Books for Tractors?: Interwar Dispersal and Sales of Russian Imperial Palace Books1

PATRICIA KENNEDY GRIMSTED (Cambridge, MA, USA)

BOOKS FOR TRACTORS?: INTERWAR DISPERSAL AND SALES OF RUSSIAN IMPERIAL PALACE BOOKS1

The elegant Russian series cataloging treasures lost as a result of World War II includes many books from the imperial palaces of Tsarskoe Selo and Pavlovsk, in suburban St. Petersburg;2 a separate volume covers book losses from Gatchina.3 However, the editors of Lost Book Treasures were not aware that in 1946 and 1947 the British restituted an estimated 60,000 books to So- viet authorities in Austria, over half of which (ca. 35,000) were from the imperial palaces.4 Nor do the editors mention the sale of imperial books in the

I. I am especially grateful to curators in the palaces of Gatchina, Pavlovsk, and Tsarskoe Selo, to Elena Solomakha in the archive of the State Hermitage (hereafter AGE) in St. Peters- burg, and to Mikhail Afanas'ev, director of the State Public Historical Library (GPIB) in Mos- cow for assisting my research. Many other colleagues in Russia and abroad consulted on various aspects of this project. My 2004 research was supported by a collaborative research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a travel grant from the International Research � Exchanges Board. 2. Svodnyi kdtalog kul'turnykh tsennostei, pokhishchennykh i utrachennykh v period Vtoroi mirovoi voiny, vol. 1: Gosudarstvenrryi muzei-zapovednik "Tsarskoe Selo, " books I and 2: Ekaterininskii dvorets (Moscow-St. Petersburg: Ministerstvo kul'tury Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 1999-2000); vol. 2: Gosudarstvennyi muzei-zapovednik "Pavlovsk": Pavlovskii dvorets (Mos- cow: Ministerstvo kul'tury Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Departament po sokhraneniiu kul'tumykh tsennostei, 2000); English edition: Summary Catalogue'of the Cultural Valuables Stolen and Lost during the Second World War, vol. 1: The Tsarskoe Selo State Museum Zone, books 1 and 2: The Catherine Palace (Moscow-St. Petersburg: Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, 1999- 2000); vol. 2: The Pavlovsk State Museum Zone: The Pavlovsk Palace (Moscow: Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, 2000). The room-by-room organization of these catalogues, Ilowing the prewar palace inventories (1938-1940), together with inadequate labels, makes it ex- ceedingly difficult to single out book listings. The CD-ROM version (2003) - available only for the latest edition of Windows - has more sorting possibilities, although again dependent on the labels in the text with inadequate categorization of books and graphic, and so on. 3. Lost books from Gatchina appear in a later sub series of the Svodnyi katalog, vol. 1l: Utrachennye knizhnye tsennosti, book 2: Leningradskaia oblast'. Gatchina (Moscow: Ministerstvo kul'tury Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 2003); separate English edition: Lost Book Treasures, book 2: Leningrad Region oblast'. Gatchina (Moscow: Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, 2003). 4. See Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, "Knigi iz Tsarskogo Sela vozvrashchaiutsia domoi s voiny," in Kniga. Issledovaniia i materialy. Sbornik 84 (Moscow: Nauka, 2005), pp. 72-94. That 1920s and early 1930s or other prewar dispersal. In fact, however, any analy- sis of the wartime fate of imperial books needs to be carefully linked to and understood in terms of both prewar developments and postwar restitution. In a 2002 account of library losses during World War II, Russian librari- ans claim, first on their list, that, "Irrecoverable damage was caused to the palace libraries outside St. Petersburg - Pushkin [Tsarskoe Selo], Pavlovsk, Petrodvorets and Gatchina."5 Quite to the contrary, I have documented - with the help of palace library curators - that, unlike the Amber Chamber, many of the books plundered by the Nazis were subsequently restituted by the British and are now once again held in the palaces. Moreover, many more of the wartime losses would have been "recoverable" had Soviet authorities made more effort to return all of the palace books received after the war from the British and Americans to their original home libraries. As it is, evidence is mounting that many of the palace books returned to the USSR were dispersed to other institutions before the palace libraries had been restored 6 Equally important are crucial prewar developments. Here we focus on the domestic dispersal and sale abroad of imperial books during the First Five-Year Plan (1928-1932). At last, we are gaining access to archival evidence that the most serious "irrecoverable damage" to the palace libraries came long before the German invasion. I concentrate on a few sam- ple findings from my own recent archival research in Russia regarding the

article updates the initial Grimsted report, published in German and Russian, "Von Bemstein- zimmer zu dem Btichern der Russischen Zarenpalaste: Identifikation und Rekonstruktion ver- brachdter Kultursch�tze"! "Ot Iantarnoi komnaty k knigam iz russkogo imperatorskogo dvortsa. Identifikatsiia i rekonstruktsiia peremeshchennykh kul'turnykh tsennostei," in Kulturguter - Moglichkeiten und Perspektiven einer gesamteuroptiischen Zusammenarbeit. Materialien der internationalen Konferenz Kulturelle Zusammenarbeit in Europa: Fragen der Erhaltung und des Schutzes von Kulturgtitern, St. Petersburg, 12. Mai 2003/ Kul'turnye tsennosti: Vozmozhnosti i perspektivy obshcheevropeiskogo sotrudnichestva. Sbornik materialov mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii Kul'tumoe sotrudnichestvo v Evrope: problemy sokhraneniia i okhrany kul'tumykh tsennostei, Sankt-Peterburg, 12 maia 2003 g. (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Vertag/ Moscow: Rudomino, 2004), pp. 108-52. Several curators in Tsarskoe Selo assisted my research, and I am especially grateful to rare books curator Irina Zaitseva. 5. A. M. Mazuritskii, I. G. Matveeva, and G. V. Mikheeva, "Book Losses in Russia during World War II," Solanus, 16 (2002), 27-38. Cf. the text of Mazuritskii's introduction to the catalogues in n. 2. 6. See my forthcoming article, with facsimile documents, "Pokhishchennye natsistami knigi vozvrashchaiutsia s voiny: Zabytaia istoriia britanskoi i amerikanskoi bibliotechnoi restitutsii v SSSR," in the forthcoming proceedings of the History of the Book Section at the Russian Library Association, St. Petersburg conference (May 2005) (St. Petersburg; RNB, 2006). See also Patricia Grimsted, "Flying Mercury Returns to Pavlovsk: Perspectives on the Return of Wartime Cultural Trophies in Austria and Russia," Art, Antiquity and Law, 10, no. 2 (2005), 107-47.