The Astonishing Scientists Who Starved to Protect Plants During the Second World War

After Simon Parkin’s account of the siege of Leningrad and the fate of the world’s first proper seed bank, after his postscript, afterword and acknowledgements, there are nine pages that — for people who know the story — are worth the rest of the book combined.

It’s the staff roll call, meticulously assembled from institutional records and other sources, of what Parkin calls simply the Plant Institute. More fully, it was then called the Bureau of Applied Botany and Plant Breeding, which, in 1992, became the Vsesoyuzny Institut Rastenievodstva in St Petersburg, Russia. The institute was founded in the nineteenth century by German horticulturalist and botanist Eduard August von Regel and was vastly expanded by Russian Soviet agronomist Nikolai Vavilov.

The list does not make for easy reading.

Starvation, starvation, starvation, died at front … Between 8 September 1941 and 27 January 1944, while German forces besieged the city, the institute’s staff members sacrificed themselves, one by one, to protect a collection for which the whole raison d’être was to one day save humanity from starvation.