A medium dive into the private libraries of the Romanovs
And why a large number of the books wound up in the US
A deep dive related to my bibliophilic interests led me recently down the path of the Russian Imperial Library, aka the Romanov dynasty’s personal libraries, and how the majority of the books ended up in the US and on the collectors’ market after 1917. In turn, this deep dive led to some details that I’m now going to be on the alert for when watching films or television set in Czarist Russia. When these details are wrong, as they will inevitably be, I will be bothered.
The Romanovs going back to Peter the Great were great book collectors. As with any family, they had members who were not particularly literate or interested in reading, but the value placed on reading and books on by the family’s internal culture was so great that even those who were ‘mediocre', in the words of Grand Duchess Olga1 (Nicholas II’s sister, not his daughter), built up impressive book collections. So important was the book within the family, that there was a bit of competition among the branches and nuclear families that made up the House of Romanov over who had the best private library. The last Czar, Nicholas II had one of the smallest private libraries, at 2,537 books, something which might have contributed to his being a little looked down upon personally by his siblings and extended family.2 The bulk of this library is the one that now lives in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Where for a while it was incorrectly billed as the ‘Imperial Library’.
By the 1830s, the Romanov book collections had grown such that administering them required a full-time department within the imperial infrastructure. This department was called the Imperial Library, but, outside of the collections of law books, there was no single library as an institution since all the collections remained the private property of each individual grand duke or grand duchess, czar or czarina. Although the term ‘Imperial Library’ merely described an administrative division within the bureaucracy that managed the imperial household — the closest modern parallel to Czarist Russia’s management of its ruling family is probably the Japanese Imperial Household Agency, which is a branch of government dedicated to managing all matters relating to the Japanese royals3 — there were certain rules that governed book collecting and presentation within the Romanov family. These rules were held to be as binding and almost as important as the Romanovs’ house law (see footnote4) and were codified as such.
The rules for Romanov books dated to the eighteenth century, and didn’t change until 1917. All books bought by or for members of the family were processed through the office of the Imperial Library. When I say processed, I mean that they were literally rebound and had identifying marks applied to the volumes in accordance with specific rules. And then they were catalogued and had standard bibliographic information and call numbers recorded.
The first step was the binding process. Through the eighteenth century, books were sold either in stitched page blocks with a loose cheap paper cover tacked onto the back and folded over the first and last pages as a protective cover, or with the pages simply placed in order and then bundled loose into a sort of folder.5 The purchaser took the book to a bookbinder and chose elements such as cover materials and colours, patterns for end papers, embossing, etc. The process ensured that book covers were highly customised and reflected the owner. The development in 1819 of mechanisation of binding and with that the development of publisher’s covers with fun, collectible covers made no difference to the Romanovs. The Imperial Library ensured that all their books were rebound according to their protocols.
The first rule was that all books had to be at least half-bound and preferably fully bound in coloured leather. The books were colour-coded according to language, so the reader could tell simply by looking at the binding what a book’s language was. Brown meant Russian; Red meant English; Blue meant French; Green meant German. This language range reflects what the Romanovs spoke at home and used in their daily lives. Quite a few knew other languages, e.g. Italian or Danish, and had books in those languages. Since there was no fixed rule for a book written in a language other than the four listed, there was some freedom for an individual in choosing binding colours for those books.
After the binding was completed, the book received an embossing on the front showing the badge of the palace where the book’s home collection was housed. This type of badge when used for books is called a super ex libris. On the inside front page, the book received a second frontispiece-style stamp with ex libris information identifying the owner and the exact collection within the palace.
There is an image of a frontispiece stamp from an 1816 Bible owned by a Romanov. The image is under copyright, but it can be viewed by clicking on the blue hyperlink.
The librarians (or bureaucrats?) next created catalogue information cards with bibliographic descriptions of the book and call numbers. One card with the bibliographic information and call number went with the book to its owner’s personal library within the palace, and one copy stayed at the Imperial Library department’s archives. Not all of these records survived the Bolshevik Revolution.
One might wonder why a family, even one as numerous and as wealthy as the Romanovs, was able to keep an entire division of government dedicated to the processing and organisation of their books. The answer is that the reigning Czar’s library was one of the legal deposit libraries for all books published in Russia. Effectively, this meant that a czar had two libraries, his own based on his personal tastes and interests, and one comprised of all the books that flowed in on a daily basis from publishers making their mandatory deposit. The work created by the rest of the Romanov family’s book collecting habit was in addition to the depository work.
In addition to the depository nature of the czar’s library, up until the reign of Nicholas II, Russian law also mandated that each of the imperial palaces have copies all legal codes and of any book relating to the field of law. These books did not belong to any particular personal collection and were held in each palace for quick reference. But they made additional work for the Imperial Library department and swelled the ranks of the book lots that were later sold as ‘from the czar’s library’.
According to the rules, a male Romanov’s personal collection was inherited along the same lines as their title and position in the line of succession, meaning that it passed from father to eldest son. The women had some freedom to leave their libraries to a preferred relative, but even then there were rules governing doing so. An inherited library was not meant to be used by the heir. Instead, the collection became a memorial to the deceased with the books being unchanged, though the collection was often moved en masse to a new set of rooms. The custom of treating book collections as memorials to the collector predated the codification of the house’s rules. In 1779, Catherine the Great bought French philosopher Voltaire’s private library of 6,700 books after his death. At about the same time, she also purchased Denis Diderot’s library. And in 1896, Nicholas II bought the library of Count Alexander Lobanov-Rostovskii
Lobanov-Rostovskii was the diplomat who had negotiated the Yamagata-Lobanov Agreement, which divided the Korean peninsula into a Russian sphere of influence and a Japanese sphere of influence. The agreement set the division at the 38th parallel, which we know today as the Military Demarcation Line, or as it is (incorrectly) called in the media, ‘the DMZ’. Lobanov also negotiated the Li-Lobanov Agreement, which effectively allowed unrestricted Russian expansion into Manchuria. This agreement contributed to the Boxer Rebellion as part of broader anti-foreign sentiment in mainland China, but it also led to the Chinese-Eastern Railroad which provided an escape in World War II to Eastern European Jews who fled eastward as they could ride to the end of the line and then either find transport to Japan or turn south to Shanghai.
Voltaire’s library still resides intact in St Petersburg as the Voltaire Library within the National Library of Russia. Voltaire’s books even still live in the rooms that Catherine the Great assigned to them in the Hermitage. Although she broke protocol regarding the no-touching of memorialised collection and declared that the Voltaire collection was to be a public library, her heirs only honoured that as it suited them. Nicholas I, the autocrat czar, ordered the rooms holding the collection to be locked up entirely. During his reign, only one person gained access to study the books and their contents: the poet Alexander Pushkin. The Diderot library wasn’t as fortunate. Although Catherine the Great wanted that collection to also be held together as a single collection and made available to the public, it was eventually broken up and dispersed through the general collections. That said, the Diderot library was still in a complete, recognisable form as of 1837, as a court decree mentioned it by name.6
No one, apart from members of the imperial family, may borrow books from the Hermitage library without written permission; those wishing to conduct scientific research will be authorised to work in the library, but it is forbidden to consult books from the libraries of Voltaire and Diderot, or to take extracts from them.
The Lobanov-Rostovskii library wound up being dispersed along with the Romanovs’ private collections following the Bolshevik Revolution.
When the surviving Romanovs fled in 1917, naturally they did not take the books. Between 1917 and 1921, the Bolshevik authorities stripped the Romanov palaces of all items and shoved them into warehouses for storage. Starting in the late 1920s, the Soviet government needed funds, so they fed a steady drip of art, furnishings, and artefacts onto the international market using backchannels to reach private collectors.
One of the collectors was the American cereals heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. Merriweather Post was an expert on imperial Russian art and decorative objects and used her fortune to acquire many of the pieces the government released for sale. Around 1925, Merriweather Post learned through the collector grapevine that the Soviet government was willing to sell the books by the weight. She was not a bibliophile and did not collect books, but she understood the historical and cultural value of the Romanov libraries, so she used her connections to organise a drive by the US government to purchase as many of the books as possible.
There was a little problem, though, which was that the US had cut diplomatic ties with Soviet Russia following the massacre of the Romanovs in 1917 and the failure of the restoration in 1919. As a result, the US could not openly buy the books, even if the Soviet government had openly admitted to placing them on the international market. The solution was to use an intermediary. American philanthropists and industrialists provided funds, and a rare book dealer, Israel Perlstein from New York City who had knowledge of Russian, was delegated, along with others, to go to the Soviet Union and purchase the books from two companies ‘International Book’ and ‘Antiquarian’, which were really fronts for the security service, the NKVD.7
Upon the arrival of the books, in several rafts, in the US, the operation’s funders ‘donated’ the books to institutions such as the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library — recipient of the entire library of Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich8 — Stanford University Library, and Harvard University Library, after which, to my understanding, the US government discreetly reimbursed the ‘donors’. The reality is that operation was high-class money laundering, which gave the Soviet Union a much needed injection of cash and paved the way for an uneasy alliance in the face of the Nazi threat.
In addition to books, Perlstein used his brief to buy documents ranging from land grant records to a copy of the printed announcement of Peter the Great’s son Czarevich Alexei’s conviction of treason to manuscript copies of decrees signed by the czarinas of the early 1700s. Thanks to the acquisition drive, the largest collection of imperial Russian artefacts and documents outside of Russia is now housed in the US across several research institutions and privately-owned, but open-to-the-public museums.
A final closing note: there is quite a bit of controversy connected to Merriweather Post and her collecting from 1936 to 1938. The controversy does not concern her personally, but it does involve her husband Joseph E. Davis, who was US Ambassador to the Soviet Union during those years. The claim is that he used his influence with the Soviets to acquire art seized from the estate of victims of the various purges at below market value.9 Merriweather Post may or may not have been involved with her husband’s art collection, but it was not hers and she did not receive part of it when they divorced in the 1950s. There is another reality about the book operation and that is that the funds transferred from the US to the Soviet Union very likely financed at least part of the Holodomor in that the buying trips and the associated circuitous cash injections began in 1926, while the Holodomor began in 1933.
Happy Wednesday!
MLD
Perry, John Curtis, and Konstantin V. Plešakov. The Flight of the Romanovs: A Family Saga. BasicBooks, 2001.
Nicholas II had a rocky relationship with his siblings and extended family. Suggested reasons have ranged from being sensitive about his mediocre intelligence compared to some of his cousins, to being given a hard time both intellectually and militarily by Grand Duke Alexander when Nicholas was under his command as a junior officer, to Nicholas’s wife Alexandra driving a wedge between him and his family out of narcissistic jealousy.
The Imperial Household Agency’s management approach to the royals, their state duties, their public personas, and their interactions with the public has caused controversy and complaint, both from the general public and from the royals themselves.
House law is the set of rules that bind all legitimate members of a royal or aristocratic family. These rules govern matters like inheritance, marriage, headship of the family, etc. For a sitting royal family, some of the house law, e.g. succession to a throne, will be a matter of public knowledge, but there may be additional rules that are not made public. An aristocratic family or a royal family that has lost its throne is under no obligation to reveal any part of their house law to the public. The Romanov Family Association, which serves as a kind of household agency for the Romanovs in exile, handles their house law, among other matters.
The Romanovs founded the Romanov Family Association to both address the status of members of the family who, post-World War I, had married Roman Catholics (forbidden under the original set of laws) or had married unequally without full familial permission, and to address the number of imposters who were claiming descent from the Romanovs by providing a centralised place where the public could check legitimacy of claimants. The family’s last publicised update to their house law was in 2010, when then late head of the family, Nikolai Romanovich Romanov, removed the religious requirement that barred Romanovs from marrying Roman Catholics and expanded the definition of ‘equal’ for marriage purposes, but he maintained that those who married without familial permission, or in deliberate violation of the Russian Orthodox Church’s teachings were disowned and their descendants are neither members of the House of Romanov nor members of the family, even if they are legitimate in terms of civil law. He also reiterated that the Russian monarchy was only male-preference primogeniture, not agnatic (male-only) primogeniture as is commonly thought, and he determined on the basis of that that lawful descendants of grand duchesses and princesses who married after the fall of the monarchy are entitled to full membership in the House of Romanov. Some of the members born post-World War II chose not to accept the offer of full status because they would then have been obligated to follow all the restrictions imposed by house law. That said, these descendants are listed among the descendants of Nicholas I as they are counted as members of the family, though not of the House of Romanov.
‘Judging a Book by Its Cover: The Art of the Publishers’ Binding | Walter Havighurst Special Collections, The University Archives & Preservation’. Accessed 5 March 2026. https://spec.lib.miamioh.edu/home/judging-a-book-by-its-cover-the-art-of-the-publishers-binding/.
‘History of the Voltaire Library in the National Library of Russia’. Accessed 6 March 2026. https://nlr.ru/voltaire/RA417/history-library-Voltaire.
‘The Bolsheviks in Business (March 18, 1996) - Library of Congress Information Bulletin’. Accessed 6 March 2026. https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9605/bolshevik.html.
KASINEC, EDWARD, and ROBERT H. DAVIS JNR. ‘Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich(1847–1909) and His Library’. Journal of the History of Collections 2, no. 2 (1990): 135–42. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/2.2.135.
Tzouliadis, Tim. The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia. Penguin, 2008.