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. 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?.....read on- many more challenges

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/12/food-source-famine-leningrad-seed-bank-nikolai-vavilov