This is damn interesting.

On a hazy afternoon in March 1927, a Russian scientist was walking through the dense forests of Abyssinia,

ducking under low-hanging branches and stopping to inspect the

wild coffee trees lining his path. Accompanied by a group of local guides, the young traveler

had been hiking for weeks through the gorges of eastern Africa, keeping a close watch

for armed bandits or stalking leopards. Leaving the forest, the group slowly made their way

to the bottom of a canyon, clinging from tree to tree to prevent hurtling off the steep slope. Down below,

the blue Nile glistened with the reflection of the afternoon sun and the blinking eyes of a float

of crocodiles. When they were ready to cross the river, the men unslung their rifles and began shooting

into the water, continuing for hundreds of rounds. The river was turbulent with the thrashing

mass of crocodiles before turning a deep crimson, their bodies floating belly up.

Pushing the crocodiles aside with the butts of their rifles, the men waded across the river towards the highlands to complete the aim of the expedition,

to collect an assortment of seeds to bring back to their extensive seed repository in the Soviet Union.

The leader of the seed scavenging expedition was an adventurous young botanist called Nikolai Vavilov.

Back in the USSR, he had witnessed firsthand the series of famines that had plagued the Soviet Union,

the result of continuous war, outdated farming methods,

and a hostile climate in which huge swaths of land languished

in the permanent grip of ice and snow.

Parents were forced to forage for acorns and tufts of grass

to feed their children, while peasants fled their villages in search of food.

As mortality rates soared, bodies accumulated outside hospitals, left in decomposing piles in the absence of anyone with enough strength to bury them.

In the late 1920s, Stalin announced his first five-year plan, aiming to revolutionize agriculture through the collectivization of farms and plant breeding programs.

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