This article describes the nature and purpose of Soviet prison and labor camp libraries during the Stalin era. Data were gathered from recollections of former political prisoners published in the West. Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago is the most important source.

Soviet prison libraries, which were sometimes quite large, seem to have continued directly the tradition of their czarist predecessors.

Corrective camp libraries are seen in the context of Soviet penal theory and of Soviet library history in general. The organizational unit taking care of the cultural work in the camps was called the Culture and Education Section (acronym KVCh); the library was situated in an area called the red corner or the club.

Camp libraries were too small to have real meaning for the great masses of prisoners, but individual prisoners were sometimes able to benefit from them.

…Under the old regime the educational work in the prisons was totally in the hands of priests, and many times more money was spent on churches and priests’ wages than on schools and libraries. Libraries were small and strictly censored. In 1911 the czarist prison libraries contained only 71,608 titles and 262,005 volumes…The article presents statistics on the growth of book stocks and on the structure of collections, especially on the relative changes in fiction, political, and productive-technical literature in the prison libraries of the entire Soviet Union and of the Soviet republics. At the beginning of 1932 Soviet corrective labor institutions contained 700,683 books.¹³ It is not easy to make comparisons between the Soviet and czarist holdings because Stelmakh does not reveal the number of prisoners in Soviet prisons, but if Rosenfielde’s estimation is accepted (see Note 6)—that, under Stalin, the number of prisoners (in prisons and camps) was constantly around 8.8 million—then the progress advertised by Stelmakh is not so laudable.

…Time had to be passed somehow, in discussions or fabricating small practical things (like buttons, chessmen, etc.) from the soft insides of bread. Niemi(-Nuorteva) tells of an improvised cell school with letters made of bread…In some prisons the inmates did not have the right to correspondence, and everywhere it was limited (once or twice a month or so). If prisoners wanted to jot down their thoughts, they were compelled to turn the notes in to the prison office.¹⁹ Eugenia Ginzburg and her cell mate were allowed to fill two notebooks. Every month they had to hand over the notebooks to the censor, who did not return them.²⁰ The prisoners preferred to erase their writings with the ever useful breadcrumbs rather than let the censor read them

…According to Stelmakh, the size of the prison libraries varied 2–10,000 volumes. Taganka prison in Moscow had as many as 12,000 volumes and Kresty in Leningrad had 7,000…The most paradoxical feature of the prison libraries was that they were not as thoroughly expurgated as other Soviet libraries, whose stock was sifted over and over again.²⁸ First they were purged of czarist and bourgeois literature; later, when high officials of the Communist party were liquidated, books written by them were removed and even pages in encyclopedias containing articles about them were changed (eg. an article about Beria was replaced by another about the Bering Straits).

For some reason the Lubyanka library and libraries of other prisons were more or less exempt from the expurgations. This may have resulted from a shortage of labor or from pure negligence: it was not likely that the prisoners would regain their freedom and spread the news of forbidden books. “State Security . . . forgot to dig in its own bosom”, says Solzhenitsyn. Thus in Lubyanka one could read Zamyatin, Pilnyak, Panteleimon Romanov, and Merezhkovsky.²⁹ Parvilahti tells about the “political isolator” of Vladimir: “It is worth mentioning as a peculiarity that the expurgations in the library were not so carefully done as in other libraries. I once chanced on a Russian book in which I could read (in the year 1949!) Trotsky’s and Bukharin’s speeches. Even this book had been ‘cleaned up’, however—photographs of fallen and liquidated Soviet celebrities, together with their speeches, had been cut out.” There were even books in foreign languages in the prison libraries.³¹

…All sources agree that books were changed every 10 days.⁶ In Lubyanka the inmates presented their wishes verbally to the librarian, who sometimes would fulfill prisoners’ orders “miraculously”, but at times brought anything haphazardly.³⁷ In the Vladimir and Yaroslavl prisons a complete catalog was delivered to the cell:³⁸…In Yaroslavl books were ordered by marking the numbers of the books desired on a piece of paper. According to Solzhenitsyn’s source, in Vladimir the prisoner could with the aid of the catalog order books for a whole year ahead.⁴⁰ In Yaroslavl the prisoners got two books per head, whereas in Lubyanka, Solzhenitsyn says, the prison staff brought “exactly as many books as there were people in the cell: the cells with the largest number of prisoners were the best off.” Bjorkelund again got 3 books for 10 days in the internal prison of State Security in Leningrad (Voinov Street).⁴¹ Returned books were examined minutely: “in case we had left pinpricks or dots underneath certain letters—for there was such a method of clandestine intramural communication—or [in case] we had underlined pas sages we liked with a fingernail.”

…The library seems to have been one of the qualities of the prison that made a difference. The general in charge of the prison for interrogation even tried to convince Bjorkelund that “in prison you are much better off than in a camp: you don’t have to work, the accommodation is more comfortable, and besides there’s a library in the prison.”⁴⁵

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