That morning Lekhnovich had awoken to find his boss Vavilov seated at a writing desk by the door, scribbling notes for the day ahead. A polyglot who read the eighteenth-century botanist Carl Linnaeus in the original Latin, Vavilov possessed seemingly inexhaustible energies. On expeditions he slept for only a few hours at night and routinely worked eighteen-hour days. He had, as one colleague wrote, “a mind that never slept and a body which for its capacity for enduring physical hardships can seldom have been matched.” “Life is short,” he often said. “One must hurry.” But Lekhnovich had detected a new sense of urgency to his leader’s demeanor on this trip, the agitation of a person worried that he might not have enough time to achieve his remaining ambitions.

In 1916 Vavilov mounted his first major expedition to northern Iran to study cereals.

Vavilov’s pride at the seed bank was braided through with the affection he felt for his colleagues, whom he referred to as the “kings and queens” of their various specialties.

Vavilov had instilled in his followers a keen sense of responsibility; many of the specimens in the seed bank, he taught them, were as irreplaceable as the artworks hanging in the Hermitage. They could not easily be re-collected or, in some cases, replaced at all, as the landscapes from which they had been harvested had already been destroyed by human activity. His staff understood that preserving the collection was now their primary goal. So, in mid-August 1941, eight weeks after the invasion began, absent government support, and with the enemy approaching the suburbs, the two potato experts had decided to act.

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.”