The quiet work of remembering
In a basement beneath the Russian State Library, rows of uncatalogued volumes sit in climate-controlled silence. Many have no known owner. Some bear inscriptions — a name, a date, a city that no longer exists under that name.
Every book that survives is a small act of defiance against forgetting.
The scale of confiscation during the Soviet period remains difficult to quantify. Estimates range from tens of thousands to millions of volumes, taken from private collections, religious institutions, and dissolved organisations.
What we know
- 1920s–1930s: Mass confiscations during collectivisation and anti-religious campaigns
- 1940s: Wartime looting and "trophy" libraries brought from occupied territories
- 1950s–1980s: Quieter but steady absorption of dissident libraries by state institutions
The cataloguing effort
Since 2018, a small team of volunteer archivists has been working to identify provenance markers — bookplates, stamps, marginalia — that can link volumes back to their original owners or collections.
The work is painstaking and underfunded, but it represents something larger: the insistence that ownership, history, and cultural identity matter even when the state has tried to erase them.