Document 27

Memorandum of N. Malstev to Ya. Rudzutak and Ye. Yaroslavsky on purge of libraries, 16 October 1932

RGASPI [Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of the Documents of Modern History], f. 17, op. 114, d. 371, ll. 116-118 (verso). Typed original.

Libraries have been purged of pernicious and outdated literature by NKPros (Narodnyi Komissariat Prosveshcheniia [People's Commissariat of Education]) without adequate instructions and control. The only instructions from Glavpol[it]prosvet (Glavnoe upravlenie politicheskogo prosveshcheniia [Chief Directorate of Political Education]), dated 29 March 1930, present no defined order for book inspection and removal and are filled with ambiguities and obviously incorrect and harmful directives that could not serve as a practical guide for conducting a purge. Therefore in some oblasts (Moscow and Leningrad) instructions solely for those oblasts appeared; more often than not, in view of the difficulty of this undertaking and the risks involved, the matter was allowed to take its own course, whatever happened would happen, and responsibility could be placed on those who actually carried out the work.

And what happened was very bad. At a meeting of those who conducted the purges, it came to light that more than sixty percent of all book holdings have been withdrawn. There are libraries in which the portion of books withdrawn reached eighty or ninety percent. Correspondence from very different corners of the USSR indicates that the classics of philosophy, science, belles-lettres, and even revolutionary Marxism have been removed: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Goncharov, Dickens, Hugo, resolutions of party congresses, reports of congresses of soviets, Sechenov, Timiriazev, Khvolson, Ivan Pavlov. The names of these "withdrawn" authors alone indicate criminal activity in the way the purge was conducted.

It is difficult to explain all this by lack of sophistication and stupidity in those carrying out the purge. It is one thing that in certain instances Lenin's books were withdrawn, for instance, because they were listed under the last name Il'in or Marx's "Communist Manifesto" with Riazanov's foreword, but in many other instances this explanation breaks down.

Lists of works recommended for removal produced by purging committees in Moscow and Leningrad drawn up by "authoritative" and "educated" people give directions that in the provinces could lead to nothing else. Under "Philosophy" the Leningrad instructions propose that "idealistic philosophy should be removed entirely from circulation" (leaving only Kant's and Hegel's works). The works of bourgeois sociologists Spencer, Tarde, M. Kovalevsky, and Simmel are being withdrawn as are Bukharin's Istmat (Istoricheskii materializm [Historical Materialism]), Deborin, Kornilov, from the section of antireligious literature Kautsky's Foundations of Christianity and the titles of ninety books that I personally am unacquainted with but which include many surnames of Communists. From the "Social and Political" section Kautsky's The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx, Luxemburg's Accumulation of Capital, Rosenberg's Commentaries on Das Kapital, Sabsovich, Borian's State Control in the Soviet Union and in Western Europe, Yaroslavsky, volumes II and IV, Nevsky, Kerzhentsev, Bogdanov's Lessons in Political Economy, Hilferding, Tugan-Baranovsky.

Under science, Bekhterev, Sechenov, Pavlov, many books about physics, chemistry, geology, and particularly biology.

The Moscow instructions differ little from the Leningrad ones. On seventy lists of books subject to removal to a special repository of the oblast library which were distributed throughout the Soviet Union without the knowledge of NKPros figure many books of great value. Listed here is all antireligious literature that unmasks religion by scientific fact alone, all trade union literature from the time before the trade unions were reorganized. Listed here are both Guesde and Jaurès, Vandervelde's Condition of the Working Class in Belgium, the Webbs, a whole series of books by Lozovsky, Tomsky, Theses for the Fourteenth Congress approved by the PB (Politburo), Friche's History of the Labor Movement in the West, Sechenov, Freud, Ditzen, Kollontai's The New Morality and the Working Class. The list for belle-lettres was drawn up in a completely arbitrary way. Why withdraw Hamsun, Dickens, Hauptmann, Zlatovratsky, Potapenko, Rostand, Oscar Wilde, Fet, Hugo, Sudermann, even Lunacharsky, Balmont, A. K. Tolstoy, and many, many others who by the humblest and most general assessment are on a higher level and less pernicious than the hundreds of junky kinds of belles-letters that Gosizdat (Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'svo [State Publishing Firm]) puts out even now?

A kind of sadistic guardianship of the reader results from all this. The main instructions of Glavpolitprosvet are more restrained and balanced. But even according to them, "all pre-revolutionary literature" concerned with upbringing and education, all pre-revolutionary mathematics textbooks, all anthologies of Russian literature, collections of pieces for recitation, oral public reading and narration "should be removed from local public libraries and transferred to central and pedagogical libraries." In the category of belles-lettres removal of all books by Averchenko, Krestovsky, and Nemirovich-Danchenko is recommended, although works deemed "least unacceptable" can be kept, including Benoit's Atlantis, the famous Tarzan, and others.

There is a really terrible peril to all this because of the quite unacceptable and unregulated way in which the books were removed. What is the"central" library that is supposed to make the final decision about the fate of a book withdrawn, whether to throw it out or sell it? Is this a raion library, an oblast one? This decision has been left to the discretion of the local authorities. The Moscow Oblast Library created such centers in twenty three spots. Glavpolitprosvet instructions propose that "[A]ll books deemed properly withdrawn-- once two copies have been deposited in the archives and a selection made of those having potential value for research and specialized libraries--are to be sold unbound to factories for recycling into paper." No wonder that, following this, for example, in Morshansk they destroyed all philosophical literature taken from local libraries? There can be no doubt that such instances abound.

But this is not all.

According to the Glavpolitprosvet instructions, two copies of a huge number of books of great value are supposed to kept in the "archives" of a library. According to the instructions of Mosoblpolitprosvet (Moskovskoe oblastnoe upravlenie politicheskogo prosveshchenia [Moscow Oblast Directorate of Political Education]) and MOSPS (Moskovsky Sovet Professional'nykh Soiuzov [Moscow Council of Trade Unions]) a "Special Repository" (spetsfond) was set up. In Leningrad a "Closed Repository." Except for books "worthy of being actively promoted to the reading masses," all other books not subject to the purge and removal process are to be put into these repositories. These books should be "kept separate from the main core [of books] in a special room or on separate shelves or in separate cabinets. Free access to them should not occur, catalogue cards for them are to be removed from the general catalog and maintained separately for reference purposes." The only possible meaning is that, after the official purge, readers can only use permitted books made available to them by a librarian at the latter's discretion, for there is no way for them even to know what else the library has (the catalog cards having been withdrawn).

All the instructions put great emphasis on the urgency of this work and the need to speed it up. Books were hauled to the Moscow Oblast Library by the truckload during the night; any organized receiving of them was out of the question. To tell what is what in such a mass of books is utterly impossible. An easy solution was sought and found: sell the books. The Oblast Library got itself a pretty good source of income out of the purge. The result? Secondhand book dealers all had books with uncanceled library identification stamps. This bacchanalia of stupidity was followed by a bacchanalia of stealing, for you couldn't have created a more irresponsible atmosphere for the bad element among library workers than by letting books with library identification stamps appear on the secondhand book market legally.

Characteristic in this business is not so much the Olympian composure and apathy of NKPros as the silence of the trade union community. During the time of the purge, from January 1930 on,"Krasnyi Bibliotekar'"(Red Librarian), VTsSPS's (Vsesoiuznyi Tsentral'nyi Sovet Professional'nykh Soiuzov [All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions]) and NKP's [NKPros] special organ, besides publishing the above-mentioned instructions from Glavpolitprosvet, made note of the purge with only a single article, whose author, Timofeev, in June 1931 could still observe that even with the removal of sixty percent of book holdings there was still much pernicious and outdated literature in libraries and demanded that the purge be more intensive and broader and that the procedure for pulping books be simplified. No need for any approvals or carting books off. Just compile two copies of a simple list, a form for which he proposes on the spot, and the books can be pulped.

It's no wonder that the purge took place under pressure, ignoring completely the opinion of librarians. Noted were isolated instances of OGPU interference (in Tyumen and Kasimov) in the purge of book stacks. In Kasimovka a OGPU agent took Bukharin's book Istmat from a student at an educational prep center for workers, and the librarian who produced the book for him was summoned to the OGPU and given a scolding.

VTsSPS in a resolution of its own published in the 4 September issue of the newspaper Trud (Labor) correctly noted the "quite obvious political harm" resulting from purge excesses. But the resolution is inadequate. First of all, though in its first paragraph VTsSPS categorically forbids trade union bodies from conducting a book purge, in the next it not only proposes that a "purge procedure" be developed, but also institutes a procedure for continuing the purge: "Removal of books must be carried out by an authoritative commission headed by a member of the Presidium of FZMK (Fabrichno-Zavodskoi Mestnyi Komitet (Local Factory and Shop Committee)" and "the lists of books withdrawn should be approved by FZMK or by the boards of the Union," i.e., in actual fact VTsSPS made matters even more confusing and made removal of books following the purge procedure more irresponsible, for one should not trust any FZMK to make a decision about the fate of a book. One should also not deem adequate VTsSPS choices for a special commission to unmask those guilty of improperly removing books. The commission is supposed to include four library workers: one from VTsSPS, one from MOSPS, one from NKPros, and one from among the workers of the given library, some of whom could have been direct culprits in this whole business and not in a position to unmask persons who are genuinely guilty in a political sense of causing extraordinary political and material harm to the building of socialism and soviet power by their criminal purging activity. The activity of a commission such as this should not and cannot be limited to the libraries of unions alone.

Therefore I propose:

1. To put forward a proposal to TsK VKP(b) to stop immediately the purging, transportation, and reselling of books from all libraries.

2. To create as a body of TsKK's Presidium a commission to unmask the real culprits of criminal purging activity and to develop measures to liquidate the harmful consequences of this activity.