At the risk of being a spoilsport, and also because the truth does nothing to diminish the importance of the endangered collections in the field genebanks [1] at Pavlovsk Experiment Station, I am trying to clarify some aspects of the story that have become somewhat muddled. Today, the scientists who died protecting the seeds.
Many of the latest crop of reports about the threat to Pavlovsk bring up the poignant reminder that scientists “chose to starve to death rather than eat the stored grain at the Pavlovsk Experiment Station near St Petersburg (formerly Leningrad)”. [2] The point is usually to indicate how truly precious these collections of agricultural biodiversity were; saving them for the future is thus only right and proper, given that people gave their lives to save them during the Siege of Leningrad. That is a line of argument I do not want to question yet; I do want to question whether the scientists died at Pavlovsk.
Pavlovsk Experiment Station was just one of several field stations established or absorbed by Vavilov as he built up the All-Union Institute of Applied Botany and New Crops after becoming its director in 1926. The institute’s name indicates why he did so. To apply the science of genetic and breeding to improve Russian agriculture, by introducing new varieties and entirely new crops. The network of sites spread from the sub-tropical south to the polar north and right across Russia, and was very successful. Pavlovsk, just south of St Petersburg, was just one of these sites, specialising in fruit, potatoes, forages, and some cereals.
Each of these field stations had its own collections of diversity, stored both as plants and seeds, but one of their main tasks was growing out samples stored at the main genebank of the Vavilov Institute, which was at its headquarters on St Isaac Square in St Petersburg. As the siege began, some of the seeds from St Isaac Square were spirited away to Pavlovsk for safe-keeping, but by early 1942 the Germans were shelling the surrounding town of Pushkin and Pavlovsk’s holdings were in danger.
In a daring move, the caretakers of the seeds loaded the portion of the collections held in Pushkin onto twenty trucks, whose drivers managed to pass through the German lines pretending to be peasants delivering grain to other German troops. That convoy of seeds eventually arrived, undetected, at the University of Tartu Experimental Station in Estonia in the summer of 1942.
Gary Nabhan’s Where our food comes from goes on to describe how the staff at St Isaac Square continued to look after the seeds, barricaded inside the building to prevent hungry people in the streets outside from plundering the genebank. The potatoes, stored of course as tubers rather than seeds, were in a basement room where a small stove fed with anything that would burn kept them from freezing.
Numb with cold and stricken with hunger, the staff took shifts caretaking the seeds around the clock. Nine of Vavilov’s most dedicated coworkers slowly starved to death or died of disease rather than eat the seeds that were under their care.
When summer came, the staff planted cabbages and potatoes in the churchyard of St Isaac’s Cathedral and in the fields back at Pavlovsk, standing guard 24 hours a day to protect the potatoes from their hungry fellow citizens. Rats, whose population was no longer controlled by the cats, which had been eaten the previous winter, were a problem too. Vadim Lekhnovich, who survived, was asked was it hard not to eat some of the plants they were growing and guarding.
“It was hard to walk. It was unbearably hard to get up every morning, to move your hands and feet. … But it was not in the least difficult to refrain from eating up the collection. For it was impossible [to think of] eating it up. For what was involved was the cause of your life, the cause of your comrades’ lives.”
Nabhan recites the names of some of those who died:
Alexander Stchukin died at his writing table, holding in his hand a packet of his most prized peanuts that he had hoped to send off for a grow out. The custodian of Vavilov’s many oat collections, Liliya Rodina, died of starvation, as did Dimitry Ivanov, who as his own life failed, stowed away thousands of packets of rice. … There were others as well — Steheglov, Kovalevsky, Leonjevsky, Malygina, Korzun — some who perished by starving, some riddled by sickness, others by shrapnel. Wolf, the herbarium curator, was hit by a missile shell fragment, and bled to death. Gleiber, the archivist of Vavilov’s field notes, died in the midst of those papers rather than leave his post.”
There were undoubtedly others. That not all of them starved is irrelevant. That they were at the headquarters of the Institute in the middle of St Petersburg, rather than at Pavlovsk, is, I believe, relevant. Vavilov’s great achievement was to see the scope and promise of bringing genetic diversity together and using it to create varieties and new crops that could take advantage of Russia’s vast area with all its different climatic zones. To do that, he needed experimental field stations in all those climatic zones, and Pavlovsk was “just” one of those.
The value of the collections lies not in the past; if people had died to protect something worthless, that should not increase its worth today. It’s worth lies in the future, in meeting the challenges — unknowable but certain — that will arise. I do not wish to diminish the sacrifice of those scientists. Not for one instant. But their deaths, on St Isaac Square for the most part, are not the main reason that the collections at Pavlovsk, as elsewhere, need to be conserved.
Next week; just how unique is Pavlovsk?
Notes:
- Despite which, people who really ought to know better are still calling it the world’s first seed bank. [↩]
- Quote singled out from here; there are lots of others to the same effect. [↩]
