ISSN 0038-0903 SOLANUS INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR RUSSIAN & EAST EUROPEAN BIBLIOGRAPHIC, LIBRARY & PUBLISHING STUDIES New Series Vol. 7 1993 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) https://archive.org/details/solanusnewseries_0007 SOLANUS INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR RUSSIAN & EAST EUROPEAN BIBLIOGRAPHIC, LIBRARY & PUBLISHING STUDIES New Series Vol. 7 1993 CONTENTS Hanna Szviderska, Censorship and the Polish Opposition Press in London, 1940-44 page 3 Mary Stuart, Vladimir Stasov and the Professionalization of Librarianship in Russia 17 Mikhail Bezrodnyf Izdatel'stvo ‘Ogni’ (1909-1923) 35 Janis Paeglis, Latvian Bibliography (to May 1945) 55 la. D. Isajevych, Books and Book Printing in Ukraine in the Sixteenth and the First Half of the Seventeenth Centuries 69 Evgenii Nemirovskii, Venetsianskii Kirillovskii Molitvennik-Sbornik 1597 g. 97 Reviews Marguerite Studemeister, Bookplates and their Owners in Imperial Russia (V. I. Fedorova) 115 Soviet Studies Guide, edited by Tania Konn (Helen Anderson) 116 Galina V. Mikheeva, Istoriia russkoi bibliografii, 1917-1921 gg. (Wojciech Zalewski) 117 Books in Russia and the Soviet Union: Past and Present, edited by Miranda Beaven Remnek (Ray Scrivens) 119 Susan Compton, Russian Ava?it-Garde Books 1917-34 (Robert Russell) 121 Iosif E. Barenbaum, Geschichte des Buchhandels in Russland und der Sowjetunion (Gregory Walker) 122 Horst Rohling, Publikationsformen als verbindenes Element buck- und einzelwissenschaftlicher Forschung an slavischen Beispielen (Gregory Walker) 123 Russian Libraries in Transition: An Anthology of Glasnost Literature, compiled and edited by Dennis Kimmage (Jenny Brine) 124 Notes 126 Contributors 136 Solanus is published by the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU © SSEES 1993 The views expressed in Solanus are not necessarily those of SSEES Editorial Board Professor C. L. Drage, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London Mr Robert Henderson, The British Library Mr W. Gareth Jones, University College of North Wales, Bangor Dr W. F. Ryan, The Warburg Institute, University of London Dr Christine Thomas, The British Library, Editor Dr Gregory Walker, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford International Advisory Panel Dr J. J. Brine, Aberdeen Professor W. E. Butler, University College London The Very Rev. Alexander Nadson, Francis Skaryna Byelorussian Library, London John S. G. Simmons, Emeritus Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford Miranda Beaven, University of California, Berkeley Professor Jeffrey Brooks, University of Minnesota Professor Marianna Tax Choldin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Edward Kasinec, Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library Professor Gary Marker, University of New York at Stony Brook Dr Wojciech Zalewski, Stanford University Libraries Dr Frangoise de Bonnieres, Ecole des Langues Orientales, Paris Dr Horst Rohling, Universitatsbibliothek Bochum Price of this volume: £10.00 or SI 5 U.S., including postage. Sterling payment should be sent to the editor (address below) by cheque or international money order made payable to Solanus. Dollar payment (cheque made payable to Wojciech Zalewski) should be sent to: Wojciech Zalewski, 162 Highland Ave., San Carlos, CA 94070, U.S.A. All correspondence, including subscription and advertising enquiries, should be addressed to the Editor: Dr Christine Thomas Slavonic and East European Collections The British Library Great Russell Street London WC1B 3DG United Kingdom Telephone: 071-323 7587 The Editor will supply Notes for Contributors and Notes for Reviewers on request. Typeset in Plantin and Times Cyrillic at Oxford University Computing Service Censorship and the Polish Opposition Press in London,1940-44 r Hanna Swiderska ‘The Polish press will not cease to remember our dead, or rather victims of murder, and those still alive, and the frontiers of our Republic. On the contrary, it will not change its line irrespective of consequences it may have to face. We are guests here but we are also genuine allies with irreproachable credentials and as such we have acquired certain rights.’ Zygmunt Nowakowski, ‘Montagues russes’, Wiadomosci Polskie, no. 21. 23.5.1943. On 2 June 1943 in the House of Commons John Dugdale MP addressed Minister of Information Brendan Bracken: ‘Does not the right honourable Gentleman agree that 31 is an excessive number of newspapers for the small number of Poles in this country?’ Mr Bracken: ‘I have said before that every time you find a Pole you find a newspaper.’1 The number of Polish newspapers and journals published in the war years in Britain at any time has been variously estimated, but at the end of the war the total amounted to 202 titles.2 Was this excessive? The first wave of Poles arrived in Britain after the fall of France from where 20,000 soldiers managed to escape, together with the Government, Supreme Command and their employees and dependants. At the same time the air force, already in Britain, numbered some 8,500 men. Throughout this period these numbers kept growing, especially after the release of Polish prisoners and deportees in Russia following the Polish-Soviet Agreement of 30 July 1941. The Polish navy and merchant fleet together had some 4,000 men by 1945. The nucleus of the Polish press arrived with its readers from France. The chief among them was the highbrow literary and cultural weekly Wiadomosci Polskie, founded in 1924 in Warsaw as Wiadomosci Literackie. In Paris it had changed its title and journalist-novelist Zygmunt Nowakowski became its offi¬ cial editor, but the original editor Mieczyslaw Grydzewski remained in control. The last Paris issue appeared on 23 June and the first London one on 14 July 1940. This speedy resumption of publication was due to the fact that in London a Polish publishing firm already existed, the pre-war Minerva, whose employ¬ ees now founded the firm of M. I. Kolin which took over the publication of Wiadomosci. 1 FO 371/34578, C 6315. 2 J. Zubrzycki, Polish Immigrants in Britain (The Hague, 1956), p. 135. 4 Solanus 1993 Another title transferred from France was the main army newspaper Polska Walczqca. These were soon joined by new titles: Dziennik Zdnierza which started in Scotland on 29 June 1940 for the troops concentrated there, soon to be followed by Dziennik Polski—the semi-official Government newspaper. Such were the beginnings of the rich and varied Polish press in wartime Britain. War shortages were beginning to bite and the British allotted a certain amount of paper to Polish needs. It was distributed by the Polish Ministry of Information, while the Polish Council of Ministers made the Ministry respon¬ sible for preventative censorship of material of military and political interest intended for publication in the press. The Ministry, however, had no powers to enforce submission of material to its scrutiny and as early as 29 July it started complaining that Wiadomosci was ignoring the censor.3 To its editors any form of censorship, even a friendly one, was anathema. There was no British preventative censorship, but the British press was subject to strict control which in theory applied to current news and sought to eliminate any kind of information which might be useful to the enemy, while comments were free. All editors received copies of a document called ‘Defence Notices’, listing subjects which should not be discussed without first consulting the censorship department of the Ministry of Information (Mol). This list was supplemented by memoranda and letters to the editors. All this censorship, however, like the Polish one, was voluntary, and a newspaper wishing to air a subject affecting public security was not obliged to obtain clearance from the censor. But everything which could adversely affect the war effort was anathema, as the Communist Daily Worker discovered when on 21 January 1941 it was suppressed by the Mol. There were also other measures to ensure compliance of the press. On 16 August 1940, The Control of Paper (No. 20) Order was issued, which provided that ‘without a licence no person shall in the UK print or make or publish any newspaper or magazine or other periodical that was not both printed or made in the UK and published therein before the coming into force of this order’.4 As the war progressed and the political situation grew more complicated the above was insufficient to deal with various tricky situations involving also the Polish papers which had started before the given date. The gap was stopped by The Control of Paper (No. 48) Order of 1 March 1943, authorising the Mol to limit the consumption of newsprint by obnoxious newspapers and (depending on interpretation of the Order) even reducing it to nil.5 To achieve this the Mol simply instructed the Ministry of Supply to reduce or stop consignments of paper sent to the printers for the use of the culprit. This in effect ended 3 PRM.37B, document 60. 4 FO 371/34584. C 8435. 5 Ibid. Censorship and the Polish Opposition Press in London 5 its existence since the publishing black market was incapable of supplying enough newsprint to produce a newspaper. On the other hand the small black- market printers produced pamphlets on all kinds of subjects which legally were free of any kind of censorship and which could in fact if not in name become periodicals in disguise, though each issue had a different title. In this category belonged the pamphlets, bitterly critical of the Polish Government’s Soviet policy and outspokenly hostile to the USSR, published by Stanislaw Mackiewicz to whom the Polish Ministry of Information had refused newsprint for a newspaper. ★ ★ ★ The freedom enjoyed by the Polish press in Britain was doomed when the USSR joined the anti-German alliance, which was followed by the Polish- Soviet Agreement of 30 July 1941. In September 1939 the Russians had oc¬ cupied eastern Poland under the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact which revived the so-called Curzon Line suggested by Britain in 1919 as the Polish eastern fron¬ tier. The Soviet seizure of eastern Poland, followed by mass arrests and depor¬ tations, now made the USSR a rich recruiting ground for the Polish Forces, and the Agreement of 30 July provided for the recruitment of the Polish Army in Russia and release of deportees and prisoners. It failed, however, to define the future Polish-Soviet frontier, and this vagueness, which boded ill for the future, turned a very large number of free Poles against their Government. Part of the press also joined the opposition. The most prominent opposition newspaper was Wiadomosci with its militant editor and regular contributor Nowakowski. The opposition press well understood the need to start a new chapter in Polish-Soviet relations but insisted that it must be based on clearly defined terms and not be synonymous with total surrender of Polish interests. Wiadomosci soon experienced the displeasure of its Government when in September it was deprived of its monthly grant of £113, and its distribution among the Polish troops was (ineffectively) banned. Its popularity and num¬ ber of subscribers rapidly increased and the number of copies printed grew from 6,200 to well over 7,000, and only the paper shortage prevented further expansion. Wiadomosci found allies in particular in two new journals: My si Polska and Jutro Polski, but it remained the leading opposition paper. Its rapid growth was impressive considering that its circulation was limited mainly to Britain. Its penetration to the Middle East following the 1942 evacuation of Polish troops and civilians from the USSR was very limited, but there its views on Polish-Soviet relations found enthusiastic readers who had fresh memories of the gulags and spetspereselenie. On 11 March 1943 the Polish authorities in London requested their British hosts to ban the export of Wiadomosci and Mysl Polska to the Middle East where they fuelled dissatisfaction with the 6 Solanus 1993 Polish Government’s policy, but the British had no regulations to fit the case and failed to oblige.6 ★ ★ ★ The limited circulation of the Polish opposition press and its exotic language did not make its role in international politics as negligible as could be expected. It did not even suspect that it had avid readers in the London branch of TASS whose head was the British Communist Andrew Rothstein, a journalist born in Russia and, by reason of his university education, since 1920 one of the leading stars of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Now he started taking great interest in these obscure newspapers and obtained a helper from the Moscow headquarters, Kaminskii by name. The Daily Worker, reprieved in August 1942, became their enthusiastic mouthpiece in Britain. The two gentlemen closely studied every issue of every Polish paper and promptly passed the information to Moscow. Despatches sent abroad had to be first approved by the Censorship Divi¬ sion of the Mol who, in difficult cases, turned for advice to the Foreign Office News Department. In March 1942 its hand was strengthened by a confidential document Y 368, which authorised the censors to ‘stop material even if it had already been published in a newspaper in this country if such material was cal¬ culated to create ill-feeling among Allied nations or between them and a neutral country’ in order to ‘prevent news agencies from giving world currency to of¬ ten obscure and malicious items appearing in little-known foreign-language papers which would otherwise receive no attention’.7 In February 1942 the Foreign Office received a memorandum from journal¬ ist Koni Zilliacus employed in the Mol Censorship Division. It reported that ‘for some time TASS has been closely following the Polish press in this country and wiring to Moscow accounts of what it says about the USSR and the peace settlement, or about Polish-Soviet relations ... Thus on Feb. 16 ... a TASS despatch announces that “No. 7 of the reactionary Polish weekly Wiadomosci Polskie publishes a number of anti-Soviet articles, [summaries follow] In gen¬ eral”, concludes TASS, “the author professes to find difficulty in choosing between Nazi and Soviet rule”.’ The contents of Polska Walczqca, Dziennik Polski and Jutro Polski are similarly described and the last paper is considered especially objectionable: ‘The German press uses every sentence in the British [szc] paper recognising a leading role of the Soviet Union in Central Europe or suggesting that the Soviet frontier will be moved further west. No-one wants a repetition of Russian oppression. The population (in Poland) does not believe the German tales that England has sold the Baltic States, including Lithuania 6 FO 371/34565. C 2757. 7 FO 371/34581. C 7199. Censorship and the Polish Opposition Press in London 7 and Wilno, to Russia. Molotov’s inclusion of Lwow in the list of Ukrainian towns mentioned in the Soviet Government’s Note on German Atrocities is tending to lessen confidence in the USSR.’8 In the FO Central Department (where relations with Poland belonged) Zilliacus’s memorandum was received with alarm by Peter Hutton, who passed it on to his superior Frank Roberts with a memorandum of his own. He concluded, ‘I feel sure that the attached memorandum will convince you that it is necessary immediately to take some very drastic steps to prevent the Poles from publishing this kind of thing in this country and so abusing our hospitality and endangering our relations with the Soviet Union’.9 Roberts, however, was unwilling to act, ‘since we hope to teach the Poles democratic procedure, and not totalitarian methods, during their stay among us’.10 He realised that Polish censorship was powerless. Effective steps could be taken only by the British, but even so were unlikely to achieve much, in view of the existing regulations. ‘If the papers in question were licensed before the restriction of paper supplies, it is virtually impossible to prevent them getting paper. Licences continue in operation until they are withdrawn ... Withdrawal is only approved in extreme cases and, even if licences are withdrawn, it is always open to the publishers to bring out their papers at irregular intervals in pamphlet form. Paper cannot be withheld from a licensed journal.’11 The simplest way to suppress the culprits would be, of course, to charge them with ‘weakening the war effort’, but unfortunately they enthusiastically supported the war with Germany. In the meantime Rothstein was becoming more vociferous and harassed the Mol censors and the FO News Department banning his Moscow despatches composed in familiar style, like ‘Notorious Mackiewicz, one of the chief pur¬ veyors [of] [sic—this is a cable] Hitlerite anti-Soviet propaganda in Poland before war, still has freedom in Britain, April 1942, to publish foulest lies and incitements against Soviet Union. British Govt which finds weapons for use against Communist press ... appears powerless either to deny paper to this declared and unscrupulous enemy of Britain’s Ally or to put him in internment camp where he belongs.’12 This text, stopped by the censor, was presented on 1 May to Eden by Ambassador Maiskii with Rothstein’s comment, ‘thus, in view of British au¬ thorities, it is perfectly permissible spread outrageous slanders anti-USSR and does not harm relations between Allies, but it is not permissible to expose the black hundred slanderers to anger of Soviet peoples and to open up this 8 FO 371/31079. C 3048. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 FO 371/31083. C 4658. 12 Ibid. 8 Solanus 1993 ulcer of inter-Allied relations before whole world’—and so on.13 The outcome of the interview was that the Foreign Secretary ordered an investigation into the possibilities of suspending the Polish opposition press., which (ten months before the issue of The Control of Paper (No. 48) Order) led nowhere, while the Mol and FO were trying to make each other responsible for finding a solution. Complaints multiplied, TASS and the Soviet Embassy harassed the British, while Wiadomosci and its allies continued printing material obnoxious to their own Government, their British hosts and the Great Ally. All the time Rothstein/Kaminskii kept Moscow closely informed about the outrages, by cable or diplomatic bag, and claimed that Soviet ‘public opinion’ was boiling with rage. Wiadomosci was presented as the chief offender, which was pointed out by Andrei Vyshinskii to the Polish ambassador in Kuibyshev who sought Soviet permission for Nowakowski to visit as a reporter on the Polish army in Russia: ‘We must regard Nowakowski as the editor of Wiadomosci Polskie. I do not know a newspaper more hostile to the Soviet Union. I took special interest in this person, read articles in Wiadomosci Polskie and saw for myself that there is probably no paper more bitterly anti-Soviet in our hemisphere.’14 On 1 March 1943 The Control of Paper (No. 48) Order was issued and soon proved very handy. ★ ★ ★ Matters came to a head when in April 1943 the Katyn graves were discovered by the Germans, which gave Stalin the desired excuse to break off relations with the Polish Government. This threw the British into panic and forced them to seek a radical solution to deal with the offensive Polish newspapers openly declaring their conviction that the Russians were responsible for the massacre. The British desperately tried to restore Polish-Soviet relations. On 25 April Churchill cabled Stalin, requesting that he should not break off with the Poles and informing him of plans to silence the Polish press, in which Premier Sikorski himself was to cooperate in order to ‘restrain Polish Press from polemics. In this connection I am examining possibilities of silencing those Polish papers in this country which attack Soviet Government and at the same time attack Sikorski for trying to work with the Soviet Government.’15 Stalin’s instant answer was that the break had already been decided because ‘such action was demanded by my colleagues as the Polish official press is ceaselessly pursuing and even daily expanding its campaign hostile to the USSR.’16 On the following day the Cabinet discussed the sorry state of Polish-Soviet 13 Ibid. 14 S. Kot, Rozmowy z Kremlem (London, 1959), p. 237. 15 FO 954/19. Pol/43/15. 16 Ibid., Pol/43/16.