Resident Bean Expert

At a canteen​ in Leningrad in December 1941, a man queued for two hours, handed over his ration card, received a bowl of soup and a bowl of porridge, ate the soup and died. A crowd formed around him, not out of concern but in the hope of acquiring extra food. Leningrad under siege was a pitiless place. Two in five people succumbed in the first winter and the streets were littered with corpses. Most citizens trudged past them without a backwards glance. All that mattered was the next meal.

This was der Hungerplan. After reneging on the Nazi-Soviet Pact and invading Russia in June 1941, Hitler ordered Army Group North to advance on Leningrad, the former capital once known as St Petersburg. As a Baltic port and centre of industry, it was a sound strategic choice, but as the cradle of ‘Jewish’ Bolshevism it aroused Hitler’s special ire. Its foundation, he said, ‘was a fatal event in the history of Europe; and it must therefore disappear utterly from the earth’s surface’. On the eve of the invasion, he informed his troops that they were fighting for Western civilisation.

Four days later, German commando units stormed key bridges south-west of the city. By 8 September, the last road link was severed and, with the help of the Finns in the north, Leningrad was besieged. The only outlet was Lake Ladoga, but German Junkers ruled the skies. There was no question of feeding the city’s two and a half million mouths, since the Fatherland needed food. Better, the Nazis reckoned, to plunder Soviet land and ‘starve the lot’. German soldiers were told to think of the enemy as Untermenschen, the opposite of ‘everything that is noble in humanity’.

When the blitz began, the food depots on Kievskaya Street were the first to be hit – three thousand tons of flour and two and a half thousand tons of sugar went in a flash. Survivors remembered the reek of burning sugar for decades afterwards. They were the lucky ones. By a conservative calculation, three-quarters of a million people died in the siege, four times the combined number killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It lasted for almost nine hundred days and in that time, especially during the early months when the ration was cut five times and temperatures plummeted to below -40°C, the blokadniki (‘besieged’) became bestial. Their skin changed colour and roughened. Their vocal cords atrophied. Their lips receded so that they drooled. Fingers froze and legs swelled with oedema. Pathologists conducting postmortems on starved bodies found that the mass of a human heart was reduced by up to a half. ‘I am becoming an animal,’ one teenager confided in her diary. ‘There is no worse feeling than when all your thoughts are on food.’

Sieges don’t change much. Communications are cut off, calories are withdrawn, disease, disinformation and bombs are thrown in. Nerves are shredded and life becomes absurd. This siege, like all sieges, contained elements of farce: concerts continued even as chandeliers shook from bombardments, while at the Hermitage tours were conducted as if the paintings were still hanging in their frames, even though the Old Masters had been evacuated before the blockade. The descriptions were so lively, one witness recorded, that ‘they could almost see Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son and da Vinci’s Madonna.’ But the skein of civilisation quickly unravels – one reason why so many writers are drawn to sieges, from Laurence Sterne and J.G. Farrell to Ismail Kadare and Zbigniew Herbert, whose ‘Report from a Besieged City’ captures the wretched kernel of hope inside every siege: ‘We look in the face of hunger the face of fire face of death/worst of all – the face of betrayal/and only our dreams have not been humiliated.’

The betrayal came from the top. Stalin, neglecting the relevant intelligence and then focusing on Moscow, all but abandoned Leningrad, while his apparatchiks appeared at public baths milky and fat in their privilege. The man in charge of the city, Andrei Zhdanov, enjoyed butter on his bread and lashings of caviar while those in his care ate their pets, sometimes their neighbours, and fashioned tagliatelle out of slow-boiled strips of leather. Nor did the Soviets acknowledge the extent of the suffering. State broadcasts told of ‘hardship’ and ‘shortage’ – not ‘starvation’ and never ‘famine’, a word that had been criminalised a decade earlier when the government’s collectivisation policy killed millions. The accepted word was distrofia, or dystrophy. Five thousand Leningraders died of distrofia on Christmas Day 1941. One of them was Aleksandr Shchukin, a 58-year-old botanist found dead at his desk at the All Union Institute of Plant Breeding just off St Isaac Square in the centre of the city. He was holding a packet of almonds. Why he didn’t eat them, or give them to other starving citizens, is the question at the heart of Simon Parkin’s book.

Shchukin and his colleagues at the institute dreamed that plants would save the world. Not only could they feed and heal people in the present moment, but their genetic traits, stored within their seeds, could be propagated for the benefit of future generations. The ultimate goal was a resilient, high-yield super-crop that might have the capacity, even in Russia, to end hunger for good. After an abortive start caused by the 1921 famine, during which the starving staff ate the collection, the institute acquired a galvanising new director, Nikolai Vavilov, who set about establishing the world’s first seed bank, ‘a treasury’, as he put it, ‘of all known crops and plants’. Armed with a fedora and burlap sack, this indefatigable explorer-scholar collected wild and primitive specimens from all over the world:

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; sweet potatoes from Taiwan … Korean soy beans, Spanish gorse, Egyptian clover tobacco.

The samples were wrapped in tissue paper and transported to the institute, housed in a former palace. By 1933, the collection was ‘unrivalled in completeness’, according to the Times. Each seed was a miniature archive, containing a signature of its past growth and vital information still to be discovered. It was imperative, therefore, to collect and conserve everything. This required some faith, but Vavilov was an inspirational leader. ‘It is better to display excessive concern now,’ he urged, ‘than to destroy all that has been created by nature for thousands and millions of years.’ When, in August 1940, he went missing in the Carpathian mountains while out hunting for an ancient strain of wheat, his disciples vowed to continue his work.

Parkin, who specialises in off-kilter war stories, tells the grim tale of Vavilov’s apparent disappearance in tandem with that of the besieged botanists in Leningrad. In reality, Vavilov had been arrested by the NKVD on charges of spying. His international reputation had told against him and a rival, Trofim Lysenko, had denounced him for ‘wrecking activity in agriculture’. His notebooks were burned and he was sent to Moscow’s notorious Butyrki Prison, where he was tortured into giving a false confession. He was put in a ‘death cell’ in Saratov Prison, near Kazakhstan, then moved to another, where an inmate beat him relentlessly. As Vavilov’s world went on diminishing, so did that of his colleagues in Leningrad, as they endured a siege within a siege.

Unaware of their director’s fate, but not without their suspicions, around seventy staff members – largely women and older men who had not been called to the front – worked to preserve his legacy. Armed only with buckets and spades, they took turns shovelling snow and extinguishing the incendiary bombs (108 in all) that fell on the institute’s roof. They fought off the city’s rodent population, which had been emboldened by the disappearance of cats and dogs. This involved not only catching rats in traps, but also tying together a hundred thousand seed boxes to cover the breathing holes on their sides and lids. It was painstaking work, ‘carried out in semi-darkness in cold rooms with broken windows’, according to Nikolai Ivanov, the resident bean expert who assumed a leadership role in place of Vavilov. Looting was infrequent, and there were no direct confrontations, but the threat of violence was constant. The cellar was guarded by three women. One was Olga Voskresenskaya, a tuber specialist who had grown up in an orphanage and joined Vavilov’s staff aged 26, working her way up the ranks and meeting her husband, Vadim Lekhnovich, in the process. She had proved her mettle before the blockade by rescuing from enemy fire some potatoes growing at one of the institute’s field stations. The potatoes needed protection from frost, an almost Sisyphean task requiring a daily supply of salvaged firewood, but also, when spring came, planting out in the fields. The couple found a plot that was perfect, except for its proximity to German guns. Every now and then they had to dive for cover, but succeeded in getting all their seed potatoes into the ground, in two neat parallel rows. Voskresenskaya survived this operation, but was felled and blinded by a blast during another, and eventually died of her injuries.

For the members of the institute, the most pressing question was how – or if – they could protect the seed bank from their own hunger. The first member of the institute to die of starvation was Vavilov’s former secretary, Pavel Gusev, just two months into the siege; then, later the same day, the librarian Maria Dmitricheva; the following month it was Shchukin, the groundnut expert with his fistful of uneaten almonds. In January, it was the turn of the head of the rice section. ‘Like Shchukin,’ Parkin writes, ‘he died in his office, surrounded by his research papers and several thousand packets of rice samples.’ In the end, at least nineteen botanists died inside the institute while having access to seeds, nuts and tubers that could have saved their lives. ‘It wasn’t difficult not to eat the collection,’ Lekhnovich later protested. ‘It was impossible to eat this, your life’s work, the work of the lives of your colleagues.’ Besides, the institute gave them a reason to go on: ‘During the blockade, people died not only from shells and hunger but also because of the aimlessness of their existence. In the most direct way, our work saved us. It invested us in living.’

This was hindsight, however, and there were certainly moments during the blockade when some questioned the collective decision not to eat the stock, or at least the stringency with which it was applied. In the spring of 1942, the skeleton staff (figurative and literal by this point) discovered some flax seeds that had missed their six-year germination window. Surely the expired grain could be eaten? Ivanov was adamant: ‘I know it wouldn’t be a violation. We can barely walk. And yet I can’t agree to it. I just can’t.’ The rule, he insisted, was to store samples for at least ten to twenty years, just in case one might retain its fertility. This bordered on fanaticism, especially as it defied an instruction sent by Johan Eichfeld, Vavilov’s absent successor, ordering the botanists to ‘spare nothing to support people’. The war would be over one day, Ivanov argued, ‘and that’s when we’ll be held to account. They’ll ask what right we had not to protect the collection.’ He won the day. Allegiance remained with the crucified Vavilov, his desiccated relics and their latent potential for a regained paradise.

The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad is the first book in English about the plant institute during the siege. (The best-known English-language account of the siege, Harrison Salisbury’s 900 Days, makes no mention of the institute, while Parkin suspects that the single, short Russian book on the subject, written by a Pravda journalist, Viktor Senin, in 1979, somewhat embellishes the source material.) It’s an extraordinary tale. Parkin gives us detailed, immersive scenes and his narrative is rich in dialogue, though he warns that much of this (including some conversations deriving from Senin’s book) ‘should be taken as impressionistic rather than verbatim’. At one point, there is a cinematic switch to spy on a Nazi geneticist who raids some of the field station holdings (without coming close to breaching the institute proper), but Parkin never loses sight of his main story. He juxtaposes the volatility of the streets with the orderliness of the institute building on Herzen Street in ways occasionally reminiscent of Bulgakov’s The White Guard.

On 26 January 1943, Vavilov died in a prison hospital, officially of ‘bronchial pneumonia’, but actually of starvation. The previous week, the Red Army had attacked the German position east of Leningrad and broken the blockade. It took another year for the siege to be fully lifted, but there would be no last stand at the plant institute. Of the quarter of a million accessions held there at the start of the siege, around forty thousand were eaten by vermin or failed to germinate, and a small proportion were evacuated by plane over the frozen Lake Ladoga in 1942, but most of the central collection was intact. It included grains subsequently crossbred to create Bezostaya-I, a variety of high-yielding winter wheat now grown around the world, and potatoes used for dozens of new varieties, including Detskoselsky, a three-species hybrid resistant to viral infections. By 1967, Parkin tells us, a hundred million acres of Russian land had been planted with seeds derived from the institute. Twelve years later, that area had almost doubled to a third of Russia’s arable land. Ninety per cent of the seeds and planted crops held in the institute’s current incarnation – the Vsesoyuzny Institut Rastenievodstva – are found in no other scientific collection in the world.

Without knowing how Russian harvests might have turned out in the absence of the central collection, it’s hard to assess the botanists’ sacrifice. But, by any measure, the deaths among them were not meaningless. Vavilov’s reputation has been restored; his face has been put on stamps and his name given to a crater on the far side of the moon. This all took time. An ‘enemy of the people’ was not the poster boy Stalin had in mind for his great patriotic war, nor did the botanists’ decision to hold back their bounty from starving citizens sit well with the Soviet fairy tale of a city in harmony, queuing together, sustaining each other, roused as one by Shostakovich’s symphony.

Parkin struggles with the ethics of their decision: ‘Did these men and women, in opting to sacrifice the lives of real people for the benefit of the imagined many, make the moral choice?’ He has no answer. The story raises important issues about the extent to which scientific progress can justify social neglect, about the ethics of collection and curation, and about our responsibilities not only to each other, but also to future generations. Whose judgment do we fear the most?