New realities: libraries in post-Soviet Russia.

ABSTRACT

The transition away from communism toward a more democratic society and the move to a market economy had profound effects on Russian libraries. Using the main public library in Bryansk, the Bryansk Region Scientific Library, as a case study, this article examines the changes in library service, including information access and the opening of previously closed collections, funding issues, the library's relationship with the government, changes in the professional mindset of librarians, and the information needs of library users in this period of transition.

INTRODUCTION

The end of the twentieth century saw Russia moving from a highly controlled society to a more open and democratic one. Russia was also transitioning from a controlled economy to a market economy. Both the political and economic transitions have had profound effects on Russia's libraries. Under the Soviets, the library was not free to collect and disseminate any information they wished. Partiinost, propagating the ideology of the party, was the order of the day, and collection decisions had to be approved by the government. Nonetheless, literacy was important to the Soviets, book publishing flourished, and it was an accepted ideal that no person should have to walk more than fifteen minutes to get to a library (Kuzmin, 1995).

After perestroika libraries were faced with drastic budget cuts and closures, but at the same time they had a new freedom to open access to information. The citizens of Russia were also faced with many changes that created more information needs. Writing in the mid-1990s, Evgeny Kuzmin noted: "Russia is at a turning point, and needs information as never before to appraise its eventful present and future, and reappraise the past" (Kuzmin, 1995, p. 106). Many libraries created new programs and expanded access to information to meet these needs. In addition to internal pressures and change, Western institutions, including foundations, government agencies, and library associations, became increasingly involved in the Russian library environment.

The political and economic transitions that occurred in Russia affected every aspect of Russian librarianship from collection development to professional values and priorities, to funding, to the new information needs of library users, and necessarily it affected the relationship between libraries and the Russian government. Russian librarians were confronted with a new reality and new circumstances in which to do their work. In this article I will examine the effects of these transitions on Russian libraries in general but will provide examples from the Bryansk Region Research Library (BONUB) that highlight some of the ways this library addressed challenges and took advantage of opportunities created by the political and economic transitions. (1)

Situated in western Russia on the border of Belarus and Ukraine, Bryansk is one of Russia's eighty-eight regions, and it is divided into twenty-seven districts. (2) In the Bryansk region, as in the other Russian regions, there is a main regional library that manages the region's public libraries, including centralized district and city libraries and their branches. In the region itself there are 741 public libraries (BONUB, 2004). Although BONUB directly manages only the public libraries, it maintains good relationships--and projects--with all libraries in the Bryansk Region, including special libraries, school libraries, and academic libraries. A young library by Russian standards, BONUB was founded in 1943 during World War II at the same time the region itself was founded (BONUB, 2001a). It is the largest library in the region, serving over 44,000 unique readers during more than 244,000 visits in 2001 (BONUB, 2001b). (3) BONUB has fifteen departments and currently employees sixty-nine librarians. (4)

FROM CENSORSHIP TO OPENNESS

Although there were hundreds of thousands of libraries in the Soviet Union, they were all under the tight central planning authority and financial control of the government (Greening, 1995). Lenin and his wife, Nedezhda Krupskaia, a librarian by profession, instituted the Soviet library system (Raymond, 1979).

 
   [Libraries] were to serve as instruments for eradicating illiteracy 
   and for educating the population; an important element was moral 
   education, one which would make for good Marxist/Leninist citizens. 
   Thus, the role of the librarian was not to facilitate access to 
   material which the reader demanded, but rather to guide the reader 
   to material that was considered appropriate and to keep away from 
   the reader material which was considered inappropriate or harmful. 
   (Thomas, 1999, pp. 114-15) 

Three things that informed Soviet librarianship were partiinost; the spetskhran, which were closed repositories of restricted material; and censorship. Partiinost, "party mindedness," formed a foundation for Soviet censorship. "In the library, [partiinost] was asserted through book purges, biased collection development, restrictions on access to disapproved information, ideologically manipulated catalogs, and bibliographical services such as 'recommendatory bibliography' and 'reader guidance'" (Kimmage, 1992, p. 56). Only librarians had access to the complete library catalog, so readers could be kept from knowing what the complete holdings of the library were.

The spetskhran was made up of the writings of discredited political figures, dissident writers (even if they only authored a forward to an otherwise noncensored book), minority writers, and foreign materials. About 30-40 percent of the Lenin Library, for example, was in the spetskhran (Greening, 1995). The opening of the spetskhran following the fall of the Soviet system affected all Russian libraries. Not only did this make available new information, it "raised yet another serious concern. Library stocks appeared to be stuffed with myriad copies of 'morally outdated' and 'ideological' literature (Genieva, 2000, p. 7). While new acquisitions to overcome this situation became a priority, there was no funding from the state for them.

The relaxing of censorship meant that…