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The materiality of secrets: everyday secrecy in postwar Soviet Union
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 April 2023
Abstract
The intensive culture of secrecy and censorship in postwar Soviet society was enabled by bureaucracies such as Glavlit, the principal agency for censorship, but also by a secondary level of ‘parasitic bureaucracy’ involving institutions and paperwork which drew lifeblood from the core regime of secrecy but had no reason to exist otherwise. In highlighting everyday secrecy at the office (through the ‘first departments’ responsible for workplace secrecy) and in libraries (in the work of special storage units for censored books), this article shows how this parasitic bureaucratic culture of secrecy prioritised the regulation of knowledge in its material and spatial forms.
French abstract
Dans la société soviétique d'après-guerre, la culture intensive du secret et de la censure reposait non seulement sur des institutions bureaucratiques telles que Glavlit, principal organe de censure, mais aussi sur un second niveau de ‘bureaucratie parasitaire' qui impliquait services administratifs et gestion de paperasses, au sein d'organismes se nourrissant d'un régime fondé sur le secret, et qui sinon n'avaient aucune raison d'exister par eux-mêmes. L'auteur met l'accent sur le devoir de garder le secret, cela quotidiennement au bureau, sous l'autorité hiérarchique des ‘premiers départements', en charge de faire respecter non seulement le silence du personnel administratif, mais aussi celui des bibliothécaires et conservateurs, tout particulièrement responsables des ouvrages frappés de censure. Cet article démontre comment, par le biais d’une bureaucratie parasitaire, cette culture du secret a pu, en priorité, réguler des formes de connaissance essentiellement matérielles et spatiales.
German abstract
Die intensive Kultur der Geheimhaltung und Zensur in der sowjetischen Nachkriegsgesellschaft wurde ermöglicht durch Bürokratien wie Glavlit, die Hauptzensurbehörde, aber auch durch eine sekundäre Ebene einer ‘parasitären Bürokratie', die mit Einrichtungen und Aktenbeständen einher ging und ihr Lebenselexier aus dem Kernsystem der Geheimhaltung bezog, aber sonst keinen anderen Existenzgrund besaß. Indem der Beitrag die alltägliche Gemeinhaltung in Büros (durch die ‘Ersten Abteilungen’‚ die für die Geheimhaltung am Arbeitsplatz verantwortlich waren) und Bibliotheken (durch die Arbeit spezieller Lagerungseinheiten für zensierte Bücher) beleuchtet, zeigt er, wie diese parasitäre und bürokratische Geheimhaltungskultur die Regulierung des Wissens materiell und räumlich priorisierte.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
Notes
1 Kornev, N. A., ‘Oratoriia laboratorii 17-A’, in two parts in Al'manakh ‘Metronom Aptekarskogo ostrovova’ 2 (2006), 92–102Google Scholar and Al'manakh ‘Metronom aptekarskogo ostrovova’ 3 (2006), 67–77Google Scholar.
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3 Daniel Balmuth, ‘The origins of the tsarist epoch of censorship terror’, American Slavic and East European Review 19, 4 (1960), 497–520.
4 Raymond Hutchings, Soviet secrecy & non-secrecy (Houndmills, 1987). For other useful Cold War-era scholarship on secrecy and censorship in the Soviet Union, see Peter B. Maggs, Nonmilitary secrecy under Soviet law (Santa Monica, 1964); Martin Dewhirst and Robert Farrell eds., The Soviet censorship (Metuchen, 1979); Marianna Tax Choldin and Maurice Friedberg eds., The red pencil: artists, scholars, and censors in the USSR (Boston, 1989); V. Rubanov, ‘From the “cult of secrecy” to the information culture’, Soviet Review 30, 5 (1989), 87–109; Leonid Vladimirov, ‘Glavlit: how the Soviet censor works’, Index on Censorship (Autumn/Winter 1972), 31–43.
5 Hutchings, Soviet secrecy & non-secrecy, 230–9.
6 A. V. Blium and V. G. Volovnikov eds., Tsenzura v sovetskom soiuze 1917–1991: dokumenty (Moscow, 2004).
7 A. V. Blium, Sovetskaia tsenzura v epokhu total'nogo terrora, 1929–1953 (St. Petersburg, 2000). In earlier works, he covered the 1920s. See his Za kulisami ‘ministerstva pravdy’: tainaia istoriia tsenzury, 1917–1929 (St. Petersburg, 1994). See also his work focused on Leningrad: Kak eto delalos’ v Leningrade: tsenzura v gody ottepeli, zastoia i perestroika, 1953–1991 (St. Petersburg, 2005). For a short English-language translation of Blium's work, see A. V. Blium, ‘Forbidden topics: early Soviet censorship directives’, Book History 1 (1998), 268–82.
8 Goriaeva, Politicheskaia tsenzura v sssr, 1917–1991 gg., 12–4; T. M. Goriaeva ed., Iskliuchit’ vsiakie upominaniia…: ocherki istorii sovetskoi tsenzury (Minsk, 1995). She also edited a volume of declassified documents on Soviet censorship. See T. M. Goriaeva ed., Istoriia sovetskoi politicheskoi tsenzury: dokumenty i kommentarii (Moscow, 1997). In this vein, see also works by others: V. N. Paramonov, ‘Sekretnost’ v sovetskom obshchestve v 1920–1940-kh gg.’, Vestnik SamGU 2 (2012), 125–33; L. V. Lozhkov, ‘Tsenzura v sssr v uslovkiiakh razriadki mezhdunarodnoi napriazhennosti (1970-e gg.)’, Vestnik un-ta. Ser. 21. Upravlenie (gosudarstvo i obshchestvo) 1 (2013), 146–66.
9 D. L. Babichenko, ‘Literaturnyi front’: istoriia politicheskoi tsenzury 1932–1946 gg.: sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 1994); D. L. Babichenko, Pisateli i tsenzory: sovetskaia literatura 1940-kh godov pod politicheskim kontrolem TsK (Moscow, 1994); М. V. Zelenov, ‘Voennaia i gosudarstvennaia taina v RSFSR i SSSR i ikh pravoe obespechenie (1917–1991 gg.)’, Leningradskii iuridicheskii zhurnal 1 (2012), 143–59; M. V. Zelenov, ‘Glavlit i istoricheskaia nauka v 20–30-e gody’, Voprosy istorii 3 (1997), 21–36.
10 E. V. Buliulina and L. S. Tokareva, ‘Dokumenty mestnykh organov politicheskoi tsenzury sssr 1922–1991 gg.’, Izvestiia Tomskogo politekhnicheskogo universiteta 320, 6 (2012), 162–6; M. S. Vinogradov and M. V. Zelenov, ‘Evoliutsiia struktury i shtatov upravleniia po okhrane voennykh i gosudarstvennykh tain v pechati pri Gor'kovskom oblispolkome (Obllit, 1953–1966 gg.)’, Vestnik Leningradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta im. A. S. Pushkina 4, 1 (2012), 100–6; S. A. Dianov, ‘Organy sovetskoi tsenzury v Komi-Permiatskom natsional'nom okruge v 1920–1980-e gg.: struktura, funktsii, kadry’, Manuskript 12, 6 (2019), 20–4; E. V. Galenko, ‘Politicheskaia tsenzura na sovetskom dal'nem vostoke (1946–1954 gg.)’, Vestnik dal'nevostochnogo otdeleniia rossiiskoi akademii nauk 2 (2008), 55–65; G. V. Kostyrchenko, ‘Sovetskaia tsenzura v 1941–1952 godakh’, Voprosy istorii 11 (1996), 87–94; A. Guzhalovskii, ‘Glavlitbel: instrument informatsionnogo kontrolia belorusskogo obshchestva (1922–1941 gg.)’, Acta Slavonica 31 (2012), 77–104; P. V. Pechkovskii, ‘Tzenzura v pechati, kak element gosudarstvennoi politiki v oblasti informatsionnoi bezopasnosti sovetskoi rossii’, Vestnik brianskogo gosuniversiteta 3 (2015), 116–21.
11 Jan Plamper, ‘Abolishing ambiguity: Soviet censorship practices in the 1930s’, Russian Review 60, 4 (2001), 526–44. See also the work of Brian Kassoff, who suggested that the goal of ideological censorship was not only to limit the circulation of dangerous ideas but also to ‘facilitate the creation of works [the Soviets] believed necessary to build socialism’. See Brian Kassoff, ‘Glavlit, ideological censorship, and Russian-language book publishing, 1922–1938’, Russian Review 74 (2015), 69–96.
12 Asif Siddiqi, ‘Soviet secrecy: toward a social map of knowledge’, American Historical Review 126, 3 (2021), 1046–71.
13 Jonathan Bone, ‘Soviet controls on the creation of information in the 1920s and 1930s’, Cahiers du Monde russe 40, 1/2 (1999), 65–89.
14 Samantha Sherry, Discourses of regulation and resistance: censoring translation in the Stalin and Khrushchev era Soviet Union (Edinburgh, 2015), 6.
15 Mark Harrison, ‘Secrecy, fear and transaction costs: the business of Soviet forced labour in the early Cold War’, Europe-Asia Studies 65, 6 (2013), 1112–35; Mark Harrison, ‘Accounting for secrets’, Journal of Economic History 73, 4 (2013), 1017–49.
16 Larissa Zakharova, ‘Trust in bureaucracy and technology: the evolution of secrecy policies and practice in the Soviet state apparatus (1917–1991)’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 21, 3 (2020), 555–90. Emphasis mine. See also Epp Lauk, ‘Practice of Soviet censorship in the press: the case of Estonia’, Nordicom Review 20, 2 (1999), 19–31.
17 For a summary of these debates, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Revisionism in Soviet history’, History and Theory 45, 4 (2007), 77–91. For early works in Soviet social history, see Alex Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks come to power: the revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York, 1976); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and social mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (New York, 1979); Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and society under Lenin and Stalin (Princeton, 1978); Diane Koenker, Moscow workers and the 1917 revolution (Princeton, 1981).
18 The later generation of social history works would include: Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin's industrial revolution: politics and workers, 1928–1932 (Cambridge, 1988); Lewis R. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the politics of economic productivity in the Soviet Union, 1936–1941 (Cambridge, 1988); Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, the state and revolution: Soviet family policy and social life, 1917–1936 (Cambridge, 1993); Sarah Davies, Popular opinion in Stalin's Russia: terror, propaganda, and dissent, 1934–1941 (Cambridge, 1997); Lynn Viola, Peasant rebels under Stalin: collectivization and the culture of peasant resistance (New York, 1996); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's peasants: resistance and survival in the Russian village after collectivization (New York, 1994). Post-revisionist works focusing on power and subjectivity were influenced by Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic mountain: Stalinism as civilization (Berkeley, 1997) and Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on my mind: writing a diary under Stalin (Cambridge, 2006).
19 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: ordinary life in extraordinary times (Oxford, 2000), 1.
20 Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 2. Emphasis mine.
21 The quote is from Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 6. For an insightful discussion of ‘practice’ as a heuristic concept in thinking about society, see Michel de Certeau, The practice of everyday life, trans. Steve F. Rendall (Berkeley, 1984).
22 ‘Dekret o pechati’ (27 October 1917) in Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti, t. 1 (25 oktiabria 1917 g. – 16 marta 1918 g.) (Moscow, 1957), 27–8.
23 Zelenov, ‘Voennaia i gosudarstvennaia taina v RSFSR i SSSR i ikh pravoe obespechenie (1917–1991 gg.)’.
24 Goriaeva, Politicheskaia tsenzura v sssr, 1917–1991 gg., 17.
25 Goriaeva, Politicheskaia tsenzura v sssr, 1917–1991 gg., 17.
26 Yoram Gorlizki, ‘Ordinary Stalinism: the Council of Ministers and the Soviet neopatrimonial state, 1946–1953’, Journal of Modern History 74, 4 (2002), 699–736; Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Cold peace: Stalin and the Soviet ruling circle, 1945–1953 (Oxford, 2004), 62.
27 ‘Ob ustanovlenii perechnia svedenii, sostavliaiushchikh gosudarstvennuiu tainu, razglashenie kotorykh karaetsia po zakonu’, Izvestiia, 10 June 1947, 1.
28 Zelenov, ‘Voennaia i gosudarstvennaia i taina v RSFSR i SSSR’.
29 Liudmila Mazur, ‘Stanovlenie sistemy deloproizvodstva v sovetskoi rossii, 1917–1950-e gg.’, Wschodni rocznik humanistyczny 15, 4 (2018), 111–26.
30 E. V. Zaitseva, ‘Stanvolenie i razvitie sovetskogo gosudarstvennogo deloproizvodstva’, Ekonomicheskaia istoriia 14, 4 (2018), 363–484.
31 For secrecy within the early Bolshevik Party and its work, see Andrei Sorokin, ‘“Inspektor tov. Petushkov pri ukhode s raboty ostavil otkrytyi seif…”’, Rodina 5 (2016), 124–9; I. G. Ivantsov, ‘Sekretnoe deloproizvodstvo organov VKP(b): 1920-e – nachalo 1930-kh gg. (na materialakh severokavkazskoi kraevoi KK-RKI)’, Nauchnyi vestnik IuIM 2 (2017), 104–9; Bone, ‘Soviet controls on the creation of information in the 1920s and 1930s’.
32 Instruktsiia po obespecheniiu sokhraneniia gosudarstvennoi tainy v uchrezhdeniiakh i na predpriiatiiakh sssr (1948), State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), fond [or collection, hereafter abbreviated as f.] r-9492, opis’ [or register, hereafter op.] 2, delo [or file, hereafter d.] 79, listov [or leaves, hereafter ll. for multiple leaves and l. for a single leaf] 2–26.
33 See ‘Razdel II: zadachi sekretnykh otdelov (sekretnykh chastei)’ in Instruktsiia po obespecheniiu sokhraneniia gosudarstvennoi tainy v uchrezhdeniiakh i na predpriiatiiakh sssr, ll. 6–6ob.
34 Instruktsiia po obespecheniiu sokhraneniia gosudarstvennoi tainy v uchrezhdeniiakh i na predpriiatiiakh sssr, l. 6ob.
35 Instruktsiia po obespecheniiu sokhraneniia gosudarstvennoi tainy v uchrezhdeniiakh i na predpriiatiiakh sssr, l. 23.
36 Zakharova, ‘Trust in bureaucracy and technology’, 561.
37 Instruktsiia po obespecheniiu sokhraneniia gosudarstvennoi tainy v uchrezhdeniiakh i na predpriiatiiakh sssr, ll. 19–19ob.
38 Instruktsiia po obespecheniiu sokhraneniia gosudarstvennoi tainy v uchrezhdeniiakh i na predpriiatiiakh sssr, ll. 21–21ob.
39 Harrison, ‘Accounting for secrets’, 1046.
40 ‘Podpiska’ in Instruktsiia po obespecheniiu sokhraneniia gosudarstvennoi tainy v uchrezhdeniiakh i na predpriiatiiakh sssr, l. 29ob.
41 These are all in Instruktsiia po obespecheniiu sokhraneniia gosudarstvennoi tainy v uchrezhdeniiakh i na predpriiatiiakh sssr, ll. 27–41.
42 See for example, ‘Direktiva zamestitelia ministera oborony sssr no. 45520ss’ (28 July 1955) in V. I. Ivkin and G. A. Sukhina eds., Zadacha osoboi gosudarstvennoi vazhnosti: iz istorii sozdaniia raketno-iadernogo oruzhiia i raketnykh voisk strategicheskogo naznacheniia (1945–1959 gg.): sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 2010), 485–8. For Soviet ‘closed cities’, see Asif Siddiqi, ‘Atomized urbanism: secrecy and security from the Gulag to the Soviet closed cities’, Urban History 49 (2022), 190–210.
43 D. Ustinov to the Central Committee (20 October 1954), Russian State Archive of the Economy (RGAE), f. 8157, op. 1, d. 1691, ll. 135–6.
44 Mikhail Agursky and Hannes Adomeit, ‘The Soviet military-industrial complex’, Survey 24, 2 (1979), 106–24.
45 See the Glavlit decree on ‘selective control over the use of copy machines in organizations and enterprises’: ‘Ob ustanovlenii vyborochnogo kontrolia za ispol'zovaniem mnozhitel'noi tekhniki v organizatsiiakh in a predpriiatiiakh’ (7 September 1970), GARF, f. R-9425, op. 2, d. 528, l. 55.
46 Kornev, ‘Oratoriia laboratorii 17-A’ (part 2).
47 ‘Podpiska’ from a research institute in the Severovodninsk in 1985, shared by Ekaterina Emeliantseva, personal correspondence, 26 November 2015.
48 ‘Spravka ob operativnoi obstanovke v nauchno-issledovatel'skom institute elektrografii (predpriatie p/ia g-4602) MRP SSSR’ (21 July 1987), stored at: http://kgbveikla.lt.
49 ‘Spravka ob operativnoi obstanovke v nauchno-issledovatel'skom institute elektrografii (predpriatie p/ia g-4602) MRP SSSR’.
50 Ronald D. Liebowitz, ‘Education and literacy data in Russian and Soviet censuses’, in Ralph S. Clem ed., Research guide to the Russian and Soviet censuses (Ithaca, 1986), 155–70; Boris N. Mironov, ‘The development of literacy in Russia and the USSR from the tenth to the twentieth centuries’, History of Education Quarterly 31, 2 (1991), 229–52. For official Soviet-era literacy figures, which used different standards than Western models, see Narodnoe obrazovanie, nauka i kul'tura v sssr: statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow, 1977). By 1970, compulsory secondary education (ten years of schooling) was introduced for all Soviet citizens.
51 XXIV S'ezd kommunisticheskoi partii sovetskogo soiuza (30 marta – 9 aprelia goda): stenograficheskii otchet): I (Moscow, 1971), 115.
52 Steven Lovell, The Russian reading revolution: print culture in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras (Houndmills, 2000), 16. For other works on reading and literacy in modern Russia, see Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia learned to read: literacy and popular culture (Princeton, 1985); Jeffrey Brooks, ‘Public and private values in the Soviet press, 1921–1928’, Slavic Review 48, 1 (1989), 16–35.
53 V. I. Lenin i bibliotekhnoe delo (Moscow, 1977), 318.
54 KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh i resheniiakh, t. 11: 1972–1975 (Moscow, 1978), 388–93.
55 Jennifer Jane Brine, ‘Adult readers in the Soviet Union’, Ph.D. thesis, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, 1985, 20–4. For changes in leisure time among the Soviet population, see also: L. A. Gordon and N. M. Rimashevskaia, Piatidnevnaia rabochaia nedelia i svobodnoe vremia trudiashchikhsia (Moscow, 1972), 24; J. Zuzanek, Work and leisure in the Soviet Union: a time-budget analysis (New York, 1980); W. Moskoff, Labour and leisure in the Soviet Union (London, 1984); Jenny Brine, Maureen Perrie and Andrew Sutton eds., Home, school, and leisure in the Soviet Union (London, 1980).
56 Narodnoe khoziaistvo sssr v 1982 g. (Moscow, 1983), 474, cited in Brine, ‘Adult readers in the Soviet Union’, 177.
57 Brine, ‘Adult readers in the Soviet Union’, 177–8. See also Narodnoe obrazovanie, nauka i kul'tura v sssr: statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow, 1977), 330, 333. For Soviet libraries, see Konstantin Kartuzov, ‘The formation of state policy in the sphere of libraries in the Soviet Union’, Public Policy and Economic Development 2, 6 (2014), 24–30.
58 V. Serov, ‘Perspektivy bibliotechnogo stroitel'stva’, Bibliotekar’ 7 (1982), 5–9.
59 N. K. Krupskaia, ‘Iz rukovodiashchego kataloga po iz'iatiiu vsekh vidov literatury iz bibliotek, chitalen i knizhnogo rynka’ (December 1923) in Tsenzura v sovetskom soiuze, 73–4.
60 For Lermontov, see ‘Tsirkular Glavlita ob iz'iatii iz bibliotek sobranii sochinenii M. Iu. Lermontova’ (28 November 1931) in Istoriia sovetskoi politicheskoi tsenzury, 461. For Trotsky and Zinoviev, see B. Volin to A. A. Andreev (8 April 1935) in Istoriia sovetskoi politicheskoi tsenzury, 476–7.
61 ‘Instruktsiia po peresmotru knig v bibliotekakh’ (December 1926) in Tsenzura v sovetskom soiuze, 110–1. See also ‘Instruktsiia po peresmotru knig v bibliotekakh i izbakh-chital'niakh’ (October 1929) in Tsenzura v sovetskom soiuze, 170–1.
62 A. Samokhvalov to Vinokurov (28 January 1938), GARF, f. R-9425, op. 1, d. 6, ll. 34–39. See also M. Z. Zelenov, ‘The library purges of 1932–1937 in Soviet Russia’, Solanus (New Series) 14 (2000), 42–57; M. V. Zelenov, ‘TsK VPK(b) i Glavlit: oktiabr’ 1937 – fevral’ 1938 g.’, in M. V. Zelenov and P. V. Batulin eds., Istoriia knigi i tsenzury v rossii: chetvertye Bliumskoe chteniia (Nizhnii Novgorod, 2018), 203–34.
63 K. V. Liutova, Spetskhran biblioteki akademii nauk: iz istorii sekretnykh fondov (St. Petersburg, 1999).
64 Like many practices of the Bolsheviks, the idea of secret library collections also had antecedents under Tsarist rule. Blium notes that secret library collections existed as early as the 1740s. See Blium, Sovetskaia tsenzura v epokhu total'nogo terrora, 94.
65 N. V. Ryzhak, ‘Tsenzura v sssr i rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka’, in L. N. Tikhonov ed., Rumiantsevskie chteniia: materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii (10–12 aprelia 2007) (Moscow, 2007), 284–91.
66 Kostyrchenko, ‘Sovetskaia tsenzura v 1941–1952 godakh’. See also N. V. Makhotina, ‘Kontrol’ Glavlita nad bibliotechnymi spetskhranami v sssr’, Nauchnyi al'manakh 4–4, 18 (2016), 66–70.
67 K. Omelchenko to the Department of Agitation and Propaganda of the Central Committee (5 May 1950), GARF, f. 9425, op. 2, d. 149, l. 53.
68 ‘Polozhenie ob otdele spetsfondov BAN SSSR’ (24 January 1972) cited in Liutova, Spetskhran biblioteki akademii nauk. For secrecy and the Academy of Sciences, see M. D. Bukharin and S. G. Karpyuk, ‘Academic science and secrecy in the late Stalin period’, Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. History 65, 1 (2020), 278–96.
69 Two days after Solzhenitsyn's expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974, Glavlit issued an order removing all his books from open accesss. See ‘Prikaz No. 10-dep. Glavlita ob iz'iatii iz bibliotek i knigotorgovoi seti proizvedenii A. I. Solzhenitsyn’ (14 February 1974), GARF, f. R-9425, op. 2, d. 639, l. 7.
70 Ryzhak, ‘Tsenzura v sssr i rosssiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka’; Valeria D. Stelmakh, ‘Reading in the context of censorship in the Soviet Union’, Libraries & Culture 36, 1 (2001), 143–51.
71 Ryzhak, ‘Tsenzura v sssr i rosssiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka’.
72 Stelmakh, ‘Reading in the context of censorship in the Soviet Union’.
73 S. F. Varlamova, ‘K istorii sozdaniia i razvitiia spetsfondov gosudarstvennoi publichnoi biblioteki im. M. E. Saltykova-Shchedrina’, in T. V. Gromova ed., Tsenzura v tsarskoi rossii i sovetskom soiuze: materialy konferentsii 24–27 maia 1993 g., moskva (Moscow, 1995), 161–7; S. F. Varlamova, ‘Spetskhran RNB: proshkoe i nastoiashchee’, Bibliotekovedenie 2 (1993), 74–82.
74 Brine, ‘Adult readers in the Soviet Union’, 199. For more details, see A. P. Seligerskii, Knizhnye fondy massovykh bibliotek: sostav, komplektovanie i ispol'zovanie v gosudarstvennykh bibliotekakh RSFSR (Moscow, 1974); ‘Luchshe ispol'zovat’ knizhnye fondy’, Bibliotekar’ 7 (1983), 3–4.
75 Dennis Kimmage, ‘Open stacks in a closed society? Glasnost in Soviet libraries; part one of two’, American Libraries 19, 7 (1988), 570–2, 574–5.
76 Andrei Rogachevskii, ‘Homo Sovieticus in the library’, Europe-Asia Studies 54, 6 (2002), 975–88.
77 G. M. Bardina, ‘Pravila pol'zovaniia literaturoi otdela spetsfondov BAN SSSR’ (1973), cited in Liutova, Spetskhran biblioteki akademii nauk. For personal views of the sketskhran and its history, see S. Dzhimbinov, ‘Epitapfiia spetskhranu?’, Novyi mir 5 (1990), 243–52; A. P. Shikman, ‘Sovershenno nesekretno’, Sovetskaia bibliografiia 6 (1988), 3–12.
78 Edward Kasinec, ‘Libraries in the Soviet Union’, Socialism and Democracy 5, 1 (1989), 173–91 (quote on p. 176). See also Edward Kasinec, ‘A Soviet research library remembered’, Libraries & Culture 36, 1 (2001), 16–26.
79 Bardina, ‘Pravila pol'zovaniia literaturoi otdela spetsfondov BAN SSSR’.
80 Ryzhak, ‘Tsenzura v sssr i rosssiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka’.
81 Liutova, Spetskhran biblioteki akademii nauk.
82 V. Markov to Savin (20 August 1973), GARF, f. 359, op. 2, d. 111, ll. 21–29.
83 V. Markov to N. G. Eliseeva (22 July 1975), GARF, f. 359, op. 2, d. 130, ll. 60–62.
84 Stites, Richard, ‘Crowded on the edge of vastness: observations on Russian space and place’, in Smith, Jeremy ed., Beyond the limits: the concept of space in Russian history and culture (Helsinki, 1999), 260Google Scholar.
85 ‘An Appeal by the Library Assistance Council of the Soviet Cultural Foundation’ (November 1989) in Kimmage, Dennis ed., Russian libraries in transition: an anthology of glasnost literature (Jefferson, NC, 1992), 159Google Scholar.
86 Rogachevskii, ‘Homo Sovieticus in the Library’.
87 See decrees regulating the stock of bookstores in Istoriia sovetskoi politicheskoi tsenzury, 210–2, 573, 588.
88 For the illegal book market, see Brine, ‘Adult readers in the Soviet Union’, 158–63.
89 Simmel, Georg, ‘The sociology of secrecy and of secret societies’, American Journal of Sociology 11, 4 (1906), 441–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar (quote on p. 484).
90 Sherry, Discourses of regulation and resistance, 52.