[Andrey_BY]

A nice story indeed. But again it seems to me Bill had no idea of real origins for varieties he brought back from Novosibirsk. The matter is there was a huge exchange programm between such Breeding Institutes and AESs. There is a still a huge collection of seed samples owned by VIR institute where most of other Soviet breeding organizations had been taking from. The main goal of these regional Institutes was to adopt a well-known varieties to their local growing conditions so they made a lot of crosses using these samples and stabilized most promising results.

So as I wrote before there is no real signs to consider those seed samples from Galina and other Siberian friends of Bill to have Siberian origin. They could be from Moscow, St. Peterburg or any other Russian regions...