> hoard of 370,000 seeds.

How many man-days of food is that?

One pound of uncooked rice contains ~29,000 grains.

Can’t you survive for 8 days on zero pounds of rice?

Sure you can survive quite a while without food. It extends survival by one day.

If they didn't do that, what would have happened?

I don't think this is a great piece of writing as it doesn't really say much about these people's legacy. Only the legacy of one man through his entire career.

Hard to find (shouldn't be). This 1992 WaPo article names the 9 who starved (starting with Stchukin). Also mentions that under duress these people smuggled seeds out of Leningrad to storage in the Ural mountains.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/05/12/s...

This Springer article goes into great detail on the Pavlovsk Experimental Station's history "by 1934 Vavilov had founded over 400 research institutes, with staffing requirements of 20,000"

https://springerplus.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s4006...

Looks like the story was first told here:

Alexanyan, S. M. & Krivchenko, V. I. Vavilov Institute scientists heroically preserve world plant genetic resources collections during World War II siege of Leningrad. Diversity 7, 10–13 (1991).