Fire Destroys 400,000 Books in Peter the Great’s Library

A leading Soviet scholar said a fire at the Academy of Sciences that burned 400,000 books and periodicals at a library founded by Peter the Great was a national disaster, but that library officials played it down like the Chernobyl nuclear accident.

Historian Dmitri Likhachev, head of the Soviet Culture Fund, demanded that top officials at the academy’s library in Leningrad be fired for lying about the size of the loss and ordering a clean-up instead of a careful salvage operation.

The Feb. 14 fire at the library, which stores publications dating back to the 17th Century, “can rightly be called a national disaster,” Likhachev said. “Our culture has suffered a huge loss.”

His comments appeared in a pagelong article published in the March 18 edition of the weekly Book Review.

The scholar said 400,000 books and periodicals had been destroyed in the blaze and that 2.7 million more suffered water and moisture damage.

The library was founded by Peter the Great in 1714 and, according to the weekly, contained about 12 million books, periodicals and manuscripts.

Likhachev, 81, charged that the library administration and the Leningrad scientific center of the Academy of Sciences “both acted, in the first days, according to the ‘model’ programmed by the mistakes of the Chernobyl catastrophe--they tried to belittle the cultural loss in the grossest manner.”

He was referring to Soviet authorities’ initial attempts to hush up the world’s worst nuclear disaster, the April, 1986, explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in which at least 31 people died and millions were exposed to increased levels of radioactivity.

Immediately after the fire, library administrator V. A. Filov estimated the loss at about $4,800 and said the library would be open again in a few days, Likhachev said.

The March 8 edition of the Communist Party newspaper Pravda said the cost of the damage was at least $480,000 and added that estimate was probably low. It said the figure was based on 1956 values and that some of the lost material was priceless.

“A bulldozer was called, and huge piles of burned, dampened and undamaged books were destroyed,” Likhachev charged. “Library workers were prohibited from saving books from this heap of ruins. All this in order to hide more quickly from the eyes of society the size of the catastrophe.”

The Academy of Sciences library began collecting books, manuscripts and periodicals in 1714, and for more than 200 years was located in a building on Leningrad’s Vasiliyevsky Island. In the 1920s it was moved to a new building built especially for it on the island.

Among the books destroyed was a library of foreign medical books gathered by health officials beginning in the 17th Century, and libraries gathered by Baltic and Polish royalty of the 18th and 19th centuries, Likhachev said.

The books damaged by moisture began to mold less than a week after the fire, and the mold is a serious threat to cause long-term damage, he said.

Likhachev warned that the Institute of Russian literature, which holds manuscripts of Pushkin, Dostoevski, Lermontov and other famous Russian writers, was also in danger. That building has not undergone capital repair in more than 150 years, he said.

Likhachev’s article was the most serious and alarming of several that have appeared in the Soviet press since the fire, and was particularly striking for its bitter tone.

Filov was hospitalized after a series of official meetings, and his assistant, V. P. Leonov, left for Switzerland, Likhachev said. He called for replacement of library administrators, saying they conducted themselves in an “insufficiently civilized manner.”