Pacific Rim librarianship: collectors of Russian materials on the Far East (1).

Polansky, Patricia

During a research trip to California in the spring of 2002, this author, the Russian bibliographer at the University of Hawaii (UH), turned her thoughts to Russian librarianship in the Pacific Rim. This broadly defined region encompasses not only the Russian Far East, but China, Japan, Korea, Hawaii, and Alaska, along with the American West Coast states of Washington, Oregon, and California. A list of libraries that have collections on the Far East, and librarians, bibliographers, and bibliophiles who have collected these materials, was made. This geographical designation of the Far East includes not only the regions of Kamchatka, Magadan, Sakhalin, the Maritime Province, Khabarovsk and the Amur, but also Japan, and the Manchurian area of China, especially during the period when Imperial Russia held the Chinese Eastern Railway concession (Kitaisko-Vostochnaia zheleznaia doroga, KVzhd). It is interesting to look at the Far East in the larger context, as much contact and interaction existed for centuries, with the first Russians having reached China in the seventeenth century. An earlier Russian version of this article appeared in the Vladivostok library journal Vlast' knigi. (2)

The following brief survey will introduce readers to a few of the people responsible for adding collections of materials to libraries that deal with the Far East. This is only a preliminary list. Librarians and collectors who lived and worked in the Russian Far East for the most part are omitted. (3) Such prominent people as Fedor Fedorovich Busse, Zotik Nikolaevich Matveev, and others are well-known in their own country, so this article focuses on Westerners and Russian emigres.

In the following biographies, the reader will get a sense of the interconnectedness of not only the geographical parts of the region, but how people moved around, and how their collecting touched on many themes important to the history and understanding of the region. It is interesting to note that there is only one librarian in the group.

Robert Joseph Kerner (1887-1956)

The complex and controversial Kerner was Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) from 1928 until his death. His view of looking at Russian history from a Pacific perspective is often referred to as the "Berkeley" or "Kerner" School. He founded the Northeast Asian Seminar and edited the 1939 Northeastern Asia: A Selected Bibliography. He taught many prominent historians in the Russian field such as Dorothy Atkinson, Basil Dmytryshyn, Raymond H. Fisher, Richard Pierce, George Lantzeff, Hugh Graham, Wayne Vucinich, and Alton Donnelly. Kerner taught at UH during the 1935 summer session.

Present-day librarians at Berkeley do not have a clear history for the early years of their Slavic collections. The Pavel Miliukov library came to UCB in 1929, and Kerner was very enthusiastic about this. Whether Kerner was the main selector for books while he was there is not known. After his death, Kerner's wife donated her husband's library to UCB in 1957. It contained more than 1,000 books, 200 brochures, microfilm, and over 1,000 periodicals and 600 unbound volumes. Part of this collection deals with Russian eastward expansion to the Pacific; Kerner's Russian-American Company materials went to the Bancroft Library. (4)

There was at least one predecessor to Kerner. The Berkeley stacks contain some wonderful leather-bound pre-revolution items in the DK750's (Siberian/Far East history) with the bookplate "Horace Carpentier." Horace Walpole Carpentier (1824-1918), a lawyer, graduated from Columbia University and arrived in California in 1850. He was instrumental in incorporating the city of Oakland, had himself made mayor; was involved in a lot of land deals, and was a stockholder in the Central Pacific Railroad Company. Around 1910, he moved back to his native state of New York. According to library records, Carpentier gave $100,000 to the university in 1918, and this was assigned to the library for the purchase of books relating to Asiatic civilization. Who actually purchased the Russian items remains a mystery. (5)

Klaus Mehnert (1906-84)

Mehnert, a Moscow-born German trained in Russian history, studied American history at Berkeley, and had met Kerner. While an assistant professor of history at UH from 1937 to 1941, he taught courses on Russia in Asia, and wrote a booklet, The Russians in Hawaii. During World War 11 he lived in Shanghai, and edited a journal called The XXth Century. (6) Later, he became an advisor on Soviet and Chinese affairs to Chancellors Konrad Adenauer in the 1950s and Helmut Schmidt during the 1970s.

Mehnert added to the UH library the first books in English and Russian dealing with general topics of Russian and Soviet history, as well as those with a specific focus on Siberia and the Far East. He brought with him the Kerner interest in looking at Russian history from a Pacific viewpoint. When he died, he left a modest sum of money to the Russian collection. A portion of this gift made possible support of the Russian State Library's publication of a catalog describing the special collection of Russian materials printed in China and Japan, some of which the Mehnert funds purchased. (7)

Klaus, tanned and enthusiastic with sparkling blue eyes, possessed a very engaging and enthusiastic personality. During the 1970s and 1980s, he taught several times at UH, usually during the summer sessions. He was very helpful in suggesting materials to add to the Russian collection. Remembering his years in Hawaii, Mehnert, in his autobiography, calls his UH successors John White and John Stephan his "son and grandson" respectively. (8)

At the same time, he remains a controversial figure. A cloud of suspicion still hangs over him as a Nazi sympathizer. The last "Russia in Asia" seminar that John Stephan gave before his retirement focused on Mehnert's life.

Anatolii lakovlevich Gutman (pseudonym Gan, 1873-after 1933)

Gutman was a journalist and publisher. He left Moscow in July 1918 and took part in various workers' uprisings. He moved around frequently, writing stories for different newspapers: Sarapul, Ufa, Ekaterinburg, Omsk, and Vladivostok. (9) In February 1920, he left for Japan, where he was editing the paper Delo Rossii at the time of the Nikolaevsk-na-Amure disaster. He interviewed some of the survivors and received access to the findings of a commission that conducted an investigation in the summer of 1920, which included verbatim testimonies from fifty-seven survivors, thirty-three of whom appear in his book's appendix. (10) Given all of Gutman s activities, it is a pity more is not known about his life.

In 1931, Gutman began corresponding with Ralph Lutz at the Hoover War Library. His letters, from Berlin, Germany, bear the title Dr. Jur., so he must have obtained a doctorate of law. A letter of July 1931 contains a list of documents he offered for sale including a) official correspondence between governments, diplomats, commanders of armies and detachments; b) official governmental acts; and c) various kinds of notes, memoirs, newspapers, and journals. He wrote, "My task as a participant and analyst of the civil war in this particular case is to give to your library a complete collection of documentary material to study the history of the civil war.... I would offer to give a complete outline and commentary to the documents." (11) Sometime later he wrote to Elena Varneck (see below): "I enclose two lists of documents, correspondence and publications relating to the history of the civil war on the territories from the Volga to the Pacific. On the basis of these materials some of which I collected here [in Berlin], and others during my twelve-years round the world travels over the Far East, United States and Europe." (12) Gutman asked Varneck to report this to Harold H. Fisher, the director of the Hoover War Library, and hoped to finally have a decision on whether they would be purchased or not. The lengthy attachment lists about 150 items, many of which were used in The Testimony of Kolchak book. Files on how much was paid for collections at the Hoover remain closed. (13)

Constantine Mikhailovich Hotimsky (1915-90)

Hotimsky was born in Tomsk. His father, an army officer, joined the Whites and was killed in battle. His widow Raisa fled to China with her two children, Constantine and Lydia. They settled in Tientsin, where Constantine Hotimsky graduated in 1932. He worked as a bookkeeper and then fled to Shanghai during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. Finally, he immigrated to Australia in 1939, where he worked as a clerk and bookkeeper. During World War II, he served in the military, and married Stella Repina in 1943. At the age of 45, he began his academic career thanks to Andrew Osborn, then head of the Fisher Library at the University of Sydney. Hotimsky became acquainted with him in various second-hand bookstores that they both frequented. Osborn wanted to develop a Russian collection, and he asked Hotimsky to do this task. When Osborn left after three and a half years, Hotimsky resigned. He next found work at the University of Melbourne, with a dual appointment in the Baillieu Library and in the Department of Russian Language and Literature. Hotimsky built up a very rich collection of Russian materials at the Baillieu, the largest in Australia. Osborn then lured Hotimsky to his new School of Library and Information Sciences in London, Ontario, in 1967. Together, they developed an excellent library science collection. In 1968, during a visit to Canberra, Hotimsky established the Russian Emigre Archive at Australian National University. He completed his MA in 1969, and was promoted to full professor in 1970. Various American and Canadian universities invited him to lecture on bibliography, the book trade, Russian explorers, and book censorship. He returned to Sydney in 1980, when he retired. (14)

This author's first meeting with this voracious bibliophile occurred at his home in London, Ontario, and lasted for three days in October 1978. Book stacks filled the entire basement of the house. Hotimsky would constantly leap up, grab a book, recall how he obtained it, and provide further history of why it was important to know it. When he retired, he sent this author a partial list of 9,000 items he wanted to sell. The fifty-seven page list contained twelve subject sections. In the end, the collection was sold to the University of Sydney. Unfortunately, to this day these materials remain unprocessed. After retiring, he continued to be very active, belonging to many organizations. He became interested in Russian materials printed in China, and located about one hundred issues of Rubezh that he sent to the UH Hamilton Library for the cost of postage. After he died, the remaining materials at his home went to the Baillieu Library; these also are unprocessed.

Known to many of his colleagues as Tim, this author knew him as Costya. He was a tall handsome Russian gentleman with excellent English; he knew French as well. He was most generous with his time and expertise. He was a pioneer in the Slavic library field, and was the father of work on Russians in Australia and the Pacific.

Mikhail Semenovich Tiunin (1865-after 1945)

An agronomist by training, after graduating in 1882 from the Petrovskaia zemledel'cheskaia i lesnaia akademiia in Moscow, he returned to his birthplace of Sarapul, where he became an official of the district council and a notary in 1912. Next he held the directorship of the Kytmanov Museum in Eniseisk in 1917. By April 1923, he lived in Harbin, and received an appointment as head of the Otdel mestnoi pechati Obshchestva izucheniia Man'chzhurskogo kraia (OIMK) from 1923 to 1928. He was an assistant librarian from 1925 to 1930, and full librarian from 1931 to 1934 at the Tsentral'naia biblioteka KVzhd. He was arrested, and deported to the Soviet Union after 1945, where he was undoubtedly repressed. (15)

The OIMK Library, the second largest library in Harbin, founded in 1922, reportedly held in the local press section (newspapers, periodicals) 11,332 items, and in the library 6,018 volumes. (16) One may clearly see Tiunin s influence in the library's growth, since, by 1934, it contained 12,733 volumes in the library and 18,811 items in the Otdel mestnoi pechati. (17)

The first place among Russian collections was the Tsentral'naia biblioteka KVzhd. It is curious that there seems to be no history about the founding of the library. In the Canadian scholar Olga Bakich's bibliography on Harbin, she noted two items: #447 (Biblioteka Kharbinskogo zheleznogo sobraniia. Katalog, 1908-1937) and #592 (Tsentral'naia biblioteka KVzhd, 1926-1930). (18) This would indicate that the library existed from the early days of the railroad. One source during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria is a catalog of this former library that listed 5,000 books in 1938. This figure does not take into account the number of volumes, issues of periodicals, number of newspapers, and other materials that libraries usually count. (19)

While Tiunin wrote several bibliographical articles, his most important publications were Ukazatel' periodicheskikh i povremennykh izdanii, vykhodivshikh v Kharbine na russkom i drugikh evropeiskikh iazykakh po 1 ianvaria 1927 g. (Kharbin: Izd-vo OIMKa, 1927) and Ukazatel' periodicheskoi pechati g. Kharbina, vykhodivshei na russkom i drugikh evropeiskikh iazykakh: Izdaniia vyshedshie's 1 ianvaria 1927 g. po 31 dekabria 1935 g. (Kharbin: Izd-vo Ekonomicheskogo biuro Kharbinskogo upravleniia gosudarstvennoi zheleznoi dorogi, 1936). Even if Tiunin was not a trained librarian, one is struck by the professionalism of these two very important bibliographies.

In the 1936 edition, the publisher pointed out not only the long time compiling this list of periodicals, but the even more difficult task of actually collecting the materials. The first edition with 305 titles was relatively easy, since Tiunin used the official registration files of the Otdel mestnoi pechati OIMKa. But the second list of 918 items took ten years to arrange, and greatly expanded the types of items listed. It included not only journals and newspapers, but calendars, handbooks, one-day newspapers and journals, and other materials. Tiunin meticulously detailed the information given for each title.

Bakich acknowledged Tiunin's valuable contribution to our knowledge of periodical publications from Harbin, the center of the Russian emigration in Manchuria, in her bibliography on Harbin. (20)

Pavel Vasil'evich Shkurkin (1868-1943)

A very talented Orientalist, Shkurkin was born in Kharkov guberniia and died in Seattle, Washington. When he finished the Aleksandrovskoe voennoe uchilishche in 1888, he served in the Far East. In 1903, he graduated from the Vladivostok Vostochnyi institut at the top of his class. Here he studied the Chinese and Manchurian languages, and took a leave of absence from his studies to participate on active duty in the quelling of the Boxer Rebellion. After graduating, he worked for the Vladivostok police force. He fought and was wounded during the Russo-Japanese War. Very knowledgeable about both regional and local geography, in 1909 he became a translator for the staff of the Priamur Military District in Khabarovsk. After arriving in Harbin in 1913, he worked as a translator and teacher for the KVzhd, and taught Chinese in several schools. In 1928, he emigrated to the United States and settled in Seattle, bringing his library and archive with him. (21)

The Imperial Russian government awarded him several medals for outstanding service and bravery. From the Chinese government, he received the Order of the Double Dragon of the second degree (with sapphires) for furthering among Europeans the understanding of the Chinese people and their culture, and another Double Dragon (with corals) for helping to stop the Boxer Rebellion. After the Russo-Japanese War, he taught Russian language and history to the Chinese in Girin, Manchuria. At some point, he also earned the fifth rank in the Chinese civil service. During this time, he was photographed wearing a medallion that the Chinese government awarded for placing first in the Hanlin Academy Palace Examinations. (22)

Shkurkin s grandson, Vladimir Vladimirovich Shkurkin now curates what has to be one of the premiere private Far East archive and library collections in the world. One may get an idea of this collection from the guide prepared by Olga Bakich. (23) From the medals awarded to Pavel Vasil'evich Shkurkin, to an extensive collection of glass slides, to unpublished diaries, to a library containing well over 1,500 items, to paintings done by Pavel Vasil'evich Shkurkin's son Vladimir Pavlovich Shkurkin, the holdings are extremely rich. In addition, included are materials from Petr Petrovich Lapiken (1907-83), a translator of Chinese poetry, a Manchurian chess champion, and literary figure, who emigrated through Shanghai to San Francisco in 1941. Also, it contains an extensive annotated photographic collection of Harbin from Nicholas Petrovich Lapiken (1905-94).

Vladimir Vladimirovich Shkurkin is a very generous curator and these materials are open to any qualified and interested researcher. You may even be served pel'meni while working! (24)

Valerian Lada-Mocarski (1898-1971)

Born in Russia, the son of a Czarist general, Lada-Mocarski, who left his homeland on the eve of the Russian Revolution, was a banker by profession. He received a masters degree from Columbia University Library School in 1954. (25) His wife, Laura Klots (known as Polly), was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to a family of prosperous Russian silk manufacturers from New York. She received her education in boarding schools in Washington, D.C. and Paris, where, in 1919, she met Valerian (Valla) Lada-Mocarski, the brother of her schoolmate. After their marriage in 1924, Valerian Lada-Mocarski began to develop his notable collection of rare Russian books. Polly Lada-Mocarski, who was a bookbinder, encouraged and supported his interest. When Lada-Mocarski was sent to Berlin to work for the United States government and later as an international banker, his wife pursued her interests. They lived in England, and for many years traveled throughout Europe. During this period Valerian Lada-Mocarski acquired not only books, but maps. (26)

After collecting for more than twenty years, a bibliography resulted, published for the one hundredth anniversary of the purchase of Alaska. This wonderfully illustrated reference is devoted primarily to first editions of books on Alaska published before 1868. (27) It is important not only for understanding the history of the Russian-American Company, but equally as important for the study of early Russian voyages in the Pacific, including Hawaii. This work is a model for anyone interested in the description of rare books. Ninety percent of all the books listed could be found either in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University or in the author's own personal collection before he died. According to one obituary, part of the collection resided in the Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

In 1960, the couple retired to New Haven to be near Yale and its libraries. Valerian Lada-Mocarski served as an adviser to the Russian book collections at Yale University and joined many social organizations. Among numerous fellowships now offered by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is the Valerian Lada-Mocarski Fellowship. (28)

Elena Alekseevna Varneck (1890-1976)

Born in Kiev, Varneck graduated from the Smolnyi Institute in St. Petersburg. In addition to Russian, she was fluent in English, French, German, and used several other languages for research and translation: Spanish, Italian, Polish, and Czech. She worked for the Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky at the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., with Ambassador B. A. Bakhmetev. (29) To begin her new job, she traveled by train from Petrograd to Vladivostok, and then by boat to Japan and America, as it was too dangerous to sail across the Atlantic due to World War I. When she told her family she was going to America, Varneck's brother Aleksei said: "You are lucky. You might get to travel via [the] Hawaiian Islands." In the Hoover Institution Archives there is a 600-page memoir of the early part of her life. Unfortunately, it ends in 1918, as she is getting on the boat for America. (30)

After the fall of the Provisional Government, Varneck went to New York City looking for work. There she met Donat Konstantinovich Kazarinoff (1892-1957), a graduate of Moscow University. Hoping to see him again, she thought he would be attending Easter services at the Russian Orthodox Church, where she did find him. Within a short time, they were married, and her husband received a position as professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan from 1918 to 1922. They had one son, Constantine (1919-2000).

Now a single mother, she worked for the Harvard Medical School as a translator from 1928 to 1929. She arrived at the Hoover War Library at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California in 1929, where she worked until 1942 as a research associate for the director Harold H. Fisher. The United States State Department employed her as a translator from 1942 to 1945, during which she worked as a translator at the first United Nations conference in San Francisco, in 1945. She taught Russian during World War II at the Navy Language School at Boulder, Colorado, and German at Montana State University in Missoula. She returned to Stanford to teach Russian from 1948 to 1951. (31)

Harold H. Fisher had been an assistant to President Herbert Hoover during World War I, when he began collecting original documents from the tsarist regime and the Bolshevik government. He was first appointed to the Hoover War Library in 1924, and held many positions until his retirement in 1955. Varneck became Fisher's right-hand person. She translated a huge correspondence, primarily Fisher's letters, both from Russian into English or from English into Russian. In addition, one can find Varneck's notes behind the letters Fisher needed to read, giving her evaluation about acquiring materials. Many of the primary documents, published and unpublished memoirs and printed materials about the civil war and other political events in the Russian/Soviet Far East that the Hoover archives and library acquired, have Varneck's hand in them. There are seventeen boxes of Varneck's translations in the Hoover archives, as well as a lengthy outline of a book she was working on about the effect of the revolution on Siberia and its far eastern regions. It bears many similarities to an outline of a book Gutman was working on and had sent with his lists of materials.

After her retirement, she became a member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in Palo Alto; she worked for anti-war causes, particularly during the Vietnam War. She was also an amateur artist working in water colors and ceramics. California resident Shera Thompson befriended Varneck in her later years, and made a videotape of her. After watching the tape and reading the memoir of her early life, Varneck can only be described as a free-spirited thinker; today she would be considered a feminist.

Anatolii Stefanovich Lukashkin (1902-88)

Born in Liaoyang, Manchuria, where his father worked for the KVzhd, Lukashkin was a naturalist by profession and a social activist. Educated in Chita and Harbin, he became an active member of the Kharbinskii komitet pomoshchi bezhentsam (1924-40), and also a statistician for KVzhd (1927-30). In addition, he served as the secretary of the natural sciences branch of the Obshchestvo izucheniia Man'chzhurskogo kraia (OIMK, 1927-29), and then as the curator (1931-32). In 1932, he was appointed chief curator of OIMK, where he served until 1939. He arrived in San Francisco in 1941, where he began work as a research biologist at the California Academy of Sciences; he worked there again from 1950 to 1978. He served as a statistician for the Department of the United States Army in Korea (1946-48). He sat on the board of the Russian Center in San Francisco from 1949 to 1952, as well as being chair of the board of the newspaper Russkaia zhizn' from 1952 to 1955, and the Museum of Russian Culture from 1954 to 1966. (32)

In the spring of 1983, Edward Kasinec, Slavic Bibliographer at University of California, Berkeley, and this author co-organized a conference on Russians in Siberia and the Far East. Lukashkin attended, and brought with him Vladimir Sergeevich Starikov, an ethnographer of Manchuria who had worked for him in OIMK and was then repatriated to the Soviet Union. The very articulate Lukashkin personified this author's image of an intellectual Russian emigre--a rather stocky figure with moustache, beard, and bald head. Although he invited this author several times to visit his home and see his library, this never took place. We met again in August 1987, in Sitka, Alaska, at the Second International Conference on Russian America.

It turned out that the long runs of 101 newspaper titles stamped "Dal'nevostochnyi arkhivnyi fond" that Berkeley-Hoover-Stanford microfilmed around 1983 on a Title II-C grant for Russian emigre serials came from Lukashkin's library. (33) How he brought these materials to California is not known, but researchers can be grateful for this wonderful collection of very rare newspapers from China, the originals of which are now located in the Museum of Russian Culture in San Francisco. The Slavic Collection of the National Library in Prague holds the only other comparable collection. (34)

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Slobodchikov (1911-91)

Born in Sarapul, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Slobodchikov was the son of a lawyer who worked for the Kolchak government and had the good fortune to get himself and his family to China just before the end of the civil war. Slobodchikov received his education in Harbin, Belgium, and San Francisco, and lived in Shanghai before leaving China. He arrived in California in 1948, where he worked as a planner and engineer. He chaired the board and served as director of the archives of the Museum of Russian Culture in San Francisco from 1965 to 1991. (35) During his long term, he worked to persuade Russian emigres to donate their materials to the museum, including not only print material, but manuscripts. He mentally noted the location of materials in the rather disordered arrangement in the museum. For example, Ella Lury Wiswell visited in 1990, looking for photos to illustrate her translation of Gutman s book on Nikolaevsk-na-Amure, (36) and as they wandered around the attic area, Slobodchikov spotted a few photos sticking out from under a pile of newspapers on the floor. He picked them up, and there they were: photos of Nikolaevsk.

When Slobodchikov died his own personal library was unfortunately dispersed among several book dealers and garage sales in the Bay Area, including a lot of material on the law in China. Fortunately, four tapes are deposited in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, containing his biography and reminiscences about the rise and fall of Russian publications in China. (37) Together with Lukashkin, these two men have been responsible for preserving Russian materials in California dealing with the Russian revolutions, the civil war in the Far East, life in China, life in California, and "general" Russian history and literature. (38)

John Albert White (1910-2001)

White was born in Rhode Island and died in Texas. He received his BA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1933, and MA from Columbia University in 1938. He received his doctorate in 1947 from Stanford University, under Harold H. Fisher, using the rich Hoover collections on the Siberian intervention. In 1947, he arrived at UH, remaining until his retirement in 1977. A perfect successor to Mehnert, he, too, held an interest in the Asian/Pacific view of Russian history. He had been hired to teach East Asian history, but soon developed introductory courses on Russian history, as well as specialized ones on Siberia and Central Asia, which he alternated every other year. His three books covered the Siberian intervention, the Russo-Japanese War, and the Quadruple Entente. (39)

One of White's biggest concerns entailed building up the library's collection on Russian history and foreign policy in general, and on Siberia, in particular. White used to recount the problems he encountered with long-time library director Carl Stroven. White would have to negotiate for almost every title he wanted ordered, which if too expensive, Stroven would veto. Once White told Stroven that the complete set of Aziatskaia Rossiia that had been purchased for $50 was now listed in catalogs for $150. "Oh, good," said Stroven, "let's sell our copy." Over the years, White worked tirelessly to persuade the library administration of the importance of continuing to build this collection.

White's work continued through three of his students. In 1970, UH hired John Stephan, who studied under White from 1964 to 1966, as a historian with specializations in both Japan and Russia. He revived White's Siberia course in 1984, in a broader context, calling it "Russia in East Asia and the Pacific." This author, who studied with White from 1964 to 1967, accepted a position as cataloger in the UH Hamilton Library in 1969. With the strong support of the faculty and eventual support of the Library Director, this author began in 1970 to create the position of Russian Bibliographer, continued developing the Siberian collection, and with Stephan s help broadened the holdings to include the Soviet/Russian Far East, and Russian relations in the Asia-Pacific region. Almost a decade after White retired, John Stephan received appointment as the director, in 1986, of the Center for the Soviet Union in the Asia Pacific Region (SUPAR; later changing its name to CeRA, Center for Russia in Asia). The center hired Robert Valliant (40), who had studied at UH from 1966 until he received his doctorate under White, in 1976, for his work on Japans role in building the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Stephan and this author cleared out White's office after he moved to Texas, and unfortunately a large portion of the collection had to be discarded. The tropical Hawaiian climate is very hard on books, and various bugs such as cockroaches, termites, silverfish, and bookworms had done their damage. Hamilton Library added a small portion (125 titles) of the 680 items saved; the remaining 555 books were sent to OIAK Library and the Gorky Maritime Public Library in Vladivostok.

Not only was White this author's professor at UH, but a real mentor for this author's library career. Thanks to him, a wonderful collection of older materials on Siberia and the Far East sit on the shelves of UH. He was a kind, thoughtful gentleman with a good sense of humor. (41)

George Alexander Lensen (1923-79)

Lensen was born in Berlin, Germany to Russian emigre parents. His father worked as a correspondent for Pavel Miliukov's Paris-based newspaper Posledniia novosti. The family immigrated to America in 1939. After receiving a BA at Columbia University, Lensen worked for United States Army Intelligence from 1943 to 1946, after which he returned to Columbia, and received a PhD in 1951, in Japanese history. In addition to knowing Russian, German, English, and French, he studied Chinese and Japanese while at Columbia. He taught at Florida State University in Tallahassee from 1949 until his death.

Among his many grants, he served as a Fulbright scholar at Hokkaido University, Japan (1953-54), after which he published Report from Hokkaido. (42) This book clearly illustrates the start of Lenseri s lifelong interest in beautiful printing and design. He also did research at Leningrad State University in the Soviet Union in 1961, thanks to the Inter-University Committee, the forerunner of IBEX. While in the Soviet Union, he successfully obtained microfilm from various archives, a rather unusual occurrence in those early years. (43)

A pioneer in looking at the history of Russia and Asia as a whole, especially in the Far East (Soviet/Russian Far East, China, Japan, and Korea), his personal library reflected this. After Lenseri's death, John Stephan tried to bring his library to Hawaii, but his widow Rumia Shabey sold it in the spring of 1981, to the Slavic Research Center at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. Tsuguo Togawa, a professor of Russian history at Sophie University in Japan, described the holdings as follows: 1) books: 2,772 titles, 3,841 volumes (808 titles, 1,030 volumes in Russian); 2) microfilms: 130 reels, 500 titles; and 3) Xerox copies: 157 items (27 in Russian). (44)

When Lensen came to Hawaii in 1978, he visited the library, and then asked to see the Hawaii State Archives. Once in the archives he requested the materials on the Russian Fort Elizabeth on Kauai. In retrospect, he was rather like the cartoon character the "Tasmanian Devil"--a flurry of activity, but knew exactly what he wanted to do--never mind the tidal wave of books and papers scattered in the reading room.

Even though he died at the young age of fifty-five in an automobile accident, fortunately there were over twenty very productive years of scholarship. He considered his final book, Balance of Intrigue, his masterpiece, telling the story of the international power rivalries surrounding Korea, Manchuria, and Shantung during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. In the preface, Lensen acknowledged his debt to John A. White as one of the proof readers, while John Stephan contributed an excellent foreword and edited the manuscript for publication after Lensen s death.

Lensen wanted an outlet for unpublished documents, for translations of works on diplomatic history, and for original monographs, leading him to establish the Diplomatic Press in 1966, which issued twenty books. Among these items, two are most appreciated by librarians as excellent reference books: Russian Diplomatic and Consular Officials in East Asia and Japanese Diplomatic and Consular Officials in Russia. (45)

John J. Stephan (1941-)

The son of an artist and novelist, Stephan was born in Chicago. He received a BA in 1963 and MA in 1964, from Harvard University. After studying at UH for two years, he went to the University of London, where he received a doctorate in Japanese history at the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1969. He began teaching at UH in 1970, where he remained until his retirement in 2001 (46) Among all his publications, Stephan s best known works about Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, Russian fascists in Manchuria and Connecticut, and the history of the Russian Far East (47) carry on in the tradition of Kerner, Mehnert, White, and Lensen.

From his first days at UH, Stephan could always be found in the library. Over the years, he sponsored the acquisitions of materials that UH could not afford. The first, in 1976, allowed UH to buy the microfiche of the Izvestiia Vostochnogo instituta in Vladivostok. Appointed for twelve years to the UH Press board of directors, he donated all of the UH Press publications for use in the library's exchanges with Soviet libraries.

While a visiting professor at Stanford in 1986, Stephan frequented the San Francisco Russian bookstores. There he met Veronica Ahrens-Pulawski, the owner of Globus Slavic Bookstore, and explained UH's collection interests. From this meeting came her long-standing practice of offering the library first choice on the antiquarian items she acquired for sale. Ahrens-Pulawski first introduced Stephan to Peter Balakshin, whose rare two-volume set Final v Kitae Stephan had earlier donated to UH's library in 1973. (48)

In the course of two dozen trips to the USSR from 1959 to 1986, Stephan helped the library and this author's own work in many ways. In 1966, en route from Hawaii to London, he stopped in Khabarovsk to see the Kraevedcheskaia, and met the director, Mikhail Semenovich Masiuk. In 1970, Stephan carried a letter from then director of Hamilton Library, Stanley West, to propose an exchange program with the Khabarovsk Library. However, it was not permitted at this time. After a 1972 trip to survey Japanese studies in the Soviet Union, Stephan suggested a list of many libraries to contact to begin a book exchange program targeting university departments and Academy of Sciences' institutes with programs and scholars studying Asia, the Pacific, Siberia and the Soviet Far East. During the 1980s, Stephan constantly brought books from the Far East for himself and Hamilton Library, mostly malo-tirazhnye publications from Khabarovsk, Magadan, Vladivostok, Petropavlovsk, and Iuzhno-Sakahlinsk with the main suppliers being the Khabarovsk Pedagogical Institute and the DVNTS Institut istorii in Vladivostok. In return, he brought to Khabarovsk Russian emigre and samizdat literature printed in the West, and a broad range of English materials. He donated to the Khabarovsk Foreign Literature Library an original edition of Voyage de La Perouse, 1785-1788, and to the Khabarovsk Pedagogical Institute a microfilm collection of the United States State Department's files on the Siberian intervention. On every trip this author took to the Soviet Union and later Russia, Stephan suggested lists of places to go, scholars to visit, and books to find.

Another event also aided the growth of the Russian collection. In 1986, Stephan received an invitation from UH Vice President Anthony J. Marsella to head a Russian Center focusing on Asia since he was impressed by the recently published Soviet-American Horizons on the Pacific that Stephan had co-authored with V. P. Chichkanov in Khabarovsk, Russia. (49) As the first director of the Center for SUPAR, Stephan regarded library acquisitions as high priority; Marsella found money to support UH purchases of Russian publications from China.

Stephan began collecting books on Russia in Asia in 1965. While working on his doctorate, he discovered a unique map collection in a London book shop. One map of the Okhotsk Sea, dated 1854, contains handwritten instructions from the British Admirality to the commander of the China Squadron. Stephan estimated that his library contained about 1,000 titles in Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and Western languages on the Far East. Since his retirement, he has been donating materials to Hamilton Library with duplicate titles being sent to Far Eastern libraries, primarily in Khabarovsk, Iuzhno-Sakhalinsk, and Vladivostok.

Conclusion

Present-day researchers, libraries, and librarians should be very grateful for the work of our scholar-predecessors for what they were able to collect, preserve, and deposit in libraries for future generations. Let us hope that libraries within the Pacific Rim will look at their holdings of these increasingly rare and fragile materials, and work to give them proper preservation whether in the original, taking advantage of modern digital technology, or even microfilming. It is an area in which joint concern for these materials could lead to cross-national proposals to share the burden of preservation.

(1) My thanks for help with this article extends to the staff of the Hoover Institution, especially Molly Molloy, reference librarian, and archivists Carol Leadenham and Ron Bulatoff; to Allan Urbanic, Slavic bibliographer at the University of California, Berkeley; to John Stephan, emeritus University of Hawaii professor of history; and to Amir Khisamutdinov at VGUES and DVGTU in Vladivostok.

(2) P. Polansky, "Bibliotekovedenie na poberezh'e Tikhogo okeana: Sobirateli russkikh materialov o Dal'nem Vostoke," Vlast' knigi: Biblioteka, izdatel'stvo, VUZ. Nauchno-informatsionnyi al'manakh, no. 3 (2002): 60-72. Translated into Russian by A. Khisamutdinov.

(3) This author's research is continuing on a greatly expanded article dealing with this subject that will contain extensive descriptions of libraries, bibliographers, and collectors. For a good summary of some of the same people mentioned here, see Stephen Kotkin, "Rediscovering Russia in Asia," in Rediscovering Russia in Asia, Siberia and the Russian Far East, ed. Stephen Kotkin and David Wolff (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), 3-15.

(4) Guide to Special Collections University of California, Berkeley, Library, comp. and ed. Audrey E. Phillips (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1973), 74.

(5) "Carpentier, Horace W[alpole]," in James D. Hart, Companion to California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 70-71.

(6) Klaus Mehnert, The Russians in Hawaii, 1804-1819 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, [19391. University of Hawaii Bulletin 18: 6 and University of Hawaii Occasional Papers, no. 38); Mehnert, ed., The XX Century (Shanghai: XX Century Publ. Co., 1941-45). An index to this journal prepared by Eric Bott is now available on the Web, along with a project to link the full text of articles. See http://libweb.hawaii.edu/libdept/russian/XX/index.html.

(7) Patricia Polansky, Russkaia pechat' v Kitae, Iaponii i Koree: Katalog sobraniia Biblioteki imeni Gamil'tona Gavaiskogo universiteta = Russian Publications in China, Japan and Korea: Catalog of a Collection at Hamilton Library University of Hawaii, ed. Amir A. Khisamutdinov (Moscow: Pashkov Dom, 2002).

(8) Ein Deutscher in der Welt: Erinnerungen 1906-1981 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1981), 222. The finding aid to Mehnert's archives is now available on the web. Check under "Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart": http://www. landesarchiv-bw.de/ofs/olf/struktur.php?archiv=hstas&id=533.

(9) Amir A. Khisamutdinov, Rossiiskaia emigratsiia v Aziatsko-Tikhookeanskom regione i Iuzhnoi Amerike: Biobibliograficheskii slovar' (Vladivostok: Izd-vo Dal'nevostochnogo universiteta, 2000), 102-03.

(10) A. Ia. Gutman, Gibel' Nikolaevska-na-Amure: Stranitsy istorii grazhdanskoi voiny na Dal'nem Vostoke (Berlin: Russkii ekonomist, 1924). Translated by Ella Lury Wiswell as The Destruction of Nikolaevsk-on-Amur: An Episode in the Russian Civil War in the Far East, 1920, Russia and Asia, no. 2 (Fairbanks, AK and Kingston, Ontario: Limestone Press, 1993).

(11) Gutman to Lutz, July 12, 1931. Ralph H. Lutz (Hoover Institution Records, Lutz Directorship, General correspondence, 1919-1944. Box 8A Correspondence, folder: 1934-1936).

(12) Gutman to Varneck, January 3, 1933. Elena Varneck (Hoover Institution Archives, Box no. 1, folder 1, item 2).

(13) Elena Varneck and H. H. Fisher, eds. The Testimony of Kolchak and Other Siberian Materials, Hoover Institution Publication, no. 10 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1935). An excellent bibliography is on pages 389-440.

(14) Nina Christesen and Patricia Polansky, "Konstantin Mikhailovich Hotimsky (1915-1990)," Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 5: 1 (1991): 135-42.

(15) Khisamutdinov, Rossiiskaia emigratsiia v Aziatsko-Tikhookeanskom regione i Iuzhnoi Ameriki, 311. Also, Lichnoe delo Tiunina [BREM archive], Gos. arkhiv Khabarovskogo kraia f. 830, op. 3, d. 5679, 1.1, lob., 2, 2ob., 4.

(16) See page 4 of first section: Review of the Manchuria Research Society (Harbin: MRS, March 1928) 36, 38. In English and Chinese.

(17) Amir A. Khisamutdinov, Rossiiskaia emigratsiia v Kitae: Opyt entsiklopedii (Vladivostok: Izd-vo Dal'nevostochnogo universiteta, 2001), 32.

(18) Olga Bakich, Harbin Russian Imprints: Bibliography as History, 1898-1961. Materials for a Definitive Bibliography (New York: Norman Ross Publishing Co., 2002).

(19) Katalog knig Aziatskogo otdela Kharbinskoi biblioteki IU.M.ZH.D. (Kharbin: Izd. Kharbinskoi biblioteki IU.M.ZH.D, 1938). The introduction says that the books recorded in this catalog are from the previously named Tsentral'naia biblioteka KVzhd.

(20) Khisamutdinov, Rossiiskaia emigratsiia v Kitae, 31.

(21) Khisamutdinov, Rossiiskaia emigratsiia v Aziatsko-Tikhookeanskom regione i Iuzhnoi Amerike, 345.

(22) Phone conversation with Vladimir Shkurkin, July 29, 2002.

(23) Olga Bakich, Dal'nevostochnyi arkhiv Pavla Vasil'evicha Shkurkina: Predvaritel'naia opis' = The Shkurkin Far East Archive: An Initial Annotated Sampler, 2nd ed. (San Pablo, CA: Vlad Shkurkin,1997).

(24) One may contact Vladimir Shkurkin at shkurkin@ix.netcom.com or by mail at 6025 Rose Arbor, San Pablo, CA 94806-4147.

(25) Who Was Who in America with World Notables, vol. 5, 1969-1973 (Chicago: Marquis Who's Who, 1973), 411.

(26) Check the Internet under "Laura Klots 'Polly' Lada-Mocarski, 1902-1997," Guild of Book Workers Newsletter, no. 115 (1997), 3. "Obituary" by Mindell Dubansky. Also on the Web under Yale Map Collection is a list of "The Lada-Mocarski Collection" of twenty-eight maps donated in 1975.

(27) V. Lada-Mocarski, Bibliography of Books on Alaska Published Before 1868 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969).

(28) http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/. Check under "Visiting Fellowships."

(29) Boris Aleksandrovich Bakhmetev, also spelled Bakhmeteff. Check the Web for the emigre archive that he helped establish at Columbia University: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/rbml/collections/bakhmeteff/.

(30) Hoover Institution Archives, 2 boxes (1890-1976) that include her memoirs, written when she was eighty.

(31) "Elena Vameck Dies; Researcher on Russia," Palo Alto Times, February 17, 1976, 2. There are some conflicts in dates in her printed obituary and papers in her boxes at the Hoover.

(32) Khisamutdinov, Rossiiskaia emigratsiia v Aziatsko-Tikhookeanskom regione i Iuzhnoi Amerike, 189-90. Also check the Web under "Loukashkin" (www.loukashkin.org: "A. S. Loukashkin: The Naturalist. Biographical Data." For further biographical data and archival collections, see the Web under Hoover Institution Archives, Russian Collection, Museum of Russian Culture microfilming project: Anatole S. Loukashkin (Lukashkin) www.hoover.org/ hilaruscollection/lukash_b.htm.

(33) Allan Urbanic, Russian Emigre Serials: A Bibliography of Titles Held by the University of California, Berkeley Library. (Berkeley: Library UCB, 1989[?]); A. S. Lukashkin, "O znachenii i role emigrantskoi periodicheskoi pechati kak istoricheskoi dokumentatsii," Russkaia zhizn', February 3, 1966.

(34) Katalog byvshei Biblioteki russkogo zagranichnogo istoricheskogo arkhiva = Catalog of the Former Library of the Russian Historical Archive Abroad (New York: Norman Ross, 1995), 267 microfiches. Also: Richard J. Kneeley and Edward Kasinec, "The Slovanska knihovna in Prague and Its RZIA Collection," Slavic Review 51:1 (Spring 1992):122-30.

(35) Khisamutdinov, Rossiiskaia emigratsiia v Aziatsko-Tikhookeanskom regione i Iuzhnoi Amerike, 285.

(36) See n. 10 above.

(37) University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library: Nicholas A. Slobodchikoff tapes P/T1355c. There are four tapes.

(38) The beginnings of their work are described in "V Muzee russkoi kul'tury v San-Frantsisko," Russkaia zhizn', 6 marta 1962. Also, more history can be found in [Olga Bakich, sost.], "Biulleten' Muzeia russkoi kul'tury v San-Frantsisko: Nashe piatidesiatiletie," Rossiiane v Azii, no. 5 (1998): 261-74.

(39) John Albert White, The Siberian Intervention (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950); idem, The Diplomacy of the Russo-Japanese War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964); and idem, Transition to Global Rivalry: Alliance Diplomacy and the Quadruple Entente, 1895-1907 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

(40) Valliant was the creator, compiler, and editor of the Center's SUPAR Report (later RA Report) (Honolulu), no. 1 (1986)-no. 17 (July 1994).

(41) John J. Stephan, "John Albert White" [obituary], Sibirica, A Journal of Siberian Studies 2: 1 (2002): 5-7; Patricia Polansky and Robert Valliant, "John Albert White," Slavic Review 61: 2 (Summer 2002): 450

(42) G. A. Lensen, Report from Hokkaido: The Remains of Russian Culture in Northern Japan (Hakodate, Japan: Municipal Library of Hakodate, 1954).

(43) John J. Stephan, foreword to G. A. Lensen, Balance of Intrigue: International Rivalry in Korea and Manchuria, 1884-1899 (Tallahassee: Florida State University Book, University Presses of Florida, 1982), 1: ix-xiv. See also "Lensen," in Contemporary Authors (Gale Group), http://www.galenet.com.

(44) Tsuguo Togawa, "George Lensen," MADO [Window], 12 (1981): 47-55. [In Japanese]

(45) Russian Diplomatic and Consular Officials in East Asia: A Handbook of the Representatives of Tsarist Russia and the Provisional Government in China, Japan, and Korea from 1858 to 1924 and of Soviet Representatives in Japan from 1925 (Tokyo: Sophia University in cooperation with the Diplomatic Press, Tallahassee, FL., 1968); and Japanese Diplomatic and Consular Officials in Russia: A Handbook of Japanese Representatives in Russia from 1874 to 1968 (Tokyo: Sophia University in cooperation with the Diplomatic Press, Tallahassee, FL, 1968).

(46) "John J(ason) Stephan," in Contemporary Authors (Gale Group), http://www. galenet.com.

(47) John J. Stephan, Sakhalin: A History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) [Japanese translation 1973]; idem, The Kuril Islands: Russo-Japanese Frontier in the Pacific (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974); The Russian Fascists: Tragedy and Farce in Exile, 1925-1945 (New York: Harper and Row, 1978) [Russian translation 1992; Chinese translation 1993]; idem, Hawaii Under the Rising Sun: Japan's Plans for Conquest After Pearl Harbor (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984); idem, Soviet-American Horizons on the Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986), co-authored with V. P. Chichkanov and translated as Sovetsko-amerikanskie ekonomicheskie otnosheniia v basseine Tikhogo okeana (Moscow: Progess, 1987); and idem, The Russian Far East: A History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).

(48) Peter Petrovich Balakshin, Final v Kitae: Vozniknovenie, razvitie i ischeznovenie beloi emigratsii na Dal'nem Vostoke, 2 vols. (San Francisco: Kn-vo Sirius, 1958-59).

(49) See n. 47.