Harvard Offers to Help Razed Leningrad Library

After a February fire in the Leningrad Library destroyed 400,000 volumes, an group representing American institutions--including Widener Library--recently met with the Soviet institution's directors and pledged to extend help.

The head of Widener's Slavic department, Hugh Olmsted, met the two acting directors of the Library of the Academy of Sciences in Leningrad on March 17 and pledged that he and his colleagues in a subcommittee of the American Council of Learned Societies would provide first aid for the 11 million documents damaged by fire and water.

"All of my colleagues shared sentiments that any help we could organize, we gladly would," said Olmsted, who was in the Soivet Union at the time to discuss exisiting exchange programs between Harvard and libraries in that country. The subcommittee will be meeting in mid-April to discuss possible actions, among them sending volunteers to Leningrad and initiating efforts in the United States to microfilm and collect replacement texts in the United States.

Any concrete plans for aid must wait until inventories have been taken and catalogues re-formed, Olmsted said. Since the fire, 15,000 Russians have volunteered to help dry waterlogged books and sift through the ashes for scraps of text.

"We sent a telegram indicating our willingness to help in whatever way necessary, and now it is up to them to tell us what they need," said Edward Kasinec, chief of the Slavonic Department of the New York Public Library and a member of the subcommittee. "But the librarians are obviously loathe to say very much until they have thefull scale of the damage."

The Leningrad library contained one-of-a-kindhistorical documents and is akin to the Library ofCongress in its importance, said Marshall Goldman,associate director of the Russian Research Center."The fire is not only a tragedy for the SovietUnion, but for any scholar," he said.

Peter the Great founded the library in 1714 andit houses private collections, original drafts ofpapers by famous scholars and unique 16th, 17thand 18th century foreign editions of Europeanpublications.

In the aftermath of the fire, questions havebeen raised about the handling of the tragedy andthe safety conditions of the library.

In a speech before the Soviet Union's Academyof Sciences, a Russian scholar, D.S. Likhachev,charged that library officials initially attemptedto conceal the extent of the damage by bringing ina bulldozer to clear debris quickly. "They triedto minimize the cultural losses in the most coarsefashion," he said.

"In a disaster like that, you have to movequickly, but what did they do, they brought in abulldozer and damaged more manuscripts," saidGoldman. "There's a real feeling that libraryofficials didn't want the responsibility, so theytried to cover up."

The fire probably occurred because of anelectrical misconnection. Olmsted said. He heardduring his trip that staff had warned about thedangerous condition of the library several timesbefore the February fire.

Library maintenance has long been a problem inthe Soviet Union, because of the poor economicsituation of that country, Olmsted said. "Theresimply isn't enough money to go around. A lot ofpeople there are concerned for the future of allnational libraries.