Leningrad must die of starvation, Hitler declared in a speech at Munich on November 8, 1941.
The following winter, hundreds of thousands starved to death.
People tried in vain to stay alive by eating sawdust.
Inside the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry, St. Petesburg.
The collection filled 16 rooms, in which no one was allowed to remain alone.
Workers guarded the storage in shifts all round the clock, numb with cold and emaciated from hunger.
In January 1942, Alexander Stchukin, a peanut specialist,died at his writing table.
Botanist Dmitri Ivanov also died of starvation while surrounded by several thousand packs of rice that he was guarding.
Many of the crops that we eat today came from cross-breeding with varieties the scientists saved from destruction.
He taught himself 15 languages so that he could speak with native farmers.
Specimens collected by Nikolai Vavilov displayed at the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry.
Lysenko also claimed that the vernalized state could be inherited by the offspring.
A political opportunist, Lysenko quickly gained the favor of Joseph Stalin.
He was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment in a Soviet gulag.
Roughly 90 percent of this collection are found in no other scientific collections in the world.
Nikolai Vavilov’s mugshot as a prisoner.
Several deep scars on his right cheek indicate the severe beatings sustained by the scientist in prison.
The seed collection at Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry in 2002.
Photo credit:Dag Terje Filip Endresen/Flickr
