incineration of Kamkin inventory

Sat Mar 9 23:17:56 UTC 2002

At 11:53 AM 3/9/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>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 emigrИ 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
>
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