No monetary price could be placed on the Plant Institute’s treasure; its value was not abstract but elemental.

It wasn’t difficult not to eat the collection, It was impossible to eat this, your life’s work, the work of the lives of your colleagues.

Routine provided the gift of a daily focus and purpose. The absence of purpose could be as deadly as cold and hunger. “For many people a regimen, a work routine, was an unattainable dream,” wrote one resident. Without a meaningful focus, beyond the most basic concerns for survival, “the effort to set their life in order just wouldn’t come.” Lekhnovich understood the mortal value of his task to keep alive the potato collection stowed in the seed bank’s basement. “During the blockade, people died not only from shells and hunger but also because of the aimlessness of their existence,” he later reflected. “In the most direct way, our work saved us. It invested us in living.”