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# At the St Petersburg International Legal Forum, Deputy Minister of Culture Zhanna Alexeyeva announced that a closed repository for literature of a "destructive nature" is being created at the Lenin Library, and called it a "spetskhran"
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/na-peterburgskom-mezhdunarodnom-iuridicheskom-forume-zamministra-kultury-zhanna-alekseeva-zaiavila-chto-v-leninke-sozdaiut-zakrytoe-khranilishche-literatury-destruktivnogo-kharaktera-i/
- Published: 2026-06-29T14:39:44.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:25:45.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Books, Moscow, Observations, Society

First of all, it must be explained at once that the spetskhran has existed in the Lenin Library all along; nobody abolished this department with the collapse of the USSR, it was merely the regime of access and the principle by which it is filled that changed. Pornographic and extremist literature, for instance, was sent there: it arrives in the library by default, either as a legal deposit copy or by other means, and in any case must be kept, whatever it may represent, but is not subject to free issue on readers' request. Naturally, then, the department of special storage never went anywhere, so there is nothing to create anew. What changes is the grounds on which books end up in this section of the library's holdings.

Specifically, Alexeyeva, as far as I understood, reported that books involving foreign agents are to be treated as 18+ material and sent to that very separate room, from which issue takes place only on request and only to adults.

The spetskhran departments arose at the dawn of Soviet power and were formally liquidated in 1990 by order of Glavlit. All the books were supposed to be returned to the general holdings, but, as you will appreciate, in some cases such a return was simply impossible from a purely technical point of view, since the lists of books barred from free circulation had never been finally abolished. Let me explain once more with a concrete example. Printed, audiovisual and electronic materials of religious associations and destructive cults, whose activity has been ruled extremist or terrorist by a court and banned on the territory of the country, are also kept somewhere. The holdings that store these materials too, and have done so for decades, for understandable reasons under a special regime of access, are precisely the spetskhran over which everyone has suddenly taken alarm.

What lay in the Soviet spetskhran? At various times it held émigré and religious books, publications from the time of the Civil War, books mentioning Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, the texts of Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Bulgakov, Severyanin, and indeed everything printed abroad, regardless of content. Access was granted on a petition from the reader's place of work signed by its head, and until 1983 the signature of the party committee secretary might also be required.

Soviet Glavlit checked the holdings by hand against the "Consolidated List of Books Subject to Exclusion". The present-day librarian is obliged, it would seem, to monitor sources such as the Ministry of Justice's register of foreign agents, that is, to follow additions to the list and move books into the closed area in advance. But one should not imagine that this is some fatal or shocking innovation: all that changes is the content of the list itself of literature withdrawn from simplified reader access.