Destruction of libraries
How to Colonize Libraries: A Guide from Soviet Practitioners
The communist authorities always paid close attention to librarianship, viewing it as a powerful tool for shaping public opinion. It’s not for nothing that from the earliest days of the USSR, nearly all public libraries were placed under the control of state agencies responsible for the political indoctrination of citizens, what was known as “political education.”
All of them were guided by instructions originating from Moscow, the political and ideological centre. In Soviet times, Russia subjugated Ukrainian libraries, and today it seeks to destroy them.
Creeping Russification
While the authorities publicly declared loyalty to the ideas of “equality of national languages and cultures,” in reality, they pursued a covert policy of gradual Russification across all spheres of life. Even the policy of “nativization”— a strategy aimed at involving representatives of the native populations of Soviet republics and autonomies in local governance and granting official (and sometimes dominant) status to their national languages—was a short-lived, tactical maneuver.
In the Ukrainian SSR, this policy, branded as “Ukrainization,” was implemented in 1923 but was abandoned after 6-7 years, having primarily served to bolster trust in the Bolshevik government. The Russification of Ukraine’s libraries was also a creeping and long-term process.
It involved various methods, from the mandatory use of Russian in library documentation to the overwhelming presence of Russian-language publications in library collections, along with the overt promotion of Russian culture and literature within these institutions.
“Purges” of Ukrainian Collections
These processes primarily involved the removal of books deemed undesirable by the authorities. These took the form of continuous campaigns to purge the collections of Ukrainian libraries, starting in the early 1920s. These campaigns were an unofficial form of censorship, controlling both the content and language of the collections. In this process, “political educators” and Golovlit worked closely together.
Golovlit was the state censorship body that first emerged in the Russian Soviet Republic, later becoming an all-Union body in 1933. It existed as the Main Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in Print until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This practice is clearly exemplified by the fate of hundreds of libraries belonging to Ukrainian cultural and educational society “Prosvita.” These libraries were stocked with Ukrainian-language publications, helping to spread the achievements of Ukrainian literature among the public, and continued to operate even after the defeat of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921.
However, by the end of 1922, almost none of these institutions remained in Ukraine. Most of their collections were either destroyed or recycled into waste paper.
Dispersal of Library Collections
A common practice was the dispersal of collections with distinctly Ukrainian publications, where books were distributed among several libraries, causing these collections to lose their integrity as historical and cultural artifacts.
For example, in the 1920s and 1930s, this happened to the private library of writer, scholar, and public figure Borys Hrinchenko, which he had amassed over 20 years; the library of the Kyiv-based “Prosvita” Society; the unique collection of Ukrainian books gathered by General Pavel Potocki, transported from St. Petersburg to Kyiv; the Shevchenko Scientific Society’s Ukrainian studies library in Lviv, the largest in western Ukraine; and other individual and institutional collections.
Seizure of Hostile Literature
From the 1920s onward, commissions of “politically reliable” individuals, acting on circulars and proscription lists issued by political education and censorship departments, routinely inspected library collections. They removed works deemed “hostile to the class,” “counter-revolutionary,” or “harmful” to Soviet ideology.
Often, books were seized solely because they were written by Ukrainians or in the Ukrainian language.
The works of many from the “Executed Renaissance” generation and victims of the Great Terror —such as Mykola Zerov, Hryhorii Kosynka, Serhii Yefremov, Mykola Khvylovyi, Geo Shkurupii, Oleksa Vlyzka, Mykhailo Drai-Khmara, Mykola Kulish, Antin Krushelnytskyi, and Maik Yohansen—were almost entirely purged from libraries.
“The Struggle Against Bourgeois Nationalism”
The destruction of books was often justified under the pretext of a “struggle against Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism.”
This made-up term became a tool for suppressing national consciousness and was applied to anything that opposed the regime’s current objectives. Works by authors who were critical of communist ideas or who distanced themselves from politics—such as the Sixtiers, dissidents, and Ukrainian diaspora writers—were banned and removed.
Those who failed to adhere to the class-based approach or “socialist realism,”
or who displayed too much national pride, were also targeted.
Even well-known figures in Ukrainian literature, like Volodymyr Sosiura, Maksym Rylskyi, Ostap Vyshnia, Oles Honchar, Vasyl Stus, Vasyl Symonenko, and Oles Berdnyk, faced harsh criticism. Librarians were often forced to remove works by persecuted authors from open shelves and hide them to avoid trouble with the authorities.
Many Ukrainian writers and scholars were denied the right to publish, forcing them to write privately or distribute their works through “samvydav” (self-publishing), a method of clandestinely copying and circulating typewritten texts. This suppression of Ukrainian literature led to Russian-language publications dominating bookstores and libraries.
Special Storage
Another method of restricting access to politically and ideologically banned books was the creation of special storage units in many Soviet libraries, particularly in scientific institutions.
These special storage funds (known as “spetsskhovy”) housed censored publications that the authorities considered a threat to the totalitarian regime. A book could be placed in these restricted archives for reasons as simple as labeling the author an “anti-Soviet element” or for containing critical remarks about party leaders or socialist practices. These special collections existed for over 60 years, from the early 1920s until the late 1980s.
Ordinary readers were prohibited from accessing these collections, and many were unaware of their existence, as there were no visible signs indicating their location.
Unsurprisingly, the majority of the books in these archives
were Ukrainian “nationalist” publications.
Ideological bodies in the Ukrainian SSR, including the Republican Committee for State Security and Ukrainian Golovlit, zealously served Moscow by actively seeking out and suppressing “anti-Soviet” content, including in books and libraries. For instance, in the postwar period, some Ukrainian bibliographers were persecuted for including works by banned authors in their indexes. These indexes were withdrawn from circulation, and published copies were destroyed.
It is telling that no concept of “Russian nationalism” existed for Russian-language authors, who were free to glorify Russia without restriction.
“Library Collectors”
Special units within book trade organizations, known as “library collectors,” also played a role in the Russification of library collections.
Following the government’s book publishing policies, these units routinely imposed Russian-language publications on libraries. If libraries wished to acquire popular Ukrainian-language books, they had to accept mandatory “supplements” of Russian-language materials, often filled with propaganda narratives.
Russian Priority
The book publishing policies of the totalitarian state prioritized Soviet publishing houses concentrated in Moscow, which published exclusively in Russian. These publishers enjoyed the greatest freedom in shaping their editorial portfolios, securing funding, and commissioning works from prominent figures.
They had access to powerful printing facilities in Russia and were responsible for translating popular foreign books into Russian. Ukrainian publishing houses could only translate some of these popular works from Russian translations if there was significant reader demand.
Furthermore, technical, medical, physical, mathematical literature, and even fiction, particularly from peripheral publishing houses like “Tavria” (Simferopol), “Donbas” (Donetsk), “Mayak” (Odesa), and “Karpaty” (Uzhhorod), were largely published in Russian. Although many books were published in Ukrainian, they could not compete with the multimillion-copy print runs of the Union’s Russian-language publications in terms of titles, circulation, or reader demand. Naturally, these disparities were reflected in the composition of library collections.
Ukrainian Libraries Today
The cumulative effect of the methods used to suppress Ukrainian books—subtle yet persistent—resulted in a paradoxical situation: in Ukraine, books in the native language were often vastly outnumbered by Russian-language publications in library collections, especially in some regions.
Russian-language literature, along with Soviet publications filled with ideological narratives,
was weaponized to sever Ukrainians from their national roots, historical memory, and cultural achievements.
This undermined their mentality, fostering an inferiority complex and alienating them from their mother tongue.
Even 30 years after Ukraine’s independence, the impact of Russification on the information space, distorted library policies, and the echoes of Russian cultural and linguistic expansion are still evident. Despite active efforts to de-Russify library collections, many still contain a significant number of Russian-language publications.
Moreover, a considerable percentage of Ukrainians, including schoolchildren and youth, continue to use Russian in their daily lives. This situation is not merely a result of inertia in social and cultural processes.
Physical Destruction of Libraries (1)
Russia has now shifted its approach from subjugating libraries to outright destroying them in Ukrainian territories. Collections are being completely obliterated or replaced with ideological content in the occupied regions. Today, there are 11,901 libraries in Ukraine—17% fewer than before the large-scale invasion.
Libraries are closing not only in frontline regions but also in Dnipro, Zakarpattia,
Lviv, Odesa, Poltava, Sumy, Ternopil, Khmelnytskyi, Cherkasy, and Chernivtsi regions.
As of June 2024, 175 public libraries have been completely destroyed in Ukraine, primarily in Donetsk, Zhytomyr, Zaporizhzhia, Sumy, Kharkiv, Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Chernihiv regions. Another 786 libraries have sustained various levels of damage, including partially destroyed buildings, roofs, ceilings, floors, windows, and doors.
However, libraries are not just damaged by shelling. After the de-occupation of territories in Sumy, Kharkiv, Kherson, and Chernihiv regions, numerous stories have emerged about what the occupiers left behind: mined buildings, utter disorder, broken furniture, stolen equipment, holes punched in walls, Ukrainian books piled in dumpsters and used as firewood, and desecrated national symbols.
The author: Serhii Zvorskyi,
an employee of the Yaroslav Mudryi National Library of Ukraine,
PhD in History, Senior Researcher.
The translator: Victoria Pushyna
- The section “Physical Destruction of Libraries” includes excerpts from material by Valentyna Zdanovska, chief librarian of the Yaroslav Mudryi National Library of Ukraine.
This article is a part of the special project ‘Erasure of a Word’ created in support of the exhibition ‘Antitext’. The project is implemented by the Chytomo media in cooperation with the Kharkiv Literary Museum, with the support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).