LENINGRAD: Here’s testimony to the value of seed banks: even under the direst of circumstances — starvation during war — the staff at Russia’s pioneering seed bank in Leningrad refused to eat up the samples of seeds in their care.

As bombs and artillery shells were falling, they succeeded in planting and growing numerous crops to ensure their seed collections survived. The seed bank had been founded in 1890 and expanded by Russia’s most renowned expert, N.I. Vavilov.

The era of extreme distress came in the early 1940s, when the famed city known previously, and again now, as St. Petersburg came under severe, prolonged attack. It was being pounded viciously by Adolf Hitler’s invading German army. The siege, which lasted for months, caused the deaths of thousands of people, many of them from cold and starvation.

But, according to Russian agriculturists S.M. Alexanyan and V.I. Krivchenko, numerous staff members at the seed bank virtually died at their desks, starving to death while thousands of seed packets were stored nearby.

Writing in the US Department of Agriculture publication Diversity in 1991, the two Russians recalled:

“While throughout Leningrad hunger was rampant, housed in the Institute (of Plant Industry) building was a great number of sorts and varieties of crops in the gene bank, with a total weight of several tons.” The seeds could have been eaten by the city’s starving citizens, and the staff.

So precious was this agricultural heritage, however, that workers such as D.S. Ivanov, a rice specialist, died of starvation even when grain was stored nearby. Oat expert L.M. Rodina suffered the same fate, as did others.

By war’s end, Vavilov’s precious seed bank “was almost completely preserved, thanks to the selflessness of workers and scientists of the Institute,” Alexanyan and Krivchenko said.

Although the seeds were saved, Vavilov himself succumbed to Soviet politics. After being denounced several times by agronomist Trofim D. Lysenko, Vavilov was sent to the labour camp at Saratov, where he died during the war, on Jan 23, 1943.

Vavilov was condemned to a labour camp because he adhered to the “anti-Soviet” idea that genetics was the best foundation for agricultural research. He thus collided with Lysenko, who had convinced Josef Stalin that genetics was a subversive subject and should be stamped out.—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Newsday