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Russian Attitudes Towards Archival Rossica Abroad: Cultural Reintegration or Political Agenda?
Patricia Kennedy Grimsted
Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, PhD, is currently Fellow, Russian Research Center and Associate, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University (Cambridge, MA), and the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam).
Address correspondence to the author at: 1583 Massachussetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 01218 USA (E-mail:
[email protected]).
The author is very grateful to the present Bakhmeteff Archive Curator, Tanya Chebotarev, and former Curator Ellen Scaruffi for assisting and verifying data with reference to the Bakhmeteff Archive holdings.
Portions of this paper were presented in Russian at the Rosarkhiv conference in Moscow “Tsel’ vyiavleniia zarubezhnoi arkhivnoi Rossiki: politika ili kul’tura?” in Zarubezhnaia arkhivnaia Rossika: itogi i perspektivy vyiavleniia i vozvrashcheniia: materialy Mezhdunarodnoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii, 16–17 noiabria 2000 g., Moskva, ed. V. Kozlov and E. E. Novikova (Moskva: Rosarkhiv, Rossiiskoe obshchestvo istorikov-arkhivistov, 2001, 20–39). The present paper also draws on materials gathered for a larger study of the subject in preparation.
SUMMARY. This article provokes a discussion on such important topics as the heritage of “Russia Abroad,” the history and evolution of the official communist and post-communist government efforts to retrieve archival Rossica, and the importance of respecting the professional archival
distinction between “provenance” and “pertinence.” It also discusses restitution issues in general and the destiny of several trophy libraries and archives in particular. The emphasis, however, is to coordinate the efforts in description and preservation of all Russian archival materials, whether in Russia or abroad.
[Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <[email protected]> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com> © 2003 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.] KEYWORDS. Archives, trophies of war, repatriation, Rossica, Russia, Soviet Union, cultural treasures, exchange agreements, provenance
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union cultural circles in Russia have shown a tremendous outpouring of interest in the heritage of “Russia Abroad.” Conferences have brought together prominent figures of the diaspora in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Recent publications include a “Golden Book” of the Russian emigration, biographical guides of émigré artists, bibliographies of Russian émigré newspapers, and others. The highly restricted Spetskhran (Special Depository) of the former Lenin Library (now the Russian State Library–RGB) has been rebaptized the Division for Literature of Russia Abroad (ORZ). Both the newly established Archive-Library of the Russian Cultural Fond1 and the Russia Abroad Library-Fund in Moscow compete with state archives to repatriate archival and library materials. New museums honor beloved Russian émigré writers and cultural figures such as Marina Tsvetaeva and Nikolai Roerikh. Unfortunately, all of the competing retrieval efforts by different repositories are resulting in the dispersal of important émigré archives.
The Federal Archival Service of Russia (Rosarkhiv) has been in the forefront of an official government program to retrieve archival Rossica, drawing considerable support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID). My collaborative work with Rosarkhiv on ArcheoBiblioBase, a database reference directory and bibliography of finding aids for Russian archives (http://www.iisg.nl/~abb/), has involved me directly in these developments. Given my extensive archival experience in the USSR and abroad, already in 1991 Russian archival colleagues urged me to prepare a survey, analysis, and recommendations pertaining to archival Rossica.2
When I addressed a Rosarkhiv conference in 1993 devoted to “Locating and Retrieving Archival Rossica Abroad,” I emphasized the need to distinguish among various categories of “archival Rossica” abroad and proposed a provisional typology. One of the bases of this typology was the importance of respecting the professional archival distinction between “provenance” and “pertinence”–between archival materials of actual Russian provenance and those of non-Russian provenance “relating” to Russia. Within the category of materials of “Russian” provenance, I urged a critical distinction between documentation created in Russia (or the Soviet Union) and subsequently alienated, and archival materials created in emigration and hence of provenance in “Russia Abroad.” I underlined, for example, the outgoing letters of Russian tsars or commissars addressed to foreign governments or those of Russian political or cultural figures addressed to foreign private recipients must necessarily and legally be recognized as the property of the receivers, even though Russian archives may understandably desire and seek copies.3
At a follow-up conference in November 2000, I turned to more cultural and political aspects, discussing the rationale first for Soviet and now for post-Soviet Russian efforts to retrieve or in some cases “repatriate” what has come to be called foreign “archival Rossica.” Those efforts, and the term itself as now used in Russia, too often fail to recognize the typological distinctions I had proposed seven years before. The differing rationales for such retrieval in different periods has, in my opinion, not received enough attention in post-Soviet Russia.
Today an examination of this history is especially appropriate in connection with the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Archive at Columbia University, now the Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European History and Culture (Bakhmeteff Archive).4
ARCHIVAL ROSSICA ABROAD AND THE BAKHMETEFF ARCHIVE
I begin with several episodes from my own experience over the past forty years. Such examples will serve as an appropriate preface to my further analysis of Russian attitudes toward the retrieval of archival Rossica from abroad and toward the Bakhmeteff Archive in particular.
My first example appropriately sets the stage for a discussion of the Soviet retrieval of archival Rossica, although in this case the initiative came first from abroad. The transfer in 1956/57 by Columbia University of four autograph Lenin documents to the USSR is the only case involving transfer of original documents from the Bakhmeteff Archive. As confirmed by Columbia University, the directors of what was then officially known as the Archive of Russian History and Culture were prepared to “exchange” four original autographs of Vladimir Lenin that had been acquired as part of the Grigorii Aleksinskii collection for Soviet publications needed by researchers at Columbia’s Russian Institute (now the Harriman Institute). Curator Ellen Scaruffi told me about evidence she had discovered in the late 1980s, showing active involvement in the process by Professors Philip Moseley and Geroid T. Robinson of the Russian Institute, apparently on the initiative of Columbia University Library’s Russian bibliographer, Simeon J. Bolan. Those negotiations, which also involved requests for Soviet publications from the Library of Congress and the Council on Foreign Relations, took place at the height of the Cold War, when Western specialists were desperate enough to recommend the proposed exchange in order to acquire, among other items, original runs of bibliographic serials from Knizhnaia palata and reports of Party conferences. Soviet authorities at that point were quite prepared to trade such publications, and they were undoubtedly also anxious to learn more about the still closely guarded émigré archival holdings at Columbia University.
Bolan visited the Soviet Embassy in January 1956 and was excited by the alluring prospect of a visa to the Soviet Union and receiving even more Soviet publications. He gave the Soviet Embassy in advance (allegedly to expedite his visa and travel arrangements) a photocopy of some of the original Lenin autographs from the Aleksinskii collection he proposed for exchange. Understandably, the matter was kept quiet because, as Moseley explained to Bolan at the time, “if any word gets around among the exile community we are ‘cooperating’ in supplying any Soviet institution with unpublished materials, this can arouse a tremendous storm and can result in cutting off all further flow of exile materials to our Archive.”5
Moseley’s concern notwithstanding, Columbia’s silence about the deal was not effective for long. From a New York Times story of May 1956 we learn that Bolan traveled to the Soviet Union that year, and brought copies of documents proposed for exchange. The Times highlights one of the “extremely important” Lenin letters that “contains Lenin’s reaction to an incident involving his friend Roman Malinovsky, a Social Democratic Workers’ Party member of the Russian Duma (Parliament) who was accused of being an agent provocateur for the Czarist police.” In addition to the four Lenin documents, the Times suggests that the university would “surrender a manuscript of Mikhail Lermontov, one of Russia’s great nineteenth-century poets.” The Lermontov text was particularly important to a six-volume edition of Lermontov underway in the Academy of Sciences, for which it would “by coincidence … decide an important textual problem.” Despite the Times report, the three original albums of Aleksandra Vereshchagin with the Lermontov text remain at Columbia University, so undoubtedly it was only photocopies that were presented to Pushkinskii dom in Leningrad. The article reports that Columbia was to receive some 15,000 Soviet publications, including issues of Knizhnaia letopis’ and missing issues of serials, literary almanacs, and journals going back to 1802 to fill in incomplete sets at Columbia.6 Although Columbia University has so far been unable to document that the exchange actually took place, the Bakhmeteff Archive today holds those Lenin letters only in photocopy.
Meanwhile in Moscow, already in 1958, an associate of the Central Party Archive (TsPA), Leonid Vinogradov, reported “the receipt of four original letters of V. I. Lenin from Columbia University … that had been sold to the university by Aleksinskii”–with a precise description of each. “Besides the Lenin documents received from Columbia University was a child’s toy block, hollow inside” that had been used “to send illegal literature to Russia from abroad.” Since Lenin designed it, “the block was given for exhibit to the Central Museum of V. I. Lenin.”7 Later he confirmed in print that
…in September 1957 in Washington, a representative of Columbia University turned over to the Embassy of the USSR four original V. I. Lenin documents in exchange for issues of our Knizhnaia letopis’.
Besides the letter of V. I. Lenin to Aleksinskii, the Institute of Marxism-Leninism received letters to G. L. Shklovskii and to F. N. Samoilov, a deputy to the Fourth Duma, and a small personal memo written by Vladimir Il’ich.8
This and subsequent Moscow publications laud TsPA’s achievement. In 1968, for example, Vinogradov recounted more details about “the visit of a representative of Columbia University in New York to the Embassy of the USSR in early 1956.” He described Bolan’s offer of
several original documents of V. I. Lenin, and in confirmation gave the Embassy photocopies, … including the poem about the 1905 revolution. And there was also a photocopy of the same 1907 letter of V. I. Lenin that Aleksinskii had shown [a Soviet diplomat] in Paris in 1946.9
Unknown to Bolan, Moseley, and Magerovsky in 1956, a decade earlier in Paris in 1946 Soviet specialists had already obtained a copy of one of the three pages of the “unknown poem by Lenin” that Aleksinskii had published in the literary monthly L’Arsh (1946) claiming it was in the hand of Lenin. Experts of the Institute of Marx, Engels, and Lenin (IMEL, later IML), already convinced that Lenin never wrote poetry, had determined that document with verses “had no relationship whatsoever to Lenin!” They were intrigued to find that Aleksinskii had subsequently sold it to Columbia with the rest of his collection, once again “deceitfully presenting it as if it were a Lenin autograph.” Bolan may have tried to include that document in the proposed exchange, but we now know that the Soviet side already knew it was a fake, which explains why that document remains in the “original” at Columbia University. As far as IMEL specialists were concerned, “Aleksinskii’s deceit was fully revealed.”10
The Soviets had also seen the autograph Lenin letter to Aleksinskii (1907) in 1946 and determined it was genuine, but they failed to obtain a copy from Aleksinskii. They were duly suspicious about Aleksinskii, who had been a leading member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDRP) faction in the Second Duma, but subsequently broke with Lenin and, already “a violent enemy of Soviet rule” in 1918, went abroad. The 1956 encounter at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC, was apparently the Soviets’ first confirmation that “Aleksinskii had sold his archive to the Americans, and again passed off the poem as a Lenin document.”11
Actually, Soviet agents (having earlier tried to obtain the collection in Paris) thought that Aleksinskii had sold his entire collection to Columbia University, but this turned out not to have been the case. As a postscript to this episode and more characteristic of Soviet acquisition methods, it is worth noting that a decade or two later, the value of a single original Lenin letter to Grigorii Aleksinskii had greatly increased. As apparent in a letter (remaining in the Bakhmeteff Archive) to Lev Magerovsky in 1965, Aleksinskii claimed that Simeon Bolan (by then retired from Columbia) had sold “to the Kremlin” a document with some “verses in the hand of Lenin” (dated 1907), which after Soviet expert appraisal was priced at $10,000. (We know, however, the document that Aleksinskii had claimed was a poem in the hand of Lenin remains at Co...
