vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #164 / Social life / Reading article...

Workmen were tearing out the library bookshelves at the Far Eastern State Technical University recently when they made a surprising discovery.

In corners of the room that had been covered by 15-foot bookshelves, they found parcels wrapped in pages printed with Manchurian characters.

The workers called librarians, who undid the string and opened the parcels. Inside were 128 copies of seven books on Asian language and politics, written by scholars of the Oriental Institute and published between 1909 and 1912. The pages had never been cut.

Someone, the librarians believe, clambered around one night, hiding bundles of books where they might survive until secret police were no longer destroying books. They have an idea who hid the books: Zotik Matveyev, a professor of Mongolian philology who was director of the library in the late 1930s.

The discovery of the books, some of them lost to scholars and libraries, has reopened a dark chapter in the life of the city, when Stalin’s terror crushed a class of intellectuals – the Orientalists. The terror reached its height 60 years ago.

“The Oriental Department was completely destroyed – along with all the professors – by 1938,” said Eleonora Yermakova, a professor of history at Far Eastern State University who has examined FSB archives and read interrogation reports on the professors. “This led to the closure of the university in 1939.”

The NKVD – the state security organ – stepped up an ongoing search for “enemies of the people” in 1935. Asian language and culture professors immediately fell under suspicion because of their cultural ties to China and Japan. Secret police shot 14 professors, nine of them on one day: April 25, 1938.

In this atmosphere, Matveyev may have been trying to preserve books that drew the suspicion of a paranoid state. The books that were saved were written not by the professors who were killed, but by an older generation of world-renowned Orientalists whose works were being purged from the library.

“He wanted to leave something to remember these old professors by,” said Vera Babenko, director of the Far Eastern Technical University’s library.

Born in 1889, Matveyev was a bibliographer, historian and Oriental studies expert. He graduated from Vladivostok College and was admitted to St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute, but he was thrown out in 1911 because of his radical views – he was a Social Democrat, then later a Menshevik (the Bolsheviks would later focus particular wrath on these two strains of pre-Revolutionary radicalism). Returning to the Far East, he studied Japanese and Chinese at the Oriental Institute, possibly under the professors whose books were found recently.

After a stint in the army, he joined the faculty of the Oriental Department at Far Eastern State University. He eventually headed the library at the Oriental Institute at the Far Eastern Polytechnical Institute. A scholarly man, he published more than 150 books.

The attacks on the Orientalists started with Krasnoye Znamya newspaper, Yermakova wrote in “Far Eastern State University: History and Contemporary Times.” The paper accused the professors of not being vigilant on behalf of the Revolution.

The newspaper reported on cases in which professors were forbidden to lecture because they supposedly didn’t use new materials or taught their students badly. The real problem was that Moscow insisted that Far Eastern authorities find ever-increasing numbers of “enemies.”

“People like that were international in nature,” said Zoya Morgun, a professor in the Oriental department at Far Eastern State University. “They weren’t needed anymore. This was in the context of mass repressions.”

The arrests began in 1937. NKVD agents, as was their practice, arrested the professors at home at night. Vasily Voiloshnikov — a teacher of Chinese language, history and geography – was a typical case.

“On the 5th of November was the birthday of our son Sasha,” his wife Yulia Voiloshnikova wrote in a letter to Yermakova, the historian. “I saw the guests off and cleaned the apartment. But at midnight, other guests arrived. … They told my husband to get dressed, and he put on winter clothes.”

As agents hustled him off, he told his wife, “I am not guilty of anything. Save my books and manuscripts – and take care of our son.’”

NKVD agents arrested Professor Isaak Feinerman, who was university director for a time, on March 2, 1938, accusing him of being a Trotskyite. In a series of letters to Stalin and Molotov, Feinerman said he was innocent and accused the NKVD of torturing its prisoners. Guards starved their captives, wouldn’t let them use the toilet, and kept themawake by beating them with belts whenever they closed their eyes.

Most trials took no more than 20 minutes; judges set aside 15-minutes to consider the case of Konstantin Kharnsky, a historian of Korea. The accusations against Kharnsky included a charge that he interfered with the destruction of library books. NKVD agents kept him standing in his cell for 19 days. When he tried to sit, they beat him.

The tortures broke all the professors except three – Feinerman, M.N. Vostrikov, and A.I. Yashin. Those who confessed were shot. Those who didn’t were sent to concentration camps and never returned.

Eventually there were no professors, and university authorities asked Leningrad University to send Asian studies students to teach classes in Vladivostok.

In the 1930s, under Matveyev’s direction, new shelves were installed in the library. He would have known that at every corner of the room was an unseen nook where the ends of the bookshelves and the walls formed a hollow. The only place you could have seen into it was from above, and a square of wood had been nailed over the spot.

Matveyev was familiar with the value of the books. In addition to being director of the library, he undertook a 10-year effort to compile a bibliography of Japanese works.

He was arrested in November 1937 and jailed for months without a trial or interrogation.

Then on Feb. 25, agents tortured Matveyev and forced him to confess that he was a traitor. Matveyev was sentenced and shot on April 25, 1938.

The books that were found this year were an uneven find. Though some were lost, copies of others exist elsewhere.

Perhaps the books could teach a lesson in humility to the West, where “censorship” battles tend to be fought over school reading lists. In Russia, at a time when the government was destroying libraries, Matveyev or some other unknown book lover tried to preserve a few volumes from destruction.

“They made bonfires out of books right out in front of the building,” Morgun said.

“Somebody who was probably an employee of that building was trying to save them.”