During the last Open Book Clinic, Veronika Trotter, Senior Collections Reference Assistant in Area Studies, brought a very interesting book she found in the Wells Library stacks:
Vstrecha s Rossiei; Kak i chem zhivut v sovetskom soi͡uze; pisʹma v krasnui͡u armii͡u, 1939-1940
Meeting with Russia. How they live in the Soviet Union. Letters to the Red Army, 1939—1940
About the book, Veronika wrote,
“The author, Vladimir Zenzinov (1880—1953), was born in Moscow, received an excellent education in Germany, and participated in all three Russian revolutions (1905, and February and October of 1917). He spent many years in exile in Siberia and finally emigrated from Russia in 1919, first to Europe, and then to the USA. After traveling all around the world, he finally settled down in New York, where he died. Zenzinov’s archive is located at the Amherst Center for Russian Culture.
In 1939, during the so-called Winter War (Soviet-Finnish war in 1939-1940), Zenzinov went to Finland to gather material about the conditions in the Soviet Union. He collected, transcribed, organized, and analyzed about 500 letters that were found on the corpses of fallen Soviet soldiers in Finland. The content of those letters sounds awfully familiar: one immediately recognizes the propaganda rhetoric enforced by Russia from the very beginning of the invasion to Ukraine. This sinister resemblance makes the book very relevant today: while reading the book, you understand how little has changed (except that no one writes letters anymore).
The book was published in 1944 in New York and is in rather poor condition: the cardboard cover attached to it in place of the original one is crumbling; however, the pages are not brittle.”
Thanks, Veronika, and all those who keep a watchful eye on the Libraries’ collections and think about how they can best serve our users.
In this case, what’s old is new again in more ways than one.
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