incineration of Kamkin inventory

[Alexander Ogden]

To view the entire article, go to 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63646-2002Mar8.html

Final Chapter for a Cold War Relic

By Dana Hedgpeth

In its heyday, the sprawling bookstore tucked into a nondescript industrial 
park behind White Flint Mall in Rockville was a curious outpost of the Cold 
War.

Researchers, Russophiles and spies made their way to Victor Kamkin Inc., 
which for decades collected and sold books detailing every aspect of life 
and history in the Soviet Union, all in their original Russian. A little 
more than 1 million bound volumes were in the last inventory, taken two 
years ago. Workers there estimate there could be nearly 2 million books and 
other published materials today.

On Monday morning, Montgomery County sheriff's deputies are expected to 
receive the entire collection at the county incinerator.

Victor Kamkin Inc., named for the Russian emigré who founded it 50 years 
ago, is being evicted, a victim of the Cold War's demise and declining 
demand for Russian books. With no buyer for the collection, its landlord 
arranged for the entire stock to be destroyed.

"It's a real shame to think these will become a book burning," said Igor 
Kalageorgi, the great-nephew of Victor Kamkin and the store's owner. Late 
yesterday afternoon, from his bed at Suburban Hospital, he was still trying 
to negotiate with his landlord to save the books. He went to the hospital 
Thursday for bleeding ulcers.

Victor Kamkin Inc. for decades was a strange middleman in the Cold War. It 
reflected the geopolitics of its time, selling obscure titles to agents 
from the CIA as well as the KGB, who were supposedly photographed by the 
other side as they came and went. A capitalist business in one of America's 
wealthiest counties, Kamkin nonetheless profited mightily from Soviet 
subsidies and a state-owned publishing monopoly. Among its musty stacks 
could be found the popular "Dr. Zhivago" by Boris Pasternak -- banned in 
the Soviet Union -- and esoteric titles such as "Problems in Crystal 
Physics With Solutions." A quarter of the store's sales were to U.S. 
government agencies.

The Soviet government subsidized Victor Kamkin, said Larry Miller, 
librarian of the Slavic collection at the University of Illinois at 
Urbana-Champaign, who has done about $25,000 worth of business a year with 
Kamkin for 42 years. "Essentially, the Soviets were paying the rent because 
the books were so cheap," Miller said.

When the state publishing monopoly collapsed with the Soviet Union, Kamkin 
could no longer count on either the assured delivery or low prices it had 
for years. Interest in Russian-language books waned. More book importers 
entered the market. By last year, Kamkin couldn't pay the $15,000 monthly 
rent for its warehouse.

Kamkin is $200,000 behind in payments to its landlord, Allen Kronstadt of 
Randolph Buildings L.P., and in December eviction proceedings began.

Normally in an eviction, anything left in the rented space is piled up on 
the curbside. That usually amounts to a few items of furniture or clothing. 
But the sheriff said putting nearly 2 million books on the street was 
impossible. Sheriff's deputies insisted that Kronstadt take the books away 
-- destroy them if he had to -- to keep them off the street.

"There would be nowhere to put that many books in the public right of way," 
said Lt. John Dean, who has been handling the case for the sheriff's 
department.

The landlord, who has been taking books he wants on Russian Jewish history 
off Kamkin's shelves in recent days, tried several book publishers, a 
Russian newspaper, an auctioneer and libraries with special collections, 
but to no avail.

"I've had a publisher tell me, sure, he'd want maybe 5,000 or 10,000 of the 
rarest ones, but not a million," Kronstadt said.

So laborers have been hired to load the collection from the 
20,000-square-foot warehouse onto trucks and haul it to the county transfer 
station, where they could be burned.

Kronstadt, not eager to be seen as a man who burns books, said he was 
looking into recycling options, which would mean, essentially, pulping them.

"Kamkin provided the Russian community with a good choice of books," said 
Oleg Kalugin, a retired KGB general and former member of Soviet parliament. 
"It's a pity. It's a loss for Washington," he said of Kamkin's closing.

Kamkin once was one of only two American importers of Soviet-published 
books and periodicals. Generations of Russian immigrants ordered magazines 
and newspapers from Kamkin.

Kamkin, who was a lawyer, was also said to have been a officer in the 
Russian imperial army who fled to China from Russia shortly before the 
Bolshevik October Revolution in 1917. There, he started publishing Russian 
classics that became popular for the fairly large Russian population in China.

Kamkin came to the United States in 1949 and briefly ran a pig farm in 
Tennessee. But after a heart attack, he moved to Washington in 1953, where 
he opened his first bookstore on 14th Street. "He had one shelf of books 
when he first started," said Kalageorgi, his great-nephew.

Kamkin cultivated a long business relationship with the Soviet government's 
International Book Co. It made Kamkin's business extremely valuable to 
Americans who wanted to find out what the Soviet government was telling its 
citizens in the form of literature, newspapers and textbooks.

At its peak, Kamkin employed 40 mostly Russian immigrants.  A quarter of 
the store's business was with the federal government, such as the CIA and 
the National Security Agency.

"It was agencies that you weren't supposed to know existed ordering stuff," 
Kalageorgi said.

Kamkin often had books in Russian that were banned in the Soviet Union, 
including works by Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam, a poet who was tortured 
in Stalin's prisons.

"You couldn't get Mandelstam's books in Russia, but Kamkin would have 
them," said Kalugin, who now lives in Silver Spring and has frequented 
Kamkin's store for decades.

  Kamkin's business was helped by his relationship with the Soviet 
government, which was eager to have a U.S. distributor for its publications 
and sold them to Kamkin cheap.

"The books were treated as propaganda. The Soviets were interested in 
getting as many Russian books into the U.S. as possible and Kamkin was one 
of the ways they did it," Miller said.

"By the 1950s, they were the premier supplier of materials from the 
U.S.S.R.," said John Daly, whose father was a professor of Russian studies 
at the Naval Academy who started buying books from Kamkin more than four 
decades ago and created a 7,000 volume library -- mostly from Kamkin.

After Kamkin died in 1974, his wife, Elena, took over the company's stores 
in New York, Rockville and Reisterstown.

Kamkin has struggled for 10 years with declining sales. It grosses about $1 
million a year.

"Ever since the Cold War ended, it was like a snap with our business," 
Kalageorgi said.

Shortly after taking over, Kalageorgi closed the New York store and has 
moved some of the rare books from Rockville to the Reisterstown store. He 
plans to continue operating in Reisterstown but that store can't 
accommodate any more of the Rockville store's collection.

The amount of material to be cleared out is immense. In the front is a 
small store with a few racks of cards, trinkets, matryoshka dolls and CDs. 
In the back is the warehouse where there are rows and rows of books, packed 
tightly, floor to ceiling. Yesterday employees were busily moving books 
around, trying to help a few last-minute customers find rare treasures in 
the stacks.

"This is the Elvis of Russia," said Nathaly Nikitina, a 57-year-old store 
employee from Russia, as she held up a record by Vladimir Vysotsky, called 
"Sons Are Leaving for Battle," with a $3 red price tag on it. Company 
health benefits for Nikitina and her 16-year-old daughter were canceled 
three months ago, but Nikitina, who makes $12 an hour, and about a dozen 
other workers keep showing up.

"I came to work here my first day in America," 17 years ago in the New York 
store, she said. When the former manager, Anatoly Zabavsky, told her that 
New York was "no place to raise a young girl," she came to the Rockville store.

"I like it here. This is what I know. These books," she said as she handled 
"Crime and Punishment" by Feodor Dostoevski.

Also slated for destruction: the two-inch-thick red book telling of 50 
years of the Russian Red Army's activities, including its march across 
Eastern Europe shown with colored maps; selected writings and letters of 
such Russian greats as Pasternak and Maxim Gorky; large-print books for 
children by Alexander Pushkin; and more than 20 volumes of Russian history 
by Sergei Solovev in green leather binding.

A few rows down near the back are books by Vasily Shukshin, a Russian 
writer and actor who died in 1974. And nearby lies a $13.95 copy of 
selected works by Mikhail Bulgakov, a popular writer of satire.

The store will be open over the weekend for a clearance sale.

"I thought I could save it," Kalageorgi said, as he opened bills in a tall, 
black leather chair in his office of his family's business Thursday 
afternoon. "Most of the people working here are Jewish refugees. They've 
worked here for years. I don't know what they're going to do. It's a bit of 
a mess."


--------------------------------
Dr. J. Alexander Ogden
Assistant Professor of Russian
Graduate Director, Program in Comparative Literature
Humanities Office Bldg, 9th floor
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
(803) 777-9573; fax: (803) 777-0132

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                  http://home.attbi.com/~lists/seelangs/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------