Spetskhran

The Soviet spetskhran did not appear at once by a single decree. Its origins lie in the early 1920s, and sources differ on the exact founding date. Under a Council of People's Commissars resolution of 30 June 1920, the Book Chamber began receiving three copies of classified literature: publications of the Red Army, the Revolutionary Military Council, and the Cheka. In 1921 émigré newspapers and journals began arriving there. Spetskhrans in libraries were established on the basis of a Council of People's Commissars resolution of 12 December 1921; under a decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and a resolution of the People's Commissariat for Education of 12 January 1922, books confiscated for being published without censorship permission were routed into the secret department. A Council resolution of 14 December 1921 ordered classified publications to be supplied also to the Rumyantsev Museum library and the Petrograd Public Library, and instructed the Commissariat for Education together with the Cheka to draft rules on keeping and using secret documents. Under those rules, secret documents could be consulted only with the permission of the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, the education commissar and his deputies, members of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), or the presidium of the Cheka, and each permit had to list precisely the documents to be issued and the full name of the authorized person. In 1923 the spetskhrans passed to the jurisdiction of Glavlit and Glavpolitprosvet, and as a result of library "purges" a great mass of older literature, at times almost everything in history and philosophy, was sent to them. A 1925 resolution on supplying state book repositories with classified publications restricted such material to four repositories: the Lenin Public Library in Moscow, the Archive of the October Revolution, the State Public Library in Leningrad, and the Library of the Communist Academy under the USSR Central Executive Committee.

What the spetskhran confined shows what the state feared. Its holdings included non-communist publications of the Civil War period; Soviet books of 1918–1936 mentioning unacceptable figures such as Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin, or their works; Russian-language books, journals and newspapers issued by émigré or Western publishers regardless of content; and publications in foreign languages. Foreign literature was divided into general-use and restricted categories, with the restricted category subdivided into four access levels, 1s through 4s. The 1s list went only to the party Central Committee, the KGB, the Lenin Library and the social-science information institute; the 4s level, such as the spetskhran of the USSR Academy of Sciences, received only a quarter of the restricted literature entering the country. In the purge years a book could be sent there merely for mentioning an "enemy of the people," or even for having been printed at "Trotsky's print shop." Works by authors on a Glavlit list of 651 names were to be removed entirely from open stocks. That forced sequestration also preserved material: thanks to the Russian State Library's special stock, thousands of publications escaped physical destruction. By 1987 up to half a million items were held in the spetskhrans of major libraries; the holdings of the Lenin State Library's department alone comprised about 27,000 Soviet and 250,000 foreign books, 572,000 issues of foreign journals, and some 8,500 annual sets of foreign newspapers. At the start of 1985 the spetskhran of the Central State Archive of Literature and Art held about 150,000 storage units, 1.5 percent of all its archival materials.

The terminology was itself a product of censorship. Spetskhran is an abbreviation of the Russian "отдел специального хранения" (special storage section) and was used interchangeably with "spetsfond" (special fund). Mentioning either word in open, non-classified paperwork was forbidden, so the non-secret part of a library was designated the "main storage funds" to distinguish it. Soviet literature sent straight to the spetskhran after publication, and not intended for the general reader, was marked "For scientific libraries"; the marking "distributed by list" was also used. Officially the department did not exist: it appeared neither in readers' guides nor in telephone directories or room lists, and no information about it was printed in library publications. The Russian State Library described it as "a library within the library."

From March 1987, with glasnost proclaimed, books began returning from the spetskhrans to open stocks and a special commission was formed to review the lists. By October 1988, 7,930 titles had been transferred to open stocks, while 462 were retained as "clearly anti-Soviet in character." Works by former Soviet émigré authors remained in the spetskhrans longest, alongside pornographic and fascist literature and material on explosives and narcotics. In 1988 ideology secretary Vadim Medvedev obtained Solzhenitsyn's works through the KGB and opened the spetskhran, returning Solzhenitsyn's previously published writings to the open shelves. On 9 July 1990 the USSR Main Directorate for the Protection of Secrets in the Press ordered the abolition of the spetskhran and the transfer of all books to general stocks, and it disappeared together with Soviet censorship. Former spetskhrans have generally become departments of literature of the Russian abroad.