One of the world's largest gene banks is located in St. Petersburg, the N.I Vavilov Botanical Research Institute (VIR). Experts usually call it VIR or Vavilov Institute. More than 300,000 seed samples are stored in VIR. The facility is named after the famous geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, who since 1920 traveled around the world to collect seeds of cultivated plants and their wild relatives. In the period from 1923 to 1940, Vavilov and his college organized a total of 180 collecting trips around the world. The most important operations went to Afghanistan (1924), the Mediterranean countries and Ethiopia (1927) and America (in the 1930s). Between 1920 and 1940, the collection grew from 14,000 to 240,000 seed samples, today it contains 320,000 samples. VIR has 12 experimental stations. Vavilov had an early connection with breeders and researchers in the Nordic countries, especially the Copenhagen Botanical Garden and the plant breeders of Svalöv in Sweden. They exchanged seeds and information, and many of the seed samples can still be found in a gene bank in Russia.
Plant Breeding and Genetics UMN HORT 4401: Nikolai Vavilov by Clarisse Randolph, 4:59 min
N.I. Vavilov Institute of Plant Genetic Resources (VIR) (homepage)
Wikipedia: Nikolai Vavilov (linkki)