BOOK REVIEWS

To See, or not to see. . .. Mary E. Slayton

Not Seeing Red : American Librarianship and the Soviet Union, 1917-1960, by Stephen Karetzky,

Lanham, Md. . University Press of America, 2002. xi + 504 pp. "A GOOD BOOK is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, " John Milton reminded readers of his Areopagitica (1644) . "We should be wary therefore . . .how we destroy that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom; and if it extend to the whole impression a kind of massacre . " The English poet's arresting reflections on blood and ink flood the mind of a reader gazing at the red and black cover of the book entitled Not See-

ing Red: American Librarianship and the Soviet Union, 1917-1960, by Dr . Stephen Karetzky . Especially stunning is the picture on it of an enigmatic Vladimir Ulianov (1870-1924), the man whom the workers called Lenin . Scrutinizing the inscrutable dark eyes of the Dictator of the Proletariat, one wonders whether he is thinking about the Soviet Union's swords or pens as he also sits at a desk in a library MARY E . SLAYTON is a former member of the Library of Congress staff and Assistant Editor of Modern Age : A Quarterly Review .

Modern Age

studying a book. Although, as Charles Dickens once said, " there are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts," Not Seeing Red is certainly not one of them . As it unfolds against the dramatic backdrop of the Bolshevik Revolution, it reveals how another type of precious life-blood was also spilled after Holy Russia 's " farewell beauty," in Pushkin's words, faded like the scarlet splendor of " the dark trees, now denuded of leaves by the winter . " Having done much to inspire the Revolution, books were imprisoned and slaughtered by it . In 1919, Karetzky points out, "Lenin declared that there must be a single ` well planned and unified organization' of all libraries in the country ; if this were not forthcoming, `then this revolution will remain a bourgeois revolution, because the basic characteristic of a proletarian revolution which is on the road to communism is this . "' In 1920, he initiated "the creation of special, locked book collections in large libraries that would be open only to individuals granted special permission ." And in 1921, he "ordered the pulping of all confiscated 'pornography and books on religious subjects .'" Exhausted, wracked by violent headaches, and nearing the end of his life, Lenin delegated much of the refashioning of the Soviet libraries to his most trusted comrade, Nadezhda Konstantin-

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ovna Krupskaya Ulianova. And so, while Vladimir was concentrating on the prison camps or the secret police, his wife sharpened her intellectual scissors . Destiny having propelled her to its cutting edge, she snipped zealously away at the fabric of history, leaving the tapestry of Russia ' s past life in tatters. By 1923, Krupskaya had shredded many of the greatest works of the Western canon. Then a strange mix of maternal and nihilistic instincts reminded Mother Lenin that children's books must be " cleansed . " Scrubbing all elements of mysticism and religion from them would not be easy. Nonetheless, young students would soon be reading books on atheism, science, materialism, and Soviet patriotism, as well as some rather unusually "purified" traditional classics. Even before Lenin died of a massive stroke on January 21, 1924, in the snowshrouded village of Nishny Novgorod (later named Gorky, after Maxim Gorky [1868-1936]), American librarians, authors, educators, and other intellectuals would brave a " sea of troubles" to tour the shipwreck of a nation . Yet, as they stepped into the decimated Soviet libraries, they no doubt failed to notice just how bare the bookshelves were . Nor did many of the foreign visitors seem even aware that librarians were also disappearing. Enough books to fill a library have since been written about individual intellectuals ' reactions to the U .S .S .R . But Not Seeing Red is the first critical analysis of how an entire profession responded to Soviet Communism in the twentieth century . As the Library Director of Felician College in New Jersey, Karetzky is eminently qualified to examine the field of library science . As a professor who has taught at universities in the United States and abroad, he also knows academicians. Moreover, as the author and editor of a number of books, he has much insight into the publishing world as well . Thus what he has to say about the librarians ' 106

profession is both informed and relevant. Of the eleven chapters in Not Seeing Red (in addition to the Introduction and Conclusion), the titles of six indicate, as does the book's subtitle, the historical period being focused on : 1 : "The Coming of Communist Librarianship ." 2 : "Accurate Critiques of the Soviet Union, 19171939 ." 3 : "Early Western Assistance to Soviet Librarianship ." 5 : "American Librarianship and the Soviet Union, 19401949 ." 6 : "American Librarianship and the Soviet Union, 1950-1959 ." 9 : "An Overview of American Librarianship and the Soviet Union, 1960-1985 ." The titles of the remaining five chapters reveal more about the theme of " not seeing " suggested in the title of the work: 4 : " Authors, Intellectuals, and Educators Applaud the U .S .S .R." 7: "The Profession Opposes Anti-Communism . " 8 : "Mainstream Intellectuals and Academics Oppose Anti-Communism ." 10 : "The Betrayal of the Professionals: Why?" 11 : "The Complicity of Library Historians . " Readers perusing those chapters will understand why the Soviets wanted the good will and assistance of the " useful idiots of the West," as Lenin characterized Americans . But why would such help be given by the land of the free to the home of the gulags? That troubling question overarches NotSeeingRed as Karetzky opens the twentieth century' s book of life . On those dog-eared pages an enigmatic relationship evolved between American and Soviet librarians so quietly that few noted its significance . In fact, for over seven decades, Karetzky points out, "the leaders of the American library profession failed to understand, or oppose, the Soviet Union and its Communist form of librarianship . This lack of comprehension and dedication to democratic ideals was remarkable . " It was also dangerous. As Krupskaya put it, " the book is like a rifle in battle ." Watching the drama of Soviet Communism and its tragic enactment of librarian-

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ship play out before an American audience, often wildly applauding, leaves one with a baffled mind and a sinking heart, not even daring to think about what the players will do for an encore . And that sight, so remarkably drawn by Karetzky, who comments on hundreds of persons, onstage and in the audience, again deflects one's attention from the Soviets ' performance to the onlookers' puzzling reaction to it . The spontaneity of their cheers was especially strange, given that they had seen the play before . As Karetzky notes, " the despotic nature of revolutionary utopianism, particularly when promoted by intellectuals and mixed with socialist or statist ideas, had already been amply described between 1790 and 1860 by Burke, Tocqueville, Bastiat, and others . Yet none of this resulted in a comprehension of the situation in the Soviet Union or of Communist attitudes towards the West . " One cannot, of course, summarize all the conclusions Karetzky reaches regarding the political, psychological, social, intellectual, and moral facets of what was blinding American librarians and other intellectuals from "seeing Red . " Even to attempt to do so would result in an oversimplification of the book's masterly and compelling analysis of over five-hundred pages, rigorously researched, as the extensive footnotes (sometimes more than three hundred in a chapter), lengthy bibliography of over fifty pages, and an exemplary index reveal . Unlike a work of fiction, although as fascinating as a novel, NotSeeingRed almost defies being glossed -or glossed over . This can initially be grasped by studying the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on the verso of the book's title page . Catalogers are generally somewhat hesitant to apply more than four subject headings to a work . Often no more than three suffice. Thus the fact that NotSeeingRed required six subject headings tells its reader a great deal. Modern Age

Although one could never adequately explicate or paraphrase or even pinpoint all of Karetzky's conclusions, one can point out that he believes that a " major reason why American librarianship was unable to reject Soviet librarianship, as well as the Soviet Union itself, was because for most of the period under consideration here the field lacked a conservative body of professional thought : the professional creed was entirely liberal. While some librarians were conservative in their private lives or their political ideology, their ethos of librarianship was still liberal . " Thus, without a counterbalancing conservative check upon them, liberal leaders of the library profession in the United States informed their subordinates, in various ways, that expressing anti-Communist sentiments was not " correct" and would be "frowned upon . " And yet they did not seem to see the parallels between such orders and those filtering down from the Politburo. Such paradoxes further revealed how inordinately complex the relationship between liberalism and Communism was in the years between 1917 and 1960 and how many professions were affected by it. With infinite implications, the affinities between those " isms " also resonated in intellectuals like James Burnham (19051987), an active Trotskyite until March 1940, who went on to condemn liberalism as a "pigmy ideology" compared to the "gigantic ideology of Bolshevism ." But much was to change as the pigmy grew. The resulting assistance provided by librarians in the United States to those " across the pond " initially took "many forms, such as giving useful professional information to the new country, furnishing the fledgling state with technical advisers, and publicly portraying the brutal government to the West in positive terms . " Eventually, those Americans "who sought to insure that Cold-War era librariesboth domestic and overseas-included vital anti-Communist works were dis107



missed as ignorant, intolerant, aggressive proto-fascists . " As the latter term suggests, it was far more " correct " to be anti-fascist, and anti-Nazi, than anti-Communist. From 1960 to 1985, Karetzky notes, the Soviets " frequently developed links to the United States and other Western countries, largely to gain scientific and technical information in all fields, including librarianship . The latter took on added significance with the development of computers, reflected in the growing use of the term library and information science in the United States to denote the library profession ." After witnessing the pandemonium following a librarian ' s announcement that "the automated system has crashed! " the reader studying Not Seeing Red wonders whether Karetzky might write a sequel to his book elaborating on how the computer will affect the library profession as yet another "god that failed . " Throughout history, the three basic components of libraries, in addition to their librarians and readers, have been their books (and the acquisition and labeling of them), their catalogues (including shelflists), and their buildings . Although book-burners have, sporadically, torched that triad, librarianship has endured and prevailed . But, like the wondrous Wooden Horse pulled by exuberant Trojans into the heart of their city, the computer is now ensconced in the inner sanctums of libraries . And there its "potential" has dawned on those selfsame left-leaning intellectuals whose utopian and radicalizing forms of thought were drawn to Soviet Communism before it faded into the red sunset of the twentieth century. Although all the professions are grappling with the pros and cons of automation, the computer will affect the field of library science more deeply than it will any other . In fact, it could even take from libraries what they are and have been, their very essence, to the extent that they 108

will no longer be what they once were. Already the "electronic book " threatens its paper counterparts in ways that would have caused Krupskaya to salute the machine as her most expeditious Cornmissar of Book Conversion . And many university and public libraries have long since completed the " retrospective conversions " of their catalogues to computer databases . "The New York Public Library," Nicholson Baker laments in his devastating article on " Discards " in The New Yorker (April 4, 1994), " ahead of the game, renovated the entire ten-million-card catalogue of its Research Libraries between 1977 and 1980, microfilmed it, and threw it out ." And that was just the tip of the iceberg . Triumphantly, "America ' s great libraries are scrapping the card catalogue in favor of the more accessible on-line system, and many librarians are toasting the demise of the musty, dog-eared file card and the bookish image it projects. But are they also destroying their most important-and irreplaceable-contribution to scholarship? " Moreover, the machine ' s obsession with clock-time is utterly antithetical to the leisureliness of libraries that historically fostered quiet " hours of reflection " and scholarly " sessions of sweet silent thought ." Thus that aspect of the computer is also dialectically opposed to the ethos of a true " conservator " who, as one critic affirms, strives "to conserve what is timeless, time-tested, time-honored . " ' This is not to suggest that libraries ' conservators should pull the plugs or smash the screens of their computers in the way that the followers of Ned Ludd in the early nineteenth century attacked the cotton power looms and wool-knitting machines of the English Midlands. But they should ponder what the great American architect Louis Henri Sullivan (1856-1924) meant when he said, with respect to the structure of buildings, that "form ever follows function . " For, if librarians again turn a blind eye to what is

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transpiring around them, then, in extremis, insidious forces and liberal colleagues could transmogrify their temples of thought into Information Centers beyond Krupskaya' s wildest dreams-cacophonous, warehouse-like structures in which viewers sit staring at identical computer screens displaying what are no longer books while Big Brother or Little Sister, who is no longer a librarian, monitors the monitors. Such a Kafkaesque metamorphosis calls to mind the haunting picture on the cover of Not Seeing Red, where a thoughtful Lenin sits behind a desk in a library holding what was still a book in his hands . "Of the many political radicals who made great use of the libraries in Czarist Russia," Karetzky notes, "none did so more than Lenin . He also made intensive use of collections in England, Switzerland, France, Denmark, and other countries during his years of exile ." Ironically, the ideas taken by Marx (who wrote Das Kapital [1867-1894] under the dome of the British Museum library), by Lenin, and by their disciples from the books they read in libraries brought about the destruction of such volumes and the alcoves in which they were shelved . And surely the Bolsheviks, seeing the "red, sweet wine of youth" pour across Europe during the Great War and splash onto the crimson snow carpeting the steppes of the Russian Revolution, knew few would view the massacres of books and libraries as other sinister forms of " pogroms" and " purges " with the analogous deadly consequences . Tragically, even some librarians were blind to what Milton had prophetically warned against : "who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God ' s image : but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself ." 1 . George A. Panichas, The Critic as Conservator: Essays in Literature, Society, and Culture (Washington, D .C ., 1992), xii .

Modern Age

The Decline and Fall of Communist Systems PAUL HOLLANDER

Rotten Foundations : The Conceptual Basis of the Marxist-Leninist Regimes of East Germany and Other Countries of the Soviet Bloc, by Peter W . Sperlich, Westport, Conn .:

Praeger, 2002. xii + 241 pp. not likely to receive the attention it deserves since its findings and propositions will arouse the enmity of the guardians of the prevailing conventional wisdoms in the social sciences . It will especially displease those who continue to believe that some variety of socialism inspired by Marx's ideas remains both desirable and viable and who refuse to draw the opposite conclusion from the collapse of Soviet communism and from the ample evidence available well before the collapse. Professor Peter W . Sperlich will also no doubt antagonize the left by his exposure of the flaws of Marxism as a theory, let alone a " scientific" one-as distinct from the disasters which resulted from its attempted realization . His fully justified emphasis on the utopian and religious aspects of Marxism will certainly not be well received also by those who continue to cling to it as as the repository of truth and hope. Finally, Rotten Foundations will be disTHIS IMPORTANT BOOK iS

PAUL HOLLANDER is

ProfessorEmeritus of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author, most recently, of Discontents : Postmodern and Postcommunist (Transaction, 2002). 109