On guard of law and morality": on reading regulation in Tomsk Province in the late 19th - early 20th centuries

The article describes the process of reading regulation in Tomsk province in the late 19th - early 20th centuries. The basic legal and administrative documents governing the establishment of free public libraries, library supervision and library funds are given. The system of reading regulation began to take shape in 1890 when The Rules on Free Public Libraries and Order of Supervising Them were put into effect. The Rules allowed to simplify the procedure of opening of the libraries and made it dependent of the governor. The selection of books was limited by the recommendations of the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Orthodox Confession. Archive documents that were not previously introduced into scientific circulation were used in the article. The documents show how government regulation was implemented in Tomsk Province; in particular, materials of the library of the Society to Promote Public Education were under study. A. Misyurev was responsible for the library of the Society; quotations from his report of 1905, where all his duties were described in details, are provided in the article. For example, Misyurev worked on the collation of the library's catalogue with the lists of books prohibited in public libraries, on verification of texts intended for public readings, as well as on lists of lecturers. Examples are also given that show that local officials could not cope with the control of library funds; in particular, there is an example of the Tomsk Public Assembly library, which was, in fact, the town's elite club. A number of prohibited books of V. Korolenko, D. Pisarev and others were found in the library, but the case was hushed up. There were other cases, too: the head of the book storehouse for schools in Barnaul, M. Kuklin, was fired in 1906 because he had a large number of anti-government editions. Characteristically, the case was initiated by the police, not the local officials of the Ministry of Education. The article also describes the audit of printing houses, public libraries and bookstores conducted by S. Lavrent'ev in Novonikolaevsk, Biysk and Barnaul in 1916. The audit showed that some libraries were not checked at all, and library staff did not have an access to the lists of prohibited books. Methods used to circumvent government's prohibitions are revealed. They included withdrawing of the prohibited books from the libraries and putting them in personal collections of librarians, or opening of a library intended for the members of a society only, later such a library became public. In general the article demonstrates that the reading regulation system failed at the level of local officials in the first place. Dramatic increase of the number of public libraries was an important factor as well; as a result, regulatory authorities did not cope with the increased workload.

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