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The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad: Science and Sacrifice in a City Under Siege
Five thousand Leningraders died of distrofia on Christmas Day 1941. One of them was Aleksandr Shchukin, a 58-year-old...
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 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.) 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.
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