The Library of the Free Economic Society

The Library of the Free Economic SocietyAuthor(s): Dorothy AtkinsonSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Mar., 1980), pp. 97-103Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2497305 .

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NOTES AND COMMENT

DOROTHY ATKINSON

The Library of the Free Economic Society

The first (and last) Soviet scholar to survey the history of the Imperial Free Economic Society (Imperatorskoe Vol'noe Ekononmicheskoe Obshchestvo, or VEO) arrived at the reasonable conclusion that this important organization deserves far greater notice than it has hitherto received.' The same is true of the Society's remarkable and remarkably neglected library, barely mentioned even in the same scholar's monograph but preserved almost intact in Leningrad today. The later activities of the Free Economic Society-the oldest (1765-1919) and most influential economic society in Russia-will be pursued elsewhere as part of a broader inquiry, but a brief note on its library is offered here to alert researchers to the potential usefulness of this unique store of economic, social, technical, and statistical materials.

Chartered by Catherine the Great at the request of a small group of pro- gressives among the landed nobility, the Free Economic Society was dedicated to the study and improvement of the economy, primarily, especially in its earlier years, of the agrarian economy. The empress herself donated six thousand rubles for the purchase of a meeting place and "for the establishment therein of an economics library."2 Over the course of its life, the VEO sponsored an active program of readings, discussions, essay contests, publications, experimental stations, agricultural exhibitions, field investigations of scientific and social problems, rural questionnaires, and the collection of statistical information. Faith- ful to Catherine's admonition to pursue practical and constructive work (the emblem she conferred featured a bee over the word "useful"), the Free Economic Society became involved in a wide range of social endeavors. Located in St. Petersburg, its members had active contacts with societies, institutions, and individuals throughout the country. The Society played a large part in the introduction of smallpox vaccination, made important contributions to the spread of elementary education, engaged in famine relief, served as coordinator and clearing house for isolated zemstvo statistical workers, and at times as con- sultant to the government on specific questions of social and economic policy. The extraordinary role of the Free Economic Society derived from the original charter which established it as an independent institution "free" of attachment to or control by any government agency.3 This exceptional status was maintained

1. V. V. Oreshkin, Vol'noe ekonomicheskoe obshchestvo v Rossii, 1765-1917 (Moscow, 1963).

2. A. I. Khodnev, Istoriia Imperatorskogo vol'nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva s 1765 do 1865 goda (St. Petersburg, 1865), p. vi.

3. Ustavy Imperatorskogo vol'nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestvo i Vysochaishie reskripty emu dannye, 1765-1898 (St. Petersburg, 1899).



98 Slavic Review

to the end of the nineteenth century and was partially sustained by force of tra- dition, even when the government challenged the prerogatives of the Society during the troubled decades that were to prove final for both.

By the time the Society's existence came to an end, it had accumulated an impressive library of a quarter of a million works in Russian and in foreign languages related to its special concerns. The collection, gathered through pur- chases, exchanges of its own publications, and bequests of private libraries, expanded rapidly during the Society's later years. In the beginning of the 1880s, about two hundred books were being added annually to the library's shelves, and the VEO was receiving some ninety periodicals. Only two decades later, the annual acquisition of books had topped two thousand, with four hundred periodicals arriving regularly. Growth continued almost to the end.4 The library was housed in the Free Economic Society's comfortable building (still standing on Moskovskii Prospekt, no. 33),5 and the reading room was open to the public. Upon payment of a deposit, even nonmembers were allowed to check out books for home use.

Among the many readers attracted to the library of the Free Economic Society was the young Lenin. When he was arrested in 1896 and decided to devote his term of exile to an investigation of the development of capitalism in Russia, Lenin sent friends a list of books he needed. These works, he advised, could be found in the VEO library from which he had already taken a number of books on deposit.6 Aware of the value of the library from personal experience, Lenin became alarmed by reports that it was being vandalized after the Society was disbanded. Therefore, in February 1920, he issued urgent instructions for its protection.7 The library's collection was placed in the care of the Saltykov- Shchedrin State Public Library while the records of the Society and many of its investigatory materials came to rest in the Central State Historical Archive. The VEO library was left in its original location until after World War II, when it was moved to the Fontanka branch of the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library.

The total VEO library currently comprises 239,761 works.8 This includes 105,992 items in the well-cataloged collection of zemstvo publications gathered by the Free Economic Society. The superb zemstvo collection has already been described by Chrarles Timberlake and does not need further discussion.9 It should

4. When the Society was ordered to suspend activities on January 30, 1915, its library also was closed. It was able to loan out books again in the later part of the year, but only to members. Library acquisitions (including zemstvo publications) declined, and the receipt of foreign materials nearly came to a halt (Otchet o deiatel'nosti I.V.E.O. za 1915 god [St. Petersburg, 1916]). Data on acquisitions are available in the annual Otchety.

5. It was in this building of the Free Economic Society, just around the corner from the present Domn Plekhanova, that the St. Petersburg soviet was meeting on December 3, 1905, when the government arrested all its members and brought the revolution to a close in the capital.

6. G. Iakovlev, "V Vol'nom ekonomicheskom obshchestve," in the newspaper Vechernii Leningrad, June 18, 1969.

7. V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenji, 5th ed., 55 vols. (Moscow, 1958-65), 51:149. 8. Data as of December 1, 1977, provided by library staff. 9. Charles Timberlake, "The Leningrad Collection of Zemstvo Publications," Slavic

Review, 26, no. 3 (September 1967): 474-78.



Library of the Free Economic Society 99

be noted, however, that the zemnstvo catalog includes only those materials published by the zemnstvos themselves, and the "nonzemstvo" part of the library contains many works on or about the zemstvos. Although the zemstvo collection has recently been receiving increasing attention, the larger part of the Society's library, amounting to 133,769 works, still remains largely overlooked and, in the view of its caretakers, underutilized. There are some obvious reasons for this. For one thing, this part of the library is less-satisfactorily cataloged. For another, most of the works in the VEO collection are duplicated in the main (Saltykov- Shchedrin) library, where they are scattered among other publications and entered only in the service catalog (sluzhebnyi kattlog) available to the library staff alone. A researcher unaware of the existence of a useful book in the VEO library will not come across it in the main library catalogs open to readers, because these contain only materials published since 1931. The most complete catalog of VEO materials is located at the Fontanka division of the VEO library, and although this also is a restricted sluzhebnyi katalog, readers there do have access to other catalogs covering much of the collection. These are important biblio- graphical guides, especially to economic and social literature published or re- printed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In addition to the zemstvo card catalog, the Fontanka division holds a number of keys to the VEO collection, and these will be described briefly in the remainder of this note. There are two alphabetical card catalogs, a topographic card catalog, two systematic "notebook" catalogs covering the periods 1888- 1905 and 1906-17, respectively, and both a card file and notebooks cataloging statistical materials in the collection.

ALPHABETICAL CATALOGS

1. Original card catalog of the Free Economic Society. This is the sluzhebnyi katalog mentioned above, the most complete catalog of the collection. It contains entries by author or title (sometimes both) for all items in the Society's library. The cards are of different sorts and sizes, some are sorely deteriorated, many are handwritten, and most provide limited information, often only the title of a work.

2. Card catalog of publications of the Free Economic Society. Compiled before World War II by the library staff, this catalog consists of cards with- drawn from the original VEO catalog described above. But unlike the parent catalog, this one is accessible to readers. It contains several thousand entries organized under the following headings:

a. Lists of members of the Free Economic Society. b. Books. This is the largest subdivision and, despite the rubric, it also

includes shorter publications such as reprints of articles appearing in the Trudy. A special section under the letter "V" includes publications per- taining to the VEO itself-its three major divisions, commissions, committees, annual Otchety, and so forth.

c. Journals. d. Trudy. Between 1765 and 1915, two hundred eighty volumes of the

Trudy were issued by the Society. Unfortunately, the catalog does not



100 Slavic Review

serve as an adequate guide, but several useful indexes are available which cover this important publication for specific periods.10

e. Manuscript materials. f. Archival materials. Included here is the limited material stored in the

manuscript section of the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library. The main deposi- tory of VEO archival materials, as noted above, is the Central State Historical Archive in Leningrad.

"TOPOGRAPHIC" CATALOGS (SHELF LISTS)

1. Card catalog of publications of the Free Economic Society. In addition to the alphabetical card catalog of publications of the Society, there is a con- venient duplicate set of cards (in the same case of file drawers) arranged by call number in shelf order.

"SYSTEMATIC" (SUBJECT) CATALOGS

1. Subject catalog of materials acquired between 1888 and 1905. For works added to the library during the indicated period (though sometimes published earlier), there is a "systematic" catalog in the form of fifty-two bound notebooks, each of which covers a particular subject. The notebook pages are alphabetized, and works are recorded in the order of acquisition in handwritten entries or in clippings pasted onto the appropriate pages. Many of the clippings appear to be from the lists of library acquisitions published periodically in the Trudy. Some of the notebooks are in poor condition and the catalog appears to be incomplete, but the set provides topical bibliographies that might be helpful to researchers in these areas. The notebook on statistics, for example, is in good shape and exceptionally full. Correspondence records show that the VEO worked vigor- ously to expand and maintain its collection of foreign as well as domestic statistics and economic literature." The subject categories are as follows:

(1) Agrarian Economy (2) Agriculture (3) Cultivation of Industrial Crops (4) Meadow Cultivation (5) Means of Fertilization (6) Agricultural Tools and Machines (7) Animal Husbandry (8) Horsebreeding

10. V. I. Vsevolod, Alfavitnyi ukazatel' statei napechatannykh v "Trudakh" i drugikh periodicheskikh izdanniiakh VEO (St. Petersburg, 1849); Bibliograficheskoe opisanie pervykh 54 chastei "Trudov" VEO (St. Petersburg, 1874); F. Groman, Alfavitnyi ukazatel' statei pomeshchennykh v "Trudakh" i ekonomicheskikh zapisakh VEO s 1855 po 1875 g. (St. Petersburg, 1855); A. I. Teodorovich, Ukazatel' statei pomeshchennykh v "Trudakh" VEO s 1855 po 1875 g. (St. Petersburg, 1876); A. Belevich, Ukazatel' statei pomeshchennykh v "Trudakh" VEO za 1876-1888 (St. Petersburg, 1889).

11. Correspondence with the United States alone in the year 1910, for example, included exchanges with the U.S. Bureau of Statistics, the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Boston Public Library, and Columbia University (Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, fond 91, opis' 2, delo 1556, 1910).




(9) Cattle Raising and Dairy Farming (10) Sheep Raising (11) Small Domestic Animals (12) Poultry Raising (13) Fishing and Fisheries (14) Apiculture (15) Silk Cultivation (16) Pests (17) Truck Farming (18) Forestry (19) Domestic Science (20) Mathematical Sciences (21) Physics and Meteorology (22) General Natural Science (23) Mineralogy, Geology, and Geodesy (24) Soil Science (25) Zoology and Physiology (26) Botany (27) Chemistry (28) Medicine (29) Veterinary Science (30) Technology (31) Construction and Materials (32) Social Science (33) Laws (34) Financial Sciences (35) Rural, Factory, and Mining Industries (36) Trade (37) Exhibitions (38) Insurance (39) History (40) Biography (41) Geography (42) Statistics (43) Ethnography (44) General and Professional Education (45) Philosophy, Philology, and Theology (46) Dictionaries and Encyclopedias (47) Calendars, Reference and Memorial Books (48) Atlases, Maps, Plans, and Views (49) Bibliography (50) Miscellaneous (51) Slavic Books (non-Russian) (52) Works in Swedish, Finnish, and other non-Slavic languages

(including a limited number of entries, primarily in languages used within the empire; works in the major European languages are listed in abundance throughout the rest of the catalog).

2. Subject catalog of materials acquired between 1906 and 1917. Library acquisitions for the final ten years were recorded in a similar but reorganized and far more complete catalog. The former fifty-two-category classification scheme, which is somewhat misleading in its emphasis on the technical agricul-



102 Slavic Review

tural literature in the library at the expense of other, growing, sectors, was replaced by a new system employing only eleven major subject categories.12 This catalog, consisting of a set of large, bound volumes with the same sort of entries, is an excellent guide to the contemporary literature on the topics covered. The main headings are:

Mathematics and Natural Science (3 volumes) Technology (3 volumes) Agriculture (10 volumes) Statistics (4 volumes) Economic Sciences (10 volumes) Sociology and Law (5 volumes) Education (1 volume) Medicine (1 volume) Geography and Ethnography (1 volume) Philology, Philosophy, Art, Miscellaneous (1 volume) Journals (1 volume)

The broad divisions are broken down into a number of subcategories. For example, "Economic Sciences," one of the largest major categories, includes subsections on general literature, political economy, finance, credit and banking, industry, trade, communication, the agrarian question, the labor question, and "Other Questions of Socioeconomic Life" (migration, insurance, food supply, and so forth). Each of the topics is further subdivided into narrower subject areas, making it possible to locate specialized literature with relative ease.

CATALOGS OF STATISTICAL MATERIALS

1. Card catalog of publications of the Central Statistical Committee. Ap- proximately five hundred titles published by the Central Statistical Committee are conveniently cataloged in a separate drawer in the same cabinet that holds the catalog of publications of the Free Economic Society. The statistical works include information on a wide array of social phenomena, such as education, factory work, prostitution, and so forth.

2. Shelf list of publications of provincial and regional statistical committees. The list is in the form of three bound notebooks, with entries listed under the issuing province or administrative region.

3. Shelf list of municipal statistical publications. Three notebooks, similar to the above, contain entries listed under the individual cities.

In addition to these library catalogs, the library contains several published catalogs covering the VEO collection through 1887. The first of these appeared in 1865 (Alfavitno-sistematicheskii katalog Biblioteki Imperatorskoe vol'nogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva [1865]). Two supplements were subsequently issued (Prodolzhenie alfavitno-sistematicheskii katalog . . . 1865-1880 [1881],

12. The new system of cataloging is described in detail in Trudy I.V.E.O., 1905, no. 4-6, pp. 95-106, which also contains a complete list of classification categories and subcategories. The system actually adopted introduced several minor modifications into the scheme projected there, but the plan is essentially the one embodied in the 1906-17 catalog.




and Vtoroe prodolzhenie . . . 1881-1887 [1889]). After this no more cumula- tive catalogs were published, but acquisitions were listed regularly, at first semi- annually and then annually, in the Society's Trudy.

Despite its limitations and the obvious drawbacks of the inadequate and cumbersome system of catalogs, it is clear that the library so diligently collected by the Free Economic Society remains a valuable storehouse of information. According to Valentina Anatol'evna Filatova, the librarian in charge who has worked with the collection for almost forty years, the VEO library has attracted relatively few scholars, and most foreigners who visit it come only to use the recently publicized zemstvo materials. Lack of attention in the past appears attributable primarily to an unfortunate lack of general knowledge about the complete collection.'3 At present, major reconstruction of the Fontanka premises has made it necessary to close, the reading room temporarily. However, researchers have been permitted to consult the catalogs, and the deputy director of the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library, Mariia Dmitrievna Moricheva, has indicated that access will continue to be made available, for which scholars will be grateful.

The library of the Free Economic Society played a special role in Russian history. It informed and reflected the views of an important sector of educated society for one hundred and fifty years. This singular resource still has a great deal to offer researchers probing the country's past.

13. In its description of the holdings of the Saltykov-Shchedrin State Public Library, the most important general directory of Soviet libraries (Biblioteki SSSR: Spravochnik, vol. 2: Biblioteki RSFSR [Moscow, 1974], pp. 14-16) fails even to mention the VEO collection, except for the zemstvo materials.



The Library of the Free Economic Society

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