the rats away with the noise.

And there were human beings. In that city hunger had turned every door into a possibility. In the institute's stores there was rice, wheat, corn, peas, lentils, almonds. A heap of food that today could be measured in tons, sitting in locked rooms, in an order known only to the botanists.

The staff set up a system of watches. Rooms were kept locked, the keys were divided up, nobody went into a store alone. Night watches were stood in pairs; both for security and so that the person on watch would not freeze and fall asleep. When the air raid sirens sounded, it was also their job to climb to the roof of the building and put out incendiary bombs with sand. One fire would have meant twenty years of expeditions turned to ash.

They were not the only side that knew what the collection was worth, either. The German agricultural administration had been interested in the genetic material at Soviet research stations from the very beginning; in the summer of nineteen forty-three a collecting detachment formed within the SS toured the research stations of occupied Ukraine and Crimea with two lorries and gathered up a portion of the samples Vavilov had spread across the country. They never reached the main collection in Leningrad. The city was besieged, bombed, left to starve; but it did not fall.

And so the largest seed library in the world stayed for eight hundred and seventy-two days inside a building that was wasting away at the same rate as the body heat of the people protecting it.

January and February of nineteen forty-two were the darkest months of the siege. Thousands of people were dying in the city every day; bodies were carried on sledges, could not be buried, and often waited on street corners. The number who died of hunger over the course of the siege is most commonly estimated at around seven hundred thousand.

The people of the Plant Institute were among that number.

Dmitri Ivanov, the botanist responsible for the rice collection, worked among tens of thousands of packets of rice. Most of them had come from Vavilov's Asian expeditions; each packet was the record of a separate village, a separate water regime, a separate ripening time. Ivanov spent that winter protecting these packets, and in the winter of nineteen forty-two he died of hunger in his own room. When he was found dead, thousands of packets of rice stood around him.

Alexander Shchukin, the groundnut specialist, was found at his desk. In his hand was a packet from his own collection. Groundnuts were among the oiliest material in that building, the one carrying the densest calories. Shchukin had not opened the packet.

Georgi Kreyer, the head of the medicinal plants department, died. Liliya Rodina, the oat specialist, died. In the institute's own account these deaths were for many years spoken of as nine people; more recent work based on the archives shows that the number of staff who died of hunger over the course of the siege was more than twice that.

None of these deaths was a suicide. None of them was a theatrical gesture, either. Nobody at the institute had bound anybody with an oath; according to what the survivors said afterwards, no such ceremony, no such scene of swearing, ever took place. Only, everybody knew the same thing: if those seeds were eaten, one person would be full for one meal that day, and a variety that was the result of centuries of selection would be wiped off the earth. Among them were people who understood better than anyone what agriculture actually is; they knew how a variety is lost and how it never comes back. The war was going to end. The fields of the country were going to be sown again. What would be sown in those fields was in this building.

One of the survivors, describing that winter, said that the hardest part of hunger was not being unable to eat. The hardest part was getting up in the morning. Lifting yourself out of bed, putting on your coat, walking down the dark corridor and opening the lock, counting the boxes, writing that day's note in the register. Every day, again.

At the very time these people were dying, the founder of their institution was dying of the same cause twelve hundred kilometres to the south-east, in the prison at Saratov. Vavilov grew steadily weaker through nineteen forty-two; in prison conditions he went into a collapse brought on by malnutrition and died on the twenty-sixth of January, nineteen forty-three, at the age of fifty-five. The cause of death, in the medical term that appears in the records, was dystrophy. That is, hunger.

The man who had travelled sixty-four countries to save the world from famine died of hunger. The people who protected the seeds he had collected died of hunger too. There was only one difference between them: the ones in Leningrad had food, and did not eat it.

Vavilov never learned what his colleagues had done. They, in turn, did not know that their director was already dead. The news of his death reached his family only years later, and the true location of his grave was never fully disclosed; he is accepted to have been buried in a common cemetery in Saratov.

In the spring of nineteen forty-two, as the siege entered its second year, those still standing at the institute took on an impossible piece of work.

The problem was this: a potato cannot be stored like a seed. A tuber is living tissue; within a few months it either rots or sprouts itself away. The only way to keep the thousands of potato varieties in the collection alive was to put them in the soil. And the soil was outside the city, and outside the city was the front.

Vadim Lekhnovich, the man in charge of the potato collection, and his wife and colleague Olga Voskresenskaya kept the tubers alive through the winter in the most suitable room in the building, regulating the temperature by hand and hauling the fuel for the stove themselves. In spring they loaded the tubers into rucksacks and handcarts and went out to the fields on the outskirts of the city. Fields within artillery range. Part of the planting was done between rounds of shellfire, in windows of a few hours a day. They tended the crop through the summer, lifted it in the autumn, stored it again for the winter. They repeated this every year that the siege lasted.

On the twenty-seventh of January, nineteen forty-four, the siege was broken. That evening, for the first time in three years, what stood over the city was not bombardment but celebration fire.

When the inventory was taken at the institute, the picture that emerged was this: the collection was where it should be. It had not been eaten, not been stolen, not been burned. The registers had been kept complete right through the war; which box had been moved where, which sample had been renewed and when, was all written down. Part of the seed had lost its power to germinate over the long cold years and had to be rescued by sowing. The years that followed went into exactly that; in a country coming out of a war, with burned stations and missing staff, the collection was returned to the soil sample by sample and renewed.

But the story did not end there, and what came next was not the ending the people in that building deserved.

In nineteen forty-eight Lysenko won his final victory. At the August session of the academy of agricultural sciences, genetics was formally declared a false science; defending chromosomal heredity stopped being an opinion and became an offence. Courses were removed from the universities, laboratories were closed, hundreds of researchers were put out of their jobs. The Plant Institute took its share; the generation Vavilov had raised was dispersed. The institution that had guarded the collection through starvation was pruned back in peacetime. The price Soviet agriculture paid in this period would be discussed at length in the harvest arguments of the decades that followed.

Lysenko's grip only began to break from the middle of the nineteen fifties, after Stalin's death. Vavilov was formally rehabilitated in nineteen fifty-five; all the charges were dropped. His name slowly came back into the publications. In nineteen sixty-eight the institute in Leningrad was named after him. Today the world knows that institution simply as the Vavilov Institute.

The collection, for its part, went on growing. Today it holds more than three hundred and thirty thousand samples, and among them are varieties found nowhere else on earth, whose wild relatives disappeared long ago. In twenty ten a part of this inheritance came under threat once again: the land of the Pavlovsk experimental station south of Leningrad was put up for sale for housing construction. That was where the collection of fruit and soft fruit was held, the collection that can only be kept alive as living plants; thousands of trees and bushes that cannot be put in a crate and moved. Scientists from all over the world started a campaign, the matter was carried into the international press, and the sale process was stopped.

Vavilov's idea itself is today buried in the ice of the Arctic. The global seed vault opened in twenty and eight in Norway's Svalbard archipelago is precisely the modern form of what he imagined: a shelter carved into frozen rock, holding the backup of every gene bank in the world. Among the more than a million samples in the vault are boxes sent from the Vavilov Institute. Which means that the descendants of those same varieties, protected in Leningrad for eight hundred and seventy-two days from rats, from cold, from bombs and from hunger, now lie hidden inside the Arctic.

The real business of the seed library was never the past. Nobody collected a mountain wheat in Ethiopia as a keepsake. Those seeds were the carriers of the answer to a disease that has not yet appeared, a drought that has not yet happened, a problem nobody has yet given a name to. Today, breeders searching for new varieties under climate change are looking at the very samples that were brought down from a mountain on the back of a mule a century ago.

In the winter of nineteen forty-two, in that cold building on Saint Isaac's Square, the man who died without opening the packets of rice in front of him could not have known this. But it was for exactly this that he died.

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