Hunting the Chechen Books

Prague Watchdog has published my translation of an essay by Arlene Blum, entitled How They Hunted The Chechen Books. From the essay's opening paragraphs:

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings," wrote Heinrich Heine.

The poet’s maxim can be applied with justice to any totalitarian regime. As a matter of fact, these two processes often run parallel, and sometimes the second precedes the first: first the human being is destroyed, and then all traces of his existence, left in printed and written sources, are erased.

In the Soviet period a frightening technique was invented: first total genocide was declared, and then this was followed by “bibliocide” – the mass removal and subsequent destruction of whole editions of books and other national printed material.

An eloquent testimony to this is provided by the contents of the restricted access collections of the major libraries, which were given the name “spetskhran”, and attained colossal dimensions – up to half a million volumes. They mostly contained the books of forbidden authors – those who were declared to be “unpersons” and were subject to “vaporization”, if one recalls the terms used by the civil servants of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s novel 1984.

The Soviet spetskhrany, like the regime as a whole, were also distinguished by another feature: not only people, but also peoples, were subject to “vaporization”. As a result, all books bearing any relation to such “unnations” must be struck from memory. They were subject to destruction, with the exception of numbered copies left for the restricted access collections of the major book repositories.

I hope you'll take time to read the whole thing.