Bittersweet Infamy - #127 - A Palace of Seeds and Nothing to Eat

Episode Date: June 29, 2025

Josie tells Taylor how the botanists at the U.S.S.R.'s Institute of Plant Industry kept the world's largest seed bank intact during the infamously brutal Siege of Leningrad (1941-44). Plus: we examine the ancient roots of the al-Badawi tree, the millennia-old olive tree that keeps vigil over the embattled village of al-Walaja, Palestine.

Beautiful Anonymous changes each week. It defies genres and expectations. For example, our most recent episode, I talked to a woman who survived a murder attempt by her own son. But just the week before that, we just talked the whole time about Star Trek. We've had other recent episodes about sexting in languages that are not your first language or what it's like to get weight loss surgery. It's unpredictable. It's real, it's honest, it's raw. Get beautiful anonymous wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey sweethearts, Taylor here from the podcast you're just about to listen to. This episode of Bittersweet Infamy is about war crimes, including discussions of genocide, upsetting subject matter. Listen with care. Welcome to Bitter Sweet and Food.

I'm Taylor Basso. And I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we share the stories that live on in infamy. The strange and the familiar. The tragic and the comic. The bitter. And the sweet. We're past that summer solstice.

The days are technically getting shorter depending on, you know, where you live in the Earth's rotation. Yeah, shorter from here on out. It's a very depressing. That's fine. Yeah, it's, yeah. Yeah, what's that about? Well, let's not focus on that.

The days are still long. The twilights are still dim. Yeah. And we are still here to fill your languid summer evenings those bittersweet summer evenings with infamous tales Gleaned from human history. How about you Jerm number 13? I'm doing well. I am out of the jury box Wow back on the ice folks

So for those who didn't listen to our last offering, number 126, spin out in the fast lane, we got the information that Josie is in fact Jersey as in she has been conscribed into jury service. My brother just got a jury summons today. Oh shit. It's like the measles. Yeah, contagious like a yawn. So tell me about your experience. First of all, you were the alternate.

Did you in fact have to vote? No, I did not. As the alternate, I sat in the jury box in like a slightly different chair. And then when the jury did go into deliberations, me and this gentleman were escorted to a different room and we ate our Luby's lunches in another office space. I can't believe it's just called Luby's like that out in the open. Have you ever been to Luby's?

No. It's like buffet. Well lubricated food. Well oiled. Well oiled indeed. It's like an old kind of that buffet style. It's not all you can eat, but like you go and you get your food. It's known in Texas is like that's where all the old people go

because you can get like big servings of good chicken and dumplings. I want to eat where the old people are eating. That's a lot of wisdom got you to that. Luby's little did I know that Luby's caters the courthouse, baby. A nice capitalist contract for Luby's. We love to see it. So the case was a criminal case and it was the state of Texas versus this individual and he was on trial for causing serious bodily harm with a firearm to a family member.

Well, you don't like to hear that. Geez. No. And like that's how much we learned in the jury selection process. But then when the trial started and opening arguments happened, we learned that this individual had shot his grown son, his like 20 something son, multiple times. Non fatally. Oof.

But he had shot him. Damn. Yeah. Guns are the him. Damn. Yeah. Guns are the devil's tool. Yeah. And we learned right after the opening statement. So we learned in that first day, surprising to the prosecution that the defendant pled guilty immediately.

He said, no, I did this. I totally did this, but I want a jury to determine my sentencing. Oh, how interesting. Yeah, it was kind of a rare case. In fact, yeah, the state prosecutor, she didn't know that going in. So she was like, oh, OK. And even the judge was like, oh, OK. Well, that part of the trial is I didn't know we did that.

I didn't know that we did off menu items like this. Baby, it's a Luby's, you know, a la carte, all you want. And this was kind of a cool moment at the end of the trial when the sentence was delivered by the jury. We went back into the jury room and the judge came and talked to us. And then both the prosecuting and the defending lawyers came and talked to us. So we got to ask them questions. Like, did you know that he was gonna plead guilty or not guilty and da da da da da? So we got like inside track info, which was interesting.

Oh wow. Yeah. Didn't even have to pay the VIP pass either. Even the alternate got it, yeah. You got the meet and greet, damn. Yeah. It was a very intense case because it's all family. There were two police officers and an ER doctor that testified, but besides that, the rest

was family members. It was the son who was shot, his wife, the mother, even the defendant, the guy who pled guilty got up on the stand. Oh, wow. Without delving too much into it, and I guess without compromising the privacy of the individuals involved, what were your own impressions? Like, what would you have taken into account as a juror?

I don't know. There's a lot to kind of take in. As we always say, much to consider. Much to consider, yes, yes. The family members who testified were very nervous. And so sometimes it was a little hard to read them. We've seen what happens when this guy gets frustrated with his family members, no disrespect.

I can understand why they might feel nervous. Yeah, yeah, all four of the family members who testified, testified with the translator. They testified in Spanish and then it was translated. That was interesting because you didn't quite get the emotion of their response or when you got the full translation of what they said it was through a translator who was talking in monotone and yes, no Yes, I know who my yes. My father's yes. He's sitting right there. He has the plaid tie on and the glasses. Yes

You know, it's all very like you can still hear the emotion in their visual testimony. How's your Spanish? My listening is better than my speaking. There were some times when I was like, because I could understand the Spanish. And the guy who sat next to me, he was fluent in Spanish. I felt bad for I think there were maybe like two or three people who are fluent in Spanish because they just heard the testimony fully completely twice. That was a little tricky and emotions are just running very high. The defense had a point that they made repeatedly that like the instigating incident was that his wife wanted

a divorce. His wife of 30 years wanted a divorce and that kind of turned his world upside down and like sent him to a dark place. You can't shoot your son like that though. In some ways I was relieved that I wasn't part of the delegation. That's I think the thing that weighs most heavily to me about the jury process is like imagining myself in the position to be like the moral arbiter of people's misdeeds when I think that's something that I really like fear and impose on myself often and you know things like this.

No, that that's true. And I think that's why they give you 11 other people and you have to come to a consensus. It can't be like majority rules or anything. Everybody has to vote for what you propose. What a system. Twelve angry men, just men. Okay. I didn't believe it either, but I watched the movie and they were all men. So the other jurors decided to give him seven years

in prison. Damn. Well, the prosecution asked for 30 years. Shit. And the defense of course asked for probation. What impressions did you come away with about the process, the justice system, people, anything like that? Misogyny as alive and well.

In what capacity? The defense's arguments around the wife and I think also like guns be dangerous dog. Oh yeah, we knew that. Because you can have a bad night and if you don't have a gun you're not going to shoot somebody. But yeah, it was an experience. I don't want to have to do it again anytime soon. It is kind of exhausting.

Like it's a lot of like stand up, sit down, sit down, keep sitting for hours, listen, okay, go into this tiny room and eat a bad salad and you know like that kind of thing so. First of all don't say that about lubies. Second of all don't order the lubies at salad. That was my mistake. That was a lubies mistake. That was my mistake. Don't order the lubies at salad. You heard it here. Oh shit sorry. And then do they now at least pull you out of the pool of names for a little while or are you just right back in? I have three years.

Or they can't call me. Okay, sick. What are you gonna do with those three years? Savor them. What have you been up to? What did you have for lunch ten days ago? I can't give you ten days ago, but I can give you Friday afternoon. That's pretty good.

I'll take Friday afternoon. That's pretty good. I'll take Friday afternoon. So I went with my neighbor Maureen and true old heads of the podcast will know Maureen because if you go back to, I think it's our fourth episode, our first ever Christmas special Lapland New Forest, which was recorded during the absolute like thick of COVID. Oh my God. The variants were flying around, right? Variants named after various Greek letters. And you can hear Maureen walking around with her little maraca, cause it was 7 PM and that's when people would bang the pots and pans

for the healthcare workers. But she was after people gave up on salute and the nurses. She was on that shit for months doing the little maraca, dude. And you can hear her do it in that episode. Maureen. A gem. Great lady Maureen. I shake my maraca for you, Maureen. Too true, too true. Well, we went out and shook our maracas together on Friday because we were a little bit prior to that. We had just run into each other on the bus on our way downtown to different things. She had mentioned that there was a Banksy exhibit in town and asked if I'd seen it. Oh. I said, oh no, have you? And she said, Oh no, I don't have anyone to go

with. And I said, well, Maureen, why don't we go to the Banksy exhibit? Cause of course we know how to solve this problem. Exactly. More seems to me like we've got two halves of the puzzle here, right? Yeah. And so I finally got my act together, looked it up. We decided to go. I went and I picked her up outside her church and we just walked over to this exhibit in Gastown about the street artist, very, very well known, well beloved, worldwide famous, but anonymous street artist Banksy. Oh, very cool. What do you know about Banksy? My favorite Banksy exploit is every time I see a piece of graffiti. I'm like, I think that might be a Banksy. I do that too. I think probably a lot of people do that. Maybe we're not that special. I did that just today. I was like, oh that's Banksy. It was just someone in our neighborhood tags things as Obama. So it just writes Obama on the wall. And I saw an Obama tag too. It was like, oh Banksy.

And again, you just, Banksy. Ha ha ha, I did again, you sh- Manks. Ha ha ha. What a little scamp. I sort of associate Banksy with these very striking, stenciled, a child holding a balloon that's a heart, a depiction of like a child in a war-torn place, sort of metaphorically, symbolically. Yeah. And then I think like some great publicity stunts too. The big like kind of stunty one that I can think of

is when Sotheby's was auctioning off one of his prints and then he hit a button so that immediately after this thing was sold for like 8.5, whatever, 850K or whatever, it shredded. Which has to be at first the most horrifying moment for the person who just bought that print. And then afterwards you have to be like, oh my God, I own the print that Banksy shredded.

That thing just quadrupled in value. All those little shreds, yeah, each one is worth what I just paid for the whole thing. Really interesting exhibit, really interesting body of work this guy has overall. Very cool to be surrounded by it and immersed in it. And I think I was also surprised at the reminder of how like anti-colonial, anti-war, anti-capitalist, etc. so much of the work was. You would imagine Banksy is doing quite well for himself. This sort of like an anonymous graffiti artist from Bristol in the UK working under a pseudonym comes about starting in the 1990s with some like kind of audacious public art stencils. And just sort of now it's at the point where everything he touches is gold. Like if Banksy vandalizes your home, that thing is now quadrupled in value. So he can

kind of get away with whatever he wants because like... And then he shreds your home. If he shreds it, now it's worth more. Quadruple, now it's quadrupled. Yes, now it's worth like $8 billion. He'd be a great like bittersweet infamy candidate with our Banksy's. He's gotten up to a lot of various shenanigans. Do you think he'd be a guest? He could just not turn on his camera.

I don't know how to look him up is the thing. When I open up the yellow pages, what then? What do I go to? I think that one thing I was really impressed by that I hadn't realized was how much of his work is actually done in these sort of active zones of conflict. Like you will go into like the Ukraine or Palestine or places like this and do art there that is like reflective of the persecution that is being faced there and like the conflict and the violence that is being felt there.

That is pretty cool. Yeah. And it was sort of apt, I guess, because I was in this space when I was surrounded in this kind of gallery space with these You know videos and pieces about Syria about Palestine about Ukraine Where I would had already been doing a lot of the looking into and research for today's Minfamous which takes place in the Palestine in which we find ourselves today a modern Palestine Although yeah It's a story that predates that in a lot of ways and you'll kind of get what I mean when we get to the main point of it. I've brought a story about a tree

of interest because I love trees and I love to be ensconced in trees and I think that... Vancouver boy through and through. Vancouver boy through and through. There's a line in this story that's yet to come that trees are better than people and that's not my quote, that's yet to come that trees are better than people. And that's not my quote, that's someone else says this in this story, but I thought it was true. I remember we sort of talked about this back in episode 93, the tree huggers, which is one, a Josie story about the Chipko movement of Uttar Pradesh and India and these folks who like hugged trees

for activist reasons, right? Yeah. And there is something really, I don't know, there's something that grounds us and connects us to the earth in a really timeless way about these large ancient trees. So I bring you a story about a large ancient tree that lives in Palestine. Cool. But in order to do that, I need to explain why the situation in Palestine is so fraught right now. So we've got to set the table a bit. Okay. Should say coming in I have no desire to enter this story with disrespect to anyone. I'm conscious that I am an agnostic slash atheist westerner who lacks the spiritual

connection to this place shared by the major players. I am conscious that the role of westerners in this conflict has been to interfere and facilitate violence and I don't wish to imitate that in any way. I'm also conscious that I'm speaking as someone who's a settler in a colonialist settler society. Lastly, I don't wish to label any population as being comprised of any one type of person. There are Palestinians and Jews who seek peaceful coexistence. There are Israeli people who speak out and label Israel's actions in Palestine as a genocide. There are others who rigorously deny this. There are Palestinians in support of the actions

of Hamas and others who are not. This isn't by any means the whole picture, this is just a minfamous. Which is a story design of our own making. We can't break the rules in any means. So in the late 19th century, Zionists, people who want to create a Jewish ethnostate, arrive and purchase land in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Their goal effectively is to take over the joint

and create said Jewish ethnostate in an area of religious significance for all three of the world's most prominent religions, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. The idea of a Jewish return to an Israeli homeland appears in the Torah, with the story of the expelled Egyptians as well as the return of the expelled Babylonian Jews to the land Judea, and also figures prominently into the Passover Seder, which ends with the words Next Year in Jerusalem. Jewish people more generally lived in the Ottoman Empire throughout its existence, including arriving there due to displacement after expulsion from other areas, such as from Spain in the 15th century.

Long history of displacement. Long history. After the Allies win World War I, part of the aftermath is that in 1918 they partitioned the Ottoman Empire, which had been aligned with Germany, into smaller sections which they, the victors, individually police. The area of Palestine is put under British control under what is called Mandatory Palestine. Zionists living in Palestine find an ally in the UK who announced their support for Zionism in 1917 via the Balfour Declaration. The population of the Ottoman Empire, more generally, is about 96% ethnically Arab at this point. Fast forward 30 years to the end of World War II and the Holocaust, during which an approximate 6 million European Jews are killed in a genocide committed by Adolf

Hitler's Nazi regime. This is a time of great collective trauma within the world's Jewish communities, which is something to consider when we think about how fervently some pro-Israel folks associate the idea of Israel with the idea of safety from persecution. For such people, the idea of Israel and its righteousness can become deeply enmeshed in their sense of Jewish identity, although again, that's not the experience of all Jewish people. While this is a story that is critical of the actions of the state of Israel itself, as well as some Israeli settlers, I understand the search for a safe homeland free of discrimination. However, the creation and maintenance of the state of Israel will involve many instances of the settlers replicating those traumas

against the Palestinian population. In 1947, the UK announces it will end its mandate on Palestine with the decision of the area's future being assigned to the United Nations who recommend partition into two states, much to the disagreement of Palestinians. In 1948, we see the Arab-Israeli War and the beginning of the Nakba, an ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland. Josie, when we say the phrase ethnic cleansing, what does that evoke to you? I mean, the Holocaust, Rwandan genocide, brutal murder, brutal death based on phenotype. It's based on things that are assumed and seen and not always confirmed. And that's, I think that's what makes the violence so brutal is that it's our basis.

Like you don't look right. Therefore I'm going to remove you from the planet. You and your people and your traditions and your culture will never be able to take root and grow ever again. Certainly. And there's also the idea in addition to the brutal violence of it, we see a lot of forced migration in this context and specifically the forced migration of Palestinians in the 1948. Nakba is the largest forced migration in modern history. An estimated 13 to 16,000 Palestinians are killed. Palestine is placed under martial law until 1966, so a good chunk at about 18 years there, during which time massacres of Palestinian citizens continue.

In 1967, the Six-Day War sees Israel fighting its Arab neighbors, primarily Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, with Iraq and Lebanon also involved. By the end, Israel has taken territory in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, the two territories that make up the state of Palestine previously occupied by Egypt. Hundreds of thousands more Palestinians are displaced. In Israeli-occupied Palestine, Palestinians face severely limited rights. Their property is confiscated. They live under military law and are not allowed to access certain areas accessible to Jewish Israeli settlers. Officially, the policing of to Jewish-Israeli settlers. Officially, the policing of separation of the Israeli and Palestinian populations is called hafradah, but, says Human Rights Watch in a 2021 report,

in certain areas these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution. And apartheid is different rules for different ethnic groups, essentially, to boil it way down. Yeah. In 1987, we see the first of two intifadas, Palestinian civil uprisings. These include suicide bombings carried out by the Palestinian Islamist Jihad, a Palestinian paramilitary organization resulting in the deaths of 491 Israeli civilians. Citing these bombings and their effects at the turn of the millennium, Israel builds a wall around the West Bank.

Right. In 2007, Sunni Islamic nationalist group Hamas takes over governance of Palestine after a civil war. Hamas attempts to resist Israeli settlement via armed conflict, suicide bombings, etc. On October 7th, 2023, Hamas launches an attack on Israeli civilians. 1200 Israeli people are killed, more are wounded, and 251 are taken captive. That sort of kicks off the current saga that we are watching play out. Yeah. Israel responds by occupying and attacking Palestine in what the United Nations,

Amnesty International, and global scholars have called a genocide, which continues to play out horrifyingly before our eyes via the means of bombings, starvation, sabotage of aid, and more, Israel denies the accusations of genocide. Pretty vehemently too. Yeah, oh yeah. Sketchy estimates put the Palestinian death toll between 30 and 70 thousand so far. Pretty much all the statistics are grim.

Gaza has the largest number of child amputees per capita in the world. While the world's governments have slowly become more critical of Israel and its conduct in Palestine, not so with the USA, the country's key ally, which shares Israel's priorities of religious expansionism, militarism, so on. Throughout all of the above, Israeli citizens are given a depiction of the conflict that emphasizes Palestine's wrongdoing without discussing the wider historical context of Palestine being passed around by colonial powers for over 100 years. In 2011, for example, Israel passed the Nakba law, which denies government funding to institutions that commemorate the Nakba. Palestine's aggression in this context is explained away as anti-Semitism from an extremist

Islamic state, which, to be clear, anti-Semitism has greatly affected the movement and treatment of the world's Jewish communities, including in Islamic states. We can also see, however, that the everyday oppression under which Palestinians live under Israeli rule plays a major role in the extension of this conflict." So that sort of brings us in a very, very simplified way, because again, this is not by any means the whole story, that gives us some of the major flash points in this conflict that has really defined, I would say certainly Western perceptions of the area in a 21st century context. And that is really an unfortunately full violent bloom right now.

Yeah. Like this history, like I feel like 1945 learned about the British creation of Palestine, but then kind of any education following that was kind of stopped. I mean, Six Days War, you kind of learn some of those things, but any discussion of much to consider and the role of antisemitism and the role of genocide and ethnic cleansing, all of that. Islamophobia.

Islamophobia, yeah, all of that just kind of went, well, it's a tricky area. It's a conflict zone. Conflict zone. Right. And it's not our conflict even though we have, again, the American apple pie special pumped a bunch of weapons into the situation. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Not just America. Israel has many, many allies, right? Although lately it's been less and less in vogue as sort of the situation in Palestine, I think, upsets more people in the world. Yeah. Or becomes more prominent in certain types of news. And I think for a lot of people, the like, conflict zone has always been like just off the table. Ta-Nehisi Coates has his latest book called The Message.

He writes about Palestine. And one of the first things he says is like, I've looked at American Jim Crow, I've looked at racism, I've looked at like the apartheid system that the US has built and still lives with and under. He admits like, I've always just kind of pushed Palestine to the other side of the table because I didn't know what to do with it.

The book is like him actually visiting and seeing and writing about it. But I feel like a lot of folks have had to kind of bring the magnifying glass closer. It's often to my great delight that I don't have to participate in some incredibly fiery, complicated per my perception discussion where I perceive it is a combative discussion or that I will be judged for my POV on it or whatever. Get to be an alternate. Yeah, get to be an alternate, exactly. But the flip side of that is if there is something I can do in my limited capacity as someone

who can donate money and there are many places and many mutual aid crowdfunding type situations to which you can donate money. I've been donating to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, but there are, I'm sure, other great charities doing work in this department. But then the other kind of limited thing that I can do from here where I am is to, I guess, lend my voice to the subject. And why don't we tell a story?

You're good at it. So, one way that the persecution of Palestinians continues is to do with the olive harvest. Olives are a major crop in Palestine with a reported 7.8 million olive trees in 2011, though certainly those numbers, like many to do with Palestine, will have changed in the recent past. About 100,000 families rely on olives for their primary income, with olives comprising 45% of all crops on agricultural land. Oh.

It is common for Palestinian farmers to be working their own land and be threatened away by the Israeli Defense Force, the IDF. Even prior to this, the Israeli targeting of the olive trees themselves was extremely common with 870,000 olive trees uprooted between 1967 and 2009. Whoa. Yeah. It's hard because I don't mean to in any way suggest that I guess the damage done to people isn't in any way subservient to the damage done to a grove of trees, for

example. And certainly when you damage a grove of trees, there are also implications for the family that saw to that land and had those trees, right? But it does mean something to destroy a food source. Absolutely, a resource, a food source, a potential source of money, potential source of nourishment, of shelter. And identity. And identity. Yeah, of course.

They're ancient. They're ancient in the truest sense of the word. Like we're talking many hundreds of years and we'll go into it. The olive tree itself is a sacred tree in many cultures. They're frequently mentioned in the Bible and in the Quran it's said that Allah swears in the name of the fig and the olive tree. The olive branch in a grim irony is a symbol of peace. Yeah, that's rough. Olives and olive trees figure in a lot of art and imagery around Palestinian identity and it's not hard to see why.

These are beautiful, wise and big trees with a lot of living under their belts. They're providers of abundance. They're resilient in a frequently harsh climate and terrain. And there's a real, I guess, cultural significance to what I saw referred to as a sacred season, which is the olive harvest. You really come together with your family. You have this dish called Musa Khan, which is the olive harvest, you really come together with your family. You have this dish called Musa Khan, which is a chicken and onion dish that's sort of the national cuisine of Palestine. And the starring ingredient is like the world's freshest

olive oil that we just got from the trees kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. And you sit there and you do religious ceremony together and you catch up on life and you have meals together and you connect with on life and you have meals together and you connect with your cousins and your little sister comes back from university to come help. You know what I mean? This is the vibe. Yeah. And when is the olive harvest season? Is it summer? October, November. And so for today's Minfamous, I want to take a look at one such olive tree. Known as the al-Badawi tree, it grows in the Palestinian village

of Al-Walaja, a West Bank village near Bethlehem. Carbon dating puts the age of the al-Badawi olive tree at between 3 and 5,000 years old. Woah. Holy shit. That's some old ass shit. It said Romans. Those kids. those tykes, the Roman Empire. And it's still pumping olives? She's declining a bit, but still produces olives. Okay, good for her. Lots of them even when she yields, lots of them.

And a lot of it I think has to do with climate change and these are very sensitive trees and I can't imagine being surrounded by warfare is very good for the skin, you know? Yeah, yeah. That's ageing goals right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all that olive oil, right? Keeps you young and dewy. Yep, yep. Moisturize. Dewey. To put that age, three to five thousand years into perspective, this tree situated in a fraught place of deep religious significance pre-existed the creation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. pre-existed the creation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Oh man. The creation of Judaism in particular, because that shit out.

Along with a handful of similarly ancient specimens that live in the region, it is one of the world's oldest olive trees. According to Paloma DuPont de Dénuchin for Atmos, quote, the tree towers nearly 43 feet high, boasts a circumference of 82 feet, and casts a shadow of 2,600 square feet, the same footprint as the average American home. Whoa, I love that idea of the shadow. That's very cool. So I'll show you, Josie,

and I'll put them on our Instagram too, I'm sure, but I'll show you a couple of pictures. And one of these is from the outside, so you can really see the big canopy. That's very cool. That's big. Very, very big and it has these sort of like gnarls to it and bends out and has this gigantic canopy that you could imagine laying under that. In like one of these 40 degree desert days, you have this olive tree to keep you warm and keep you fed and keep you safe and you just go and lie under its branches, right? Yeah, that's very cool. It's huge.

And in fact, the name, the al-Badawi tree, is said to have come from the 13th century Sufi mystic, Ahmad al-Badawi, who is supposed to have spent time under the branches of this particular olive tree. And so now, as a result, this tree is a popular pilgrimage site for Sufi Muslims because this very important mystic in their religion supposedly used to spend time here, you know, so they say. So legend says. Yeah. Oh, that's so cool. The Baus also protected the residents of Al-Walajah, who were driven from their homes during the Nakba and slept under the olive trees as Israeli personnel ran military drills in the valley

below. The stewardship of the Al-Badawi tree, which requires special care. She's an old girl. She's very particular, you know. She needs a certain amount of water. You need to sing to her at a certain time of night. Yeah, at a certain pitch. If you're late, she'll know. Yep.

The stewardship of the Al-Badawi tree is overseen by a 50-year-old father of four named Salah Abu Ali, although one imagines such a tree will have had many stewards over the millennia. Yes. Ali considers the tree, which grows on his family's orchard, his fourth son. Aw. Or I should say he's had a fourth son since. His fifth son. Or I should say he's had a fourth son since. His fifth son. Okay.

And he has named a branch of the tree Ibrahim because it started growing on the same day that his youngest son of the same name was born. Oh, whoa. He spends all day at the orchard, tinkering with the finer points of the water and soil. He occasionally sleeps there at night. He feels a profound connection with

these trees broadly, but this specific tree, the albedawe tree, to the point where his wife reportedly feels jealous. Ooh, uh oh. Your big sexy other woman, your big ancient grandma, sexy grandma. You only drink sparkling water, fine. Some of the nicknames Ali has coined for the tree include Al-Kitariya, which is the wise old woman, Em Al-Zaytun, which is the mother of olives, and Arus Falstein, which is the bride of Palestine. The tree broadly is declining in production and entirely barren in some recent years,

although in others it has provided 400 kilograms or 900 pounds of olives, as much as 25 younger trees. Oh my god. Holy shit. The old girls still got it. Yeah, yeah. Even after all these thousands of years. Yeah. The tree and others like it are among the few resources left to the villagers of Al-Walajah,

whose boundaries have shrunk considerably as Israeli settlement has continued, and which is now nearly entirely isolated and contained by Israeli walls and settlements. The village's access to water and uncultivated land has been drastically reduced, and in fact the al-Badawi tree was nearly cut off by the separation wall until village residents won a court case and had the fence diverted. Oh wow. Yeah, impressive. Yeah. Since October 7th, 2023, Israeli settlers have destroyed 43,000 olive trees. Incidents of Israeli settler violence during the olive harvest have gone up, although there are some groups, like Israeli interfaith organization Rabbis for Peace, that send volunteers to protect and help with the harvest.

Even that doesn't always help, as in one incident where those volunteers were pelted with stones by hooded assailants. Families are being driven from their own land. olive harvesting is becoming increasingly unprofitable, tourism to the area is basically dead. Yeah. But the Al-Badawi tree lives on, and Salah Abu Ali believes it will continue to do so, saying of the tree, it's better than people. Yes. Yeah.

This reflects the spiritual – yeah, it sure is, huh? It sure fucking is. This reflects the spiritual connection Yeah, it sure is, huh? It sure fucking is. This reflects the spiritual connection Ali and others like him have with these trees, with some even conceiving of the trees as having moods and memories. One olive farmer, Khaled Muammar of Batira village near Al-Walaja, says of one of his own trees, The olive tree knows who planted it. In this case, my grandfather. If you abandon it, it gets depressed.

Oh, yeah. I appreciate the respectfulness in that kind of relationship with nature and the earth. And I think there's something extremely humbling in contemplating these trees, which predate the modern nation of Israel and the British Mandate of Palestine and the Ottoman Empire and the Crusades and the Romans and the Greeks and the Babylonians. Yeah. Yeah. And keep going.

Just keep everything. Yeah. Halfway through the Egyptians. Halfway through the Egyptians is when this tree kind of touches down. Okay, yeah. Maybe not halfway, but in and amongst, in and amongst. These trees have kept watch over us as humans as we commit our various atrocities. In some ways, it's a reminder of how small we can be to each other as people when the alternative would be to exist in cooperation with one another.

I understand why so many Palestinians resonate with olive trees as an image and a metaphor, and while I understand the bittersweetness of wishing anybody resilience because it means they have something to survive, I wish resilience for all the civilians affected by this conflict, especially those in Palestine whose suffering is ongoing. I wish healing from the trauma that has affected both the Muslims and the Jews who've been driven from their homelands and subject to terror and genocide over the millennia that this tree has been alive, and I hope that this cycle of institutional discrimination and colonial violence is able to stop. I hope that this place and this culture and these trees remain. In the words of

Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, olive will stay evergreen like a shield for the universe. Olive will stay evergreen. Like a shield for the universe. Like a shield for the universe. That's very cool. Want to do a film club ad? Battle of the sexes baby! Do you want to be Steve Carrell? Do you want to be Emma Stone? Bee? Like are we bee-ing them? Is that what we're doing?

Yeah, we're just going to play tennis over Zoom. Do you want to do a film club ad? Battle of the sexes, baby. Do you want to be Steve Carell? Do you want to be Emma Stone? Be? Like are we being them? Is that what we're doing? Yeah, we're just gonna play tennis over Zoom right now. Sure, sure. I'll be Emma Stone only because I feel like it's too obvious for you to be Billie Jean and me to be Steve Carell.

Let's switch that up. Let's cast against type. I'll be like the haunted woman with like a short haircut and big glasses. And you'd be like the hacky sexist comedian guy. I'm ready. I yes, this is this is what acting is all about. Give me your Steve Carell is Bobby Riggs. Come on, little sweetie. We got this game. You could hit the ball sometimes.

Get in the kitchen. Not bad. Not bad. Thank you. Got to say. OK, OK. Yeah, I know. I don't have a Billie Jean in the tank. Just imagine me like looking kind of like sad in glasses and like kind of holding my mouth like slightly open. Perfect. That's the cast of Battle of the Sexes 2017 sports drama about the real life Bobby Riggs

versus Billie Jean King Battle of the Sexes tennis match. We reviewed it and we're just about to post it over at coffee.com ko-fi.com slash bittersweet. It was an interesting film didn't you think Josie? Yeah I really liked it and thank you Lizzy D for selecting it. Too true. Taylor the mind meld on this was pretty incredible. I knew tonally what you were bringing, but I did not know any specifics. It's not necessarily trees, but it's definitely plants

and plants in wartime as well. So we really did, we really did. Yeah, we mined melded it. And to be fair, I wasn't like, oh, you are going to do kind of a wartime piece. What I thought was like no farts, no diarrhea. Yeah. Ever since I did that slave song right before she did the Dick Museum, we have a sacred and a profane rule now.

It's been helpful. When one of us is bringing something that's too far on either end of that, we check in now. I'm just gonna let the other know. Yes. But I did not know any more of the specifics than that. And yes, this story that I'm about to tell you features plants heavily, in particular seeds. Back at it with the seeds, okay.

Yes, okay. Yes, yes. And we are in Russia during World War II. So we're like Soviet Union to be clear. Yes, yeah, sorry. I'll use kind of Soviet Union, USSR, and Russia kind of interchangeably. Even during that time, wasn't Russia kind of like culturally, it's Russia, but very politically it's the USSR.

Sure. When we talk about the al-Badawi tree and the long, long, long context that plants require us to think in and how that pales so much in comparison to human strife and war and unkindness and kindness. It can be very grounding, right? Pun very much intended. And this story that I'm about to tell you, it features plants and seeds, but unlike al-Badawi,

these plants and these seeds aren't looking back. They are instead looking forward to a future. A seed bank? A seed reserve? It is a seed bank that was maintained, guarded, and kept very much alive during one of the most deadly and destructive sieges in recorded history. The Siege of Leningrad, which was close to a 900 day blockade. Oh God, that's like three fucking years. Yes, on the northern, like Northwestern city in Russia,

the USSR, that at the time of the siege was called Leningrad, but before that, and now it's called St. Petersburg. Very large city. Very large city, very old ancient city. And it housed the world's first seed bank. And one of the elements that made this siege or this blockade so destructive and so deadly is that no food could enter the city during one of the coldest winters on record. Oh, in Russia? Yes. Thousands upon thousands of people died due to starvation as these devoted botanists kept, guarded, and maintained a seed bank that later, after the war,

would provide a basis for Russian crops that would eliminate famine, but only in the future, not in their present. So again, too, both of our stories are not only concerned with plants in wartime, but the stewardship of these plants. The vigilance with which you must, you know, a 5,000 year old olive tree doesn't happen by accident. That requires millennia of cooperation. And then the same with the guarding of a seed bank during an incredibly deadly siege. That does not happen by accident either. That requires stewardship. Yes, and quite a lot of resolve indeed. A sense of servitude to this thing that is greater than yourself in some ways. Something that's better than people. Trees are

better than people. Plants are better than people, certainly. Yes, most of them. Most of the animals, too. A lot of the like bacteria, you know, several rocks. Yeah. General non-human things. Yeah. Yeah. So, let me set the scene just slightly. Russia, cold.

City, big. People, communist, broadly. Okay, nailed it. Yeah, done. All right, moving on. I'll add to that too, that before the era that we're entering, which is like the 1940s, World War Two, Russia had survived World War One, but also the Russian Revolution. So civil, essentially civil war in Russia. Yes. So there's been in the 20th century,

early 20th century, even before we hit 1940s, Russia has experienced a lot of war, a lot of disrupted society, a lot of changes. Can't catch a break these fucking people. A lot of famine included. As we head into Leningrad at this particular time of the siege, everybody who lives in Leningrad at this time has in some way been personally connected to famine or starvation.

So whether it's individually, they've experienced it, or they have a close family member or loved one or friend who has experienced it. So it's very much in the societal psyche, this understanding of what it means to go without food, what it means when your government can't supply you with enough food, or when your growing crops can't supply you with enough food to survive. And these have been going on well before the 1940s. In the 1600s, there was

a famine so deadly that it wiped out completely nearly one third of Russia's population. So huge devastating stuff. And then most recent to this era, in the 1930s, there was a wave of famine that swept through Leningrad as well. So while it may seem quaint or worst case wasteful to consider the work of agronomists as important, there are some even today who find their work wasteful as we see with the Trump administration who just cut $4 million for legume systems research in a cost saving measure. What a dumb bitch. America runs on legumes, you stupid cow.

What's funny too is like this, this cut, there's so many cuts that are happening right now and all the doge and all this kind of efficiency stuff. But this one gets highlighted a lot by pro-Trump politicians because they're like, oh, look at this stupid thing that we were doing. Four million dollars for beans. Oh, that's gone. Yeah. For peanuts. But really it's like, no, no, no. All that research goes into creating like hybridized versions that will be drought resistant and climate change resistant and it'll help with pests and diseases. Greater yields for your farmers, your agriculturists, your base. You stupid idiot.

Exactly. So we can maybe understand even in a current day context how someone might consider the work of agronomists quaint or wasteful. Can I put my two cents in there? Hell no. That's the stupidest shit. Fuck that agronomists rule. Go on. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Bumper sticker. Boom. Go. I said two cents. I say three.

You know, let's keep it brisk. Well, good. Cause then you would kind of fall in line with the general basis of Russian society at this time because food insecurity was such a very real thing for Russians. Again, many people had experienced themselves or had direct access to memories or experiences with food insecurity. People understood that their work was important. So that means the wider society, but also the scientists and the botanists who were doing it. So there were very clear goals for botanists at this time, creating, like we said, more disease resistant crops, crops that could withstand harsher climates, especially in Russia that's important to have crops that can withstand cold and to have higher yields

of crops so you can feed more people. And if you have leftover, great, you can export it and make a little money. Yeah. I mean, yep. You sure are describing agriculture as it interacts with commerce. Yes. Overall aim of Russian USSR botanists in the 1940s is let's stave off famine in Russia. Everybody knows what famine is? Everybody don't want to do that? Yeah.

Great. Remember that shit? Yeah. Flop era. Let's not bring it back. And the larger goal even beyond that is this global idea of ending world hunger. If Russia can produce a wheat that is resistant to certain diseases, it's cold resistant, then this wheat could feed the entire world. And that ain't a bad goal to have to wake yourself up in the morning and go to work. And that ain't a bad goal to have to wake yourself up in the morning and go to work. The Plant Institute, which has many a different name in some of its iterations.

But I like the Plant Institute. I have a feeling that's a pretty concise description of what they're about. And they are considered the world's first seed bank. It was started in 1921. And this was right after the end of the Russian Revolution. And I'll caveat that because seed collection and cultivation has been going on for millennia. Yes. Like, it's the first not collection of seeds, it's the first Western, yes, Russia, but Western

like scientific put them in their little trays, make a note, everything's labeled and we know where it is seed bank kind of thing. And the goal too is not just to save seeds for your own farm or your own crops. The idea is to save seeds from all over the world to create, you know, like a full on world wide bank. We should have access to mangoes here if we want? Yeah, because we're gonna do the work to catalog, store, research, and meticulously note. Lofty, but like, why not us?

Yeah! If no one's doing it, why shouldn't we do it? Why shouldn't we go and get those Parisian orchid seeds and those Japanese snowflower seeds and whatnot. No, exactly. Exactly. Do things like flowers enter into the equation or is it all edibles? There is a specific focus on edible crops or wild seeds that could then support crops. But the idea is any and all types of plant varieties. Interesting, very interesting stuff. Big goal, big, gotta catch them all, Pokemon, right?

Yeah, it might be too that the seed bank was in the USSR because of one particular scientist. In a very un-communist way, we do have a protagonist. The people are the protagonist, Josie. The people, right? The large montage of the people. It was a collective effort. We all did it together.

His name is Nikolai Vavilov. Okay, good Russian name. Yes, he is assigned to lead the Plant Institute in the 1930s. So he's a well-known scientist before this. He has kind of studied broadly with other scientists around the world and international research. And when he is given the Plant Institute,

he arrives in Leningrad to find an abandoned palace in the heart of the city. It's an older city and it's known as kind of, you know, the seat of arts and culture and scientific thought. Pavlov did his experiments with dogs. That sounds bad. But like, no, no, no sad dog shit. No sad dog shit.

Even if it's just that they don't get their treats. Yeah, they just got treats. They, yeah. No, they didn't get, sometimes they didn't get their treats. Sometimes he just rang the bell and he didn't even fucking give them anything. It was barbaric. OK, well, that's pretty sad. Yeah.

Anna Maria, don't listen. So this is like, you know, the opera is here, the symphony is here, the ballet is here, like this is a cultural center of Russia, even during this era of Stalin. What are they stalling about? Are they what are they trying to hold off from happening? Human rights? I don't know. I set it up.

You shot it into the goal. So Vavilov shows up and he's been assigned to be the leader of an operation that is huge. There are thousands of people who work at the plant Institute and they have satellite situations in kind of the suburban areas of Leningrad, but then further afield all throughout Russia. But this is the headquarters, and it is a shambly, kind of pokey situation.

It is not a laboratory. It was a palace that the Soviet government took over and repurposed. So he shows up in the 1930s to find that the seed bank that's only about 10 years old at this time has largely been eaten. So I mentioned the early 1930s famine, the recent situations.

Oh, you know, now I see it. Famished staff and hungry looters had gone into the seed bank and consumed those seeds so that they were no longer there. Fuck. Vavilov is in charge then of trying to get this shit in order and to pump up the seed bank again, to find more samples, to save them properly and to instill in his staff the sense of obligation and accountability. Don't put that in your mouth.

No, spit it out. Dmitry, get it out of there. Spit it into my hand. Olga, I see you. Actually, even though he's in charge of all these people and it's the USSR and he's telling people to spit things out of their mouths, Vavilov is a charismatic leader. He is really, really quite a nice guy. There's not anybody who, besides if you're tied to Stalin and want to try and defame

him and get him sent to a Gulag, you're saying good things about Vavilov. He took it upon himself to travel the world to collect his samples. He collected all different types of plants, but his focus was wheat, rye, and barley crops, especially those that grew at high altitudes because he was very interested in the ways that those crops and wild plants were resistant to cold weather. And that's perfect for Russia. You cross breed that with other grains and you can make a more cold resistant wheat that could be used across Russia. So he collected wheat and grain from Turkestan, from Iran. He collected orange and lemon pips. From Tokyo, he collected radishes and all types of edible lilies, the same with Taiwan. He visited the UK and North America, collecting more and

more. So he's particularly focused on wild varieties that were on the verge of extinction. So this is also really important because these samples that he collected could not be found anywhere else in the world. They were like in this one little valley and this very rare, maybe even ancient grain that he was trying to collect. And he did this work so well that he, in that short amount of time, amassed the largest collection of seeds up to that point in history. And you know, caveat on that, because it's again, like the largest collection in recorded history.

You don't know what they were slanging around back in Mesopotamia. Seeds are ancient, plants are ancient. Yeah, they surely are. They surely are. And well, and it also just, it feels silly to kind of qualify it like that, but you know, it's the USSR and- But fuck it. We got a podcast to sell. It's the biggest seed bank to ever exist. That's it, that's it. So, Pavlov, he was a handsome man, kind of a thick head of hair, thick mustache.

I suppose that's kind of Stalin-esque. Stalin was a handsome guy in his youth. Yeah, yeah. That's not my issue with him. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. No, it's not that he's ugly. I have other gripes. Don't with him. Right. It's not that he's ugly. I have other other gripes. Don't tell him, please. Okay. Yeah, we won't let him know. He won't be listening to this one. He always traveled in a three piece suit and he traveled like to far away countries, but then he would go to those countries and go deep into the countryside to look for specimens. So he's, you know, like climbing mountains, digging into ditches, wading into swamps in a three-piece suit with his mustache and- Oh, he's a thornberry. Yeah. Yeah. Essentially, but Russian. Thornberevich. Yes. There we go. He was known to make very genuine connections with scientists and farmers all over the world.

He was planting the seeds for good relationships. Exactly. The seeds for friendships. He was a polyglot. He took time and energy to learn the local languages so that when he was on a hillside in Turkestan, he could talk with the goat herders there to find out where did this wheat come from, what about that? Can you suggest anything else?

A man who knows how to say the word wheat in so many languages. It's so true, yes. And please and thank you probably as well. And having traveled internationally too, he did a lot of collaboration with esteemed scientists all over the world. At a certain point, he was elected a member

of the Royal Society of London, this, you know, fancy dancy scientific society. Yeah, sounds it. Yeah. English botanist Cyril Darlington, another Thorneberry. No. Yeah. Wow.

Okay. Said of Vavilov, wherever he went, he took sunshine and courage and sunshine is important in the botany game oh well especially in Russia too sunshine in Russia yeah oh yeah and Stalin's Russia yeah oh baby the American Nobel laureate Herman Muller said that Vavilov was more life-loving life-giving and life-building than anyone else I have ever known. So not only was he this very kind and obviously charismatic guy, but he was also a great leader and took a lot of pride and interest in the young scientists that worked under him.

He was very careful with them, was very good at being able to inspire confidence in them. And he did this with no regard for their background. In Stalin's Russia, if you came from an upper class background, it was very hard to get far, maybe not far to your local work camp. But if you had peasant stock, that was held as a very important political capital. Especially when we're talking about botany and agronomy. If you could say, you know, my parents were peasants and my grandparents

and their parents and da da da da da, you come from this long lineage of hardy Russian stock, then Stalin will look very kindly on you. Interesting. To the point of excluding folks who don't have that background. There's that. Well, again, we never said that Stalin was running the ship perfectly on Bittersweet Infamy.

We've never gone that far in our endorsement of Stalin. I think we went with he was handsome when he was younger. Yes, when he was younger. Who isn't handsome when they're younger? I've met a couple people. Okay, yeah, that's true. No, you're all beautiful. All he is.

Look at that face. But he was so encouraging and nurturing of those who worked and studied under him that it was clear that he took plant science to heart. This idea of caring and nurturing and providing fodder for these young scientists was plain to see when you met this man. And this was especially true when he took over the plant institute and its half-eaten stores. Yes! He had a lot of work to do to inspire the people under him to rebuild this, but then also what it means to take care of it, what it means to be faced with an impossible decision and decide to continue the work of the stewardship that you were tasked with.

There's another scientist at this time, another botanist, Lysenko. Lysenko was of this hearty peasant Russian stock that Stalin was very fond of. And again, in this field of agronomy, botany, this gave him even more cachet. Lysenko, his science though, he took a Lamarckian view of plant development. I know what that means, but Josie, why don't you tell the people who don't know what that means? I'll just watch. Okay, okay. You're doing great. No notes for me. Just keep going. Lamarck was this earlier scientist who, before Darwin, he had this idea that

Genetics could be passed on in a plant's life cycle or a human's life cycle Here's a good example a blacksmith gets strong muscles from his work Therefore his sons inherit those strong muscles you pass along your stat points that you acquire along the way. Yes, yeah. So got it. Yes. You can't get super jacked and then have a jacked baby. Right. Yeah. Because your baby might grow up to, you know, not be jacked and that's okay. Send the letters to Josie. Okay, my baby's shredded. If I'm remembering correctly back to AP Bio, the mark also had this idea that like a giraffe could grow its neck in its own lifetime instead of this idea that the Darwin's idea of evolution

where no, the shorter necked giraffes can't eat as much and so they die off or just aren't as strong as the longer neck drafts who can reproduce more because they have more sustenance. And then all of a sudden that genetic material gets passed on through various generations. So it's very different philosophies, right? Sure. They result in, you know, a long neck draft, a strong blacksmith, but the timelines are very different. Now, something that Lysenko had going for him was that this view of traits being inherited within a lifetime and being able to be passed down was very attractive to Stalin because this confirmed a political

and societal view that if you changed the environment for the Soviet worker, then he could become a stronger, fitter, the good of everybody, communism is the best. He would inherit those traits. A skookum guy. He'd become a skookum guy, right? Yes. So if you change that environment, if you just put all these, you know, the new Soviet man in these environments, it will essentially bake into his DNA. And this creates a society and an ethnic identity that is in line with Stalin's political goals. The shortness, I think, of the timeline and Lysenko's theory is very attractive to Stalin because of course

we want this Soviet change. You don't want your eugenics to take too long. Yeah. So Lysenko had this theory that Stalin was very fond of. He was a peasant. And in addition to that smaller timeframe, he had estimations for increasing the Soviet grain yield that were half of what Vavilov was predicting. So Vavilov was like, I think we could get this done in about a decade. You know, if we, if we grow these, we can, we can get this, get this done.

And Stalin was like, anybody else? And Lysenko was like, I can do it. And like three to four years and Stalin is like, you are the scientist for me. I like the sound of your science. Let's get that going. Let's write that. I'm sure you do. Exactly. Interesting. Promises have more power than facts and action. Yes, they sure do. And the promise of gain of getting rich quick. You wouldn't think that dangling that in front of the world's biggest name communist would work as strongly as it does, but right. Yeah. We're all susceptible to the same shit as people. It turns out. Yeah. You too could loot the seed bank in your moment of weakness weakness weakness weakness your

moment of weakness! So because Lysenko was angling his scientific research and his own personal history such that he would be very much in Stalin's favor, Vavilov, who was not as interested in that, who was traveling abroad and working with other scientists outside of the USSR. This charismatic leader, charming, he had a loyal following at the Plant Institute. Those two stacks of Lysenko completing all that and Vavilov failing to complete in Stalin's view all this didn't quite work out for Vavilov in Stalin's Russia. When he was head of the Plant Institute, detractors, so kind of pro-Lysenko people, were given prominent positions, essentially there to kind of undermine Vavilov. And the work was hard, there was a lot to be done. And with these detractors kind of baked into the situation,

Vavilov, his depression grew, his own physical health waned, he reported chest pains during this time. Oh, Vavilov. It was really hard for him because he had built this seed bank for Russia to become the largest one in the world. It's always bullshit. It's always the bullshit. It's the people. It's not the seeds. I could sit here and catalog seeds all fucking day. It's the people. Seeds are better than people.

Yeah. August 1940, Vavilov is on one of his research trips to collect samples in the mountains of Ukraine and a black sedan pulls up onto the remote dirt road where Vavilov is in his three-piece suit collecting wheat grain and the men who spill out of this car swarm him and say you are needed immediately in Moscow. We must get you in this car and go now. Oh no. Oh, that's the worst, isn't it? He wasn't really needed in Moscow, Taylor. I didn't think he was. I thought that maybe they were taking him elsewhere for other reasons. These men were officers in the NKVD, which was the precursor to the KGB, political police doing the henchmen work of whoever is in power.

Hustling people into vans, hustling inconvenient people into vans. Exactly. With urgent false appointments in Moscow. Yeah. In Moscow, Vavilov is subjected to torture to procure a confession from him, a false confession, that he had collaborated with foreign enemies, essentially that he was a spy. And he confirmed again and again, I have worked with foreign scientists, but I have never spied on the USSR. And he maintained

that throughout his time in Moscow and in prison. Wow. But the verbal and physical abuse was intense. Every session would start and repeat again and again with this exchange between him and the officer in charge of whatever session he was in. They would ask, who are you? And he would reply, I am the academic Nikolai Vavilov. No, you are a piece of shit. And they would repeat it again and again. That's crazy. That's brutal, dude. That's brutal. Yeah. I won't get into the physical torture because I think we can all just imagine how horrific and horrible some of that is. But there's something about the fact of being called a piece of shit so repeatedly. I would get very punchy about that and then I would get my shit handed to me by the pre-KGBs.

I'm not saying I'd win, but at some point I'd be like, hey, fuck you, buddy. You're a piece of shit. You're a piece of shit. You clown. And then, yeah, then they'd knock my teeth out. So he was stood this level of torture for months until he finally did sign a written confession. He confirmed even in that late stage

that he was never a spy. He kind of said yes to whatever else they were going to heap on him and that his scientific method was false and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He knew well enough that that was not true, but he never let them have the moment that he would say that he was a spy because he never was. Wow.

So he has a very short trial after these months. God bless this efficient trial system. Right? Yeah. No Lubies was passed around here in fame and USSR. They did him with no lubies for sure. It's true. He was given a sentence of death. Oh my God.

Yeah. Oh my God. He was seen as a level of political dissident that would warrant, hey, we got to get you gone. Oh my God. Now he was sent to a prison to await essentially whenever another judge would decide it was time. And it was literally like, oh, we're just going to get a letter in the mail and then put you up against a wall and shoot you. But he waited there long enough that he was able to plea and explain that his research could be helpful for Russia in the future,

that he shouldn't be killed, and they did commute his sentence to 20 years of hard labor. That was good of them. Right? The system works, folks. Yeah, 20 years of hard labor in a forced labor camp known as a gulag. Oh, God. Yeah. Thanks for never getting me sent to a gulag, Josie. I so appreciate that as your like friend and coworker.

Oh, well, you're welcome. Oh, that way. Fuck, Josie, what did you do? I found this fact disturbing between 1923 and 1961, as late as 1961, 18 million people passed through these forced labor camps. Horrible. 18 million people and tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands died due to complications and all of this.

Of being worked to death. Yes. 18 million people. It's insane. But let's return to Leningrad and let's see what's happening at the Plant Institute. Josie's wearing a floral today, by the way, for the Plant Institute story. I'm wearing my sick sad world t-shirt for my story. Actually, this is a nice combo. By the early 1940s, Vavilov had done the work, put in his time, inspired his cohort, and they had collected 150,000 live seeds and tubers.

So by all accounts and measures, a success. It was indeed, again, the largest collection of seeds in the world. Though at this time, as Vavilov was disappeared from the Ukrainian mountainside, the seed bank was left without a leader. And not only was he like not there and like on vacation or on a research trip, he was mysteriously gone. Nobody knew where he went. We I'm sure could understand based on the trends of the times that perhaps people were getting shuffled into vans around this time but we didn't have confirmation certainly whether he was alive or dead I'm sure.

Exactly. But they're also in this strange limbo where they think the botanists who are working at the Plant Institute, they can make maybe pleas to the local government and to the larger government. You know, like, this guy is really important. We need him here. He is essential for the USSR to continue so that we can eradicate famine. We really need him here. Please, please, please. And of course, anybody who signed a letter or spoke to an official was immediately canned from their job. And there was even a botanist who worked at the Planned Institute

who approached Vavilov's brother, saying, you know, he was a high-up scientist as well. And they said, there's got to be something you can do. Here's all this documentation. Like, we need him here. And even his own brother said, there's got to be something you can do. Here's all this documentation. Like we need him here. And even his own brother said, there's nothing we can do. He's gone. We don't know what he's doing or where he is, but we're not going to get him back. So the Plant Institute is rudderless

and extremely worried about their leader and their work. Because as we note, Lysenko and his kind of pseudoscience is taking over. So all the botanists at the plant institute are like, oh shit, are we going to have to like switch over to this guy because he's not going to care about preserving genetic material if he thinks he can adjust and manipulate genetic material within the lifespan of one plant cycle. So why would you keep the seed? You know, so they're at this very uncertain time when the siege of Leningrad takes place. So as I mentioned, most destructive in history and possibly the most deadly in recorded history, the Nazis.

Boo. Yes, good. Thank you. You passed the test. Yeah. Boo. Yes, good. Thank you. You passed the test. The Nazis have crossed into the USSR and Hitler has his sights on Leningrad. And as we mentioned, it's this multicultural center of the country, arts and culture. It's a scientific hub.

This is a symbol of Russian identity that Hitler is very eager to erase. So much so that initially Hitler says, first we will take Leningrad and then we'll focus on the capital Moscow. So the Nazis make very quick work of it. There are multiple reports from outside of Russia, even Churchill sends Stalin word that some of our intelligence are getting very clear signals that you are about to be invaded. Stalin ignores them, doesn't really care.

He was Stalin. He's Stalin. He's totally Stalin. Yeah. The fall of 1941, the Nazis have marched further and further into the USSR so that they have the city of Leningrad completely surrounded. Leningrad edges a huge big lake, Lake Ladoga,

and the city even kind of takes part of this peninsula that borders the lake as well. So every single side of the city, except for the lake, is guarded by Nazi soldiers. The blockade is tight and complete. Nothing can go in and nothing can go out. As they had completed this blockade, Nazis dropped bombs routinely on the city. Again, this city filled with civilians. There were attempts

to evacuate, but they didn't work very well. One, the fact that Stalin didn't really take the reports and intelligence reports seriously. So everybody was caught unawares when Germany marched outside of Leningrad. So everybody was kind ofawares when Germany marched outside of Leningrad. So everybody was kind of like, wait, is this happening? There was this sense too, that the USSR was giving very optimistic reports to the citizens of Leningrad that were not reflective of a reality. There was this joke in Leningrad. They said, we're winning, but the Germans are advancing So there was always this sense of like it's going super well. It's going really well. That's a bomb

That just dropped, but we're winning. Don't worry about it Yeah, everything was very The machinations of war are very stressful for the everyday citizen who just wants to move on with their fucking life, huh? Yep. So with this very tight blockade, the food supply was also affected. And what was stored in Leningrad wasn't a whole bunch. In part because Stalin had made a non-aggression pact with Hitler where he agreed to send mass amounts of Russian grain

and other food stuffs to Germany in exchange for them not invading, them not causing harm to the Russian people. But obviously that didn't really happen. They kept at it. Early in the fall, the Leningrad food stores were bombed and citizens remarked how the whole city smelled of bacon grease and burnt sugar. Oh, God, all the resources caught fire.

Yeah. And this meant that whatever people had in their pantry cupboards was going to have to sustain them for nobody knew how long. So again, the Nazis set up this blockade in early fall by November 1941. It's clear that starvation has set in in Leningrad. Oh, how frightening. How awful. How awful. As this really harsh Russian winter approached, well, by November it's certainly there. But the Nazi campaign realized that this climate was going to be so much harsher than they ever anticipated, and that their own troops were going to be strapped for resources. They opted to instead of

evacuate the citizens and move them to German internment camps or refugee sites, they opted, instead of doing that, to just hold the siege and purposefully starve the citizens of Leningrad. Starting to think these Nazis weren't very good guys. No, uh-uh. Now, at the time, this wasn't determined to be a war crime, but it very much is a war crime in a modern context, but even then it was a war crime to starve out a population. People don't take war crimes very seriously, do they? International law, you know, what's that? We pick and we choose. Yeah, you know. It's been a sad realization that one. Yeah, that one's a little rough. So starvation, it's a rough route. Yes. The body essentially burns itself

for food. According to this author, Simon Parkin, who wrote this book, The Forbidden Garden, which comes from the Houston Public Library. Thank you, HPL. Love you. Parkin writes, Starvation is a fire that consumes from within. When the intake of calories falls drastically short of the energy needs of the body's fundamental systems, the body begins to burn itself as fuel, carbohydrates, fats, and eventually the protein parts of the body tissue are thrown into the furnace. Yeah. Not the furnace.

It's a pretty slow agonizing experience to have whether you succumb to starvation and die or just experience starvation because even if you survive you could still have organ damage. The psychological toll that it takes is really intense. Brain damage, I'm sure. Yeah. But even just being in that frame of mind without enough food and your body is kind of breaking down, one Leningrad citizen wrote that she found it psychologically easier to drag a bucket of water up the stairs than to reach out for a pencil. So the idea behind this is that any action that you can directly

relate to survival, your brain can understand it, switch into it, do it. Anything that's beyond that is just kind of unfathomable. So hauling a bucket of water, psychologically, not physically, but psychologically. We need that bucket of water. We can rationalize away the reaching out for a pen and as such it is no longer a priority. Yeah, exactly. And this drastic shift in the psychological mood of the entire city, it totally reconfigures the economy. People sell sewing machines and pianos and they trade them for moldy crusts of bread.

Wow. People are eating what they can find. Once they've gone through their pantry stores, folks look for leather to boil down into soups. People eat fur coats, paper, toothpaste, wood glue, sawdust. Oh, God. The pigeon population. Plummets, I'm sure. Not a boon for the pigeon population, something like this. Yeah.

Once we're eating the fur coats, sorry, pigeons are done. And Anna Maria, close your ears because... Oh, God. RIP Fido in advance. Families decide that, or they make the very awful decision that feeding their dog or cat is just too taxing, but the dog or cat could become sustenance. So there's reports of people who just could not do that to their own pet. And so they swap with a neighbor so that they don't have to have that, like emotional connection

to the animal if it's somebody else's. Yeesh. These are dire times. If we're eating the family pets, then you know that there's going to be cases of cannibalism throughout the city. It's a real issue. Thirteen hundred people are arrested for cannibalism. So that's like confirmed.

Oh my God. I mean, it's Stalin Russia. I don't know if we can say like confirmed jury trials. No, but no, but enough to address it in a political way or in a social way. We have a cannibalism problem at the moment. Wow. This sounds hideous. This sounds like a horrible way to live. Well, part of why this winter in particular was so gnarly is that the temperatures dropped to the coldest that they have seen in Leningrad. You did say that, yes. The temperature reached negative 40 degrees Celsius, Taylor.

Negative 40 degrees Celsius, Taylor. Negative 40 degrees Celsius. That is so fucking cold that Fahrenheit just like taps out and was like, we give up, we'll do Celsius too. Negative 40 degrees Celsius is negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Reaching across the aisle. That's fucking terrible. That's painful. That hurts your face to be in that. Your nostrils freeze. And there's this phenomenon where your breath, you blow out and the moisture in your breath freezes. The cloud turns to crystals and they clink when they hit the ground.

Look at this nice July story. You brought us June, July story. You brought us. Yeah, exactly. The Siberians refer to this as the whispering of the stars. That's beautiful. Yeah I mean it yeah yeah. Nothing to do out there but make poetry about the way your breath freezes I guess. I mean it is Russia like that's kind of what they're known for. They have a few guys like that in their toolbox don't they? Yeah they do. It's so cold in the city that, of course, if your breath is, you know, turning into stardust, your pipes are certainly frozen.

The entire sewage system is frozen. Oh, just when you think it can't get worse. Yeah, it is so cold and people are so hungry that it is not uncommon for someone to try and venture out for some food, be so exhausted that they fall into the snow and simply die there. And everybody else is so exhausted that they can barely move themselves to go and pick up that body. So all over the city there are bodies being covered in snow. People just crouching in the sidewalks and dying in the cold.

Wow. That's really sobering. Yeah. That's really sad. The first winter was the most brutal of the siege. Well good. Yeah. I'll give you that slight reprieve. Well, good. This is the worst of it. You eat your cat. It's the worst.

Yeah. So let's check in on the plant Institute, which again, is this huge. Oh, Christ. I completely forgot. I know in the middle of the city, they are tasked with this ironic job, right? Of caring and guarding for 120,000 tons of edible, edible, I repeat, edible seeds. Wow. That could have been eaten. But remember, the collection is comprised of rare specimens, some of which are on the verge of extinction if they haven't already been extinct out in the wild. And this collection will provide the genetic material to create drought and cold resistant and disease resistant varieties of foodstuffs after the war. And that becomes the refrain that all the botanists of the plant institute hold tight after the war.

Whatever we plant won't be safe during the war and could just be destroyed and then we've lost that resource forever? Those fucking nazis will come with their little scythes and clip down the fucking super wheat and then where are we? Well this, remember, it's in a pretty tight time frame. It's the first winter. We can't plant anything, ignore my idiot question. No, no, no. But it's a good question because the siege is three years long

That's in part why the siege was so brutal was this winter they didn't have any time to prepare, right? They didn't know it was coming and then the siege kind of locks in the blockade locks in in the fall So there's nothing that they could really have done So now they're in this position where they have to save these seeds by not eating them, but they also can't let them freeze because not all of these seeds can freeze and then still be viable. And this work, it all leads back to Vavilov because he did so much to instill in them that this work goes beyond just you or your family or this terrible, horrible moment.

The goal of the seed bank is to end world hunger for future generations. And one of the things that he said to them and they took to heart, it is better to display excessive concern now than to destroy all that has been created by nature for thousands and millions of years. So our stories really do. Yeah, we get that scale of time that you could eat this extinct wheat from the foothills of Afghanistan and that would be done forever or you could abstain and not eat it and suffer starvation for the benefit of

humanity the same humanity that's currently Blockading you and starving you if you want to get real cynical about it And I'm sure in day, you know six hundred something of the siege or whatever you start getting a little day, you know, 600 something of the siege or whatever, you start getting a little cynical about people at some point. A little hangry. So remember this building where the plant institute is? It's a palace, right? It's like a disused old palace. Yeah, it's a poorly kept very drafty situation. And the seeds do have to be kept a certain temperature. It is a hard task. Wharfrost appears on the metal bank boxes where they store the seeds.

They're, as we mentioned, a dearth of cats and dogs in the city, and so rats don't have any predators. Their population swells and they are very hungry. So they have to protect the seeds from rats. Rats, ratoncito. Yes. And of course, the botanists themselves are suffering from malnutrition. They're extremely weak. But they still have to, you know, it's not just like standing at the door and being like, don't come in here, don't eat this. They do have to check on the seeds, make sure that they're not too cold. There's routines, scientific routines that they have to maintain for the safety

of the seeds. And part of that too, is it's not just a siege where no food can get in. It's not just the blockade. It's also the attacks from the Nazis. So there's incendiary bombs that are dropped on the building. The botanists are broken up into teams, one of which assembles on the roof of the plant institute, and they are charged with kicking off these bombs down to the grounds below, where another team is tasked with quickly covering the bombs with enough sand so that when they explode, they don't go anywhere. They just muffle and turn the sand to glass because of extreme heat.

Wow. Remarkable stuff. They don't teach you that at plant school, I'm sure. No. As the winter continues, many of them end up just living at the Institute because to make the daily commute, all the trams have stopped, there's no public transportation. You have to walk. And if you're walking even a mile without... You're burning calories. Yeah, it's not happening. And the botanists are suffering from frostbite, starvation, and all the complications that come with that. Edema, which is an effect of malnutrition where fluids gather in your limbs, particularly

your feet. Organ failure is very real here. Again, the body becomes this furnace and it starts to burn itself. Despite all of this suffering, the botanists practice an incredible restraint by not eating the edible seeds that are in front of them. Wow. Very admirable, very admirable. There's the botanist Alexander Chukchkin,

who was an expert in ground nuts. Christmas day, he was found in his office, motionless in his desk chair. He had died from complications of the cold and starvation. And when his colleagues went to try and shake him awake and then move him, they realized that in his hand was a packet of almonds that he was studying. That if he had eaten, could have extended his life if not prevented his death.

Wow. Those almonds are looking pretty good at that moment. Wow. That's a very remarkable restraint. Yeah. Grigori Rupstov. At a certain point, this botanist was allocated an evacuation permit. And like anybody who could have gotten out, all the botanists agreed that they would carry seeds out with them. So he had adhered to his middle section, four pounds of grain seeds. Now this evacuation was a very perilous situation. They had cut roads in the now frozen Lake La Doga.

And so these huge trucks that were exposed to the frigid air would haul people out on these roads, but it was massive amounts of exposure for folks who were already so weak with malnutrition. So by the time that he gets to the other side of the lake, Rube Stove collapses and they take him to a field hospital where the nurse is trying to treat him and yet he dies. She's preparing to move him when she finds the seeds on his stomach and she says, why? He could have saved himself. Another of the seed bank staff, the fruit expert, Pitor Bogashevsky, lay in a nearby bunk with frostbitten face and feet. He raised himself onto one elbow.

For life, he replied to the nurse. For the children you'll have after the war. He was carrying seeds. He was keeping them warm. Give them to one of our people. Whoever makes it out alive can hand them on. Wow, that's very tragic. And like such an intense resolve too.

Yeah, yeah. The idealism that allowed them to do that was... But Lysenko said he could do it in like half the time. Right, yeah. So, you know. So at a certain point in the winter, in this first winter, they even found stores of expired seeds

and duplicate seeds. And there were long discussions about whether or not they should eat them because we have them saved in the seed bank. Some of these are expired, they're past their, you know, best buy date, but they decided as a group that they would not eat them. The idea was that the expired seeds could contain viable seeds still in them and they didn't want to risk ruining those viable seeds or destroying them. At this point, three people had already died in the plant institute from starvation. And they didn't want to decredit their sacrifice.

If they held off, then we should hold off. It's very noble stuff. Yeah. Though I think one of the survivors also noted that he felt that if him personally, if he started to eat the duplicate or expired seeds, he didn't think he'd be able to really stop himself. It was kind of like- Once you pop, you can't stop. You just can't stop. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Know your limit, play within it, as the BC Lottery Commission famously says. Yes, exactly. So surrounded by life-sustaining sustenance, 19 scientists of the Plant Institute died

of starvation. That was throughout the entire siege. Wow. And starvation is not a fun way to go. No, God, no, God, no. Ordinary people can be heroes, I guess. Yeah. So we get through, remember I promised you, that the worst of the siege was the first

winter. So the first spring brings a lot of relief. Well I shouldn't give you the relief quite yet, because there's the cold thaws. All those bodies that were under the snow. Exactly, All those sewage pipes that burst. Appropriately enough Chekhov's gun situation with those bodies and those sewage pipes. Oh totally, totally, totally, totally. The city is pretty fucking nasty. There is trash and refuse that is melting. As you mentioned, dead bodies are everywhere, even the ones that they could manage to bury.

Those mass graves are sinking. There are concerns with disease. I'm sure. Yes, especially because this population is already vulnerable from being so malnourished. So the city sets up a huge cleanup job. It is every comrade's duty to clean their kitchen. And I'm sure it is. I'm sure it is. Yes. And it's a slow go because everyone's pretty tired.

I'm sure they are. But without that negative 40 degrees freezing them into place, the city does manage to thaw physically but also emotionally. So a lot of people report at this point feeling numb. They might be able to have some of their cognitive abilities back online, but they still have no emotion towards what happened, meaning the horror and the grief. You know, we talked about hauling a bucket of water versus picking up a pencil.

The bucket of water feels easier. And it's the same thing with grieving the family member who passed away. Yeah. All that emotional work was just put literally on ice. And so in the thawing of this, people are kind of looking around, coming to realizations of what had happened,

what they had done or what their neighbors had done. God, I can't imagine. But also with that realization came the very real relief that they had survived, which, you know, might feel bad. Yay, good. I'm still sad. I'm still sad. But things did thaw.

The ice melted, the sun came out, and things started to grow in the city. The botanists at the Plant Institute immediately understood the spring of 1942, the sacrifices that they had made that past winter. Because once the city was sanitized, once they did the arduous job of cleaning everything up, every single citizen turned their attention to planting. Every arable inch of land in the city was used to grow crops. Wow. And everybody was eager to forage for whatever edible green thing they could find. So the Plant Institute botanists during this spring had loads of work to do. They were tasked with identifying the best arable land for different

crops in the city. They were asked to create how-tos on how to grow and harvest crops for people who might not be familiar with that. One of the scientists created these watercolor posters to help foragers identify which foods were good to eat and which were poisonous. I bet those posters were so fucking iconic if you grew up in that place in time. Oh my god. Yeah, that watercolor poster that everyone's mom had or whatever. Yeah, yeah. And they were really plastered all over the city. So it was like this citywide guerrilla gardening campaign. What a nice idea in the midst of so many darker aspects of our survival as humans. Yeah. Yeah. How warming, you know? And part of that was the square,

the park in front of St. Isaac's Cathedral, which shares the same square as the plant institute. They took out all the grass that was growing there, and the whole thing was replaced with a cabbage patch. And there's some really iconic photos of these like ginormous cabbages like right in front of this palace like on a city street. Thank God. Yeah. Yes. Right. Yes. I haven't really breathed much during this story. I feel a little bit of relief now, finally. Okay, good, good, yay! Yeah, fine, a little, good.

In the suburban areas that were still within the blockade, but they had even more arable land, so the scientists would commute out there to help with crops and orchards that they tilled and weeded under German observation. The Nazis were close enough that they very easily could have fired on them. Fuck off Nazi punks. Exactly. I'm sure that's what they whispered to the potatoes. It was in a like Cyrillic script rather than, you know, the ABC language, but it was there. Yeah. The end of the siege did come. I mentioned the first winter was the hardest.

The second, there were stores from the spring and the summer that we're talking about in 42, and they knew what to prepare for. We're not eating the coats anymore. There are no more coats. So we ate the coats. So we're going to eat the cabbage and the dandelion roots now. That makes sense. By the third winter, the Red Army had gotten the better of the Nazis, which was great.

Or you know, it's also probably was a little bit of the Russian winters had gotten the better of the Nazis. That home field advantage, you can't underplay it. That's we've seen it time and time and again. Benito Juarez, it's nice to know the lay of the land. Yes, yes, yes. Helps you against the foreign invaders who show up and like, they don't know that you get yellow fever

sometimes here or whatever, or you freeze. Yeah, yeah. Whatever it is. Exactly, yeah. January, 1944, the German blockade is finally broken by the Red Army. In the end, the staff of the Plant Institute had saved the entire collection of seeds. Remarkable. You know, I will say, I think they probably could have cracked into some of those expired

ones, some of those dupes. Yeah. You know, these were dire times, but that's very, very, very, very impressive. I fully see why you would bring a story like that here. And it is much more, I think now that I know the extent and the context of the Siege of Leningrad, Siege of Leningrad is three words. When you talk about 900 days and rats and sewage and people freezing to death on the streets and eating the family pets.

The whispering of the stars. The whispering of the stars, it really puts into relief how disciplined these people had to be. You really do have to feel that sense of stewardship, of service to something greater than yourself. The seeds that they saved, not all of them were completely viable, but... That's a pain in the ass. We should have eaten those, fuck!

Right? Well, they did learn from that though, more about the expiry of seeds. Like they kept such meticulous records even as they were starving that they were able to go back and learn. Okay, so these ones didn't work, but these ones did. It's all science. It's all data. It's all data. Yeah. The seeds that they saved, the ones that were viable, they went on to plant over 1 million acres of Russian crops and countless crops around the world. Rare seeds that would certainly have gone extinct if they had been eaten. They survive to this day and they are located in seed banks around the world. Wow. The palace where the plant institute was housed is still housing the Russian seed bank and genetics laboratory today. It's a lot to move. It's the biggest seed bank in the world.

It would almost be more trouble to move it to a new facility. You know, at this point, yeah. We've all gotten used to the draft. Yeah, exactly. The seed bank is now called the N.I. Vavilov All-Russian Institute of Plant Genetic Resources. Good, I was going to ask, does he ever return to the plant institute? A year prior to the blockade breaking, this is January 1943, Vavilov, his death sentence had been commuted to... To 20 years hard labor, a slap on the wrist. Unfortunately, the 20 years of hard labor, well he didn't even get to 20 years. The prison guards, as part of his treatment,

failed to feed him enough. He died in a prison hospital. His cause of death was clearly starvation, but his death certificate read bronchitis. And it surmised that the doctor didn't want to get the prison warden in trouble by saying that he wasn't fed enough. But I think it is important to note

that he died of starvation, which was the same thing his loyal followers suffered and so many also succumbed to. His international buds, the English scientists, Cyril Darlington and another Sydney Herald. That's a newspaper. No, no, no. Sydney Harald

is a newspaper. Harland. There we go. There we go. Sydney Harland. They, upon hearing about his death, co-wrote an obituary that was featured in the science journal Nature, which is still around today. So it's a very, you know, like well-known publication. And they spoke of his accomplishments and what a charismatic and wonderful man he was. But they also wrote, when Leningrad came to be besieged, the residue of his collections was eaten by the famished people. So when the surviving botanists of the Plant Institute read that in the renowned publication Nature, they immediately called up these scientists and said, excuse me. Yeah, excuse me. Your honor, objection, excuse me. And they invited them to come to Leningrad

and look at the seed collection. You can see the seeds. Come and see the seeds. They are all here. We did not eat them. In fact, we worked very hard not to eat them. And we would like to record to show, that we in fact maintained

and guarded his collection and his life's work. So they issued a retraction and Darlington in particular was very embarrassed and explained that he had heard in a BBC broadcast that it had been consumed and he didn't double check it. Fucking BBC. Yeah, yeah. But he and everybody in England really just could not fathom that type of restraint. They really just thought, no, that must have been eaten considering the situation. But that was not the case.

Unfortunately, after his death, Pavlov's name and his legacy was stricken from the record. Stalin was not too keen on him, so there was no way that he was going to become a hero. Which is such a shame because he actually did embody so much of the things that this Soviet Union professed to be about. Right! Yeah, the idealism, certainly. A focus on like the collective good. Yes. A focus on like being the best, most excellent version of the Soviet Union that we can be. He's too smart for and nice for his own good probably in a place that doesn't value

its intelligentsia unless they're really, really toeing the ideological line. And after Stalin's death he does become more known and you know the Institute is now named after him. line. And after Stalin's death, he does become more known. And you know, the Institute is now named after him. Right. And the survivors in particular, one man Nikolai Ivanov, he worked really hard to make sure that his story, that Vavilov's story was documented and like, you know, maintained in the Plant Institute. Thank you for keeping that story, you know? You need people to keep the story going. Unfortunately, though, our boy Lysenko, the guy with the pseudoscience idea that...

Right, if you get really jacked that your baby can come out with killer traps, I remember him. Jacked babies. We'll refer to his scientific theory. Old J.B. Lysenko, Jack Baby Lysenko. Having been a darling of Stalin's, he does get his little moment in the sun, right, during Stalin's Russia. But strangely, weirdly, predictably perhaps in our modern times, his pseudoscience is again taking root in Russia, like currently. It never ends.

It's being tied to an idea of epigenetics, which, you know, in layman's terms, kind of short term genetics. Eugenics. It's just more of the same fucking theory stuff of we can change something in a short amount of time. We got lucky with those M-Bit guys, let's not push it. Right, yeah. You know, it's a false science, but it follows a fashionable politic.

His legacy is seen as, oh, a great Russian, and this really aligns with how we view Russia and want to see the change that man can make in a short amount of time. But truthfully, his pseudoscience and the research that he propagated led to famines and killed millions of people. He's not somebody to carve into marble. But a lack of scientific education in Russia, a big kind of gap in the 90s has allowed folks to kind of roll back to him and pull these theories back up. Education. Again, the answer is education.

And it's not something that is unfamiliar over in the country I'm currently residing in. Nor am I. nor am I. That's a little sad. It's also something we've been talking about since one of our very early episodes on breatharianism, the idea that you can live off the light and air and energy without eating.

Yeah. There will always be adherence to the pseudoscience. Yeah. I don't know if that's something that we can make go away except through education and where education doesn't work or isn't accessible. You know, we have this. When it comes to the botanists of the Plant Institute, long after the war has finished, the story comes out, right? And the siege of Leningrad is so horrific and people are not stoked to share their experience much less relive it. So the story

comes out slowly but then we start having reporters and investigators asking questions, in particular of the surviving botanists. There's a reporter who met with one of the managers of the Plain Institute who survived, the reporter asks Nikolai Ivanov, why didn't you eat the seeds? Can you really explain this because this is a hard one? The expired ones, the duplicates. The expired ones, yes, exactly. And Nikolai, even long after this experience, replied, what is truly being done for the sake of science cannot be fathomed. Never. We were well aware of this during the blockade. Otherwise, we wouldn't have had the strength to live. And that's kind of it, isn't it? Is it like monastically keeping and cataloging and refraining

from disturbing this archive, even if it is an archive of edible things, gives you purpose in a time where every other need of yours is probably not being fulfilled. Every other physical need, certainly. Yeah. That's another answer that some other of the survivors gave was that it gave us purpose and it tied us to something that was outside of ourselves, beyond ourselves and a future. So you could actually like think beyond the blockade. You could think beyond your own hunger. By preserving this thing for the future, you have decided that there will be a future.

And I love the idea of how a seed is so representative of that right it's this tight little collection of cells that can reproduce hope incarnate right and if you can keep the seed alive even in its dormant state if you just keep it viable and don't fucking eat it then it's gonna be helpful it it's gonna be useful, and there is hope for something. Thanks for listening. If you want more Infamy, we've got plenty more episodes at bittersweetinfamy.com. Or wherever you listen to podcasts.

If you wanna support the podcast, shoot us a few bucks via our Ko-fi account. At ko-fi.com forward slash bittersweetinthemy. But no pressure, bittersweetinthemy is free, baby. You can always support us by liking, rating, subscribing, leaving a review, following us on Instagram at bittersweetinthemy, or just pass the podcast along to a friend who you think would dig it.

Stay sweet! For this episode's Minfamous, my sources included Palestinian olive farmers defy Israeli attacks for prized crop In Al Jazeera by Ibrahim Husseini, October 29, 2020 In Palestine, protecting one of the world's oldest olive trees is a 24-7 job In Gastro Obscura by Jason Ruffin, March 6, 2020. In Palestine, protecting one of the world's oldest olive trees is a 24-7 job. In Gastro Obscura by Jason Ruffin, March 6, 2020. West Bank's ancient olive trees face their biggest threat yet by Paloma Dupont de Denechin for Atmos, January 22, 2025.

Seven decades of struggle, how one Palestinian village's story captures pain of Nakba. By Oliver Holmes and Pablo Gutierrez for The Guardian, May 13, 2018. Hostilities in the Gaza Strip in Israel, Flash Update Number 172 by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. That was released in 2024. A Threshold Crossed! Israeli Authorities in the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution, released by Human Rights Watch April 27, 2021.

Gaza sickening normalization of suffering amidacks on People and Aid Convoys. In the UN News, December 13, 2024. Amnesty International Investigation concludes that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. By Amnesty International, December 5, 2024. Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza? New report from BU School of Law's International Human Rights Clinic lays out case in BU Today, June 5th, 2024 by Aline Boronova. For general history, like quick dates and things like that, I looked at the Wikipedia articles for Partition of the Ottoman Empire, Nakba, Six-Day War, Olive Cultivation in Palestine, and Israel Invasion of the Gaza Strip. Lastly, I watched the documentary Where Olive Trees Weep, which I really recommend.

The sources that I used for this week's episode include an article from Science History Institute Museum and Library, their publication Distillations Magazine, The Tragedy of the World's First Seed Bank, written by Sam Keon, published September 27th, 2022. I listened to the History Unplugged podcast. While starving at the Sieged Leningrad, scientists hid drought resistant crop seeds that could prevent future famines. This was published December 24th, 2024.

I looked at the Wikipedia articles for the Siege of Leningrad, Nikolai Vavilov, and Trofim Lisenko. And special thanks to the Houston Public Library for lending out the book that became the bulk of the sources for this episode, Simon Parkin's book, The Forbidden Garden, the botanists of besieged Leningrad and their impossible choice, published by Simon and Schuster, and it came out in 2024. If you're interested in even more Bittersweet Infamy, you can head over to our Ko-fi account, that's K-O-F-I dot com slash Bittersweet Infamy, where if you become a monthly subscriber, you get access to the Bittersweet Film Club. We've watched Battle of the Sexes starring Emma Stone and Steve Carell. So you can hear me, Taylor and Perpetual Special guest Mitchell

Collins chat about the fine film selected by our subscriber Lizzie D. You too, if you become a subscriber, can select a movie for us to watch. A big thanks to all our subscribers, including Terry, Jonathan, Erica Jo Brown, Soph, Dylan, and Saksha the Cat. And a shout out to our most recent supporter, Josie's mom, aka my mom. Thanks, ma'am. Bittersweet Infamy is a proud member of the 604 Podcast Network. This episode was lovingly edited by Alex McCarthy with help from Alexi Johnson. Our cover photo was taken by Luke Bentley. The interstitial music you heard earlier is by Mitchell Collins. And the song you are listening to now is T Street by Brian Steele.