In the winter of 1941/42, a building full of food stood in St. Isaac's Square in blockaded Leningrad. It housed the largest collection of seeds in the world from the All-Union Institute of Plant Breeding - grains, rice, nuts, legumes, gathered by Nikolai Vavilov's expeditions across five continents. About one hundred thousand samples could not be evacuated: on August 30, 1941, the Germans captured the Mga station, and the city was sealed off.

Employees received 125 grams of bread. They guarded the boxes, tying them together so that rats could not topple them, and did not take any grain from the collection. On November 27, 1941, the curator of oilseed crops, Alexander Shchukin, died at his desk - among bags of nuts. On January 9, 1942, Dmitry Ivanov, head of the cereal crops department, died in the office where bags of rice stood. That same winter, agrometeorologist Nikolai Leontievsky and medicinal plant specialist Georgy Kreyer also died. In total, at least fourteen employees of the institute perished during the blockade.

Their teacher could not help them. Nikolai Vavilov was arrested on August 6, 1940, during an expedition near Chernivtsi. In July 1941, he was sentenced to death, which was later commuted to twenty years in camps. On January 26, 1943, the man who dreamed of freeing the world from hunger died of exhaustion in a Saratov prison.

The collection survived the blockade. From it, dozens of new varieties were developed, and today the VIR has more than 320,000 samples. In 1955, Vavilov was rehabilitated 'for lack of evidence of a crime.'