As the latest newsletters from our department and from the Cambridge University Libraries Decolonisation Working Group show, the questions of how best [a] to handle and catalogue and [b] instruct our readers about the offensive material in our libraries is a very live one.  Of *course* we have such material – research libraries inevitably acquire titles that represent the negative aspects of the world our academics and students research and not only the positive ones.  A big issue lies in making sure that our readers understand that the presence of a particular book or other item in Cambridge collections does not equate with the endorsement of its contents by library or academic staff.

This issue has been in my mind as I’ve been undertaking the distasteful task of selecting and cataloguing various pro-war Russian books (all ebooks, since they are easier to buy at the moment than print books).  It would be easiest of all not to buy them in either form, but it is important that our readers can see what is being published in Russia during the all-out war against Ukraine, to get a feeling for the kinds of material being pushed at the Russian reading public.

For very extreme printed books, we can use the Arc class held by Rare Books.  In general, though, most offensive material will simply be in ordinary classes and.  For ebooks, they will just be in ordinary ebook collections (as is the case for these: East View ebooks (EV being the provider of the site the ebooks are hosted on)).  Nor is it standard for cataloguers to flag any sort of warning about the contents of a book.  Where feasible for these ebooks, I add the war heading Ukraine–History–Russian invasion, 2022- but feasibility involves the book having a quite substantial section on the subject, which hasn’t been the case for all of them even if it is quite possible that they have been pushed forward for publication first and foremost because of the context of the war.  Where possible, I have been adding some kind of cataloguer’s clue about each title, but it hasn’t been possible every time.  This is why it is vital that our readers know that we have upsetting material and can recognise it for themselves when they see it.  In the case of these books, the title itself should often be a flag enough.  I’ll look briefly at two examples.

Many of the pro-war books I’ve bought have required what we call original cataloguing, which means providing a catalogue record from scratch because no other institution we normally can share records with has apparently acquired a copy.  One of these is SVOi stikhi by Natalʹi︠a︡ Denisenko.  The title means “One’s own poems” but the capitalised first three letters of “one’s own” (SVO) stand for Spet︠s︡ialʹnai︠a︡ voennai︠a︡ operat︠s︡ii︠a︡ – the “Special Military Operation” term set for this war by Putin.  Denisenko is described on the back cover as “a poet born in February 2022” (ie with the onset of the full-scale war) by Igorʹ Karaulov, a poet who has supported the war through various activities put on under the heading Za Rossii︠u︡ (For Russia), with the opening Z using the Latin version rather than the Cyrillic character (З) – readers will be aware that the Russian offensive and support for it have bizarrely used the Latin versions of Z and V as patriotic symbols of the war.  The Z appears in the title of the series that this book has been published in – Rodina zovët! (The motherland calls!).

The book’s title alone makes it clear that this is poetry about the war; taken in conjunction with the series title, it is clear that the poetry is pro-Russian (or pro-Ruzzian, as many anti-war people write).  I’ve added the relevant subject heading: Ukraine–History–Russian invasion, 2022- Poetry.  I’ve also added a note to say “Series title uses the Latin letter “z” instead of the Cyrillic equivalent.”  Many Russian books include an “edition” statement in their colophon which describes the kind of book it is (you can find out more about these statements in the Slavic Cataloging Manual).  We generally do transcribe these when we are doing original cataloguing – it can be quite useful to flag to the reader that a book is a “nauchno-populi︠a︡rnoe izdanie” (academic-popular edition (normally far more popular than academic)), and I am making a point of doing that for the pro-war Russian ebooks whether the record is my own or an imported one.  There is such a statement in this volume, which I have transcribed, but it’s not one of the more informative ones (basically “literary belles-lettres”).  I only worked properly on the catalogue record today, so its record will still look very scant until later on 15 October.

Antologii︠a︡ voenno-patrioticheskogo sluzhenii︠a︡ Otechestvu (An anthology of military-patriotic service to the Fatherland) by V.D. Samoĭlov contains years of what seem to be diary entries recording the author’s views on the events of the day (professional and/or national).  It is depressing reading.  For something published by a company called RU.Science (where the English world “science” is often used in Russia to mean “academia”), it is really much more of a baffling and sometimes stomach-churning stream of consciousness, including a section about the 2022- invasion.  There is a bibliography which runs to 130 entries, of which 47 (or 36%) are books or articles by the author himself.  With this book, I was able to base our record on a catalogue record from the US.  The book has no “edition” statement to transcribe as any kind of identifier of the clearly non-academic nature of the book, but I noticed with a slightly hysterical laugh that the US cataloguer had, knowingly or not, given what I would consider a pretty significant flag already, with the inclusion of the following note:

Some more books from the RU.Science stable include:

• Kharakternye cherty molodogo patriota sovremennoĭ Rossii [Characteristics of the young patriot in modern Russia] by M.I︠U︡. Zelenkov (2023)
• Opyt patrioticheskogo vospitanii︠a︡ Mozhaĭskogo regiona v sisteme doshkolʹnogo obrazovanii︠a︡ [Experience of patriotic upbringing in the Mozhaĭsk region in the preschool education system] by N.G. Panteleeva. (2022)

None of these titles is something I am glad to have catalogued, but I do know that it is sadly important that we have such grim examples of the realities of pro-war publishing in Russia.

Mel Bach