Help future generations or feed the starving? How besieged wartime scientists responded to a terrible dilemma

Leningrad, 1942. A city under siege. Hitler has declared that it must be rendered uninhabitable and razed to the ground. A ring of German steel ensures almost no food can enter, and three million people are starving to death. The streets are stacked with emaciated corpses, some of which bear evidence of cannibalism. And yet a former tsarist palace in the city centre, close to the Hermitage Museum, houses a great repository of nuts, grains and tubers, the result of decades of plant-hunting by some of the foremost botanists of the era. This is the All Union Institute of Plant Breeding, otherwise known as the Plant Institute, the world’s first seed bank. What will the scientists who work here do? Safeguard their collection, and with it the prospect of high-yield, disease-resistant crops to feed future generations? Or eat it?

This moral dilemma lies at the heart of Simon Parkin’s book The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad, a history of the Plant Institute during the siege, which lasted almost 900 days, from 1941 to 1944. As we have come to expect from Parkin, whose 2022 book The Island of Extraordinary Captives looked at internment camps for “enemy aliens” on the Isle of Man, it is a richly researched and meticulously observed account of a little-explored corner of 20th-century history.