Following is the last in a series of three articles on rare Russian materials in the Law Library (see LC Information Bulletin, Feb. 5 and Feb. 19).
The city of Tomsk was founded in a remote part of the Siberian taiga in 1604. The high walls of the fortress, embracing several dozen peasant households, served as a shelter for traders, artisans, clergy and government bureaucrats who were charged with collecting the salt tax and sable levies so necessary to the czar's treasury in faraway Moscow.
Little remains of the early days of this remote but thriving settlement, so typical of Siberia's colonization, save some fragmentary documentary evidence, most of which is found in the Law Library of Congress. By what miracle did they end up here in Washington?
In the early decades of the Soviet Union, the government needed hard currency. The documents from Tomsk (and elsewhere) had ended up in the hands of amateur historians, state archives and book dealers. The Bolsheviks banned private ownership of historical documents and implemented an ambitious plan to confiscate all private collections, libraries and shops. The confiscated goods became the prime inventory for two entities set up by the security forces of the young state -- "International Book" and "Antiquarian."
Although called firms, they were in fact departments of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB. The state was in desperate need of cash to build its industrial base and decided to sell its "assets" for hard currency. The NKVD started selling paintings from its museums -- Rembrandts from the Hermitage to Andrew Mellon (who donated them to the National Gallery of Art) -- and looked for buyers for its book and manuscript inventories.
It was, of course, harder to find buyers for old Slavic manuscripts than for Old Master paintings, but there were certain enterprising and far-sighted book dealers in the West who recognized this rare opportunity. The most successful was Israel Perlstein, a Polish immigrant who set up a book shop in New York City and boarded a boat to St. Petersburg in 1926 when he heard news of the sale of treasures from the basement of the Winter Palace.
What he found there was a trove of private -- that is, nonstate -- materials that had belonged to the Romanov family. He purchased the library of the imperial family and brought it back to America, where he immediately called Herbert Putnam, Librarian of Congress, to see if he would be interested in acquiring the materials. Putnam was and did, and today a large part of the private library of the Romanov family is housed in the Library's Rare Book and Special Collections Division.
Perlstein returned to Russia often and bought for a number of clients, including Harvard University, New York Public Library, Columbia University and others. But the Library of Congress was his best customer, and the Law Library in particular. On several occasions Putnam had to decline to purchase certain items for lack of funds, but he referred Perlstein to John Vance, Law Librarian of Congress, who had a larger acquisition fund, thanks to the critical advocacy of the Friends of the Law Library of Congress, established in 1930 to lobby Congress for greater support of its Law Library.
Founding members such as George Wickersham, Andrew Mellon, Harlan Fiske Stone, Roscoe Pound and Cordell Hull successfully appealed to Congress to increase the Law Library's acquisition budget during the depths of the Great Depression.
One of the most intriguing collections of rare Russian legal materials is the collection of scrolls from 1628 to the mid-18th century. Before Peter the Great made sweeping changes to the clerical traditions of Muscovy, clerks used to write all documents on narrow strips of paper that were glued together at the top and bottom to produce one long scroll.
Documents could measure tens of meters in length. The clerks wrote in an almost indecipherable shorthand known as skoropis' (literally, quick writing), which scholars today can read only with some training. The Library's collection of 48 scrolls received extensive preservation treatment in the 1980s. More recently, they have been fully described by visiting Russian scholars Andrei Pliguzov and Viacheslav Kozliakov and microfilmed to make them more widely available to Slavicists and legal historians around the world.
The scrolls come not only from the Tomsk city archives, but also from Pskov and Galich, from private family papers (the Gladkovs of Sviazhsk) and from churches and monasteries of Vologda.
Because of their quotidian nature, they reveal the details of local life (a mother petitioning for redress against a delinquent young girl who cut off her daughter's braid -- a serious dishonor to her family), of clerical practice (the founding of new parishes and maintenance of church buildings), of land management practices (endless litigation over the right to exploit properties) and, most important, of how the Kremlin was able to govern the largest state in the world, reaching from the present borders of Poland to the Pacific Ocean.
One example is the detailed files of a criminal investigation of an accused thief who was tracked by officials from the scene of the crime in Tomsk all the way back to Moscow, a distance of several thousand miles. One petition even recounts the affecting story of a peasant family who hid the Patriarch Filaret from his enemies during the years of civil unrest following Boris Godunov's death in 1605, known as the Time of Troubles.
Among printed treasures are a group of books with unique annotations, such as a rare copy of The Regulations of Louis XIV, King of France and Navarre, for the Naval Forces and their Arsenals (1715), a translation of a French naval codex of 1689, which Peter ordered. Altogether only 26 copies were printed and only a handful survive. The Law Library's copy is unique because it is extensively annotated, most likely by the translator himself, Konon Zotov. Indeed, it appears to be the proof copy. There are also unique manuscript decrees from the reign of Anna Ioannovna (1730-41) and unpublished decrees of Peter the Great's daughter Elizabeth, promulgated in 1729 and signed in her own hand.
Another collection purchased from Perlstein by the Law Library is a collection of more than 130 18th century books, which comprise single known copies of works (Regulation on Bankruptcy, 1741) and an exceptionally rare copy of the Moscow printing of the public announcement of the guilty verdict of Peter the Great's only son on charges of treason (1718).
Shortly after Czarevich Alexis was found guilty of plotting to overthrow his father, he died under torture. In an early example of political "spin control," Peter had his own exculpatory version of events printed up and dispatched quickly to the capitals of Europe to counter the rumors that the "barbarian czar" had killed his son with his bare hands.
To this day, historians are divided on what role Peter played in his son's death, and this slim tome proves that it was within days of the event that rumors began implicating the Czar Reformer in murder.
Concrete information about how much hard currency was earned for Soviet coffers during this period in the 1920s and 1930s of marketing art and manuscripts remains buried in the archives of the NKVD and its successors in Moscow. But there is no question that the selective sale of pieces of Russia's history to research libraries has richly benefited the study of Russia in America. Long before the Cold War, when study of the Soviet Union became a matter of national security, prescient book dealers and librarians, including Herbert Putnam and John Vance, were ready to take advantage of the often bizarre ways rare books and manuscripts enter the marketplace.
