Seeds of hope in the siege of Leningrad

The idea was revolutionary – yet there was something ancient at its heart. The scientist Nikolai Vavilov, arriving in Petrograd in 1921 to take the helm of the Bureau of Applied Botany and Plant Breeding, was on a sacred mission: to make, in his words, ‘a treasury of all known crops and plants’. The world’s first seed bank would shape the future of agriculture – possibly even eliminate failed harvests and hunger. This was gleaming scientific idealism, but there was also an element of the Old Testament Ark about it.

The vision would collide with the brute reality of Stalin’s own efforts to bend nature to his will, and then the nightmarish Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941. Petrograd – by then named Leningrad – would be besieged for three years and transformed into a frozen necropolis with iced-over corpses lying in the streets.