6 May 2025
by Anna Benn
Anna Benn reviews A True Story of Science and Sacrifice in a City Under Siege by Simon Parkin [Hardback, £25, 384pp., ISBN-1399714554, Sceptre, London, 2024]
The Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944) which forms the backdrop to this book was among the most devastating episodes of the Second World War when the city of Leningrad (now St Petersburg) was cut off and then bombed by the German army. During the almost 900-day siege one in three of the city’s inhabitants died from starvation and cold, an estimated 1.5 million people. Although now disappearing from living memory, much has been written about the Siege. In its aftermath the Soviet Union lauded the heroism of the Defenders of the City in monuments, a museum and the city’s famous Piskarovskoe cemetery. At the same time, as the journalist Anna Reid has written, ‘actual blokadniki’ often challenge this Soviet narrative of selfless heroism and ‘are anxious to stress the siege experience’s closed, stony quality; its complete lack of redemptive value…’. In this fascinating and multi-layered book Simon Parkin spotlights one extraordinary example of selfless, if at times almost incomprehensible, heroism in the face of the siege’s horrors. This is the story of how the world’s first and greatest seed bank was saved by its staff from extinction.
The seed bank, housed in a former palace in the centre of the city by St Isaac’s Square, had been amassed in the preceding twenty years by the brilliant and charismatic leader of the city’s Plant Institute – the botanist and explorer Nikolai Vavilov. Vavilov travelled widely to create his ‘Noah’s Ark of plant matter’ with the purpose of developing the most robust grains and plants to banish famine and feed the entire Soviet Union. But Vavilov’s growing celebrity abroad and enviable lifestyle made him increasingly mistrusted by the Soviet authorities (Stalin favoured the theories and quick-fix promise to end famine of another horticulturist, Lysenko) and in 1940 he disappeared. It was no surprise to find out subsequently that he had been arrested, despatched to a gulag and sentenced to death.
Just as they were reeling from the loss of their charismatic leader, the staff of the Plant Institute found themselves in a city under siege. There were urgent State-led efforts to save the city’s treasures with the collections of the Hermitage Museum despatched by train to the Urals, a story in itself. The staff of the leaderless Plant Institute were less fortunate; there were no plans to evacuate their collection, but they were resolved to defend it. This resolution is the central theme of Parkin’s book: the more the horrors of the siege and starvation take hold, the more we are confronted by the moral ambiguity at the heart of this choice, in which preserving the collection takes priority over life itself. For those who were its guardians, the seed bank held the key to the future of Russia – the survival of its grain was imperative to feed the people of Russia after the war and into the future. But at the same time, as millions starved (including the nineteen Institute staff who died from starvation), ‘In thousands of tins sat packets of nuts and seeds that could be tapped into open palms and consumed by the handful’. The steadfast refusal of the Institute staff to allow themselves or anyone else to do so is both admirable and shocking. As, in the words of the poet Olga Bergholz, ‘the blockade tightened round the city’s throat like a noose’ the efforts of the Institute staff can appear in equal parts heroic and incomprehensible. Even when seeds had passed their expiry date by some years, the decision was made to refrain from eating them – there might just be one viable seed amongst them. Faced with such choices, Parkin hedges his bets, understanding the workers’ unshakeable belief in the future and determination not to destroy the work of a lifetime but unable or unwilling to pronounce on whether their sacrifice was morally justifiable.
The book is meticulously researched from the Institute’s archives and numerous diaries and letters to create a fast-moving blow by blow account of events. At times Parkin’s novelistic instincts can grate as he not only describes smells and sounds but also the feelings and thoughts of his protagonists. But he is an effective story-teller, expert marshaller of material and a master of the telling detail such as in his account of the installation of two folding beds and a stove for the person guarding the forty-room Institute building.
Parkin takes us right up to the end of the siege when he describes how the city slowly came back to life and vegetables were sown throughout the city in public spaces, almost to the doors of St Isaac’s cathedral, by the Plant Institute. Emerging wild flowers such as dandelions could now be harvested and potatoes, saved in the Plant Institute, planted out. We also return to the fate of Vavilov. Although his death sentence was revoked, his horrifying state-imposed ordeal in a prison in western Russia is described with angry energy by Parkin as a grotesque counterpoint to the deprivations of the besieged Leningrad. Managing his ordeal through a sense of routine and finding other prisoners with whom he shared common ground, Vavilov died a slow death from the rigours of prison life in 1943. It remains unclear if he ever received news of the saving of his seed bank.
After his death Vavilov saw a slow rehabilitation in the Soviet Union, regaining his reputation as a heroic pioneer in the 1970s. On a visit to the Millenium Seed Bank in Wakehurst – made in part because of the impossibility of visiting St Petersburg due to the Ukrainian war – Parkin meets a curator who still describes Vavilov and his team as ‘way ahead of their time’, pioneers of many processes still in use today. As for the heroic efforts to preserve Vavilov’s seed bank, Parkin tells us that by 1979 a third of all Russia’s arable land was planted with seeds derived from the Institute’s collection while ninety percent of the seeds and crops held in the Institute today do not exist in any other scientific collection in the world. But despite this unquestionable scientific legacy of the efforts of those who are the heroes of this valuable account, there remains in both author and reader a nagging concern. ‘I understand why,’ says Parkin in his Afterword, ‘… people could not destroy their irreplaceable life’s work… But to do so at the cost of people’s lives other than their own? To this I have no answer.’
