A Usable Collection

Social History is one of the world's leading research
institutes on social history, holding one of the richest

collections in the field. These collections and archives
contain evidence of a social and economic world that
affected the life and happiness of millions of people.
Including material from every continent from the
French Revolution to the Chinese student revolt of
1989 and the new social and protest movements of
the early 2000s, the IISH collection is intensively
used by researchers from all over the world. In
his long and singular career, former director Jaap
Kloosterman has been central to the development
of the IISH into a world leader in researching and
collecting social and labour history. The 35 essays
brought together in this volume in honour of him,
give a rare insight into the history of this unique
institute and the development of its collections.
The contributors also offer answers to the question
what it takes to devote a lifetime to collecting social
history, and to make these collections available for
research. The essays offer a unique and multifaceted
view on the development of social history and
collecting its sources on a global scale.
A Usable Collection
Established in 1935, the International Institute of
A Usable
Collection
Essays in Honour of Jaap Kloosterman
on Collecting Social History
Edited by Aad Blok, Jan Lucassen and Huub Sanders
ISBN 978 90 8964 688 0
AUP.nl
A Usable
Collection
A Usable
Collection
Essays in Honour of Jaap Kloosterman
on Collecting Social History
Edited by Aad Blok, Jan Lucassen and Huub Sanders
Amsterdam university press
A us a b l e co l l e cti o n
A u s ab le c olle c ti on
|5
Contents
Preface

Henk Wals
10
Social History Sources, Knowledge and Research

Introduction to A Usable Collection
Aad Blok, Jan Lucassen and Huub Sanders
12
How to Qualify for the Directorate of the iish?

Jan Lucassen
24
part i the emergence of social history collections

I.1

Prolegomena to a Social History of Dutch Archives

Eric Ketelaar
40
I.2

The founder of the iish, as Experienced by his Daughter

Interview with Claire Posthumus
Huub Sanders
56
I.3

Looking for Traces of Huizinga

His Relation with N.W. Posthumus,
Based on Unpublished Letters and a Text
Huub Sanders
66
84
Working for the Institute

Kees de Dood, N.W. Posthumus and
the International Institute of Social History, 1940-1950
Alex Geelhoed
I.5

The Persistent Life of The British Merchant

Co Seegers
100
I.6

Harry Stevens, the British Correspondent of David Rjazanovs Institute

On the History of Collecting at the Marx-Engels Institute (1927-1931)
Irina Novichenko
108
I.7

The Importance of Friendship

The Shared History of the iav/iiav and iish
Francisca de Haan and Annette Mevis
142

I.4

c onte nts
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part ii the european collections of the iish:

acquisitions and catalogues
II.1

A Broken Mirror
The Library of Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis
Bert Altena
158
II.2

The Archives of Hendrik de Man

A Tragedy
Wouter Steenhaut
170
II.3

Trying to find a Masked Man

An Unfinished Investigation
Marien van der Heijden and Franck Veyron
186
II.4

La Rosa de Foc 198

Collecting Anarchist Materials
Andrew H. Lee
II.5

The Key to the Librarys Collection

Rules and Practices
Coen Marinus
208
II.6

From Ice Age to Global Warming

The Libraries of the Amsterdam iish and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (fes)
Rdiger Zimmermann
222
II.7

Does a History Research Institute Need its Own Archive?

Karl Heinz Roth
234
II.8

A Manuscript Found at the Institute

Kees Rodenburg
240
II.9

Did Castoriadis Suppress a Letter from Pannekoek?

252
A Note on the Debate regarding the Organizational Question in the 1950s
Marcel van der Linden
II.10 Matriarchy and Socialism

French Precedents

Francis Ronsin
II.11 Neo-Malthusians

A Photograph

Jenneke Quast
264
276
II.12 Secret Suitcases

Dutch Communist Party Papers

Margreet Schrevel
284
II.13 Long live the Library!

The Book Collections of the iish in particular the knaw Library

Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk
292
II.14 The iish as a Trailblazer in Technology in the 1990s

Jaap Kloostermans Transformative Breakthroughs

Henk Wals
302
part iii the iish and eastern europe

III.1 Publications of Posrednik and Svobodnoe Slovo Publishing Houses
in iishs Russian Collections

Els Wagenaar
310
III.2 Bakunin and Bacon Cake

E-editing in Social History

Lex Heerma van Voss
318
III.3 The Activities in Moscow after 1991 and Memorial

Francesca Gori
330
III.4 Rescue Efforts in Post-Soviet Moscow

Nanci Adler
342
III.5 Archival Revolution and Intellectual Access in Russia

ArcheoBiblioBase in Moscow and Amsterdam

Patricia Kennedy Grimsted
352
III.6 Sources for Writing the History of Russia and the Soviet Union

National and Transnational Perspectives

Gijs Kessler
376
III.7 The Making of Collective Memory

The Politics of Archive in the Soviet Azerbaijan

Touraj Atabaki and Solmaz Rustamova-Towhidi
386
part iv the iisg goes global

IV.1

The long Journey of the dhkp Archive

From the Turkish Prisons to the iish
Zlfikar zdoan
400
IV.2

The Egyptian and Sudanese Communist Collections

Roel Meijer
408
IV.3

Collecting under Uncertainty

The Creation of the Chinese Peoples Movement Archive
Tony Saich
418
c onte nts
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IV.4

From Dhaka with Love

The Nepal Nag Papers and the Sino-Soviet Split
Willem van Schendel
426
IV.5

The Role of Archives and Archivists in the Contemporary Age

in Ensuring the Transmission of Collective Memory
Stefano Bellucci
434
IV.6

Gunnar Mendoza
A Life to Share
Rossana Barragn Romano
442
Jaap Kloosterman
A Tentative Bibliography
454
Notes on the Contributors
464
Index
470
Preface
Much of what I know about the iish and about collecting social history I
learned from Jaap Kloosterman. This is understandable, since we teamed up
for decades running the iish: first Jaap was deputy director and I head of
operations, later Jaap became director, and I advanced to deputy director.
We interacted daily, sometimes in very intense sessions in times of crisis, as
well as on our many long drives together to the Czech Republic or Hungary
to fetch collections there. Jaap and I often shared the same view about many
things. Whenever we differed, our positions were very complementary. In
2006, when I left the iish to become the director of the Huygens Institute,
I was suddenly on my own and without a sparring partner. That was an adjustment for me, and my guess is that Jaap had to get used to it as well.
I have returned to the iish and once again see Jaap daily. I still value his
opinion. That each of us now has a different role matters little to me. We
interact as we always have, even though Jaaps office has been moved a few
doors further away. He is an exceptionally valuable advisor, and I hope to
continue to benefit from his input for quite a while.
Jaap Kloosterman has been involved with the iish throughout his career.
In 1969 he started working at the Institute in the Bakunin Department.
In 1985 he became deputy director of Collections, and he was appointed
director in 1993, when Eric Fischer left for a position at the Verbond van
Verzekeraars. Jaaps appointment was not taken for granted within the
Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (knaw). Board members of the
knaw usually take the view that acclaimed scholars make the best directors
of its institutes. Appointing Kloosterman a university dropout may have
been an occupational accident within the erudite society of the Academy,
but the choice was very fortunate indeed for the iish.
In hindsight, after all, Jaap Kloosterman has in my view been one of the
best directors the iish has had and easily holds a candle to Posthumus,
Rter, and Fischer. Eric Fischer, during his relatively brief period as director between 1984 and 1993, gave the Institute a complete overhaul, setting
up a research department, acquiring the new premises at Cruquiusweg,
and extending collection development beyond Europe. And it was Jaap
Kloostermans innovative spirit that guided the iish into an unprecedented heyday in the 1990s. Jaap introduced information technology in the iish
very early on, revolutionized collection processing, and was aware before
anyone else of the enormous impact the Internet would have. Under his aegis, the iish became a pioneer in many fields and became renowned as a
superior international research institute.
Jaap Kloosterman had a unique managerial style that is difficult to describe. He did not operate according to a set protocol. Coaching may best
pre f ac e
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capture his approach. Jaap often talks with co-workers, possibly over dinner
at whatever happens to be his favourite restaurant at the time. His impressive knowledge of virtually all areas the Institute covers may unintentionally be overwhelming, but he rarely imposes his ideas, at least not noticeably.
Jaaps most distinctive trait is his ability to relativize. What many people
would call wonderful, he will at best label nice or usable, often preceding such modifiers with the qualifier fairly. The title of this book A Usable
Collection refers to this practice. In addition, the term usable is the shortest possible summary of Jaaps chief principle in developing and cataloguing
the iish collection: it should be usable for researchers. This was the basis for
many of his decisions, which in many cases were years ahead of what was to
become standard practice in traditional library and archival circles.
Jaap Kloosterman gave his co-workers extensive latitude. Thanks to his
efforts, the IISH has become a setting where creativity and individual initiative thrive. Jaap is immensely tolerant of deviant, wayward behaviour. In
fact, he appreciates it. This receptive disposition appeals to people of any ilk
and all political affiliations and encourages them to contribute to the iish.
In seeking out knowledge, Jaap leaves no stone unturned. His opinions
and ideas derive from his great familiarity with the subject concerned. In
debates he is rarely at a loss for words and is very convincing. This coincides with another trait: careful reflection about every word he puts in writing. Jaaps publications sometimes have an extended gestation period, but,
once they are done, they do not contain one word too many or too few and
are not subject to revision. He despises peer review for this reason, since he
believes that all suggested changes will mean deterioration. He is probably
right about that.
Many co-workers, former co-workers, and other contacts have nonetheless contributed to this volume, edited by Aad Blok, Jan Lucassen, and Huub
Sanders. Thanks to the authors and the editors, the result is impressive in
terms of both size and content. It is not a traditional Festschrift serving a
hagiographic purpose but a serious work about a subject particularly dear to
Jaap Kloosterman: the iish. We hope this book reflects the immense merit
that Jaap has had for the Institute, and that remains undiminished.
Henk Wals
Social History Sources

Knowledge and Research
Introduction to
A Usable Collection
Aad Blok, Jan Lucassen
and Huub Sanders
The International Institute of Social History (iish) in Amsterdam has a

time-honoured tradition of writing its own history, as might be expected
from one of the worlds leading centres of collecting social history. Jaap
Kloosterman, the longest-serving director of the iish (1993-2008), has named
this tradition iish science. A developmental milestone in this science was
the exhibition Rebels with a Cause and the publication of the accompanying
catalogue with the same title in recognition of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the iish in 2010.1 The catalogue included a wealth of illustrations
based on the unique exhibition featuring the vast and varied scope of the
Institutes exceptional collections, based on a selection of contemporary
views about the history of labour and labour relations, representing the perspective of the entire world over the past half millennium. The selection
presented at this exhibition and in the book aimed to reveal how the principles that defined the establishment in 1935 have been conveyed in the collection over the course of three quarters of a century.
Jaap Kloosterman and Jan Lucassen, Rebels with a Cause: Five centuries of social history
collected by the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam 2010).
i ntrodu c ti on
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In their introduction (Working for Labour) to Rebels with a Cause Jaap

Kloosterman and Jan Lucassen, explain the background to and reasons for
the origin of the iish, and how the Institute has progressed into one of the
worlds largest and most renowned repositories concerning social and economic history. In just over fourteen pages of text (plus a two-page bibliography), the authors offer a comprehensive sketch of how the Institutes
collections have evolved. They conclude that the history of this unique collection at the same time mirrors the history of those who have built it over
the past 75 years. The succinct text of this introduction clearly reflects the
style of Jaap Kloosterman.
Two years later, in the Festschrift for Jan Lucassen, published in recognition of his 65th birthday (the title being next to identical to that of the introduction to Rebels with a Cause is not entirely coincidental), Jaap Kloosterman
contributed the chapter Unwritten Autobiography: Labor History Libraries
before World War i in the final section Sources. In what may be considered both an extension and a sequel to the introduction of Rebels with a
Cause, Jaap writes from the perspective that the history of libraries and their
origins and development are like an autobiography of the field they cover:
Since almost any collection of books indeed, almost any collection tends to appear as the product of deliberate choice, historians have become interested. They have begun to realize that
the history of book ownership, and the formation of collections, [] provides a window into earlier tastes and fashions.2
Extending the metaphor of the history of a collection mirroring the history
of the collection builders by applying it to the author, these two recent publications may be read as a reflection on the highlights of a lifelong career
started 45 years ago, when Jaap joined the International Institute of Social
History as an assistant on the Bakunin project. They may also be regarded
as two steps in his ongoing active involvement in the development of the
Institute, by contemplating and writing the Institutes own history in that
of collecting social history.
When Jaap officially stepped down as director in April 2008, he had the
idea of gathering information on the history of the collection-development
at the iish. He realized that many relevant facts and ideas were in danger
of being lost because of the future and near-simultaneous retirement of a
group of curators. Inspired by Polanyis ideas on tacit knowledge, he was
especially interested in things people often do not bother to record but are
essential to the daily operations of a collecting institution. How a catalogue
is composed or an inventory compiled belongs to this realm. To this end, in
2
Jaap Kloosterman, Unwritten autobiography: labor history libraries before World

War i, in Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen (eds), Working on Labor: Essays in
Honour of Jan Lucassen (Leiden, 2012) pp. 395-416, quotation 395.
14
2009 a small team at the iish conducted the memory project, from which
selected results are presented in this Festschrift.
This involvement was expected to conclude on 1 July 2013, when Jaap
Kloosterman turned 65, the official retirement age in the Netherlands at the
time. Circumstances at the iish, then undergoing one of the most extensive
reorganizations in its existence, however, led him to stay on. He remained
head of the collection development department until the end of 2009. From
November 2012 until December 2013 he manned this post again. From
November 2011 until September 2012 he once again served as deputy director. And at the time this is written, he continues to advise the present director, who started 1 November 2012. Nonetheless, from the middle of 2012,
management and co-workers alike suggested that Jaaps retirement would
be a logical moment to honour him with a dedicated publication. An editorial committee was formed to coordinate the necessary preparations.
Collections
The earliest discussions made clear that this volume was not to become a
standard Festschrift or liber amicorum. From the outset, it was understood
that for someone who has been so influential in the development of the
iish and in its collections in particular, the focus should primarily be on collections, libraries, and archives. Libraries and archives may be seen in several ways. They may be considered the laboratories of the historians, a conditio
sine qua non for historical research. As we know from Latour and Woolgar,
chemists and biologists produce scientific facts in their laboratories. But
they are not the sole creators of facts. In their analysis in Laboratory Life, they
credit many more people of different ranks, professions, and positions with
promoting the creation of these facts.3 And even the material objects present play a role on an equal footing. In the analogy of the iish as a laboratory, social historians work through and select material they can use for their
histories, their facts, and their creation of knowledge. They do this with raw
material that upon closer consideration already consists of knowledge with
a certain structure that was often devised previously by social historians in
a different capacity or produced and organized by the social agents: activists transformed into archivists or historians. Archivists and librarians subsequently contribute their own viewpoints in the creative process. What a
historian finds and is therefore able to use depends largely on how these
other professionals have handled the raw material. Willingly or otherwise,
they initiate still another process in the historical trade, colloquially known
as archivization. What has been kept, inventoried, and classified, has, because
of those actions, come to outrank documents overlooked or neglected.
Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory life: The social construction of scientific facts
(Beverly Hills, 1979).
i ntrodu c ti on
|1 5
In work in libraries and archives, the value or quantity of the curated documents sometimes controls the minds of the staff. Systems are built, remodelled, and ground again and again at the risk of becoming a goal in their
own right. Jaap has consistently combated this outcome, from his early days
in the library commission of the iish, through his term as deputy director
and head of the collections department, responsible for the introduction
of library automation, to his position as general director. He has pursued
a pragmatic course in all dealings with collections. In the end, the use of a
collection was what mattered, not its revered status.
People familiar with the iish take for granted that the archives and collections in its care come from individuals or organizations. We should be
aware that this means there is no legal obligation whatsoever to collect
these materials. Conversely, these individuals and organizations are not required to keep their own records, and there is no guarantee that the knowledge about the specific world they contain will be manifested at all. It exists
by virtue of the deliberate choice mentioned earlier. Quite a number of
collectors contributing to the iish collections were actively engaged in ensuring that material in danger of neglect would survive. The usual motivation for these efforts was to make the voices of the people who produced
the material resound.
Archive Particularities
Jaap has experienced all the particularities of archives in his career. Baptized
by fire in 1969 as a young man editing Bakunins texts, he became familiar
with all that archives could represent. As a historian and collector, he knew
that archives were not only sources of information but were also sources
of legitimacy and recognition, especially in our highly politicized field of
interest. He witnessed two occupations of the Institute, in 1979 and 1984
by groups connected to the successors of the pre-Franco Spanish cnt/fai.
In both cases, the occupation was intended to obtain the cnt/fai archives,
which the Institute had rescued in 1939. The group able to claim ownership
would clearly solidify its claim to political legitimacy as well. As director,
Jaap managed many years later to deescalate the conflict and broker an
agreement, whereby these archives were deposited in Amsterdam.
Jaaps continuous interest in Russia visualizes many of the elements mentioned above as well. The highly political nature of arrangements with regard to archives is clear. In 1991 Jaap seized with unequalled skill the opportunity when communism fell in the Soviet Union. The change was both
promising and ominous. Many in Russian archival circles were happy to
work with Western partners and grant access to the sources hidden during the long years of the Soviet regime. Ironically, sources directly relating
16
to communism and the labour movement were now in jeopardy. Jaap was
aware of this and invested considerable efforts in maintaining the collection
of the successors of the imel.4
Cooperation with Memorial in microfilming records of Gulag prisoners
tied in closely with the original function of the iish of rescuing sensitive
material not produced by but contrary to the incumbent political powers.
The recent political developments in Russia and the Ukraine attest to the
wisdom of the course taken back then, whatever the future outcome of the
present conflicts. Jaap does not consider states by definition to be the sacrosanct protectors of the historical heritage of its citizens.
Another aspect of the new relations with the Russian Federation after
1991 manifested in the restitution issues. Overall, the fascinating story is relatively simple, but its details are amazing. German agencies in World War
ii seized archives and libraries in occupied Europe from those perceived as
enemies of the Nazis. Some parts of the iish prewar collection suffered that
fate. In May 1945 these collections, or whatever had survived the acts of war,
found in the areas under Red Army control were seized by the special archival units of the Soviets. These collections were brought to Moscow and
kept in a special secret archival institution of which the existence was disclosed only in 1991. The ensuing struggle for restitution clearly revealed that
opinions vary on what archives represent.5 These archives undoubtedly belonged to owners from the World War ii allies of the Soviet Union but were
nevertheless classified by Russian officials as war trophies. From a distance,
Jaap followed all the negotiations with great interest.6 Though always pragmatic, in one instance he nonetheless adopted a principle stance: when the
Russian counterparts suggested that a custodial fee was due for keeping the
archives in Moscow from 1945 on, Jaap refused. He was not willing to pay
for a service never requested.
Cooperation with Russian people and institutions is a special case of international cooperation. The International Association of Labour History
Institutions (ialhi) is a central force in the international relations of the
Institute. This association, which was formed in 1970 and included the iish
as a prominent member from the start, became a platform for cooperation
in a sensitive world of archives that often originated from political parties
and trade unions.7 In the beginning old grudges made for slow progress in
cooperation. From 1987 to 1996 the iish housed the associations secretariat,
4
5
6
7
About the imel: Vladimir Mosolov, IMel citadel partijnoj ortodoksii iz istorii Instituta
Marksizma-Leninizma pri ck kpss 1921 1956 (Moscow, 2010).
See Patricia Grimsted, Eric Ketelaar, and F.J. Hoogewoud (eds), Returned from Russia:
Nazi archival plunder in Western Europe and recent restitution issues (Builth Wells, 2007).
Eric Ketelaar was important in the early stages of these negotiations.
See: Dieter Schuster and Rdiger Zimmermann, Chronik und Dokumente zur
frhen Geschichte der International Association of Labour History Institutions
(ialhi) (2008), available at: http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bibliothek/05588.pdf; last
accessed 8 April 2014.
i ntrodu c ti on
|1 7
which was run by Jaap. Under his aegis, membership of the ialhi rose substantially. At the same time, the scope was expanded beyond Europe and
the United States to comprise institutions in the global South.8 While this
would merit a separate contribution in this volume, it is definitely thanks
to Jaaps efforts that this very diverse group of libraries, archives, research
institutions, and other organizations has become a serious and productive
International in our field of interest. This association is now equipped to
deal with the complicated eu bureaucracy in raising funds to produce international tools for social historians such as the hope project.9
Coping with Bias

The dilemmas that Jaap confronted in his Russian and international endeavours, as described here very briefly, mirror the choices faced by the iish
and similar institutes at large. Given that all actors in social history decide
what they put on record, which selection they deem worth conserving, and
which selection of these preserved records they wish to make available for
historical research, many selections have been performed before any historian enters the picture.
As the bias is therefore huge before any document reaches a historical
collection, how to cope with it without aggrandizing it? The simple answer
adopted by at least the iish is conscientiously building in checks and balances in the three steps we might discern in processing documents between
the initial moment of acquisition and the final step of inviting visitors to
the reading room, whether virtual or physical. These checks and balances
are between different members of the collections department and, as always
strongly advocated by Jaap, between that department and the researchers.
He believes that the secret power of the iish is the mutual and cordial confrontation of collections and research.
After all, and this is essential, the iish and its sister institutes need not be
personified, as institutes are not individuals but collectives. While private
collectors may be guided by any kind of personal predilections and eccentricities, collectives have (or should have) this tendency to a lesser degree.
They should try to adopt as their guideline questions from present and future researchers. That is why an ecumenical approach yields the best results, without the futile illusion of averting any mistake. Although by no
means an unequivocal success and sometimes even rather haphazard, the
history of the iish as a collecting institute may be written by noting these
three types of subsequent choices in acquisitioning, cataloguing and making items available to researchers.
8
9
Jaap shares some impressions of the ialhi in Jaap Kloosterman, In Bebels

voetspoor. Wouter Steenhaut en de IALHI, Brood & Rozen Special, (2009), pp. 27-35.
http://www.peoplesheritage.eu; last accessed 8 April 2014.
18
First, in the collectioning policies, N.W. Posthumus set the standard. As a

social democrat he understood immediately the value of acquiring collections of not only his own movement but also of e.g. anarchists, as proven
by his decade-long effort to acquire the Nettlau collections, culminating in
success.10 As the Institute grew, birds of a feather have contributed to the
collections: activists have entrusted their own and their friends papers, former activists remaining sufficiently confident about the movement, scholars with a reputation for compassion with the downtrodden, and sincere
academics as such have done as well. All have come together at the iish
and continue to, argue and question each other, if need be. Not only at the
Institute, but also at similar institutes, intense competition of arguments
and close cooperation in preserving the past are unavoidable.
Second, in the cataloguing process. This is by no means a purely technical
procedure governed by age-old principles with no room for exceptions. To
start with, which papers to keep, and which to destroy or return as duplicate, irrelevant, or unimportant? The next question is whether and how to
list according to different rules such types of materials as diverse as books,
periodicals, archives, banners, posters, or other sorts of audiovisual materials. And, how to store them and under what conditions?
Third, availability policies offer a wide range of choices, including admission policies for researchers. Under what conditions may readers consult the
holdings of the Institute? Is everything universally available? Do former or
current owners (in case documents have been given on loan) have to be protected from themselves, or, on the contrary, do they need to be convinced
to be more generous in matters of accessibility? And what about the options
for generating hard and digital copies?
Finally, although these three steps may be distinguished analytically in
the activities of any institute, sometimes and in fact more often than not,
they may be combined in specific persons. The iish, for example, following the time-honoured example of the Moscow imel, applied the cabinet
model for the first half century of its existence. This entailed combining acquisition and listing of documents and even source publications by region
in one and the same organizational unit, such as the German, the Russian,
and the Dutch etc. cabinets. As these cabinets consisted of more than one
person, checks and balances were not absent, but they functioned less well
than in the new structure. In this structure, run by Jaap for so long, the
iish was organized in different units dedicated to acquisitions, cataloguing,
and the reading room, as well as in a separate research department checks
and balances from now on had to be realized by a continuous exchange of
views.
This volume offers a fascinating albeit incomplete catalogue of examples
of the dilemmas and adopted solutions previously listed, in part in the pe10
On the Nettlau collection, see: Maria Hunink, Das Schicksal einer Bibliothek: Max
Nettlau und Amsterdam (Assen, 1982), pp. 4-42.
i ntrodu c ti on
|1 9
riod when Jaap was at the helm of the iish, in part during earlier periods of
the Institute, and in part at other institutions similar to the iish.
Overview
The three steps involved in building a usable social history collection as explained above are represented or depicted in the contributions to this volume in a variety of ways. Most authors deal with the first step of the actual
creation of a collection or part of one. The first section, The Emergence
of Social History Collections, offers a variety of perspectives on the early
history of social history collections, as practised by the Institutes founder Posthumus. Eric Ketelaars Prolegomena to a Social History of Dutch
Archives sketches the larger infrastructural context of writing the history of archival collections. Huub Sanders explores the personal history of
Posthumus in an interview with his daughter Claire Posthumus and covers
the modest professional contacts of Posthumus with the great Dutch historian of his era Johan Huizinga in another chapter. Alex Geelhoed contributes
to the early post-1945 history of the Institute in the context of the reconstruction of the Netherlands in his portrait of Posthumus student Cornelis
de Dood. Co Seegers adds the economic history aspect of collection building
by portraying the recent acquisition of an important addition to the neha
collection. One prominent iish competitor, the Marx-Engels Institute and
its famous first director Rjazanov, features in Irina Novichenkos fascinating story of Harry Stevens activities as a correspondent for the early Soviet
acquisition endeavours, while Francisca de Haan and Annette Mevis explore
how Posthumus was involved in setting up the International Archives for
the Womens Movement (Internationaal Archief voor de Vrouwenbeweging,
iav) and the iish.
The next section, The European Collections of the iish: Acquisitions and
Catalogues, is focused on what could be called the classical core of the iish
collection and its relations with European sister institutes. The politics and
strategies around building a social history collection may be traced in the account from Bert Altena of how Posthumus tried to incorporate the library of
Dutch early socialist and anarchist leader Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis.
Collection building may as well be seen in the essay by Wouter Steenhaut
on the deliberate strategy of dispersion by Hendrik de Mans heirs of his
personal papers, as well as in the chapter by Margreet Schrevel on the laborious manoeuvring around the Dutch Communist Party archives. In the contribution from Rdiger Zimmermann, we discover the relation of the iish
with the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, which progressed from its tense start to
increasing dtente, while Karl-Heinz Roth describes in his essay how Jaap
and the iish were involved in founding the Stiftung fur Sozialgeschichte,
two examples of the importance of institutional relations in this context.
Another specifically Dutch institutional context is the background to the
incorporation of the knaw library in the iish library collection, as told by
20
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk. Marien van der Heijden and Franck Veyron,
Andrew Lee, Kees Rodenburg, Marcel van der Linden, Francis Ronsin, and
Jenneke Quast in their contributions in this section each focus on a specific
collection or document in their explorations of topics that Jaap cherishes,
remarkably all of them concerning writings in the Romance languages
French and Spanish.
The second step, processing and cataloguing, is represented in this section by the contributions of Coen Marinus on the origins of the cataloguing
rules, and how this process has driven changes in iish cataloguing practices.
Henk Wals concludes this section by documenting the essential role Jaap
played in the early digitization of both cataloguing and providing access.
In this volume published to honour the man who started his iish career working on the Bakunin project, the ample consideration for the iish
Eastern European collections and activities in the third section (The iish
and Eastern Europe) is perfectly logical. The story of the acquisition of
the Posrednil and Slovobodnoe Slovo publishing houses, as related by Els
Wagenaar, offers a fine example of the kind of small collections special to
Jaap as a connoisseur. The essays by Francesca Gori and Nanci Adler connect
very directly to the aforementioned essential role Jaap played in the post1990 era in the restitution and preservation of archives that became endangered by the end of Soviet communism. So do Touraj Atabaki and Solmaz
Rustamova-Towhidi more indirectly in their contribution on the politics of
archives in Azerbaijan in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. A remarkable
form of ensuring sustained access to the newly opened Soviet archives is
the ArcheoBiblioBase (abb), the online directory of Russian archives and archival repositories, developed and maintained with extensive support from
the iish. The story of its origins and development over the past decades as
told here by the projects indefatigable coordinator and advocate Patricia
Grimsted underlines Jaaps pivotal role as facilitating advisor, with deep
concern for the accessibility of collections. The activities to enable ongoing
and improved access to archives in Russia and the former Soviet Union, in
which the iish has played such an important though not always very visible role, has in fact brought about a new frontier in historiography, as
Gijs Kessler analyses in his contribution on the effects of these newly available sources on Russian and global social history. Lex Heerma van Vosss essay, concluding this section, brings to our attention another example of the
early adoption of new digital techniques devised under Jaaps directorship:
the process of making available the complete Bakunin Archive on cd-rom,
which in a way may be interpreted as Jaaps iish career coming full circle.
The last section, The iish Goes Global, brings us to the most recent
emergence of globalization in both research policy and collection development at the Institute. Starting with the establishment of a Turkish department, as described in Zlfikar zdoans contribution and followed by the
description by Roel Meijer of the acquisition of Egyptian and Sudanese communist documents, these collections were among the first steps on a new
i ntrodu c ti on
|21
course of collecting that Jaap once captured in an iish brochure as Go East,

young man!: turning the lens beyond the Atlantic region to a truly global perspective on social history. The trek eastward started quite suddenly
with the archival impact of the events on Tiananmen Square in 1989, as contained in the source for the Chinese Peoples Movement Archive brought
to Amsterdam by Tony Saich, who has recorded this story in his contribution. The South Asian part of this globalization movement in the iish collecting and research profile is represented in Willem van Schendels story
of the Nepal Nag Papers. That this globalization movement is not limited to
an eastward direction is shown in the last two contributions. Stefano Belluci
takes on the more principled issue of defining what constitutes an archive
and what defines an archivist in our increasingly digital networked contemporary society. Rossana Barragn, last but not least, portrays the Bolivian archivist Gunnar Mendoza, who may be seen as both a geographical antipode
and a kindred spirit of Jaap: largely an autodidact in the field of social history collecting but influential beyond direct measurement.
An unusually large number of colleagues from inside and outside the iish
have contributed to this volume, reflecting not only the extraordinarily long
but also intense involvement of Jaap with the Institute. As such, these essays not only pay tribute to the Institutes longest serving director but also,
we believe, constitute a new and important addition to iish science.
At the same time, anyone who has come to know Jaap over the years understands that one of his defining characteristics is modesty: both his soft
voice and his affinity for understatement have mitigated any effort to highlight Jaaps own career and personality. For a volume in honour of Jaap,
asking a wide group of colleagues from outside and within the iish to base
their contribution in the iish collection or any element therein, or, more
generally, on collecting in international social history seemed apposite. This
broadly defined framework, apart from the considerable freedom of choice,
of course included the invitation whenever and wherever possible to connect the theme or topic of choice to Jaap.
This has led to a volume with an at first sight dazzling variety of subjects
at the same time strongly focused on honouring Jaap Kloosterman and figuring as a sequel to his own recent work in Rebels with a Cause and in Working
on Labor.11 It is indeed a reflection of the history of collecting in social history and nicely illustrates the deliberate choice of our nonetheless limited
knowledge.
The result is a fairly coherent collection of contributions. The Dutch modifier tamelijk, meaning fairly and being among Jaaps favourites, immediately raises the question of wherein this coherence lies. We believe that
it concerns the very close connection between collections and historical
knowledge. It relates to the principal political nature of the existence of his11
Of course, some biographical and bibliographical notes on Jaaps career had to be

included as well, to elucidate his personal role in the processes described here.
22
torical knowledge, which in turn implies that all activities involving writing and collecting history are intensely personal. Because of this personal
character, it is also contingent and narrative. Whatever laws and structures
we think we discover as social historians, human agency will always play a
role. In collecting and in history writing, people make deliberate choices. If
they are helped by pragmatic people with usable collections in institutions
that do not forget their origins, they will enlarge knowledge for the benefit
of all of us.
Acknowledgements
A volume as complex as this one could be realized only with the help of
many. The initial editorial board consisted of Aad Blok, Marien van der
Heijden, Marcel van der Linden, Jan Lucassen, Coen Marinus, Elise van
Nederveen Meerkerk, Jenneke Quast, Huub Sanders, and Eric-Jan Zrcher.
Henk Wals has greatly supported the entire process. Lee and Phyllis
Mitzman worked on translations and editing English-language texts.
Additional translations were done by David Fernbach and Tineke van Buul.
Copy editing was provided, meticulously as always, by Bart Hageraats.
Images from the iish collections were reproduced by Hans Luhrs and
Vimala Tummers. Ivo Sikkema, Ruparo designed the book, and at aup,
Saskia Gieling and Rob Wadman have provided wonderful support. Thanks
are due to all.
How to Qualify for

the Directorate
of the iish?*
Jan Lucassen
How to qualify for the directorate of the iish? The nearly eighty-year history of the Institute reveals a clear precedent in terms of formal qualifications: a Masters degree from a Dutch university (one director) or, better yet,
a phd degree (all others), to be supplemented by a professorial chair (five
out of eight) seem to have become prerequisites.1 Of course, many more requirements apply, but the director serving longer than any other so far is a
remarkable exception. Jaap Kloosterman, deputy director 1987-1993 and general director 1993-2007, was enrolled in the Dutch philology and literature
programme at Utrecht University for a few years but never seems to have
tried to obtain academic credentials.
*
1
I am grateful to Aad Blok and Huub Sanders for their useful comments. Any errors,
however, are entirely mine.
N.W. Posthumus 1935-1940; 1945-1952 (professor University of Amsterdam),
A.J.C. Rter 1952-1965 (professor Leiden University), F. de Jong Edz. 1965-1977 (professor University of Amsterdam), J.R. van der Leeuw 1978-1983 (ma in History, also
1984-1986, when he was officially still director, but his successor was actually in
charge), E.J. Fischer 1984-1993 (professor University of Amsterdam), J. Kloosterman
1993-2007 (deputy director 1987-1993), E.J. Zrcher 2007-2012 (professor Leiden
University), H. Wals 2012 to present (phd, University of Amsterdam).
l u c as s e n H ow to Qu ali f y ?
|25
Nevertheless, as many contributions to this volume indicate, Jaap is regarded as having been an immense success as a director, a function that has
become more challenging since the Institute became part of the prestigious Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences of the Netherlands in 1979. If we
count Jaaps years as deputy director, no other person has been at the helm
of the institute for so long, not even the Institutes founder Posthumus.
Apparently, Jaap developed the skills necessary to be such a successful director in different ways than his predecessors.2
In hindsight he appears to have pursued in four main life courses, each
comprising a significant minor pursuit. While they did not culminate jointly
in any kind of official degree, he nevertheless developed various skills that
enabled him to become a successful director. With imperceptible guidance
he is unlikely to have harboured a longstanding ambition to become director of the Institute, the explanation below actually suggests the contrary
he became proficient in a great many languages (both active and passive),
learned to write fluently and clearly, acquired practical knowledge about
running libraries and archives, and gained an extremely broad and in-depth
understanding of history (especially that of leftist movements), and finally
became skilled in the art of diplomacy. I will not systematically elaborate on
each of these skills but will demonstrate how, when, and where he acquired
them by highlighting some of his activities.3
Course 1: The Classics with a Minor in Sports

Jaap received the most thorough intellectual schooling available to young
people in the Netherlands at the time. From 1960 to 1966 he attended Sint
Bonifatiuslyceum in Utrecht and completed the final examination in gymnasium alpha [pre-university humanities and social sciences] by age seventeen.4 In those days this meant that during his final two years he received
eight hours of Latin instruction per week, eight hours of Ancient Greek, and
several hours in the modern languages Dutch (3), English (2), French (2), and
German (2), in addition to history (4), mathematics (2), physical education
2
It follows from the nature of this volume that this contribution was prepared without involving Jaap Kloosterman. I also chose not to interview persons close to him
now or in the past, because Jaap deeply cherishes his privacy, as all his colleagues
and friends are aware. These two circumstances have severely limited this effort.
Nevertheless, Jaap, a strong advocate of making documents available through
archives, libraries, and online, will be pleased to see how much information is
publicly available, including about his own activities.
I have chosen not to cover what Jaap learned from his mother (Wilhelmina
Gerarda Maria Kieft, Baarn 1918 - Utrecht 1989) and father and others. This is
not because I consider this to be unimportant but simply because I have no
information about this. Moreover, this is not a biography but merely an impressionist sketch. Biographical data were obtained from the Centraal Bureau voor
Genealogie, the Hague.
Utrechts Nieuwsblad, 10-06-1966, p. 2.
26
(2), and of course religious education (2), as he attended a Roman-Catholic

gymnasium.
This conventional secondary education, inspired in the Netherlands mainly by nineteenth-century German educational ideals, of course did not guarantee linguistic fluency. In Jaaps case, in addition to his apparent natural
gift, his father Wilhelmus Johannes Kloosterman (Watergraafsmeer 1908 Utrecht 1989) studied classical languages at the University of Amsterdam5
and after a period as pow taught among others at the Sint Bonifatiuslyceum
until retirement in 1973. He is described by his colleagues as a modest man,
devoid of any pretensions and renowned for his dry wit and understatements.6 At home, all kind of books on the Ancients, as well as English novels
(a favourite pastime of his father) were readily available, and judging from
Jaaps enduring love for them, he must have read many of these works.7
Perhaps even more remarkably, Jaaps father must have had some impact
on Jaaps side pursuits in this phase of his life. Kloosterman senior is remembered by some as the left winger on the Dutch national team, although
national team merits qualification. In the years before the Second World
War, he wore the orange shirt in a unit now inconceivable but then considered perfectly normal in Dutch compartmentalized society: the Roman
Catholic National Eleven.8 Little wonder that the teachers team of Boni,
as the school was nicknamed, could not manage without him in their annual match against their pupils, or that Jaap loves this game.9 Jaap may have
been still more deeply involved in another game: he was a talented chess
player, and reports about his chess matches as a schoolboy even appeared in
the local Utrecht press.10 This particular pursuit may explain Jaaps fascination with military strategies (see his edition of Von Clausewitz), but it also
5
9
10
Still, Jaaps parental home was not traditionally academic: grandfather

Kloosterman, born in Zaltbommel, was a mason and grandfather Kieft a pastry
baker.
This information is based on documents from the school archives, which the archivist and teacher of classical languages Ton Drubbel ma has kindly made available
(in particular documents on the silver jubilee of W.J. Kloosterman as a teacher in
1971 and the school journal Stemmen); For the inventory see: http://www.boni.nl/
bonionline2/informatie/archief/archief.htm; last retrieved 12 February 2014.
The same may hold true for Jaaps younger sister Elly. She took an ma degree in
history from Utrecht University in 1979 and published her thesis on Dutch anarchists in the Spanish Civil War thirty years later: Elly Kloosterman, De Nederlandse
anarchisten en de Spaanse Burgeroorlog. Hoe de Nederlandse anarchistische beweging uiteenviel door de gewelddadige strijd in Spanje tussen 1936 en 1939 (Amsterdam, 2009).
This information was kindly provided by Ton Drubbel. I have no further details
about this team. In 1971 W.J. Kloosterman recalled his role in the Hollands Elftal,
which had its fields next to those of Ajax, of which he became a life-long fan.
Apart from what many of us know, see the scarce written evidence in D.M., Een
vriendelijke goedlachse jongen, Trophonios 5, No. 22 (21-03-1969), p. 3.
Utrechts Nieuwsblad, 13-05-1964, p. 9, Ibid., 04-06-1964, p. 19 about the well-known
chess and draughts tournament of Tuindorp (one of Utrechts suburbs), in which
Jaap Kloosterman (only 15 at the time) played in the first division.
|27
may have prepared him for his fourth minor pursuit, which was computer hardware and software (see below). At the time, it was still very remote
from institutes such as the iish, although our operations are now inconceivable without them.
Course 2: Journalism with a Minor in Politics

While studying at Utrecht University, from 1966 to 1969 Jaap was very active
in journalism and politics. The combination of the two in this particularly
politicized period in recent Dutch history may explain his difficulties making time for his studies in Dutch philology and literature. Why he chose
this particular field is hard to infer from the sources, but afterwards he told
everybody who asked that he hated the classes he had to take in Gothic language and historical grammar.11 He was probably more interested in the literature classes, especially those on modern literature.12
Upon being elected editor-in-chief of the student weekly Trophonios in
December 1967, he was presented in the local newspaper as a man with various talents.13 The source was undoubtedly his predecessor, who boasted that
the new candidate was already the editor of the stencilled Poly-rood, published by all sorts of socialist groups. The plural seems to imply both that
the editor was aware of the many intricate differences between the leftist
movements and of the strategic urge to unite them. As he also served as secretary to the Utrecht chapter of the pacifist-socialist party (p.s.p.), we have
an impression of his own political convictions at the time.
Poly-rood was published by the Utrecht chapter of the national student
organization Politeia. From its foundation in 1945 until the early 1960s,
Politeia was closely linked with the Partij van de Arbeid (the Dutch Labour
Party). Former iish director Frits de Jong Edz. had been an active member
in the aftermath of the Second World War.14 At the time Jaap joined, the organization had drifted from the pvda to the independent left and consisted
mainly of students at the far left of the Labour Party (including unofficial
Trotskyites) and some others left of the social democrats.15 Jaaps activities may be traced from November 1967 onwards, when he served both as
editor of Poly-rood and as vice-president of the Utrecht chapter of Politeia.16
11
D.M., Een vriendelijke goedlachse jongen, p. 3.
12 In Stemmen he had already reported on the Dutch novelist Willem Frederik
Hermans.
13
Utrechts Nieuwsblad, 07-12-1967, p. 9, Trophonios krijgt een nieuwe hoofdredacteur.
On how Jaap was recruited for this new job, see D.M., Een vriendelijke goedlachse
jongen.
14
iish, Archives Politeia, available at: http://search.socialhistory.org/Record/
ARCH00453; last accessed 30 May 2014..
15
F. de Jong Edz., Macht en Inspraak. De strijd om de democratisering van de universiteit van
Amsterdam (Baarn, 1981), pp. 102-104.
16
I have found only three issues of Poly-Rood (also spelled Polirood): 2e Jg No. 10, 14-06-
28
Compared to Trophonios, Poly-rood was very amateurish.17 Most contributions,

including some almost certainly authored by Jaap (e.g. translations from Le
Monde and Tricontinental Bulletin), are anonymous. Politeia was mainly a group
of very close friends. Even Jaaps engagement to Ineke Mertens (three
cheers!) was announced here, as well his simultaneous move from his parental home at 12 Prof. Abersonlaan to 4bis Oudwijkerveldstraat. Two events
were meaningful in the subsequent course of events. At his new address,
Jaap organized a discussion group on Trotsky, and on two occasions Arthur
Lehning delivered lectures to Politeia in Utrecht (in November 1967 on Via
Ariadnes thread to New Babylon and in October 1968 on Socialism and
Art).18
Jaaps second achievement at age 19, in addition to becoming editorin-chief of Trophonios, was his role as secretary to the Utrecht chapter of
the Pacifist-Socialist Party (psp), which held two seats on the city council in
1968. To my knowledge this was the only time that Jaap joined a political
party. The psp was founded in 1957 as an alternative to the pro-Washington course of the social democrats on the one hand and the pro-Moscow
course of the communists on the other hand. Between 1966 and 1969 popular support for this party was at its peak, with four delegates in the House
of Representatives and three in the Senate of Dutch Parliament, 24 in the
various provincial executives, and 122 on city councils. The party profile
was anti-colonial, pacifist, and republican, and the movement opposing the
Vietnam War was one of its spearheads.19 Jaap appears to have been among
those who stressed socialist principles over pacifist ones. Not that he opposed pacifism, but he saw it as apolitical and thus not conducive to changing the world.20 The few letters (some undated) written by or received from
Jaap in his capacity as secretary suggest that he did not fit very well or last
very long in this party.21
Through these two activities, Jaap established his reputation sufficiently
to become editor-in-chief of Trophonios, a professionally printed and illus-
17
18
19
20
21
1968 [8 pp; monthly]; 3e jg No. 1, 06-09-1968 [20 pp] and 3e jg No. 2, 17-10-1968 [8
pp], all in IISH, Archives Politeia Amsterdam, folder 1.
Jaap had already acquired some writing experience as one of the editors of the
school newspaper Stemmen, in which he published his own work as well.
Jaap stopped being active in Politeia after August 1969 while already employed
at the iish when he had agreed to launch a new periodical for Politeia/svb, see
iish, Stan Poppe papers 76, letter from Ed Elbers to Jaap Kloosterman, Nijmegen
24 August 1969. Hunink, Kloosterman, and Rogier, Voor Arthur Lehning [see fn 46], p.
484.
For a history of this political party, see Paul Denekamp, Bert Freriks, Gerrit
Voerman, Sporen van pacifistisch socialisme: bibliografie en bronnen betreffende de psp
(Amsterdam, 1993).
Jaap Kloosterman, psp: Wat te doen? and Wat doet de psp?, Trophonios 5, No. 18
(21 February 1969), p. 3.
iish, Archives psp, 532; Ibid., Archives psp Utrecht. I thank my colleague Jack
Hofman for his assistance.
|29
trated weekly of 8 pages, published by a foundation under Dutch law supported by Utrecht University, but independent as regards content. On a cold
December afternoon in 1967 Jaap was at work in the antiquarian bookshop
of Frans la Poutre in Schoutenstraat (Utrecht), where besides second-hand
books political pamphlets and graphic art were for sale, when he was asked
to take on this new job. He will not have regretted it, although after a year
and a half, he appears to have become somewhat bored with it and grew
uncertain about the effect of all his work.22
The topics Jaap wrote about were always serious and in most cases concerned international politics, especially China, Vietnam, Africa, and South
America. The first of his contributions to Troof (as the student paper was
nicknamed) dealt with the war in Angola and the Johnson Tribunal. He authored a total of 45 articles, on average more than two articles a month, at
least one in every second issue. This output exceeded by far what Dutch students were required to produce in their first two years at university! At the
time studying at Dutch humanities departments meant listening and taking notes while professors lectured and subsequently reading ten to twenty
books. Students sat for their exams orally, often at the private home of their
professor. Hardly any written work was required.
One may wonder what role Jaap played in this journal, which must have
included many dissatisfied individuals on its staff, as suggested by the remark made by Helge Bonset at the occasion of the farewell gathering for
their colleague Han Heidema: Han is gewoon een gelukkige tevreden jongen, wel een beetje vreemd voor een Troofredacteur, eigenlijk. [Han is simply a happy, contented young man rather unusual for a Troof editor].23 This
was echoed in 1969 by the farewell to Jaap as een vriendelijke goedlachse
jongen [a friendly young man, with an easy laugh].
At the same time Jaap was described as de strenge sectarir die tot ieder
prijs een revolutionair standpunt wil innemen [the rigid sectarian, ready to
take a revolutionary stand at any price]. There may be some truth to these
words, but the sources give the impression of a very dedicated student trying to grasp the origins of all injustices he discovered throughout the world.
Dutch politics and even student politics very vibrant at this time of university sit-ins, democratization, and administrative reforms rarely set his
pen in motion.24 Jaap once warned against undue optimism and against the
infiltration of leftist student circles by Dutch intelligence agents, but that
was about all he wrote on Dutch politics.25 In world politics his main con22
23
24
25
D.M., Een vriendelijke goedlachse jongen; for Frans la Poutre (1924-2012) see:
http://dnu.nu/artikel/5937-flaneur-frans-la-poutre-overleden; last accessed 30 May
2014.
Helge Bonset in Trophonios of 01-03-1968.
Cf. Jacques Janssen and Paul Voestermans, De vergruisde universiteit. Een cultuurpsychologisch onderzoek naar voorbije en actuele ontwikkelingen in de Nijmeegse studentenwereld
(phd, Nijmegen University 1978).
Jaap Kloosterman, Studentenakties: niet veel te verwachten, Trophonios, 5, No.9
30
cern was the division between the rich West and the poor rest, a division
he believed the countries that had been made and kept poor would have to
overcome on their own through revolutionary means.
As such, Jaap could certainly be called a revolutionary at the time. As
far as practical political choices were concerned, however, he seemed far
quicker to condemn abuses than to advocate a concrete ideology or party
line notwithstanding his membership of the psp for some time. Of course,
he was also involved in some practical actions, such as when he acted as
the Utrecht chapter of the Comit van Solidariteit met Cuba (Cuba solidarity
committee), which launched a campaign to send books to Cuba.26
Parties and ideologies that did not promote this revolution were social
democracy and Russian-style communism, and the Christian democrats in
Latin America were doomed as well, according to Jaaps writings.27 In his
numerous contributions on China he loathes the Cultural Revolution, and
although he criticizes the ensuing Soviet and American policies vis vis
China, he is uncertain what to think about the developments in China in
general. He was certainly no Mao fan in the making. So what else?28 Trotsky
as a historical figure, especially since his exile from Russia, was unquestionably among his sources of inspiration. In particular the common manifesto
of Trotsky and the surrealist Andr Breton (1896-1966), published in 1938 as
Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art offered a solution, according to
Jaap. Together with the pamphlet by the Dadaist-surrealist Benjamin Pret
(1899-1959), Le dshonneur des potes (1945), these are the texts for which he
expressed approval in the articles he published in these years. In the end,
new morals were far more necessary than new politics. This also shows
clearly that Jaap has derived far greater inspiration from revolutionary
politico-artistic, intellectualist ideals than from actual political ideology or
strategy, be it Trotskyite or anarchist.29
Just as important as his search for the right political views and politics,
these articles attest to his scholarly approach to journalism. Jaaps contributions to Trophonios mostly advanced solid arguments. Although he was never
afraid to express his political opinions, Jaap did not use fancy words and
settled for straightforward, tongue-in-cheek phrasing. Little wonder that
26
27
28
29
(08-11-1968), p. 1.
Advertisement in Trophonios, 5, No. 8 (11 November 1968), p. 7.
Jaap Kloosterman and Wam van den Akker, Kristendemokratie: opkomst of ondergang. De Latijnsamerikaanse situatie, Trophonios 5, No. 21 (14-03-1969), pp. 4-5.
For Jaaps many contributions on China in the years 1968-1978, see the bibliography elsewhere in this volume.
Jaap Kloosterman, Een moraal voor de enrags. Trotski en Pret, Trophonios,
5, 17 (14 February 1969), pp. 1 and 8; cf. Ibid., Tussen twee wereldoorlogen: de
Surrealistische revolutie and Changer la vie et transformer le monde, Trophonios,
5, No. 14 (13 December 1968), pp. 5-7; in a letter to Igor Cornelissen dated 16 May
1967 he is very positive about the Trotskyite periodical De Internationale but confesses that he is not a pure Trotskyite (iish, Igor Cornelissen papers, 137) .
|31
Jaap prefers a more factual style, even though his political stand was always
clear. In two extended articles on biological and chemical warfare, for example, authored together with the chemist Han Heidema, tables and footnotes are used to demonstrate the effects and consequences of this kind of
weapon, which Jaap, as the classicist of the two authors, traces back to the
Trojan War.30 These contributions bear the distinctive title War without casualties. This was also the phrase the American Army Chemical Corps used
to curry favour among politicians under the Kennedy administration first
and subsequently, slowly but surely, among the public at large. Operation
Blue Skies of the Corps suggested that this type of weapon, unlike the
atomic bomb, would enable the u.s. to eliminate the enemy by putting him
to sleep, whereas napalm of course came closer to reality. In the footnotes,
finally, we see the detective at work, as one of the main sources is the secret
internal course material of the Dutch army for officers about bc weapons.
While calling Jaap a Francophile might be exaggerated, his taste for
French culture, literature, and intellectual climate was visible in his editorial work from these years. In an in-depth comparative study of the coverage of Greece, India, China, Africa, and Latin America in ten Dutch and
three international dailies (once again, with an elaborate table listing word
counts in press releases by press bureaus and articles based on them), he
concludes: Het is voor een fatsoenlijk mens haast niet meer mogelijk nog
n[sic]ederlandse kranten te lezen wanneer hij eenmaal Le Monde in handen
heeft gehad. Iets wat vr dit onderzoek al eens gebleken was. [These days
it is hardly possible for a decent person to read Dutch newspapers, once he
has got hold of Le Monde, as already apparent before this research].31
For several reasons all that I have written in this paragraph has to be seen
as highly provisional. Not only because of the limited context I have forced
myself to observe, and because developments covering roughly two and a
half years have been forged together in a single course comprising a minor, but most of all because we cannot forget that this is an attempt to
characterize somebody by reading about his younger years. Jaap stresses
this point very eloquently in a quotation by Rgis Debray (born 1940), who
in Le Nouvel Observateur commented on the unauthorized republication of
some of his early texts.32
En wat de commercie betreft, daar komt opeens een uitgever
die meedoet aan dezelfde inflatie, evenzeer voorbijgaat aan wat
30
31
32
Han Heidema and Jaap Kloosterman, Oorlog zonder doden (i) and (ii),
Trophonios, 4, 18 (2 February 1968), pp. 1 and 4 and no. 4, 19 (9 February 1968), p.
1. Han Heidema (born 1943, also amateur poet and friend of Cees Buddingh) is
actually editor-in-chief ofSpel!, the Dutch games magazine, see: http://www.internationalgamersawards.net/members/general-strategy/han-heidema; last accessed 13
January 2014.
Onder de pers, Trophonios, 19-1-1968, p 1.
Jaap Kloosterman, Kritiese Kritiek, Trophonios, 4, No. 27 (15 March 1968), p. 5.
3 2
essentieel is: hij publiceert twee teksten van een padvinder, een
snotneus, teksten die ik in de puberteit geschreven heb en destijds niet te publiceren waren, alsnog onder de titel Twee verhalen [As for commercial considerations, this publisher applies
the same exaggeration and similarly overlooks the essence: he
publishes two texts by a Boy Scout and brat that I wrote as an
adolescent, and that were not suitable for publication at the
time, issued now as Two stories.].
Course 3: History with a Minor in Anarchism

When this Boy Scout, this brat, was hired at the iish in July 1969, he was no
longer a tabula rasa, as we have seen. After two years he had abandoned his
study of Dutch language and literature, had switched to sociology, but ultimately decided that his future lay neither in academic study nor in journalism (zo kan ik net zo goed op kantoor gaan zitten [I might as well take a 9
to 5 office job]).33 We may, however, imagine how Lehning saw in this young
man, barely 21, an excellent assistant for his scholarly editorial work: a nice
young man, far more adept at languages than the average student (Lehning
published mainly in French on Bakounine), widely read in history, experienced in leftist politics, and endowed with a precise and excellent writing
style.
Arthur Lehning (Paul Arthur [Mller] Lehning, 1899-2000) was nearly 70
and already widely known, when Jaap came to work for him.34 He had been
friends with or had at least met well-known artists and writers, such as
Hendrik Marsman, Piet Mondriaan, Erich Wichmann, Jan Slauerhoff, Menno
ter Braak, Walter Benjamin and the contributors to his famous periodical
i10 (published 1927-1929). As a student of economics in Rotterdam from
1919 to 1921, he had taken classes in economic history taught by Professor
Posthumus. Afterwards, the two stayed in touch on and off, in particular
in the years 1935-1945. The Dutch Christian socialist and later anarchist
and anti-militarist Bart de Ligt (1883-1938) introduced Lehning to the ideas
of Bakunin, and in 1924 Lehning first met the Austrian Max Nettlau (18651944), the Herodotus of anarchism. This talented collector, bibliophile,
and historian became the main inspiration for Lehnings subsequent academic work.35 Since Jaap as a historian is in a way a pupil of Lehning, he is
also indirectly one of Posthumus and Nettlau.
In 1928 Posthumus and Lehning started their attempts to save Nettlaus
invaluable collections, initially, with the neha in mind as a repository,
33
34
35
D.M., Een vriendelijke goedlachse jongen.

Bert Altena, Arthur Lehning, Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandse
Letterkunde, 2002, pp. 137-160.
Maria Hunink, De papieren van de revolutie. Het Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale
Geschiedenis 1935-1947 (Amsterdam, 1986), pp. 28-48.
|33
later the iish, after it was founded.36 Apart from this extended undertaking that culminated in success, the professor and his former student (who
never took his degree, neither in Rotterdam, nor later on in Berlin) were
linked in other ways. On 11 December 1930 Lilly van der Goot defended her
phd thesis in Rotterdam and became the first woman to obtain a doctorate degree in economics in the Netherlands.37 Her thesis advisor was professor Posthumus, whom she married a few weeks later in London. Among
the 30 guests present at the wedding banquet were her former fellow students and friends Arthur Lehning and Joris Ivens and his girlfriend Quick
Nolthenius.38
In 1935 Lehning became one of the first staff members of the new Institute,
responsible for the French cabinet, which included all books and papers
on anarchism, of which the Nettlau collection was indisputably pivotal. This
treasure trove also contained the Bakunin papers, acquired by Nettlau over
the years from friends and relatives of this great Russian anarchist. As a consequence of the turbulent history of the Institute during the war, manifold
problems with his German nationality, and his involvement in the Indonesian
independence struggle, Lehning resumed his work for the iish only in 1958.39
Again he was approached by Posthumus. The founder of the iish, then 78
years old and formerly director of Brill publishers, asked his former student,
then 58 years old, to edit the complete works of Bakunin. This became the
incomplete (at least in its original form) Archives Bakounine project of which
seven volumes in eight parts appeared between 1961 and 1981.40
Lehning worked on this project mainly from his private home overlooking the Amstel River, well-stocked with books and quality art. After some
years, he was permitted an assistant at the iish. Jaap joined the Institute
on 1 July 1969, at the time of the move from the original address at 264
Keizersgracht to 262-266 Herengracht, which could house the iiav and the
Domela Nieuwenhuis Museum as well.41 Initially Lehning was going to do
the project with Dr. P. Scheibert, first in Cologne and then in Marburg, and
they certainly collected materials together (Scheibert in Russia). Ultimately,
however, this man features only as series editor together with Institute director Rter. He is never listed as the editor of a volume of the AB.42 In all
seven volumes published, Arthur Lehning appears as the sole editor.
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
On Posthumus wide range of interests as a collector, including anarchism, before

the iish was even an idea, see the contribution by Bert Altena elsewhere in this
volume.
Cf. the contribution by Annette Mevis and Francisca de Haan elsewhere in this
volume.
iish, Claire Posthumus papers.
Annual Report iish 1958; Altena, Arthur Lehning, o.c., pp. 157-159.
See the contribution by Lex Heerma van Voss to this volume.
See the contributions by Francisca de Haan and Annette Mevis, and by Bert Altena
elsewhere in this volume
Annual Reports iish 1958, 1960-1964.
3 4
For many years, Archives Bakounine was treated by the Institute as a completely separate project, and little information appears about it in the annual reports of the iish. Only gradually from 1970 onwards, does the iish
no longer wish to describe the project publicly as a sort of private enterprise of Arthur Lehning, initially separately financed by the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft and soon by zwo (now nwo, the Netherlands
Organisation for Scientific Research).43 The publication of a volume every
other year since 1961 is certain to have been conducive to extending the annual funding for more than a decade. The same holds true for the qualities
of the editor and the staff. After Mrs. E. Thijssen de Graaf for Russian texts
(half-time-assistant 1964-1978, succeeded by Christine Warmenhoven), Jaap
became the second assistant in 1969, Els van Daele the secretary in 1972,
and on 1 January 1974 Maria Hunink (1924-1988), one of his dearest friends
in those years, exchanged her position as the iish librarian for one as research assistant. Lehning, already known for his interesting life and anarchist views, now gained recognition as well for this academic enterprise at
prestigious institutes, such as Princeton and All Souls in Oxford, culminating in his honorary doctorate at the University of Amsterdam in 1976.44
When Jaap arrived as second research assistant, Volume i (Michel Bakounine
et LItalie 1871-1872 in two parts) had already been published in 1961 and 1963,
Volume ii (Michel Bakounine et les conflits dans LInternationale 1872) in 1965, and
Volume iii (tatisme et Anarchie) in 1967. Preparations for Volume iv were in
progress but took longer time than anticipated, as the manuscript had originally been scheduled for completion at the end of 1967. During the frequent
absences of Lehning, the staff of three assistants and a secretary was coordinated by Jaap, who actively participated in the publication of volumes iv
(Michel Bakounine et ses relations avec Sergej Necaev 1870-1872) in 1971, v (Michel
Bakounine et ses relations slaves) at the end of 1974, vi (Michel Bakounine sur la
guerre franco-allemande et la rvolution sociale 1870-1871) at the end of 1977, and
vii (LEmpire knouto-germanique et la rvolution sociale 1870-1871) in 1981.
Jaaps importance on the project was also recognized, as from 1978 onwards he was officially called assistant editor and from 1980 onwards editor
on the same footing as Lehning.45 In 1974 Director Frits de Jong Edz. already
described Jaaps tasks as follows:
De Heer Kloosterman is te omschrijven als de Heer Lehnings
belangrijkste assistent. Niet alleen is hij verantwoordelijk voor
alle technische details de publicatie betreffend en onderhoudt
43 Hunink, De papieren van de revolutie, p. 166.

44
Unless stated otherwise, the following is based on the official accounts of the project as published in the annual reports.
45
This is not to say that he received a commensurate increase in salary, as Director
Frits de Jong Edz. deplored in a letter to the University of Amsterdam in 1974. As
might be expected, the obstacle was Jaaps lack of academic credentials.
|35
hij daartoe de relatie met de uitgever (de firma Brill in Leiden),

maar ook heeft hij een groot aandeel in de definitieve conceptie
van het wetenschappelijk gedeelte van het werk dat bij de heer
Lehning berust, verricht de Heer Kloosterman zijn werk veelal
geheel zelfstandig en heeft hij in dit opzicht het volste vertrouwen van de auteur. Aangezien deze in het algemeen veel buiten
de muren van het instituut werkt, verricht de Heer Kloosterman
bovendien de functie van, laat ons zeggen chef de bureau,
doordat hij de dagelijkse leiding over de afdeling voert, de werkzaamheden cordineert en een groot deel van de lopende zaken
afhandelt. [Mr Kloosterman may be described as Mr Lehnings
chief assistant. In addition to being responsible for all technical details concerning the publication and liaising with the publisher (Brill in Leiden), he has done a major share of the definitive planning of this scholarly work entrusted to Mr Lehning,
Mr Kloosterman does his work largely independently and is
completely trusted by the author in this respect. Since this person often works off-site from the Institute, Mr Kloosterman also
serves as what we may call the office manager by running the
departments day-to-day operations, coordinating activities, and
settling many pending matters.]
Even allowing for some exaggeration after all, De Jong Edz. hoped that
this letter would lead to an increase in Jaaps pay these achievements after four years are quite impressive. Jaap summarized his work on the last
three volumes published of the Archives Bakounine as follows. In addition to
all sorts of assistance with Volume iv, he participated in the introduction
and was responsible for the majority of the annotations to Volume v. He did
the same on Volume vi, except that he did the entire annotation in this one.
On Volume vii, the last one published, he contributed a substantial share of
the introduction and once again the entire annotation.46 Thanks to the great
acclaim for the series and Lehning alike, all sorts of complementary publications were commissioned from what by then was known as the Archives
Bakounine Department; the 1970s must have been very busy and exciting
years for those involved.47
In addition to enabling Jaap to master gradually the particular type of historical research that text editing is, Arthur Lehning introduced him to inter-
46
47
I am grateful to the director of the iish for this information from the Institutes
current archives.
On Lehnings activities during these years, see Maria Hunink, Jaap Kloosterman,
Jan Rogier (eds), Voor Arthur Lehning. Over Buonarotti, internationale avant-gardes, Max
Nettlau en het verzamelen van boeken, anarchistische ministers, de algebra van de revolutie,
schilders en schrijvers (Baarn, 1979), pp. 419-514; on Jaaps part, see also his bibliography for the years 1969-1979 elsewhere in this volume.
3 6
esting persons and literature. Although this is not the context to reconstruct
Jaaps intellectual development in the 1970s beyond what a glance at his
bibliography may reveal, one exception is justified: Jaap was fascinated with
the French political, intellectual, and artistic Situationist International and
their main representative Guy Debord (1931-1994). His interest in this group
most likely started in his Trophonios years, and Lehning is believed to have
encouraged this pursuit.48 There was also a practical link: Grard Leibovici
(1932-1982), the film producer and founder of the Paris-based Champs Libre
Publishing House, with whom Artur and Jaap were in direct contact because he reprinted the Archives Bakounine volumes, was a close friend of Guy
Debord. Together with his co-editor from Trophonios Ren van de Kraats, Jaap
translated Debords main work La socit du spectacle (1967) into Dutch as De
spektakelmaatschappij (1976).49
Jaap also maintained a personal correspondence with Debord. It may be a
curious coincidence that in a published letter from Debord to Jaap, dated 23
February 1981, we learn about the deep rift that had come between the iish
and Lehning, as well as between the master and his pupil.50 That Debord in
this letter fully agrees with Jaap about this is not important here. Nor would
the contrary have been relevant. What matters is that the two editors, finally equals on paper, were no longer able to work together in the very year
that Volume vii of Archives Bakounine went to press, and that the next year
(1982) Arthur Lehning took leave as editor, although he will continue to
work for the institute as the annual report states.51 Jaaps third course had
come to an end.
48
49
50
51
Altena, Arthur Lehning, p. 147.

For Jaaps recent summary of Debords life and significance, see his review of Guy
Debord, Un art de la guerre. Sous la dir. dEmmanuel Guy et Laurence Le Bras (Paris, 2013),
in IRSH, 59, 1, 2014, pp. 134-136.
Guy Debord, Correspondance, Vol 6: Janvier 1979-Decembre 1987 (Paris, 2006), pp.
84-86.
Annual Reports iish 1980-1982 (published only in 1984). This fervent wish was not
granted, see Eric Fischer, Wim Polak als bestuurder. Het Internationaal Instituut
voor Sociale Geschiedenis, in Wim Polak. Amsterdammer en sociaal-democraat
(Amsterdam, 2003), pp. 285-295 (288: Within the Bakunin department, tensions
had risen so high that two factions emerged that were no longer able to work
together); cf. Altena, Arthur Lehning, p. 159 (Lehning became entangled in
difficult conflicts with a few of the staff members on the Bakunin project and later
with the iish, which was forced to cut costs and reorganize. Outsiders sometimes
had difficulty understanding these conflicts but undoubtedly noticed how acute
they were. Emotions ran high, and [personal] interests and lack of diplomacy
played an equally important role.). I have made no attempt to investigate the
backgrounds to these conflicts.
|37
Course 4: Management with a Minor in Computing

Jaaps fourth life course happened very suddenly and quite unexpectedly,
as far as I can tell. In 1979 the activities of the iish were placed under the
aegis of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Koninklijke
Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, knaw), while at the same time
ensuring that its collections remained the property of the independent iish
Foundation. Consequently, all funding and activities that had emerged more
or less organically in the eventful first four decades since the Institute was
established in 1935 came under review. Because of problems with the accommodations, the Institute moved for the second time, from Herengracht
262-266 (where in 1969 it had been expected to stay for at least 30 years)
to an eccentric factory building at 51 Kabelweg in Amsterdams western
docklands. A mixed review committee of representatives of the iish Board
of Directors and the knaw drafted a policy paper, and in 1983 a committee
assigned to implement this policy met no less than 13 times. One influential
member was Theo van Tijn (1927-1992), professor of social and economic history at Utrecht University and long active as a Trotskyite in the Dutch socialdemocratic party. He appointed Eric Fischer as his assistant, and from then
on rapid progress was made.
Eric Fischer (born in 1946) had a very circuitous career before becoming
an economic historian.52 On board of merchant ships (he advanced to third
mate) he studied for admission to university and took an ma degree in economics, with a minor in economic history. In 1974 Van Tijn offered him a
staff position at Utrecht University, and a few years later Eric defended his
phd thesis, in time to figure in Van Tijns plans for the iish. From 1984 Eric
became managing director of the iish, and the adjective was soon dropped
from his title. He has said on several occasions that the iish included many
people talented in their own field, but that Fritjof Tichelman and Jaap were
the very few he could rely on for the necessary transformation of the iish.
On 1 August he appointed Fritjof acting librarian and Jaap as his adviser for
the preparation of the catalogue automation.
As bibliophile highly experienced in trade in antiquarian books, Jaap had
on several occasions already shared his opinion on the way the iish library
should be run, and especially on how adequate cataloguing of its collections
would enable far more efficient use.53 This was his chance to show how it
could be done. Eric provided him with feedback and his complete confidence. Equally importantly, Eric knew how to pull strings to obtain funding for the Institutes innovations on many fronts simultaneously. These
were also the years of large-scale computerization, when the growing pains
52
53
Cf. Leo Noordegraaf, In gesprek met Eric Fischer, in idem, Waarover spraken zij?
Economische geschiedbeoefening in Nederland omstreeks het jaar 2000 (Amsterdam, 2006),
pp. 79-89; Fischer, Wim Polak als bestuurder.
See the contribution by Coen Marinus in this volume. Cf. also that of Eric Ketelaar.
3 8
from the first decade had been overcome. Jaap, with his interest in international developments and his early minor in chess, was ideally positioned
to pose essential questions and find logical answers, thus ensuring the success of the automation of the collections department.54 An experienced
historical researcher,55 he understood what this species really needed from
this Institute. First mate Eric now had Jaap as a second, and the two worked
closely together. When Fritjof Tichelman was injured in a serious traffic accident, Jaap became the temporary stand-in for Fritjof in November 1985
and from 1 January 1987 became deputy director and head of collections.
Soon Henk Wals was to become third mate.
In 1993 Eric Fischer, seeking new challenges, left the Institute, and Jaap
succeeded him. Crash course number four was over, and Jaap had completed the full curriculum, albeit still without the official credentials.
54
55
See the contribution by Henk Wals in this volume.

His bibliography, and especially that of the last years, shows that this may be the
true constant in his many-faceted life.
I
THE EMERGENCE
OF SOCIAL HISTORY
COLLECTIONS
I.1
Prolegomena to a
Social History of
Dutch Archives
Eric Ketelaar
On several occasions Jaap Kloosterman has shown his interest in and mastery of the history of collections. In his historical overview of the labour history libraries before World War I he demonstrates that contemporary problems associated with industrialization provided an incentive to collecting.
The history of a collection provides a biography of the scholarly discipline
served by that particular collection.1 Because that history needs to be placed
in a broader social and cultural context, the history of the iish written by
Kloosterman and Jan Lucassen begins with a sketch of the political, economic, social, and cultural backgrounds: the dynamic world filled with new ideas about social planning, emerging political parties, and trade unions.2 The
1
Jaap Kloosterman and Jan Lucassen, Working for Labour: Three Quarters of a
Century of Collecting at the iish, in Jaap Kloosterman and Jan Lucassen (eds),
Rebels with a Cause: Five Centuries of Social History Collected by the iish (Amsterdam,
2010), pp. 7-28; Jaap Kloosterman, Unwritten Autobiography: Labor History
Libraries before World War I, in Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen (eds),
Working on Labor: Essays in Honor of Jan Lucassen, (Leiden, 2012), pp. 395-416; Jaap
Kloosterman, In Bebels voetspoor: Wouter Steenhaut en de ialhi, in Paule
Verbruggen (ed.), Wouter Steenhaut en AMSAB-ISG (Ghent, 2009), pp. 27-35.
Kloosterman and Lucassen, Working for Labour, p. 12.
Ke te l a a r P r o l e g o me na to a S oc i al Hi story
|41
later vicissitudes of the iish are treated against the backdrop of the lead-up
to ww ii, the reconstruction of Europe after the war, the Cold War, and the
aftermath of the demise of the Soviet Union.
It is only natural for an institute such as the iish to have such a social
history of the collection.3 And this history is also an aspect of the social history of Dutch archives as well, and that is the subject of my current work of
which I present here a few prolegomena as introductory reflections.
Historicizing Archives
Historicizing is desirable for collections and parts of collections: the separate archives. The usual practice is for Dutch archival inventories to provide
in the introduction a history of the archives with a view to their proper
use.4 An inventory aims to provide access, and this determines the limited
scope of the introduction. The introduction does not present the archive as
an object of historical study. Neither does it mention how the archival system functioned in the past, although the essence of such a system is disclosed in its functioning. Peter Horsman calls this the behaviour of the archival system (in the interaction with its environment). He supplied a model
for the explanation of this behaviour and applied it to the archival history
of the city of Dordrecht (1200-1920).5 Archivists as scholars of record keeping are the very people to fathom the mechanisms of the old administration, as the Dutch Manual for the arrangement and description of archives (1898)
already stated.6 This forms an essential part of historical archivistics as advocated by Charles Jeurgens, professor of archivistics at Leiden University.
He wants to look behind the formation of the records to find out in what
way the information laid down in the record, has come into being.7
3
5
6
See also the history of the International Womens Archive (for long closely associated with the iish): Francisca de Haan and Annette Mevis, The iav/iiavs
Archival Policy and Practice: Seventy Years of Collecting, Receiving, and Refusing
Womens Archives (1935-2005), in Saskia E. Wieringa (ed.), Traveling Heritages. New
Perspectives on Collecting, Preserving and Sharing Womens History (Amsterdam, 2008),
pp. 23-46; updated version: Francisca de Haan and Annette Mevis, The Making of
the Collection Internationaal Archief voor de Vrouwenbeweging (iav). Seventy-five
Years of Collecting, Receiving, and Refusing Womens Archives (1935-2010), in
Theo Vermeer, Petra Links, Justin Klein (eds), Particuliere archieven. Fundamenten in
beweging. Jaarboek 12 Stichting Archiefpublicaties (s-Gravenhage, 2013), pp. 150-168.
Eric Ketelaar, Dimensies van archiefgeschiedenis, in Eddy Put and Chantal
Vancoppenolle (eds), Archiefambacht tussen geschiedenisbedrijf en erfgoedwinkel. Een
balans bij het afscheid van vijf rijksarchivarissen [ ](Brussels, 2013), pp. 227-241.
Peter Horsman, Abuysen ende desordin. Archiefvorming en archivering in Dordrecht 12001920 (s-Gravenhage, 2011).
S. Muller, J.A. Feith, and R. Fruin, Manual for the Arrangement and Description of
Archives. Translation of the Second Edition by Arthur H. Leavitt, with New Introductions []
(Chicago, 2003), section 61.
K.J.P.F.M. Jeurgens, Een brug tussen twee werelden. Rede uitgesproken bij de aanvaarding
van het ambt van hoogleraar op het gebeid van de archivistiek aan de Universiteit van Leiden
42
Records and Archives

An archive (archival fonds) is an entire body of archival documents. The latter
term the equivalent of the Dutch archiefbescheiden encompasses records
and archives. As Sue McKemmish and Frank Upward explain,
the archival document can best be conceptualised as recorded
information arising out of transactions it is created naturally
in the course of transacting business of any kind, whether by
governments, businesses, community organisations or private
individuals. [] An understanding of the archival document
which encompasses both current and historical documents
directs attention to the continuum of processes involved in
managing the record of a transaction from systems design to
destruction or select preservation. [] Within this approach,
documentation of a transaction is archival from the time the
record is created and the archival document retains evidential
value for as long as it is in existence.8
The continuum of record formation encompasses every creation and recreation, from the first capture of documents in a record-keeping system,
to their management, use, disposal, and transfer to another record-keeping
system (which may be an archive). Record formation happens through interactions, interventions, interrogations, and interpretations by creator, users,
archivists; these are activations which co-determine the archives meaning.9
This implies that the archive is not static, but is a dynamic process. That
process is managed by individuals, businesses, churches, private, and public
agencies in their social and cultural contexts. Through time these contexts
are ever changing and always being constructed
shaping the action of the people and institutions who made and
maintained the records, the functions the records perform, the
capacities of information technologies to capture and preserve
information at a given time, and the custodial history of the
records.10
9
10
op vrijdag 20 mei 2005 (Leiden, 2005), p. 13, available at: https://openaccess.leidenuniv.

nl/handle/1887/2722; last accessed 6 March 2014.
Sue McKemmish and Frank Upward, The Archival Document: A Submission to the
Inquiry into Australia as an Information Society, Archives and Manuscripts 19 (1991),
pp. 17-32, 19-20.
Eric Ketelaar, Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives, Archival Science, 1 (2001),
pp. 131-141.
Tom Nesmith, Seeing Archives: Postmodernism and the Changing Intellectual
Place of Archives, American Archivist, 65 (2002), pp. 24-41, 35.
|43
Archiving as a Social Practice

As Ernst Posner stated in his Archives in the ancient world (1972)
Archives administration is so intimately connected with the
governance of secular and religious affairs and with the individuals conduct of business that it must be viewed within the context of the cultures in which the archives originated and which
now they help to bring back to life.11
Yet, in the introduction to an archival finding aid we hardly ever read what
the relations were between the archive (the archival system) and society,
even though the formation and use of archives happen in a social context.
And this context is wider than is shown in the archival context models,
which are limited to the factors that directly determine the origin, structuring, and questioning of the archive.12 Archiving is a social practice that,
while it is useful or obligatory for the record creator, is just as important for
society as a whole. This wider view is in keeping with the idea of the records
continuum described earlier. In this view records are never complete, but
are continually formed while moving through recurrent phases.13
This means that the context of the record has to be found both in the
archive and in its societal context. Research into the context of origin, writes Theo Thomassen, professor of archivistics at the University of
Amsterdam, does indeed bring to light societal factors that have influenced
the formation, management and use of the archives.14 Those factors play a
role in what I called archivalization, meaning the conscious or unconscious
choice (determined by social and cultural factors) to consider something
worth archiving.15
Thus, for example, in the New World, the colonizing powers had different
cultural definitions of basic economic interests: taxing land (the English), or
11
12
13
14
15
Ernst Posner, Archives in the Ancient World (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), p. vii.
Theo Thomassen, Het begrip context in de archiefwetenschap, in P.J. Horsman,
F.C.J. Ketelaar and T.H.P.M. Thomassen (eds), Context. Interpretatiekaders in de archivistiek. Jaarboek 2000 Stichting Archiefpublicaties (s-Gravenhage, 2000), pp. 15-28.
Sue McKemmish, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: A Continuum of
Responsibility, in P.J. Horsman, F.C.J. Ketelaar, and T.H.P.M. Thomassen (eds),
Naar een nieuw paradigma in de archivistiek. Jaarboek 1999 Stichting Archiefpublicaties (sGravenhage, 1999), pp. 195-210.
Theo Thomassen, Instrumenten van de macht. De Staten-Generaal en hun archieven 15761796 (phd thesis Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2009), pp. 35-36, available at: http://
tinyurl.com/8qmpqxe; last accessed 6 March 2014.
Eric Ketelaar, Archivalisation and Archiving, Archives and Manuscripts, 27 (1999), pp.
54-61; Eric Ketelaar, Archivistics Research Saving the Profession, American Archivist,
63 (2000), pp. 322-340, 328-329; Eric Ketelaar, Writing on Archiving Machines, in
Sonja Neef, Jos van Dijck, and Eric Ketelaar (eds), Sign here! Handwriting in the Age of
New Media (Amsterdam, 2006), pp. 183-195, 188.
44
taxing people (the Spanish), or trading goods (the Dutch). These archivalization factors caused the creation of different types of records: the English
kept survey maps, the Spanish censuses, the Dutch commercial data.16 These
different record types reinforce the limited colonial gaze which focuses on
land, people, or goods. For, as James Scott writes in Seeing like a state, there
are virtually no other facts for the state than those that are contained in
documents.17
In her book on the ceremonies of possession in Europes conquest of the
New World, Patricia Seed also argues that for the Dutch, discovering and
taking possession of new territories meant description: tracing coastlines,
noting their exact latitudes, drawing locations, describing places, and inscribing names. These predominantly written forms of claiming conflicted
with those of the English, who were convinced that only clear acts or physical objects created possession of new territories.18 Archivalization led the
Dutch and the English to different types of recording and archiving.
Social and Cultural Archivistics

As early as 1980 American archival educator (and future Archivist of the
United States) Frank Burke called for research into questions such as
What is it within the nature of society that makes it create the
records that it does? Is the impulse a purely practical one, or is
there something in the human psyche that dictates the keeping
of a record, and what is the motivation for that act?19
In the opinion of Burke, the merit of asking and answering these questions
was not only the enhancement of the theoretical basis of the archival endeavour, but also the possible practical outcome. He suggested that by determining the motivation for record formation and researching its sociological
aspects, it might be possible to devise practices that will satisfy a basic human need.20 This is the mission of what I have named social and cultural archivistics: studying the characteristics of records in their social and cultural
contexts and how they are created, used, selected, and transferred through
time. Social and cultural archivistics focuses on socially and culturally situPatricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europes Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640
(Cambridge, 1995), pp. 188-189.
17
James C. Scott, Seeing like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
Have Failed (New Haven and London, 1998), pp. 82-83. See also Geoffrey C. Bowker
and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences (Cambridge,
Mass., 1999).
18 Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, pp. 151-170.
19
Frank G. Burke, The Future Course of Archival Theory in the United States,
American Archivist, 44, (1981), pp. 40-46, 42.
20
Burke, The Future Course of Archival Theory, p. 42.
16
|45
ated archival practices. These practices experience and sustain changes in

society, causing changes as well as continuity in archiving. This means that
Burkes questions should be addressed to the present as well as to the past:
over the course of history, what kinds of purposes have animated individuals and societies to keep and preserve documentation in its many forms, and what kinds of social consequences
have induced them to continue to do so, to stop doing so, or to
change how they do so?21
The relation between social-cultural context and archives has yet another
dimension. In the hands of people archival systems have power, a kind
of communicative power that can effect change in our lives, according to
Brien Brothman.22 But he also sounds a warning in saying that archives not
only function as agents of political continuity and social solidarity, but also
as powers of political denial, upheaval, and discontinuity. These aspects
now begin to be researched in archival history. Examples are the studies of
archives of totalitarian regimes, their secret services and police (the Stasi,
for example)23 and not to forget the archivists and the archival institutions
under these regimes.24 But also under normal conditions, record formation is subject to power and exerts power.25 What is recorded/archived and
what is left out, is determined not only by archivalization by powerful actors but also by seemingly innocent practices of classification, filing, registering, etc.26
In the past few decades many anthropologists, sociologists, scholars of
cultural studies, and historians made the archival turn, considering not
only the archives as places of research or a theoretical concept, but also and
foremost as a fascinating object of study in itself.27 Their archival histories
21
Brien Brothman, Perfect Present, Perfect Gift: Finding a Place for Archival
Consciousness in Social Theory, Archival Science, 10 (2010), pp. 141-189, 143.
22
Brien Brothman, [review of] Pekka Henttonen: Records, Rules and Speech Acts,
Archival Science, 8 (2008), pp. 149-156, 154.
23
Raul Hilberg, Sources of Holocaust Research: An Analysis (Chicago, 2001); Alison Lewis,
Reading and Writing the Stasi File: On the Uses and Abuses of the File as (Auto)
Biography, German Life & Letters, 56 (2003), pp. 377-397; Karsten Jedlitschka, The
Lives of Others: East German State Security Services Archival Legacy, American
Archivist, 75 (2012), pp. 81-108. See also the bibliography in Antonio Gonzlez
Quintana, Archival Policies in the Protection of Human Rights (Paris, 2009), available at:
http://tinyurl.com/ckohmku; last accessed 6 March 2014.
24
R. Kretzschmar (ed.), Das deutsche Archivwesen und der Nationalsozialismus (Essen, 2007).
25
Eric Ketelaar, Recordkeeping and Societal Power, in Sue McKemmish, Michael
Piggott, Barbara Reed, and Frank Upward (eds), Archives: Recordkeeping in Society
(Wagga-Wagga, 2005), pp. 277-298.
26 Jeurgens, Een brug tussen twee werelden, pp. 13-15.
27
Randolph Head, Preface: Historical Research in Archive and Knowledge Cultures:
An Interdisciplinary Wave, Archival Science, 10 (2010), pp. 191-194, 191.
46
show the numerous ways with which archival practice and archival knowledge shape subjects in history and subjects of history.28 The archival profession followed the archival turn from a distance, although even in 1982,
Tom Nesmith had argued for an archival scholarship grounded in the study
of the nature and purposes of archival records and institutions, taking as
a starting point the history of society.29 His plea was repeated in 1992 by
Barbara Craig who warned archivists that if they left archival history to others, their future would be at stake. She was of the opinion that archival history is essential for the professional identity of the archivist in the modern
age, because it is an aid in understanding the contextual place of records
in the world of affairs, of thought, and of information. In short we would
benefit greatly from a historical sociology of the record and a diplomatic of
the document.30 At her invitation the first International Conference on the
History of Records and Archives (i-chora) met in 2003.31 According to the
hosts of the first i-chora, archival history is important because it holds the
promise of providing a better understanding of human experience and human needs.32
Social Context
A social history of archives has to reach out beyond record formation as
such to its social and cultural contexts. Thus, the Australian Michael Piggott
expects to find an answer to questions like how Australian society and
its constituent groupings and strata have been ordered and governed by
recordkeeping.33 Recently he proposed searching for the conditioning facAnn Blair and Jennifer Milligan, Introduction, Archival Science, 7 (2007), pp. 289296, 291.
29
Tom Nesmith, Archives From the Bottom Up: Social History and Archival
Scholarship, Archivaria 14 (Summer 1982), pp. 5-26, 6-7; repr. in Tom Nesmith (ed.),
Canadian Archival Studies and the Rediscovery of Provenance (Metuchen, nj, 1993), pp.
159-184, 161. In 2003 Nesmith urged for a reorientation of the knowledge base
of the archival profession toward this expanded degree of historical information
about records creation, its surrounding personal and organizational cultures, types
of records, record-keeping systems, and custodial and archival histories. Tom
Nesmith, Whats History Got to Do with It?: Reconsidering the Place of Historical
Knowledge in Archival Work, Archivaria, 57 (2004), pp. 1-27, 27.
30
Barbara L. Craig, Outward Visions, Inward Glance: Archives History and
Professional Identity, Archival Issues, 17 (1992), pp. 113-124, 121.
31 Subsequent i-chora conferences were held in Amsterdam (2005), Boston (2007),
Perth (2008), London (2010), and Austin (2012). Selections of the presented papers
were published in Archivaria, Archival Science and Libraries & the Cultural Record.
32
Barbara L. Craig, Philip B. Eppard, and Heather Macneil, Exploring Perspectives
and Themes for Histories of Records and Archives. The First International
Conference on the History of Records and Archives (i-chora), Archivaria, 60 (2006),
pp. 1-9, 7-8.
33
Michael Piggott, The History of Australian Recordkeeping: A Framework for
Research, in B.J. McMullin (ed.), Coming Together. Papers from the Seventh Australian
28
|47
Archival consciousness expressed: Cornelis van der Voort, Regents of the Old Peoples
Home (Oude Mannen- en Vrouwengasthuis) in Amsterdam, 1618. The pictured registers
and documents were not randomly chosen, but expressly shown to the painter with
the instruction to portray these records because they were important to the home.
Amsterdam Museum, SA 7436.
tors shapingthe patterns of record creation, demise, preservation, management, and multiple uses in Australia.34 Following his approach, I have been
looking for these conditioning factors in Dutch society. It might be useful to
take as a starting point what struck visitors to the Dutch Republic:
the prodigious extent of Dutch shipping and commerce, the
technical sophistication of industry and finance, the beauty and
orderliness, as well as cleanliness of the cities, the degree of religious and intellectual toleration to be found there, the excellence of the orphanages and hospitals, the limited character of
ecclesiastical power, the subordination of military to civilian au-
34
Library History Forum (Melbourne, 1997), pp. 33-45, 45.

Michael Piggott, Archives and Societal Provenance. Australian Essays (Oxford, etc., 2012).
48
thority, and the remarkable achievements of Dutch art, philosophy, and science.35
Indeed, most if not all of these had an effect on (and to a large extent: were
facilitated by) practices of record formation. The same is true for many aspects of the Dutch moral geography of the embarrassment of riches,36 of
Dutch economy,37 etc.
But for the factors determining archivalization (and consequently archiving) it is important to look further, seeking archival consciousness that
precedes the appearance of formal archives.38 Such archival consciousness
manifests itself in oral tradition, rituals, monuments, and art,39 embedded
in a socio-cultural mind set. Archival theory, as Tom Nesmith argued, should
broaden its purview, from a focus on what constitutes the nature of an archive and a record according to the classical doctrine, to the study of how
human perception, communication, and behaviour shape the archives.40
As the main conditioning factor in Dutch society past and present
I propose its particular mode of consensual governance, the polder model.
The polder model (an expression coined in the 1990s) is described in a recent
book by historians Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten van Zanden as a manner
of living together in which different societal groups always join forces and
political decision-making leaves room for mutual concessions and modifications resulting from negotiations among these groups.41 On Wikipedia it is
called consensus decision-making in the Dutch fashion and described with
phrases like a pragmatic recognition of pluriformity and cooperation
despite differences. Prak and Van Zanden label Dutch society as one that
through structured conversation through discussions, eventually followed
by a vote endeavours to find answers to societal challenges.42 In different shapes this has always been a characteristic of Dutch society since the
Middle Ages.43 It has made the Netherlands into a vergaderland:44 a country of
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477-1806 (Oxford, 1995),
p. 1.
Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches. An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the
Golden Age (London, 1987).
Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy. Success, Failure, and
Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815 (Cambridge, 1997).
Brothman, Perfect Present, Perfect Gift, p. 155.
Eric Ketelaar, Accountability Portrayed. Documents on Regents Group Portraits in
the Dutch Golden Age, Archival Science, 14 (2014), pp. 69-93.
Tom Nesmith, Still Fuzzy, But More Accurate: Some Thoughts on the Ghosts of
Archival Theory, Archivaria, 47 (1999), pp. 136-150, 142.
Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten van Zanden, Nederland en het poldermodel (Amsterdam,
2013), p. 12.
Prak and Van Zanden, Nederland en het poldermodel, p. 9.
Dennis Bos, Maurits Ebben, and Henk te Velde (eds), Harmonie in Holland. Het poldermodel van 1500 tot nu (Amsterdam, 2008).
Wilbert van Vree, Nederland als vergaderland. Opkomst en verbreiding van een vergaderre-
|49
vergaderen (gathering) where people come together in meetings of councils,

boards, and committees, either in public or behind the scenes, reaching a
compromise, governing through more or less ritualized meetings, minutes
of which are carefully drawn up and reported to the bodys constituents.
Even when a certain power is due to a person, this is embedded in a form
of meeting: the investiture of the count, the lord of the manor, and the king
(since 1814) took (take) place in a ceremonial gathering of the people.
Boards of regenten governed the Dutch republic (1581-1804) at national, regional, and local levels, they also controlled the Dutch East and West Indies
Companies, the universities, charitable institutions, etc. Commanders of the
army and the navy had to comply with the deputies of the States General
and the provincial States who accompanied each war campaign. The
Reformed Church was governed by a synod, and each parish had a church
council. Many of these councils, boards, and committees continued even
in the reign of King Louis Napoleon (1804-1810), during the occupation by
the French (1810-1813), and after the establishment of the Kingdom of The
Netherlands in 1814/1815.
Of course, the unitary state of 1796 entailed a centralized national government, but that did not make an end to the meeting regime or habitus
of discussing, deliberating, and decision-making. In 1848 a new constitution
granted more power to parliament and more autonomy to provincial and local assemblies and executive committees. From the 1870s trade unions, political parties, social movements, and religious organizations became more
and more important. Until the 1960s the Netherlands were divided up in a
Catholic, a Protestant, a socialist and a neutral segment, the zuilen (pillars).
Each zuil had its own trade unions, schools, mass media, hospitals, sports,
and consumers associations. They all gathered in their own circle, deliberating, controlling, and making extensive minutes of their council and board
meetings.
Resolutions
Governance according to this polder model was reflected in the archiving systems. For centuries their backbone were the resoluties, decisions taken in a
meeting. All incoming and outgoing letters were arranged as annexes to the
resoluties, made accessible through indexes on these resoluties.45 In the course
45
gime (Groningen, 1994). Transl. by Kathleen Bell: Wilbert van Vree, Meetings, manners
and civilization: the development of modern meeting behaviour (London, 1999). The Dutch
word vergadering is [] difficult to translate accurately, because it imposes a specific and well-understood mode of behavior not quite covered by the more vague
meeting: William Shetter, The Netherlands in Perspective. The Organization of Society
and Environment (s-Gravenhage, 1987), p. 123.
Muller, Feith, and Fruin, Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives, section
20; Thomassen, Instrumenten van de macht, pp. 283-286. Decision making by councils
and boards and minuting their proceedings are not typically Dutch. However the
50
Collegiate decision making: Jan de Baen, Directors of the Chamber Hoorn of the United
East India Company (VOC), 1682. The pictured registers, documents and maps (including
a town plan of Cochin, todays Kochi in India, the VOCs headquarters in Malabar) were
the directors instruments of governance. Westfries Museum Hoorn.
of time there have been different variants and innovations, but up to the
present day the emphasis in archiving has generally been on collegiate decision-making, reflected in the acta or proceedings.46
Some examples
In the Dutch Reformed Church, decisive factors to start recording the acta
of the local church council, consisting of ministers and elders, were both
the need to maintain unity and discipline within the church and the need
to account for its management. Sinners were summoned by the church
46
Dutch system surpassed in complexity any of the Kollegialsysteme in Germany and

Austria: Michael Hochedlinger, Aktenkunde. Urkunden- und Aktenlehre der Neuzeit (Wien
and Mnchen, 2009), p. 56.
My letter of appointment and the notice of my resignation are formally extracts
from the register of proceedings of the board of the University of Amsterdam,
although such a register is no longer used.
|51
council to answer accusations of unorthodoxy, or of drunkenness, gossip,

quarrels, fights, and the like. The sinner could be reconciled with the congregation after a public admission of guilt. All this was written down in the
acta. Thereby the acta formally established that people were qualified to
take Holy Communion and were in good standing with the congregation.
That, in turn, was a condition for receiving a certificate in case of transfer to
another town. In such a letter of security or indemnity the church council
declared to maintain the departed member in case he was unexpectedly reduced to poverty or unable to earn his living.
At the national level, maintaining the unity of the Reformed Church was
the task of the States General (the gathering of deputies of the seven sovereign provinces). In 1625 the States General had the acta of the general synods of the church taken to The Hague. There they were kept in a chest with
eight locks in the Trves Room (adjacent to the meeting room of the States
General). The Clerk and the provinces each had a key to the chest. In 1628,
1641, and thereafter every three years until 1800, a special committee had to
verify whether the acta were still in good order.47
In 1602 the United East India Company (voc) was founded.48 What, as
Peter Burke states, was most remarkable in the information system of the
voc was the importance to the company of regular written reports.49 Even
more remarkable is that it was in meetings that these reports were made,
read, and used as a basis for decision-making.
The voc consisted of six chambers (Amsterdam, Middelburg, Delft,
Rotterdam, Hoorn, and Enkhuizen), each governed by a board of directors
(20 in Amsterdam, 12 in Middelburg, and 7 in each of the other chambers).
The general board was formed of the 17 representatives of the chambers:
the Lords xvii. The Amsterdam chamber had its headquarters in the East
India House. There the directors met two or three times a week. In their
board room, the Lords xvii also met for several weeks in autumn when the
fleet arrived, in spring, and often again in summer before the departure of
the ships to the East Indies. The Lords xvii decided on the sale of the goods
from Asia, the number of ships and men to be sent, the nature and quantity of the cargo, the appointment of the governors-general, governors, and
47 Thomassen, Instrumenten van de macht, p. 163.

48
Femme Gaastra, The Dutch East India Company: Expansion and Decline (Zutphen, 2003);
R. Raben (ed.), History and Manual, in M.A.P. Meilink-Roelofsz, R. Raben, and H.
Spijkerman (eds), De archieven van de Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie. The Archives of
the Dutch East India Company (1602-1795) (s-Gravenhage, 1992), available at: http://
www.tanap.net/content/voc/organization/organization_intro.htm Note that the
Dutch inventory and the Dutch version of the History and Manual are available
at: http://www.gahetna.nl/collectie/archief/ead/index/eadid/1.04.02/aantal/20
and at: http://databases.tanap.net/ead/html/1.04.02/index.html. All last accessed 6
March 2014.
49
Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge. From Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge, 2000),
p. 157.
52
the composition of the council in Batavia. The accounts had to be examined

and approved. The Generale Missive, a survey of the economic and political
situation in Asia, made up in Batavia from the reports from offices in the
different regions, had to be discussed, and an answer for the Governor
General in Batavia had to be drafted. Before these meetings, all the papers
necessary had to be prepared, and after the meeting the clerks had to write
the resolutions (one set for each chamber and for Batavia) and summaries
for each specialized department (equipage, commerce, etc.). In between, a
smaller number of directors (10) met in The Hague (the Haags Besogne) to prepare the meetings of the Lords xvii. Separate committees existed for drawing up the balance sheet and checking the books. As Prak and Van Zanden
write: with some exaggeration it can be said that the voc was one big meeting circus.50
A Social History of Dutch Archives

Against the background of the polder model and its governance by meetings,
a social history of Dutch archives should study modes of record formation
and archiving. Basic types of records that may be called constants in record creation were, according to Posner,51 records facilitating control over
persons; records with regard to real property; financial and other accounting records; notarial records safeguarding private business transactions;
the laws of the land; records created and retained as evidence of past administrative action. These can be translated in broad categories of archiving respectively people, property, places, trade, litigation, monies, and governance, each category having its own practices of record formation and
archiving. Each of these practices was executed by different agents (creators, users, archivists, and record subjects) interacting with institutions and
technologies. Record subjects are the people named in registers and other
records. They did not merely, as Foucault argues, leave traces in their interaction with power: they were also co-creators, providing input in and interacting with the archiving systems of institutions.52 Although archiving is
important for the record subjects, their relatives, and society at large, the
certificates, licenses, letters, and other documents people received from institutions have only rarely been preserved, mainly because the owners did
not think them worth preserving. The decision to throw a document away is
as much part of the archival consciousness as the decision to keep it. What
50
Prak and Van Zanden, Nederland en het poldermodel, p. 135.
51 Posner, Archives in the Ancient World, p. 3.
52
Michel Foucault, Lives of infamous men, in James D. Faubion (ed.), Michel Foucault.
Power. Vol. 3 (London, 2002), pp. 157-175, 161. Thomas Osborne pleads for a sociological history of the agents of the archive framed in the technological terms
of the sociology of power: Thomas Osborne, The ordinariness of the archive,
History of the human sciences, 12/2 (May 1999), p. 52.
|53
was kept and ended up in the archives, was only the tiny flotsam of the
great, slow-moving river of Everything, to use Carolyn Steedmans words.53
Archives and archives

So far the discussion of a social history of archives has paid no special attention to the history of Archives. Archives with a capital A refers to either
(1) The division within an organization responsible for maintaining the organizations records of enduring value or (2) an organization that collects
materials from individuals, families, and organizations other than the parent organization.54 The difference is, in records continuum thinking, that
the former focuses on organizing the organizational memory, whereas the
latter aims at the constitution of collective memory in a way that crosses
organizational and jurisdictional boundaries.55
Collecting archives were established in the Netherlands from the beginning of the 19th century. Hendrik van Wijn, the first national archivist (appointed in 1802) was only tasked with inspecting and describing state papers.56 In 1814 the new king created the Rijksarchief (State Archives), where
Van Wijn was to collect and manage all state archives before 1794. Some
provinces and cities appointed an archivist, who in most cases served the
records creating organization, and continued the archival work of his predecessors of the 18th century. Although archivists at state, provincial, and local
levels were legally authorized to allow access to researchers in 1829, it took
a long time to develop in-house archives of provincial and city governments
into collecting Archives, as institutions managing archival documents for
research by people other than the staff of the records creating agency. The
main actors stimulating this development were not governments, but befitting the meeting regime of the Netherlands as vergaderland national,
53
54
55
56
Carolyn Steedman, Something She Called a Fever: Michelet, Derrida, and Dust,
American Historical Review, 106(4) (2001), pp. 1159-1180, 1165. Also Carolyn Steedman,
Dust (Manchester, 2001), p. 18.
Richard Pearce-Moses, A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology (Chicago,
2005) available at: http://www2.archivists.org/glossary. In the appendix to
Recommendation R (2000) 13 of the Council of Europe on a European policy on
access to archives, archives and Archives are distinguished, the latter meaning the
public institutions charged with the preservation of archives: https://wcd.coe.int/
ViewDoc.jsp?id=366245; all last accessed 6 March 2014.
Sue McKemmish, Yesterday, today and tomorrow: a continuum of responsibility,
in Proceedings of the Records Management Association of Australia 14th National Convention,
15-17 Sept. 1997 (Perth 1997), reprinted in: Horsman, Ketelaar, Thomassen, Naar een
nieuw paradigma, p.203. p. 203, available at: http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/
research/groups/rcrg/publications/recordscontinuum-smckp2.html; last accessed 6
March 2014.
Th.H.P.M. Thomassen, De nationale collecties en het amalgaam der charters: het
ontstaan van het Nederlandse archiefwezen, in Het archiefwezen in Europa omstreeks
1800. Les archives en Europe vers 1800 (...) (Brussels, 1998), pp. 57-74.
54
regional, and local societies of historians and antiquaries. These associations

were mushrooming from the 1820s to the 1860s, evidence of the emancipation of the historical discipline and a concurring scholarly interest in archives as historical sources.57 Members of these societies were frequently
also active in provincial and local assemblies, which, as mentioned before,
under the constitution of 1848 had been granted more autonomy. In the
1840s city archives were established in Leeuwarden (1838), s-Hertogenbosch
(1841), Kampen (1842), and Amsterdam (1848). By 1910 there were 31 such archives. Together with the 11 state archives in the provincial capitals (the last
was created in 1890), they formed a network of public Archives.
In the private sector, the first collecting archives was founded in 1914: the
Vereeniging Nederlandsch Economisch-Historisch Archief.58 This association (196
members joined in the first year, in 1930 there were 850 members) provided
a home for endangered archives of businesses and trade unions, and it collected (and published) important sources for economic history. Governance
by the neha annual members meeting, its executive and advisory board
had many characteristics of the polder model, specifically in the use of its network of members as links with science, business (industry, trade, transport,
and banking), and the archival world.59 N.W. Posthumus not only founded neha, but also the second private collecting archive, the iish, in 1935.
Posthumus wanted the iish to be a part of neha, but De Lieme (whose insurance firm De Centrale provided the funding) did not want the Institute
to be governed by the supreme power of the neha heterogeneous members meeting. The iish became a foundation governed by a board whose
members were appointed by (and from) the boards of De Centrale and neha,
by the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Faculty of Letters of
the University of Amsterdam.60 Posthumus was very much involved in the
foundation, in 1935, of the third collecting archive, the Internationaal Archief
voor de Vrouwenbeweging (International Archives for the Womens Movement)
(Posthumus wife was one of the three iav founders). In 1943 Posthumus
took the initiative for what was to become, in 1945, the Rijksinstituut voor
Oorlogsdocumentatie (State Institute for War Documentation). That institute,
another collecting archive not in private hands but a state agency was
led by a directorate of three members representing the Catholic, Protestant,
and socialist zuilen. The composition of the directorate and its early history
made this collecting archive the epitome of the polder model.
57
58
59
60
Jo Tollebeek, Thorbecke in kavels. De institutionele ontsluiting van historisch

bronnenmateriaal in Nederland, in Jo Tollebeek, De ijkmeesters. Opstellen over de
geschiedschrijving in Nederland en Belgi (Amsterdam, 1994), pp. 36-54.
E.P. de Booy, Documentatiecentra, private archieven en het historisch motief,
Nederlands Archievenblad, 78 (1974), pp. 309-317.
E.J. Fischer, J.L.J.M. van Gerwen, and J.J. Seegers (eds), De Vereeniging het Nederlandsch
Economisch-Historisch Archief 1914-1989 (Amsterdam, 1989), pp. 11-14.
Maria Hunink, De papieren van de revolutie. Het Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale
Geschiedenis 1935-1947 (Amsterdam, 1986), p. 9, 183, 185.
|55
Conclusion
A social history of Dutch archives should treat societal archivalization influencing practices of record formation and archiving, and vice versa: record
formation and archiving that conditioned or facilitated societal practices.
Such a social history of archives is important for the user of archives, the
archivist, and the archival policy maker. We must understand the societies
and the people who created and used the documents before we can really understand their value for research and other purposes.61 Archives have
narratives of their own that need to be carefully read before their materials can be fully appreciated and most effectively used.62 According to
Francis Blouin and Bill Rosenberg, historians and other users of the archive
must comprehend the conceptual and cultural milieu in which their archival sources are created, structured, processed, appraised, discarded, and
preserved.63 Research in this field may bridge the divide between archivists
and historians, they argue.
This divide is strange to Jaap Kloosterman and the iish. The strength of
this Institute, as Jaap once said, is in the collaboration of research and collection management under one roof, in one organization, thus bridging conceptual borders, leading to synergy and enrichment.64 May a future social history
of Dutch archives be written in this spirit!
61
62
63
64
Nesmith, Archives From the Bottom Up, p. 16 (in Nesmith, Canadian Archival
Studies, p. 171), referring to C.N.L. Brooke, The Teaching of Diplomatic, Journal of
the Society of Archivists, 4 (1970), pp. 3-4, 9.
Francis X. Blouin and William Rosenberg, Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in
History and the Archives (Oxford, 2011), p. 208.
Blouin and Rosenberg, Processing the Past, p. 210. See also Jeurgens, Een brug tussen twee werelden; Terry Cook, The Archive(s) is a Foreign Country: Historians,
Archivists, and the Changing Archival Landscape, American Archivist, 74 (2011), pp.
600-632.
J.A.M.Y. Bos-Rops and P.W.J. den Otter, iisg revisited. Een gesprek met Jaap
Kloosterman, Nederlands Archievenblad, 99 (1995), pp. 209-215, 210.
I.2
The Founder of the
iish, as Experienced
by his Daughter
Interview with
Claire Posthumus*
Huub Sanders
The idea was to speak with Claire Posthumus to discover why there is no
N.W. Posthumus archive? Of course talking with a creative person such as
Claire soon turned out to cover all kinds of other subjects.
Claire is the daughter of N.W. Posthumus (Nien) from his second marriage. His previous marriage, from 1908 to 1928, was to Dorothea Maria van
Loon. They had two children, Jan Huibert (1909-1991) and Theodora [Tedoor]
Wilhelmina [1914-1998].1
How would you describe your fathers intellectual background?
My father was not from a family of academics, but they were by no means
uneducated. His younger sister Annie, for example, completed a phd, I believe in Scandinavian languages. I knew her. She lived in The Hague.2 I know
*
1
Interviews on 15 April 2013 and 29 November 2013 at the home of Claire

Posthumus in Amsterdam. Thanks are due to Jan Lucassen.
Jan studied law. He married W.M.G. Kivit and had a son with her, also named N.W.,
who married A. Vlot; Theodora married C.J. Kruimel, a physician in Bussum. They
had four sons: Huib, Nico, Gijs, and Bram Kruimel.
Johanna Arina Hubertha Posthumus (Annie), private teacher of Danish-Norwegian
sa n d e r s th e f ou nde r of the i i s h
|57
only a few isolated fragments about my fathers early childhood. His mother, Huibertje IJzerman, was a very clever woman.3 My grandfather, who was
also N.W., was a geographer and regularly wrote for the Tijdschrift van het
Nederlands Aardrijkskundig Genootschap.4 He died young, in 1885, when my father was only five. His mother remarried by 1886.5 My father was not happy
about that. His mothers second husband was a geographer as well. My father felt driven to go to university quickly. Money was tight at home, and he
had a strong sense of urgency.
At any rate, together with his sister, probably as the first in his family, he enrolled at
the university, where he met many fascinating individuals.
I never really spoke with my father about his student days. I remember him
telling me about the writer Aart van der Leeuw. He met him around that
time, when he was a member of the Clio student society.6 I heard the story
that he gave a lecture about Calais to Clio, but it was not greatly appreciated. His active involvement in socialism was never mentioned. I am unaware of whether he ever considered entering in politics.7 I have no idea as to
his oratory skills. He spoke highly of Jacques Presser as a speaker.8 In 1908
he took his phd on a historical study of Leidens cloth industry, on which he
had discovered many previously unknown archives.9
3
4
philology, born in Amsterdam on 5 September 1881, died on 11 July 1964, known

Dutch translator of the Bjrndal trilogy by Tryve Gulbranssen (1894-1962), originally published in Norwegian, 1933-1935; she took her phd in 1911 on a dissertation about an Iceland saga: Annie Posthumus, Kjalnesinga saga / by Johanna Arina
Hubertha Posthumus (Groningen, 1911).
Her brother J. IJzerman was also a well-known geographer and headmaster of the
Openbare Handelsschool, where Nien started his career.
He co-edited an atlas for secondary school students: N.W. Posthumus, Atlas van
Nederland ten gebruike bij het lager, middelbaar en gymnasiaal onderwijs (Amsterdam,
1878). Upon its publication, he was headmaster of the three-year H.B.S. (commercial
secondary school) programme in Amsterdam.
N.W. Posthumus Sr died on 22 June 1885. Huibertje remarried on 24 October 1886.
Her second husband was Jan Snijder, born in Zwolle on 25 December 1839, died in
The Hague on 26 December 1925.
Aart van der Leeuw (1876-1931), writer, friend of C.S. Adama van Scheltema during their student years, known for his book Ik en mijn speelman (1927); see: http://
www.historici.nl/Onderzoek/Projecten/BWN/lemmata/bwn3/leeuw; last accessed 14
October 2013.
Posthumus student society Clio comprised many social-democrats who later
embarked on careers as scholars and in literature: C.S. Adama van Scheltema, H.
Bolkestein, W.A. Bonger, H.E. van Gelder, J.J. van Loghem and H.P.L. Wiessing.
Van Dillen has mentioned that Werner Sombart once said after listening to a
lecture by Posthumus: You are not as tedious as your books. J.G. van Dillen, Ter
nagedachtenis aan Nicolaas Wilhelmus Posthumus, een ondernemend historicus,
Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 73, 3 (1960), pp. 337-339, 339.
N.W. Posthumus, De geschiedenis van de Leidsche lakenindustrie (s-Gravenhage, 1908).
58
Did he ever describe the early days of his career, after graduating in 1904?
After graduating my father followed in the footsteps of his father and his
uncle and became a teacher at the Openbare Handelsschool in Amsterdam.
In the very first class he taught, he expelled a boy from class. Firm discipline was his method of choice. He also worked on his phd thesis, which he
defended in 1908.
He soon became a professor at the newly opened Handelshogeschool (institute of higher education in business administration) in Rotterdam, in
1913. He always had many other pursuits as well. When he administered
oral exams, he was constantly interrupted by telephone calls.
So he advanced rapidly in his career. Was he also adept at communicating with those
around him?
He was a gentleman and was always well dressed. He cared very much about
that and always wanted me to look elegant as well. Not necessarily formal
skirt suits, but enough to make a good impression. His talent was in demand early on, and he was recommended to the minister as a possible candidate for the position of State Archivist in the province of Zeeland in the
1920s.10 He was one of the few to acknowledge the importance of archives.
In addition, he knew how to communicate with the authorities in these circles. Who do you tell, when you discover a major archive? Yes, your friends,
of course, but it ends there. He was able to tell important people and to
persuade them as well. On the one hand, he was terribly introverted, on the
other hand, he was very charming and playful.11
How did he meet your mother?
My mother Willemijn (known as Lil or Lillian to her many foreign friends)
van der Goot was one of his students in Rotterdam. Others she met there
included Arthur Mller Lehning and Joris Ivens. They were present on 11
December 1930, when my mother defended her phd thesis in economics
(the first woman in the Netherlands to do so!). My father was her phd advisor.12 He had divorced his first wife over two years earlier. One week after
she took her phd, they drafted their prenuptial terms, and on 7 January 1931
they were married in London. She was 17 years younger than he was and
was very internationally oriented.13 Mother was one of the founders of the
10
11
12
13
F.J. Dupac and W.A. van Es, Een eeuw strijd voor Nederlands cultureel erfgoed (s-Gravenhage, 1975), p. 457.
Peter-Paul de Baar, Een bewogen huwelijk. Echtpaar Posthumus bracht sociale
archieven bijeen, Ons Amsterdam, 62:10 (2010), pp. 402-405, 407.
Willemien Hendrika Posthumus-van der Goot, De besteding van het inkomen: het indexcijfer van de kosten van levensonderhoud (s Gravenhage, 1930).
Wilhelmina Hendrika van der Goot, Pretoria 1897-Amsterdam 1989 spent much of
her childhood abroad, in South Africa (1897-1900) and the Netherlands East Indies
(1902-1915) and then lived in Switzerland for some years, where on 17 October 1918
she enrolled at the University of Lausanne. During the First World War, she made
|59
Internationaal Archief voor de Vrouwenbeweging [International archive of

the womens movement] (iav). I was born on 29 May 1938. Before the Second
World War, until 1940 or 1941, we lived at Apollolaan 72 in AmsterdamSouth. My father was a professor of economic and political history at the
Gemeentelijke Universiteit [municipal university] of Amsterdam at the time.
He was also still the director of the neha (Netherlands Economic History
Archive) and of the iish, but this Institute was already taken over by the
Nazi forces after the occupation in May 1940, and all staff members were
dismissed. Growing up in such surroundings gives you a natural interest in
playing with archives as well. As a child, I used to build towers with my fathers archive folders.14
What are your earliest childhood memories?
My earliest memories are of the war years. Unlike in Leiden and Delft, at the
University in Amsterdam the students did not go on strike in 1940, and the
university was not forced to close following the anti-Jewish measures proclaimed by the occupying forces that autumn. The University slowly ground
to a halt over the course of two years.15 When the anti-Jewish measures were
extended to the knaw, in 1942, the Jewish members were expelled, my father cancelled his membership in October that year. This was an extraordinary move, as very few Academy members followed his example.16 After the
war ended, he became a member once again.17
In late 1940 we moved to Noordwijkerhout and then to Noordwijk aan
Zee. We had to leave there, because of the construction of the Atlantikwal.
We ended up in Leiden, at Boerhaavelaan 20, where we stayed until the war
ended.18 The house on Apollolaan was let in that period. I seem to remember my father walking to The Hague, to the neha, or even to Amsterdam, to
the ehb.
14
15
16
17
18
various trips to France, where she met allied officers.

Claire Posthumus Vrouwelijke Opinie Nieuws Werk Maatschappij Cultuur
Forum Opzij. See: http://www.opzij.nl/Opzij-Artikel/Claire-Posthumus.htm#;
last accessed 23 October 2013.
Peter Jan Knegtmans, Die Universitt von Amsterdam unter deutscher Besatzung,
sterreichische Zeitschrift fr Geschichtswissenschaften, 10:1 (1999), pp. 71-104.
P.W Klein and M.A.V Klein-Meijer, Een beeld van een academie: mensen en momenten
uit de geschiedenis van het Koninklijk Instituut en de Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van
Wetenschappen 1808-1998 (Amsterdam, 1998), p. 149. J.H. Oort (1900-1992), L.G.M. Baas
Becking (1895-1963), W.J. de Haas (1878-1960) and H.A. Kramers (1894-1952) cancelled
their memberships. In 1940 J.C. Naber had already resigned. Oort and Baas Becking
used to visit the Posthumus home in Leiden.
Klein and Klein-Meijer, Een beeld van een academie, p. 152.
In Noordwijkerhout the family lived for two years in Villa Thimnath Serah. In July
1942 this house was requisitioned with 24 hours notice. After staying for a while
with Aunt An Diaz, who also happened to live in Noordwijkerhout, they moved to
Villa Vera at Noordwijk aan Zee. See the archive of Claire Posthumus, Box 27, baby
book.
60
In 1942 or 1943 my parents

took in a Jewish girl. We were
living in Leiden with my aunt
An Diaz-van der Goot, my mothers sister, as well as my cousin
Liesbeth.19 My cousin Liesbeth
came down with diphtheria
there. She was quarantined, and
we communicated by tapping
on heating pipes. The Jewish
girls name was Bep Koster, we
called her little Bep.20 In retrospect, the whole situation was
unbelievable: some high-ranking German officer lived in one
of the homes on Boerhaavelaan
as well, in any case, the house
was guarded by German soldiers. We children found that
creepy. In Leiden my father
was the only man in a composite household of six. My halfbrother Jan lived there briefly.
Lil Posthumus-van der Goot, Claire and
To Little Bep, N.W. Posthumus
N.W.Posthumus, circa 1948. iish Archive
was mainly the Professor. She
of Claire Posthumus, album in box 27.
rarely saw him, since he spent
most of his time working in his
study. He did tell us bedtime stories he made up about Little Mook from A Thousand and One Nights.21 My father loved to surprise me with the magic tricks he knew.22 When he moved
his trouser legs back and forth, I was amazed to see large postage stamps! I
remember that in the early years we used to visit somebody in Oegstgeest
19
20
21
22
An van der Goot (1901-1976), married Luigi Diaz in 1927. They had a daughter, E.M.
Voskuilen-Diaz. Before the war, while she still lived in Paris, An Diaz-van der Goot
was very active for the iish and was employed there from 1947 until 1960. Claire
called An Diaz-van der Goot Aunt Koel, a name that ran in the family, and that
her mother had bestowed on her sister, in memory of a cat with the same name.
Nicknames were commonplace: Her cousin Liesbeth was called Cucuz. Mother
Posthumus-van der Goot was nicknamed Bliek.
In 2008 the two sisters and N.W. Posthumus were posthumously awarded the Yad
Vashem medal. Little Bep first went into hiding with the Posthumus family in
Noordwijk aan Zee, quite early in 1942.
Bep Koster remembers him reading the stories aloud. See: Maaike Schoon, Isral
eert oprichter niod en zijn vrouw, Het Parool, 24 November 2008.
De Baar, Een bewogen huwelijk, p. 407.
|6 1
that I called Mr Brill.23 He used to give me postage stamps as well. I loved

postage stamps. Liesbeth collected them too. Once, when Aunt Koel, Cucuz
and Little Bep were in Drenthe for a few days, I made off with her whole collection. But the moment they were home, my cousin knew who had taken
them. My name echoed through the house, and I had to confess and return
the loot. My punishment was swift and severe. That evening, when he returned, my father rescinded it. I remember a few of my girlfriends from
those days. Ibi Simons, for example, and Hilletje Cleveringa, the daughter of
the famous professor.
And what about after the war, when your parents separated, and your father moved
from his pursuits in Amsterdam to Brill?
After the war ended, in October 1945, my family returned to Amsterdam, to
our home at Apollolaan 72. Aunt An and my cousin returned to Noordwijk,
and Little Bep went to live with her mother in Rotterdam. That was a very
difficult time for me. My father was very busy setting up the riod and many
other projects. He had a chauffeur-driven car from the riod. I think the
drivers name was Hoks. Back in Amsterdam, our family fell apart. I became
ill when I was eight, with early stage tb. I spent the first six months of my
illness in Amsterdam. I remember Lou de Jong coming to visit me with my
father. In January 1946 I was sent to Davos in Switzerland, supposedly for six
months. I ended up staying there from February 1946 until May 1948.24
When I returned in mid-June 1948 I was ten. There was another boy staying at our house in Amsterdam then, Peter Thijssen. My father despised
him. He was 17 or 18 and attended the Amsterdamsch Lyceum. Evening
meals were a decidedly unpleasant experience.
I visited Annie Adama van Scheltema-Kleefstra at home once and was told
by my father to call her auntie. This must have been before father moved
to Wassenaar in 1950.
In 1949 he retired from the University of Amsterdam and later became the
director at Brill publishers. All these activities led him to drift away from the
iish. With respect to Brill, I remember a visit from messrs James William
Christopher and Peter Syrup. My father thought that with Christophers
help, Brill could cover the U.S. and German markets. But the two were soon
at loggerheads.25 My mother, who found Christopher charming and was possibly even infatuated with him, took his side.
23
24
25
This was probably Theunis Folkers, director of Brill from 1934-1945.

Claires mother fetched her in Davos on 20 May 1948. See the iish archive of Claire
Posthumus, Box 31. Personal documents, such as a travel diary and letters from
Claire, are also among the personal papers of Willemijn Hendrika Posthumus-van
der Goot, kept in Atria, Amsterdam.
Sijtze van der Veen, Brill, 325 years of scholarly publishing (Leiden/Boston, 2008), pp.
118-120.
62
My parents quarreled a lot, and in 1950, when I was eleven, my father

moved to Wassenaar.26 I witnessed the final spasms of the marriage. My father had a lady friend, Wil van Straalen. This had started during the war,
probably in The Hague.27 We called my fathers girlfriend Aunt Wil.
In 1949 their son Rob was born. My mother refused to give my father a
divorce, probably for financial reasons relating to his pension and the like.28
To make my brother Rob legitimate, my father had arranged for Aunt Wil to
marry some Mr Doze or Dozen. Rob later had himself recognized at the registrar of births, deaths and marriages and now has the surname Posthumus.
To this end, he asked my brother, my sister, and me to recognize him as
my fathers son. An important politician was involved, I believe this was
F.J. van Thiel, the chairman of the House of Representatives in the Dutch
Parliament.
Did he stay in touch with the rest of the family after the actual separation in 1950,
when your father, by then 70 years old, disappeared to Wassenaar?
In Wassenaar, at Eikenhorstlaan 19, family gatherings continued, including
birthday dinners and the like. Aunt Annie (my fathers sister) attended such
events. The Kruimels took her along with them. My half-sister Theodora I
had to call her aunt too took an intense dislike to my mother. She married in 1937, a year before I was born. Our father had remarried in 1931 and
his new wife, my mother, and my half-sister were only 17 years apart.
The home in Wassenaar was kept very clean. Wil was extremely fastidious
about that. My father had a small alcove in that house, where he kept some
books in a bookcase. There was also a newfangled little desk with drawers
on one side. Once I noticed him working there on a price history, as he explained. He showed it to me and said it was important.29 He was working on
26
27
28
29
There were still some fun moments. In this collection, see also the contribution
from Alex Geelhoed. At the festivities in honour of Posthumus 25th anniversary
as professor at the gu Amsterdam in 1947, Willemijn, Aunt An, Annie Adama-van
Scheltema, Theodora and others put on a little performance for him. See: iish
Archive of Claire Posthumus, Box 36. Claire remembers that when her father
retired as a professor, Amsterdam Mayor dAilly presented her father with a silver
medal of the City of Amsterdam.
Wilhelmina van Straalen, 1912-1997.
In an out-of-court-settlement deed of 18 March 1955 N.W. Posthumus and Willemijn
Posthumus-van der Goot settled their reciprocal financial claims. According to this
deed, the house on Apollolaan became the property of Willemijn Posthumus-van
der Goot, in exchange for forgiving a substantial debt. See iish Archive of Claire
Posthumus, Box 31. The Apollolaan house was noticed by his son Jan shortly after it
was built and was purchased by N.W. Posthumus in 1929.
iish Archive of Claire Posthumus, Box 36: this contains a copy of Posthumus
publication De Oosterse handel te Amsterdam, het oudst bewaarde koopmansboek van een
Amsterdamse vennootschap betreffende de handel op de Oostzee, 1485-1490 (Leiden, 1953)
with the following dedication: To Claire, from her father, who hopes that she
will enjoy reading this book now and in the future, as much as he did writing it. 9
March 1954.
|6 3
corrections. He did not have a large library of his own; in Wassenaar he had
only a bookcase, and the books were hardly extraordinary. The entire home
radiated the ambience of Aunt Wil. Aunt Wil was the home. She was a bit
neurotic about being in control. Walking around there felt creepy: you were
surrounded by white things. On Apollolaan and in Leiden he had always had
his own room. But because he moved so often, not much accumulated. That
is one of the reasons why he did not leave behind a vast collection of personal papers.
Father did not exactly beat a path to the door of family members. I remember once we went to visit Aunt Annie in The Hague, at my suggestion.
The moment we arrived, my father announced: Claire asked. .
When you were growing up as a secondary school student, your father was not there.
Did you stay in touch, and how?
I often went to Leiden. We would have lunch together.30 At a certain point I
started visiting him at home in Wassenaar. About once every two months. It
was immensely important to him that I learned Latin and Ancient Greek.31
He compiled charts of words in different languages. I took them back with
me and never looked at them. He bought a lot of books. I was always interested in reading and books. He encouraged that and gave me piles of books,
such as Kapitein Marryat32 and Coopers Last of the Mohicans.33 Complete series.
He picked them up at estate auctions and the like.
I also visited Brill publishers at Oude Rijn in Leiden, when my father was
the director there.34 I was given a guided tour. I remember being told about
archery, and that he gave me a book about that.35 I was also impressed by a
30
31
32
33
34
35
The personal papers of Claire Posthumus at the iish include notes from Posthumus
to his daughter about these appointments. One from 14 January 1952, for example,
starts Dear Sweetheart and is signed daddy, and one from 28 September 1953
opens Dear Claire. In this note he expresses regret that Claire had to cancel and
therefore missed out on the wild duck he ordered at the restaurant De Turk (presumably In den Vergulden Turk). The note concludes So please write me soon,
monkey face. Bye. Much love from daddy. iish Archive of Claire Posthumus, Box
36.
In 1962 Claire passed the gymnasium state examination.
Frederick Marryat and Jan van der Velde (translator), Kapitein Marryat (Amsterdam,
1940).
Frans Piet (illustrations) and James Fenimore Cooper, De laatste der Mohikanen: een
spannend indianenverhaal (Haarlem, 1948).
During his term as director at Brill, Posthumus sharply reoriented the publishing company to Asia. In 1957, for example, he launched The Journal of the Economic
and Social History of the Orient. On this subject, see: Harriet T. Zurndorfer, The
Orientation of jeshos Orient and the Problem of Orientalism: Some Reflections
on the Occasion of jeshos Fiftieth Anniversary, Journal of the Economic and Social
History of the Orient, 51, 1 (2008), p. 2-30. On his directorship, see: F.C. Wieder, In
memoriam professor mr. N.W. Posthumus 1880-1960. Directeur van de N.V. E.J. Brill
1946-1958, De Uitgever, 40, 5 (1960), pp. 149-50.
This most likely refers to one of the books published at the time by the publisher:
64
typesetter specialized in Chinese characters, who told me that the Chinese

character denoting peace was one woman in a house and the character
denoting war two women in one house! My brother Jan, who was nearly
thirty years older than I and had become a lawyer, worked for Brill as well,
at the branch in Jakarta and later on in Leiden.
The deputy director of Brill was Frederik Wieder Jr. He later succeeded my
father. Wieder used to give me postage stamps. Upon entering, the structure
of command was immediately clear from the layout, the size and the position of the desks. My brothers desk was in my fathers office.
And did he ever talk about the iish during his years at Brill?
I do not remember the iish or the iav coming up in conversations. I vaguely recall him mentioning the riod. Occasionally I visited the Keizersgracht
premises, where the iav and the iish were both located. I used to meet my
aunt An Diaz there. Auntie was proud of her work at the iish. She catalogued Chinese journals there and spent her evenings learning Chinese
characters for this purpose. I remember a few men who worked at the iish
as helping her with the journals and visiting her at her home in Noordwijk,
such as Jan Beerthuis and Karel van het Reve.36 Some of them used to come
stay at her house near the seaside; it was always pleasant there.
In those days I was never told: oh that is the founders daughter. That
began only once I worked at the iav, after taking my first degree in 1974.
Piet Besselsen, who worked on photography at the iish, whispered once to
me in my early days there the founders daughter has come to work here.
I answered: yes that would be me! Luckily, that was about the only instance I noticed. I just want to do my own thing. At the iav they hounded
me with: Your mother this, your mother that Enough was enough.
That did bother me.
What about your fathers final years?
At 17 I had a shotgun wedding, and on 21 February 1956 my son Bas was
born. So I was on my own very early on. We settled briefly on Vondelstraat.
When my husband Wim Polling was called up to serve in the armed forces,
I returned to the house on Apollolaan. I stayed there until I married my second husband in the late 1960s.
My father had his three legitimate children (Jan and Theodora from his
first marriage and me from his second one) sign an agreement allowing
Aunt Wil to use the house in Wassenaar. The following year, in 1959, this
36
Eugen Herrigel and R.A Baudisch, Het Zen-Boeddhisme in de kunst van het boogschieten
(Leiden, 1951).
Karel van het Reve (1921-1999) was the librarian at the Russia Institute from 1947.
This institute founded in part at the initiative of Posthumus was located in the
same building as the iish on Keizersgracht from 1948 (Jaarverslag IISG, 1948, pp. 1112). Only in 1961 did the Russia Institute move out of the iish premises (Jaarverslag
S, 1961, p. 5).
|6 5
house was sold, together with a considerable amount of land. He and Aunt
Wil then moved to Blaricum.37
One week before he died, I saw him walking along in Amsterdam.38
I waved to him, and he waved back. Then he was gone. He spent only a
week in the hospital. He had advanced prostate cancer. Aunt Wil mentioned
cancer very discreetly. He was admitted to the hospital in Laren.39 I visited
him there shortly before he died. He smiled to show he recognized me, that
moved me. I was very fond of my father, despite all the issues. He died at
Easter. I rushed over there and saw him before he was laid out. Aunt Wil
rang me to ask what he was wearing. She hoped he was dressed in his finest
pajamas. The question struck me as odd, given the circumstances. He was
buried in Blaricum.40
Few were present at the funeral, only immediate family members and
Aunt Wil.41 Rter, director of the iish at the time, did not attend. The
mourners were divided into two groups: Aunt An Diaz was there together
with Annie Adama van Scheltema across from us, his children! The inheritance was the problem. You can imagine that it caused bad blood between us
and Aunt Wil. My brother Jan thought we should decline the inheritance, or
what remained of it, after all, it was nothing but debts. Especially tax debts.
During his final years, father had made a huge mess of his finances.
I learned later on that after his death Aunt Wil sold the home in Blaricum
to pay my fathers tax debts, because she felt that a professor should not
leave behind any debts. Since she was in fact not married to him, she probably could have avoided that.42
37
38
39
40
41
42
Address: Steenakker 2. This house became the property of Wil van Straalen, depriving the three legitimate children of their inheritance.
This was probably on 7 April 1960. The neha board, on which Posthumus still
served, met on that date. The festivities held 29 February in honour of his 80th
birthday figured on the agenda at this meeting. Posthumus was chairman of the
neha association until his death. See iish Archive neha 9.
He passed away on Easter Monday 1960 (18 April) at the St. Jans Hospital in Laren
(nh). See: De Telegraaf, 21 April 1960.
He was buried at the Algemene Begraafplaats [general cemetery] in Blaricum. See:
De Telegraaf, 21 April 1960.
The obituary was the absolute sole notification of his death. The funeral will
be a very quiet affair on Wednesday 20 April [1960]. The obituary was placed by
the children from his first marriage and their spouses, Claire and her husband
and Posthumus sister. Not listed: Willemijn Posthumus-Van der Goot and Wil van
Straalen and her son. iish Archive neha 485. Upon the death of Wil van Straalen in
1997, Rob Posthumus had widow of Prof.dr.mr. N.W. Posthumus printed beneath
his mothers name. iish Archive Claire Posthumus, Box 36.
During this period Wil van Straalen also sold 18th-century price gazettes, privately
owned by N.W. Posthumus, to the antiquarian Menno Hertzberger. See: http://
www.neha.nl/specialcollections/0771comm.php; last accessed 25 October 2013.
I.3
Looking for
Traces of Huizinga
His Relation with
N.W. Posthumus,
Based on Unpublished
Letters and a Text
Huub Sanders
Introduction
The eight-year age difference between Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) and N.W.
Posthumus (1880-1960) cannot possibly be the real reason why the former
became a renowned cultural historian and the latter a pioneer in social and
economic history. During Posthumus student years between 1898 and 1906
in Amsterdam, Marxism was definitely more in vogue than when Huizinga
was studying in Groningen between 1891 and 1895. This may explain why
Posthumus chose the course he did. German studies and comparative linguistics as an area of specialization accommodated Huizingas preference
for language and culture. In 1897 he took his phd on classical theatre in
India. P.J. Blok (1855-1929), who until 1894 was a professor of general and
national history in Groningen and later on in Leiden, encouraged his interest in history and helped him find his first job: in 1897 Huizinga became
a history teacher in Haarlem. Haarlem was also the first historical topic
on which he published.1 In 1905 Blok was the one who arranged to have
1
J. Huizinga, De opkomst van Haarlem (s-Gravenhage, 1905). In this study Huizinga

deals at length with economic subjects. On Huizinga and economic history, see: H.
Baudet, Huizinga en de economische geschiedenis, Groniek, 6 (1973), pp. 166-180.
sa n d e r s l o o ki n g f or trac e s of h u i zi nga
|6 7
Huizinga appointed professor of general and national history in Groningen.

Huizinga had married Mary Vincentia Schorer (1877-1914) in 1902. The couple had five children. The death of this wife and mother was a major blow
to the family in 1914. Describing his state of mind as a deep fog, he followed Bloks advice for the third time and in this year rife with both personal and political tragedy applied for a position as professor of general history
in Leiden.2 He remained there, until the Nazis shut down the university the
day after Cleveringas lecture on 26 November 1940.3
In 1915 he became the editor of De Gids, serving as such until 1932. In 1916
he had joined the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (knaw),
chairing the literature department from 1929 until 1942. From 1932 until
1933 he was rector of the University of Leiden. In 1937 Huizinga remarried.
His second wife was Auguste Schlvinck (1909-1979), who bore him a daughter. He was officially dismissed from his position as a professor on 1 June
1942. On 7 August that year, he was held as a hostage at St Michielsgestel,
where he remained until 25 October 1942. He spent the last three years of
his life at Cleveringas country estate in De Steeg near Arnhem, after being
released on the condition that he should settle in Gelderland or Overijssel.4
Given the small circle of Dutch historians before the Second World War,
one might expect that Posthumus and Huizinga would have been in regular contact, despite their different areas of interest. Posthumus was appointed professor at the Nederlandse Handels Hogeschool in Rotterdam in 1913
and was therefore Huizingas professional equal, although Groningen
was of course renowned and Rotterdam had yet to establish a reputation.
Posthumus became a member of the knaw in 1929. The recommendation
memorandum that led to his appointment was signed by H. Brugmans
(1868-1939), G.W. Kernkamp (1864-1943), C.A. Verrijn Stuart (1865-1948), and
I.H. Gosses (1873-1940).5 Understandably, such a text did not contain negative remarks about the candidate. Its value lies in the course of the evaluation and the merits that these senior scholars credited to the 49 year-old
professor. After listing the publications credited to Posthumus, they wrote:
But [the list] by the very nature of the case cannot do justice to the sound
knowledge, the astuteness, and the strong scholarly awareness of Mr
Posthumus. They submitted that he had an exhaustive command of economic history. And this scholar, who is also an organizer has even
2
3
4
J. Huizinga, Briefwisseling I 1894-1924, Lon Hanssen, W.E. Krl, Anton van der Lem
(eds), ([Utrecht] 1989), p. 170.
P.B. Cleveringa (1894-1980), professor of commercial law and law of civil procedure
at Leiden state university, was dismissed by the Nazis on 27 November 1940.
Short biography of Johan Huizinga by F.W.N. Hugenholtz at: http://www.historici.
nl/Onderzoek/Projecten/BWN/lemmata/bwn1/huizinga; last accessed 24 July 2013;
chronology in Anton van der Lem, Johan Huizinga: leven en werk in beelden & documenten (Amsterdam, 1993), pp. 287-290; Jo Tollebeek, De toga van Fruin: denken over
geschiedenis in Nederland sinds 1860 (Amsterdam, 1996), pp. 201-257.
Noord-Hollands Archief, knaw Archive, 559.
68
created and organized this scholarly practice. His accession to the knaw
introduces an entire branch of historical scholarship not yet represented
there in its own right. Moreover, he was the best representative of this
scholarly discipline. The four concluded that this appointment would cover economics as well. In 1929 Posthumus and his fellow Clio student society member H. Bolkestein (1887-1942) were elected to the knaw Literature
Department, of which Huizinga became the chair from December of that
same year. Bolkestein was the first knaw representative on the board of the
iish, which Posthumus had established in 1935.6 Following the anti-Jewish
measures imposed by the occupation forces, Posthumus cancelled his membership on 11 December 1942: a fairly exceptional act.7 Previously, in 1942,
Posthumus had been dismissed by the occupying forces from his position
as professor at the University of Amsterdam on political grounds, together
with eleven of his colleagues.8
For over twelve years, Posthumus and Huizinga shared a prestigious position and met at meetings of this scholarly society, of which the History and
Literature Department comprised 45 members in 1939/40.9 The combined
meetings of both departments included reports from the audit and review
committee, on which Posthumus served.10 Posthumus was also involved in
the knaw library as secretary to the Library Commission. In 1940 he reported with satisfaction that the period of a backlog, in the library, definitely lay behind them.11 During Huizingas years as chairman, Posthumus
published twice in knaw series, and one of his activities from this period
appears in the inventory of this institutions archive.12 We find no traces
6
7
9
10
11
12
Jaarboek der Koninklijke Nederlandsche Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1935-36, p. 148.

P.W. Klein and M.A.V. Klein-Meijer, Een beeld van een academie: mensen en momenten
uit de geschiedenis van het Koninklijk Instituut en de Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van
Wetenschappen 1808-1998 (Amsterdam, 1998), p. 149, 152; four Leiden professors followed his example and cancelled their membership as well: J.H. Oort (1900-1992),
L.G.M. Baas Becking (1895-1963), W.J. de Haas (1878-1960) and H.A. Kramers (18941952); G. Alberts and H.J. Zuidervaart (eds.), De knaw en de Nederlandse wetenschap
tussen 1930 en 1960 (Amsterdam, 2009), p. 27. In 1940 J.C. Naber (1858-1950) had cancelled his membership, when Royal was dropped from the name. On 1 May 1942
Huizinga was forced to resign as chairman of the knaw Literature Department;
Van der Lem, Johan Huizinga p. 290.
Alberts and Zuidervaart, De knaw en de Nederlandse wetenschap, p. 23 at: http://
search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&
AN=387351; last accessed 5 December 2013.
Jaarboek der Koninklijke Nederlandsche Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1939-40, pp. 17-18.
Determined for the years 1937-1941. Jaarboek der Koninklijke Nederlandsche Akademie
van Wetenschappen, 1937-1942.
Jaarboek der Koninklijke Nederlandsche Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1939-40, p. 130. He
is known to have been a member of this commission by 1937. Others in this commission were P.C. Molhuysen (1870-1944), director of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek
(National Library) until 1937.
N.W. Posthumus, De neringen in de Republiek (Amsterdam, 1937) and Id.,
Levensbericht van Hajo Brugmans (5 maart 1868-6 December 1939), Jaarboek der
|6 9
of joint activities or critiques of each others work in the knaw archive, although both supported a recommendation memorandum for the Austrian
historian Dopsch to become a regular member abroad of the knaw.13 This
document reflects the signatures of Gosses, Posthumus, and Huizinga alongside one another. Huizingas archive at the Leiden University library does
not reflect any other signs of contact between the two.14
With this in mind, the discovery in the neha archive that Huizinga was
the twelfth member of this association is all the more remarkable.15 No archive of Posthumus remains; his activities and contacts are reflected in the
archives of the organizations he served or founded or co-founded. As for his
ties with Huizinga, we find very few traces. A letter to Posthumus dated 18
May 1914 is listed in the annex as the first one. And a letter to him from
Huizinga from 1938, published as the third in this article, is about a request
from Dopsch mentioned above.
We can only speculate about the reasons for the lack of contact between
these two great historians. Politically, Huizinga was moderately conservative, whereas Posthumus was a social democrat. But Huizinga hardly restricted his interactions to kindred spirits. He corresponded extensively
with Henriette Roland-Holst (1869-1952), whose actions were more leftist
than those of Posthumus. Other correspondents of his included Jan Romein
(1893-1962) and Annie Romein-Verschoor (1895-1978), both communists until
well into the 1930s.
The file on Posthumus membership of the knaw contains a form with
data entered by Posthumus.16 At Question 4: Names of the wife and children, he listed only his two children. On 1 August 1928 he had divorced
his first wife, Dorothea Maria van Loon (1881-1960). In the staid society of
the Netherlands in 1929, could this act have deterred Huizinga from staying
13
14
15
16
Koninklijke Nederlandsche Akademie van Wetenschappen (1939-1940), pp. 242-257. The

knaw archive, preserved at the Rijksarchief Noord-Holland, lists this activity as:
No. 294 Letterkundigen, carbon copies of letters to the minister of education,
arts and sciences on grant applications (to the minister) from the Committee to
commemorate Heynryck van Veldeken, by the publisher Paris, by Dr Cramer, by
Mr Suyling, by Professor M.W. Posthumus and from Professor Geyl. M.W. is
most likely a typo for N.W.
Noord-Hollands Archief, knaw Archive 559. Alphons Dopsch (1868-1953), economic
and cultural historian, employed at the Seminar fr Wirtschafts- und Kulturgeschichte,
University of Vienna. He became a member abroad of the knaw in 1936. Huizinga
incorporated Dopschs work in his lectures. See Anton van der Lem, Inventaris van
het archief van Johan Huizinga; Bibliografie 1897-1997 (Leiden, 1998) Inventory, 126 and
138.
Van der Lem, Inventaris archief Huizinga.
iish neha Archive 261 Member register. The 12th member was registered on 10
April 1914: Dr J. Huizinga, Helpman at Groningen. This address has been crossed
out and replaced by: Leiden. Paid through 1919. Followed by: Cancelled 3 June
1919.
Noord-Hollands Archief, knaw Archive 574, 15 April 1929.
70
in touch with Posthumus? This seems unlikely. Admittedly, Huizinga was

known for his traditional values and left no traces at all of any flings in the
extended hiatus between Mary and Auguste, let alone during his marriages.
Even so, he would not have severed ties with more frivolous individuals.17
He maintained close contact with Richard Roland Holst (1868-1938), who
openly had an affair for years, as well as with the rather licentious Andr
Jolles (1874-1946).18 Based on current knowledge, the only conclusion possible is that the two men operated in separate circles, despite frequently
attending the same meetings. Huizinga connoisseur Van der Lem knows
nothing of a falling out between the two.19 The two had separate worlds and
different areas of interest. This appears to have made for minimal contact.
Broadening the search for letters from Huizinga in the archives kept at
the iish, we found many more specimens.20 While many have been published, several have not, including Huizingas letter to Bruno Becker (18851968) dated 6 February 1924, which is published here as No. 2.
Huizinga had several important students, who appear in published correspondence and were in some way involved with the iish. The most important correspondence with Huizinga kept at the iish is the collection
of letters to and from Jan Romein.21 The three published volumes feature
a total of 35 letters from Huizinga to Romein.22 In a letter dated 25 March
1920, Huizinga suggests to Jan Romein that he write a dissertation on a subject connected to Erasmus.23 The editors of the correspondence have added a note indicating that the dissertation with Huizingas comments were
among Romeins personal papers at the iish. This is the Jan Romein archive
No. 224.24 The 27-page handwritten dissertation reflects many remarks that
Huizinga added to the text in red, as well as more detailed commentaries,
also in red, on inserts at the corresponding pages. Before the dissertation,
the file contains a handwritten text by Huizinga, which is a general review
of the history of the interest prohibition concept. This text is published
in the annex to this article as text 1. Romeins degree certificate from
Leiden is among his personal papers as well: cum laude and signed by his
preceptor.25 Romein is important for the iish not only because the personal
17
Catrien Santing, Het liefkozen van schone vormen. Johan Huizinga en het vrouwenvraagstuk, De Gids, 168 (2005), p.122.
18
Ibid., p. 127.
19
Email from Anton van der Lem to Huub Sanders, 8 October 2013.
20
Thanks are due to Bouwe Hijma for his immense assistance in these searches.
21
Short biography of Jan Romein by Albert Mellink at: http://socialhistory.org/bwsa/
biografie/romein; last accessed 25 July 2013.
22
J. Huizinga, Briefwisseling I 1894-1924 (eds.) Lon Hanssen, W.E. Krul, and Anton van
der Lem ([Utrecht], 1989); J. Huizinga, Briefwisseling II 1925-1933 (eds) ibid. ([Utrecht],
1990), J. Huizinga, Briefwisseling III 1934-1945 (eds) ibid. ([Utrecht], 1991).
23 Huizinga, Briefwisseling I 1894-1924, op. cit., p. 291, note 1.
24
iish Archive of Jan Romein: 224 First research paper for the history section of the
degree programme. With corrections. 1920. Includes a rough draft. 1920. 1 folder.
25
iish Archive of Jan Romein, No. 228. The phd thesis of Romein was not supervised
|71
papers of this Marxist historian

are kept there. This student of
Huizingas also served on the
board of the iish from 1947 until
the year of his death in 1962.26
Another student of Huizingas,
A.J.C. Rter (1907-1965), was far
more important for the iish as
an institution for historical scholarship.27 Rter was a bright and
talented student. He took his university degree at age 24 in 1931.
That year Huizinga toured the
Netherlands East Indies, while
Rter and his friend G.W. Locher
(1908-1997) replaced Huizinga
in Leiden as junior assistants.28
In 1935 he took his phd on the
railway strikes study De spoorwegstakingen van 1903. Een spiegel
der arbeidersbeweging in Nederland.
Posthumus brought Rter to the
Johan Huizinga, circa 1940. Photo H. Jonker &
iish by 1935. As Den Boer indiZoon, Leiden. Foto-archief knaw.
cates in the aforementioned short
biography, Huizinga thought very
highly of Rter. This is clear from
the letter of recommendation that Huizinga wrote in 1937, when a vacancy arose in Amsterdam, reading 6. Dr. A.J.C. Rter. Highly gifted and very
mature for his young age. In addition to his work on the Railway strike,
is interested in medieval history, which was his main subject for his first
degree. Proven exceptional ability to access unused sources.29 Ironically,
however, not Rter but Romein was granted the position, albeit only in
1939, after several political manoeuvres. When the iish was shut down in
1940, Posthumus arranged a job for Rter at the Utrecht University library.
After the war he became professor of national history in Leiden (and consequently, following an intermezzo with Colenbrander (1871-1945), succeeded
Huizingas patron Blok). From 1950 until his death in 1965 Rter was direcby Huizinga, but by N. van Wijk (1880-1941).
International Institute of Social History, Jaarverslag 1947-1962.
Short biography of A.J.C. Rter by W. den Boer at: http://www.historici.nl/
Onderzoek/Projecten/BWN/lemmata/bwn1/rueter; last accessed 25 July 2013.
28
Note 3 in G.W. Locher, Het Leidse perspectief, in F. Bovenkerk et al. (eds), Toen en
Thans. De sociale wetenschappen in de jaren dertig en nu (Baarn, 1978), pp. 80-94, 289.
29 Huizinga, Briefwisseling III 1934-1945, pp. 163-164; Huizinga to N.N. 25 January 1937
about the succession of J.S. Theissen (1874-1936) in Amsterdam.
26
27
72
tor of the iish and did much to establish the scholarly reputation of this
Institute.
The personal papers of Rter at the iish include few documents relating
to Huizinga. Inventory No. 6 lists Summary of Beschrijving en verklaring
van Augustinus [...]. First degree dissertation supervised by J. Huizinga.
[1931] Handwritten and typed. 3 covers.30 Pencilled onto these archival documents are three small remarks by Huizinga in pencil. What a difference
from the sea of red on Romeins project.
The iish also holds the personal papers of Jef Suys (1897-1956).31 Two letters to this friend of Jan Romein are in Huizingas handwriting. Suys also
started as a communist and became entangled in a dispute over a professional appointment.32
Yet another student of Huizingas whose published letters are kept at the
iish is Herman Bernard Wiardi Beckman (1904-1945).33 The reconciliation
of social democracy with the Dutch nation that Wiardi Beckman advocated
may be the most visible manifestation of Huizingas political influence.34
Letters 913, 948, and 956, which are about different topics, were published
in Volume II, and the location is listed as: held by family, Aerdenhout.35
In 1994 and 1995 the iish received accruals to the Wiardi Beckman archive,
including copies of the three published letters stated, as well as two unpublished ones, listed as letters 4 and 5.
F.M. Wibaut received a letter from Huizinga dated 20 January 1928.36
At the time Wibaut was briefly on leave as alderman but was interested in the appointment of a successor to Jhr Jan Six (1857-1926) at the
Gemeentelijke Universiteit. Huizinga recommended his friend Andr
Jolles for the position.37 The letter is published in Volume ii of Briefwisseling
[Correspondence].38
30
http://search.socialhistory.org/Record/ARCH01222/Holdings#tabnav; last accessed 26

July 2013.
31
http://hdl.handle.net/10622/ARCH03084; last accessed 26 July 2013.
32 Huizinga, Briefwisseling I 1894-1924, letter 548, p. 527. This original copy at the iish
is in the archive of Jan Romein, correspondence with Suys, inventory number 108
(thanks are due to Alex Geelhoed and Lon Hanssen); Huizinga, Briefwisseling II 19251933, letter 885, pp. 326-328. The original of this letter is listed as being held by S.J.
Suys-Reitsma. Since the personal papers of Jef Suys were transferred to the iish in
2009, a copy of this letter has been located there among that papers.
33
Short biography of Wiardi Beckman by J.S. Wijne at: http://socialhistory.org/bwsa/
biografie/wiardi-beckman; last accessed 26 July 2013.
34
J.S. Wijne, Stuuf Wiardi Beckman: patricir en sociaal-democraat (Amsterdam, 1987).
35
J. Huizinga, Briefwisseling II 1925-1933 p.356, 388 and 393. Originals are probably still
held by the family.
36
http://hdl.handle.net/10622/ARCH01630; last accessed 26 July 2013.
37
Short biography of Jolles by Antoine Bodar at: http://www.historici.nl/Onderzoek/
Projecten/BWN/lemmata/bwn4/jolles; last accessed 26 July 2013. Jolles final work
was a study of freemasonry, commissioned by the sd.
38 Huizinga, Briefwisseling II 1925-1933, letter 747 pp. 193-194. This letter is listed as being located at: Amsterdam, IISG (p. 194). Unfortunately, this letter was not found,
|73
The list of illustrious individuals concludes with Jhr Nicolaas Govert

Teding van Berkhout, Esq. (1885-1942). Volume iii includes a letter from
Huizinga to him dated 7 January 1942.39 This nobleman had been taught
by Huizinga at the Haarlem hbs secondary school. During the First World
War, he had become imbued with anti-militarism. Inspired by his devout
Christian beliefs, he signed the Conscientious objectors manifesto in
1916. Devoting the rest of his life to this cause, he campaigned throughout
Europe and regularly wound up in prison. The suitcase containing the personal papers of Goof, as Nicolaas Govert was known, were entrusted to
Jaap Kloosterman by Jhr J.P.E. Teding van Berkhout, Esq., in 2004.40 Letter
1453 thus travelled from Meppel to the Cruquiusweg in Amsterdam.41
Huizingas letter starts: Dear Govert, I still have a copy of the most recent
edition of my Herfsttij, which I look forward to giving you; the assignment
is obvious.42 Goofs personal papers contain a draft reply, which starts as
follows: Dear Johan, Many thanks for your letter and book, featuring an inscription that leaves nothing to the imagination.43 This edition of the book,
which is from 1941, is not part of the collection of the iish. There was no library, when the personal papers were transferred.44 The obvious assignment
is to be regarded as lost for the time being.
in any case not in the personal papers of F.M. Wibaut, where one might expect to
find it.
39
J. Huizinga, Briefwisseling III 1934-1945, letter 1453 p. 332.
40
iisg Archief iisg, letter from Jaap Kloosterman to J.P.E. Teding van Berkhout, 29
October 2004.
41
Inquiries by Hansen et al. revealed that this letter was held by M.F.W. Teding van
Berkhout, Esq. See Huizinga, Briefwisseling III 1934-1945, p. 332.
42 Huizinga, Briefwisseling III 1934-1945, op. cit. (Note 27), p. 332.
43
IISG Archive N.G. Teding van Berkhout, No. 60.
44
Oral remark by Frank de Jong.
74
Annexes
Letter 1, neha archive: No. 24.
klein toornvliet
helpman
at Groningen
18 May 1914
Dear Sir,
I lack the time, within the rigid deadline you set me, to search consistently for persons eligible for membership of the n.e.h.a. I therefore list only a
few names that come to mind.
G. Mesdag Vz. Dir. agentsch. Ned. Ba.
U.G. Schilthuis, member of the provincial executive
Jhr. R. Feith, Esq., member of the provincial executive
J.H. Geertsema Wz., Esq., secretary to the Chamber of Commerce
Mr H.A. Poelman, state archive commissioner
J.E. Scholten, industrialist
[next page]
F.F. Beukema, Esq. ibid.
Jhr E.v. Beresteyn, Esq., mayor of Veendam
Professor I.B. Cohen, Esq.
Professor C.A. Verrijn Stuart, phd
J.G.C. Joosting, Esq, national archivist
M.C. Offerhaus, Esq., steward of city property.
Except where indicated otherwise, all in Groningen.45

Very truly yours,

J. Huizinga
***
45
Of the persons listed, Poelman, Scholten and Cohen were in fact members of the
neha Association.
|75
Letter 2, personal papers of Bruno Becker (iisg): No. 3 letter from Huizinga
to Becker, 1924.46
Dear Colleague,
Please accept my sincere thanks for your article, which once again reflects excellence in our history, with which you almost put us to shame.47
I would not presume to reply in Russian to somebody so proficient in foreign languages as you:
[next page]
it would be riddled with mistakes! But as a token of my best effort:
Iskrenno Uvazhaiu Vas48

J. Huizinga
Leiden 6 February 1924
***
46
47
48
Bruno Becker (1885-1968). See: http://hdl.handle.net/10622/ARCH02483; last accessed 29 July 2013. At first the archive was at the Eastern Europe Institute of the
University of Amsterdam and pursuant to an agreement dated 20 June 2002, signed
by M.C. Jansen on behalf of the Eastern Europe Institute and by Jaap Kloosterman
on behalf of the Stichting iisg, was entrusted to the iish. Beckers short biography
by M.C. Jansen at historici.nl still lists the location of the archive as the Eastern
Europe Institute. See: http://www.historici.nl/Onderzoek/Projecten/BWN/lemmata/
bwn5/becker#sthash.JQwBulrR.dpuf; last accessed 29 July 2013.
This appears to concern one of these two articles that Becker published in 1923:
Bruno Becker, Iets over Ian van Zuren, zijn drukkerij en zijn medeghesellen,
Het Boek 12, 1923, pp. 313-317, or Idem, Thierry Coornhert et Christophe Plantin,
Compas dor. Bulletin de la Socit de Bibliophiles anversois, 1923, pp. 97-123.
Translation: I sincerely hold you in great esteem. The line in Russian is pre-revolutionary spelling. Thanks are due to Gijs Kessler.
76
Letter 3 (iisg) Netherlands collection, small archives, and isolated documents, Persons, Volume 1.
HUIZINGA, J.
31 Letter from J. Huizinga to N.W. Posthumus, 1938, 1 item.49
Leiden, 27 September 1938
Dear Colleague,
Yesterday I received a letter from Professor Alphons Dopsch in Vienna,
whom you know. He has asked me to assist in helping Professor A. von
Loehr, previously director of the Austrian coin cabinet, who has been dismissed from his position.50 He is working on a book about payment methods and the like in the different countries in earlier times and hopes to
work in the Netherlands and in England to complete his material.
[next page]
He lacks the resources to this end, and Dopsch is asking whether we could
be of assistance here.
Would that not be a perfect cause for your institute?
I cannot send you the letter from Dopsch today. I do not have it here, but
the moment it is returned to me, I will send it to you.51
Best wishes,
J. Huizinga
***
49
50
51
The Collectie Nederland, kleine archieven en losse stukken at the iish was created at an unknown date. In any case, it existed when Anneke Welcker (1920-2009)
and Mies Campfens (1940-2010) were in charge in the 1970s and 1980s. This letter
from Huizinga to the director of the Institute (your Institute) was presumably
addressed to Posthumus as director of the iish. The letter therefore belongs at the
archive of the iish (organization). At some point somebody decided to register it
as a separate archival document. Who, let alone why, is impossible to determine.
Perhaps it was an iish staff member who deeply admired Huizinga?
August von Loehr (1882-1965) studied history and other subjects, was involved with
the royal and imperial coin collections at Vienna since 1906. Very active after 1918
in retaining the royal and imperial collections for Austria despite claims from
successor states. Forced to retire following the Anschluss. In 1938 he was able to
conduct research in London. Whether the request from Dopsch and Huizinga was
fruitful remains unclear. After the Second World War, Von Loehr was still highly
respected in Austrian history and museum circles. He was among the founders of
the Verband sterreichischer Geschichtsvereine. See the short biography of von
Loehr by Erwin Auer, at: http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz53752.html; last accessed 29 July 2013.
Dopschs letter is not known to be among Huizingas personal papers and has not
been found elsewhere either.
|77
Letter 4 Huizinga to H.B. Wiardi Beckman, 17 November 1935.52

Leiden 17 XI 35
Dear Beckman,
Thank you very much for your review. Of course I am open to criticism
and am aware of my weaknesses. I am delighted that you have understood
the book overall in the way I would most appreciate.53
So much better than the reviewer in the Utrechtsch Nieuwsblad of 9 November.
Two minor remarks: at the place
[next page]
... where your page 722 refers, first line at the top, I did not mean any specific statements, perhaps I had Italian oratory in mind. The way from America
to Europe, which you attribute to me on the same page, does not ring any
bells, but there might be a connection.
This week an important phd defence supervised by Colenbrander: A.J.C.
Rter on the Railway strikes and the like. You will soon see the book.
I hope you are doing well. If you happen to be in Leiden, I would be delighted, if you came to visit me. After 1 January, my address will be Van
Slingelandtweg 4.
Best wishes,
Yours,

J. Huizinga.
****
52
53
Copies of letters 4 and 5 are in the personal papers of H.B. Wiardi Beckman at the
iish in the 1994 accrual. On the cover is a handwritten note from Mies Campfens,
reading addition to the archive of H. Wiardi Beckman (copies) Mies [= initials]
11-11-94.
H.B. Wiardi Beckman, [Bespreking van] In de schaduw van morgen, De Socialistische
Gids. Maandschrift der Sociaal-Democratische Arbeiderspartij, 20 (1935), pp. 718-25.
78
Letter 5 Huizinga to H.B. Wiardi Beckman, 3 September 1940

Leiden 3 September 1940
Dear Friend,
We had long been planning to invite you over again, but we were away for
a week. It would be delightful, if we could meet Mrs Wiardi Beckman at
this occasion as well, who as we heard from Suze Kuenen, returned home a
while ago.54 Would you join us for dinner (but wait: the blackout!). Should
that be an obstacle, could you come have coffee with us on a Sunday? I presume you work during office hours during the week? Sunday the 8th we
have plans, but what about Sunday the 15th? How complicated it is these
days to make even the simplest appointment! Please let me know, what
would suit you; you are of course welcome to come visit on other dates.
Best wishes v.h.t.h.55
Yours,
J. Huizinga
***
Text 1 iish Archive of Jan Romein, No. 224.56
Plato, Arist., Cato, Seneca condemned interest [payment]. But laws prohibiting it were impossible to enact. Restrictions set during the Roman Empire:
Diocl. Const. 12%, Just. 6%. church fathers contest this. Conc. Arles 314,
Nicaea 325 prohibited clergy, capitularies also prohibited laypeople, include
all trade for profit. Ibid. Lat. 1179, Lyon 1274, Vienne 1311.
But scholasticism acknowledges: right to compensation for damnum emergens, lucrum cessans, periculum sortis, mora. landrecht [land law] allows: interest instead of pledge, rentekoop etc.
Theory of pretium iustum. One was not allowed to take advantage of ignorance or diffidence of buyers.
Cities simultaneously devised the lending system and legislation prohibiting the right of pre-emptive purchase.
Lat. 1517 revised and defined it: deriving profit from the use of a barren
business without investing labour, expenses or danger the hum., the Ref.
54
55
56
Suzanna Maria Kuenen (1916-1980). First degree in history, Leiden, 1940. See
Huizinga, Briefwisseling III 1934-1945, p. 347; Wiardi Beckman was married to Maria
Petronella Margaretha Wackie Eijsten.
v.h.t.h.: van huis tot huis: from door to door.
I will merely state in full the abbreviated names and concepts: Aristotle, Roman,
Diocletian, Constantine, Justinian, Council of Arles, Council of Nicaea, clergy
(third) Council of Lateran, Council of Lyon, Council of Vienne, (fifth) Lateran
Councils, humanists, Reformation.
|79
except Calvin maintained it under the laws of states, it came to be restricted or was officially enforced
Originals in Dutch:
Brief 1 archief neha: nr. 24.
klein toornvliet
helpman
bij Groningen
18.V.14
Zeer Geachte Heer,
De tijd ontbreekt mij, om in den korten tijd, die U mij stelt, stelselmatig
naar personen te zoeken, die voor het lidmaatschap van het n.e.h.a. in aanmerking kunnen komen. Ik geef dus slechts eenige namen, die mij invallen:
G. Mesdag Vz. Dir.agentsch.Ned.Ba.
U.G. Schilthuis, lid v. gedep. staten
Jhr.Mr. R. Feith, lid v. gedep. staten
Mr. J.H. Geertsema Wz., secr. KvK.
Dr. H.A. Poelman, comm. Rijksarchief
J.E. Scholten, industrieel
[volgende bladzijde]
Mr. F.F. Beukema, id.
Jhr.Mr. E. v. Beresteyn, burgem. v. Veendam
Prof.Mr. I.B. Cohen,
Prof.Dr. C.A. Verrijn Stuart
Mr. J.G.C. Joosting, Rijksarchivaris
Mr. M.C. Offerhaus, rentmeester der stadsbezittingen.
Zonder bijvoeging allen te Groningen.
Hoogachtend,

Uw dw.

J. Huizinga
***
80
Brief 2 archief Bruno Becker: nr. 3 brief van Huizinga aan Becker, 1924.
Zeer Geachte Collega
Ontvang mijn oprechte dank voor Uw artikel, dat opnieuw getuigt van
een meesterschap in onze geschiedenis, waarmee U ons bijna beschaamt.
Ik waag mij tegenover iemand die zijn vreemde talen zoo beheerscht als
U, niet aan een russisch ant
woord; het zou al te gebrekkig uitvallen! Maar om mijn goeden wil te
toonen:
Iskrenno Uvazhaiu Vas

J. Huizinga
Leiden 6 Febr.24
***
Brief 3 Collectie Nederland, kleine archieven en losse stukken, Personen,
deel 1,
HUIZINGA, J
31
Brief van J. Huizinga aan N.W. Posthumus. 1938, 1 stuk.
Leiden,
27 IX 38
Waarde college,
Gisteren ontving ik een brief van prof. Alphons Dopsch te Weenen, U welbekend, die mijn medewerking inriep ten behoeve van prof. A. von Loehr,
vroeger directeur van het Oostenrijksche Mnzkabinett, nu ontslagen. Deze
werkt aan een boek over betalingswijzen enz. in de verschillende landen in
vroegeren tijden en zou ter completeering van zijn materiaal nog gaarne in
Nederland en in Engeland werken.
|8 1
[ volgende bladzijde]
Daartoe ontbreken hem echter de middelen, en nu vraagt Dopsch of men
hier iets zou kunnen doen.
Zou dat niet juist iets zijn voor Uw Instituut?
Ik kan U heden den brief van Dopsch niet zenden, ik heb hem niet hier,
maar zoodra ik dien terug krijg, zal ik hem laten volgen.
Met vriendelijke groeten.

Gaarne Uw dw.
J. Huizinga
***
Brief 4 Huizinga aan H.B. Wiardi Beckman, 17 november 1935.

Leiden 17 XI 35
Waarde Beckman,
Hartelijk dank voor Uw bespreking. Ik sta natuurlijk open voor kritiek,
en ben mij zwakke plekken wel bewust. Het verheugt mij, dat ge het boek
als geheel zoo zeer begrepen hebt in den zin, die mij het liefst is.
Wel heel veel beter dan den beoordeelaar in het Utrechtsch Nieuwsblad van
9 November.
Twee kleine kantteekeningen: op de plaats,
waarop Uw blz. 722 eerste regel bovenaan slaat, heb ik geen bepaalde uitingen op het oog gehad; mogelijk heeft mij Italiaansche oratorie voor den
geest gezweefd. Den gang van Amerika naar Europa, dien ge me op dezelfde
bladzijde toeschrijft, ben ik mij niet bewust, maar het verband kan bestaan.
Deze week onder Colenbrander een belangrijke promotie: A.J.C. Rter,
De Spoorwegstakingen enz. Ge zult het boek wel spoedig zien.
Ik hoop dat het U naar wensch gaat. Voert Uw weg U naar Leiden, dan
houd ik mij voor een bezoek aanbevolen. Na 1 Januari a.s. zal mijn adres
zijn Van Slingelandtweg 4.
Met vriendelijke groeten,

De Uwe

****
J. Huizinga.
82
Brief 5 Huizinga aan H.B.Wiardi Beckman, 3 september 1940

Leiden 3.IX.40
Amice,
Wij hadden al lang het plan, je weer eens een bezoek hier voor te stellen, maar nu waren we zelf een week van huis. Het aardigst zou het zijn,
als we dan ook met Mevrouw Wiardi Beckman mochten kennismaken, die
immers, naar we van Suze Kuenen hoorden, al lang weer thuis is. Zoudt ge
samen kunnen komen eten (maar ho! de verduistering!). Levert dat bezwaar op, kan het dan koffiedrinken op een zondag zijn? In de week zijt
ge zeker aan kantooruren gebonden? Zondag 8 zijn wij waarschijnlijk niet
thuis, maar zondag 15? Wat wordt zelfs het maken van de eenvoudigste
afspraak in dezen tijd omslachtig! Laat eens hooren, wat U mogelijk is; voor
ons staan natuurlijk ook andere data open.
Met vriendelijke groeten v.h.t.h.
de Uwe
J. Huizinga
***
Tekst 1 iisg Archief Jan Romein, nr. 224
Plato, Arist., Cato, Seneca verwerpen rente. Maar verbodswetten onuitvoerbaar. Rom. Keizertijd stelt grenzen: Diocl. Const. 12%, Just. 6%. kerkvaders
bestrijden het. Conc. Arles 314, Nicaea 325 verbieden het aan geestel.- capitularia ook aan leeken: begrijpen er ook alle winsthandel in. id. Lat. 1179,
Lyon 1274, Vienne 1311.
Maar scholastiek erkent: recht op vergoeding van damnum emergens, lucrum cessans, periculum sortis, mora. landrecht staat toe: rente in pl. van
pand, rentekoop etc.
Theorie v. pretium iustum. Men mocht geen gebruik maken v. onwetendh.
of verlegenheid des koopers.
De steden ontwikkelen tegelijk het credietwezen en de
anti-voorkoopswetgev.
Lat. 1517 hernieuwt en definieert het: uit het gebruik eener onvruchtbare
zaak zonder arbeid, kosten en gevaar winst trekken de hum., de ref.
behalve Calvijn handhaven het. de staatswetten stellen nu grenzen, of
handhaven het formeel.
I.4
I.4
Working
Workingfor
for
the
theInstitute
Institute

Kees
KeesdedeDood,
Dood,
N.W.
N.W.Posthumus
Posthumusand the
International
and the International
Institute of
Social
Institute
History,
of Social
1940-1950*
History,1940-1950
Alex
Geelhoed
Alex
Geelhoed
What happens today is also history

(N.W. Posthumus, as quoted by C. de Dood in a letter,
10 June 1948)
Although I did not work at the International Institute of Social History (iish)
until 1997, I had the privilege of becoming acquainted with many of Jaap
Kloostermans predecessors as director, and his successors as well. Certainly
the most renowned was founder Nicolaas Wilhelmus Posthumus (18801960), whom I obviously never met. He was admirable for his pioneering,
his energy, networking, and success in realizing so many projects, and remaining a red hot socialist in his mind,1 as well as for his intriguing per-
I wish to express my warm thanks for the comments made by my daughters Fenna
(screenwriter) and Anne (editor), and my wife Sanne Benjamin (secretary). I refer as
much as possible to sources in English.
In a Dutch secret service report, he was speculatively called a champagne
communist, and a much too solid capitalist to be communistic at the same time.
National Archives of the Netherlands, The Hague, Archive 2.03.01, Cabinet of the
Minister President/Kabinet Ministerpresident, inventory no. 5657.
g e e l h o e d w orki ng f or the i ns ti tu te
|8 5
sonal charms. As part of an answer to a questionnaire by the Netherlands

Economic History Archive in 1950, he described the circumstances that
benefited his success in life: Working hard; receptive to new ideas.2
Posthumus initiated a string of prominent libraries and archival institutions, he nonetheless never formed his own personal archival collection.
He has only left scattered letters and documents in archives of other people
and institutions.3
Years ago I did research on the foundation of the new Faculty for Political
and Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam during and after World
War ii. Professor Posthumus, in friendly cooperation with his colleague,
historian Jan Romein, aimed at a radical modernization of the university, introducing the study of politics to address the gross political naivete
of the Dutch intelligentsia, as demonstrated against National-Socialism.
Soon, however, this initiative of the Seventh Faculty, otherwise known as
the Red Faculty, was frustrated by the Cold War.4 In the preliminary stage
of this faculty, N.W. Posthumus had contact with an Amsterdam-based discussion group in the spring of 1945, just before the liberation. Atypically,
Posthumus collected the letters and documents he received from this group
of seven, called Werkgemeenschap 7 (Study group 7), in a file he had preserved
in the archives of the Institute for War Documentation (niod, which still
exists). In 1945 this was an example of the scientific institutions founded by
Posthumus.5 (See below for more comments on this study group.)
One of the seven members was the for me then unknown novelist and
journalist, Cornelis de Dood, who seemed to be a lovable obstinate person, and who, as he stated, knew the gentle art of making enemies (J.
Whistler). The very use of his name was somewhat odd, even macabre,
as dood means death, but he was never bothered by it, on the contrary.
Ironically and exaggeratedly, De Dood found himself a tall, nervous man of
letters, a bitter cynic, completely lacking any business aptitude and at the
same time a genuine socialist, with a sense of humor.6
2
3
4
5
International Institute of Social History (iish), Amsterdam, Institutional archives of

the Netherlands Economic History Archive, inventory no. 269.
See the short biography of N.W. Posthumus by his successor as director of the
iish, A.J.C. Rter, in the Bulletin of the International Institute of Social History (1953),
also at the website of the International Institute of Social History http://hdl.handle.
net/10622/S0921254X00000970?locatt=view:master ; last accessed 3 November 2013.
See also a biographical sketch by A. Mellink: http://socialhistory.org/en/about/
posthumus; last accessed 3 November 2013.
Peter Jan Knegtmans, From Illustrious School to University of Amsterdam (Amsterdam,
2007), pp. 221-222.
niod Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam, Dossier
Werkgemeenschap 7, 249-0904A. No letters from N.W. Posthumus have been
preserved, just a few of his remarks are to be found in the margin of the letters by
J. Franken of this study group.
See on C. de Dood as a social-democrat Alex Geelhoed, Kees de Dood als stekelig
sociaal-democraat (1923-1933), in Ido de Haan et al., Het eenzame gelijk. Hervormers
86
Cornelis de Dood was born in 1892 in Amsterdam to a prosperous middle class family. In his youth, Kees de Dood (as he was called) was part of a
Bohemian group of poets, painters, and other raging artists and intellectuals, among them Erich Wichman, an artist, provocateur and proto-fascist7
whom De Dood both loved and later detested, and despite all still loved.
Members of this bunch performed at Dada-esque manifestations in the
years following the First World War. Next, we find De Dood as a journalist in
Berlin, as foreign correspondent for one of the leading Dutch newspapers,
Het Vaderland, and also working for German and American press agencies.
He even met Hitler in the early years of his movement. While in the culturally bustling German capital he married the Dutch expressionist ballet
dancer Florrie Rodrigo;8 the couple remained childless. After their return
to Amsterdam, De Dood had a unique successful play produced on stage in
1925 by the director Albert van Dalsum. After that he worked as a journalist at the Dutch social-democratic daily newspaper Het Volk, and he turned
out to be a popular orator at numerous party meetings of the sdap (Social
Democratic Labour Party) and its affiliates. In 1932 he became a member of
the Amsterdam city council, but the following year he exchanged his social-democratic seat for a position in the communist party group. This act
stemmed from his political radicalization after the Nazi-seizure of power,
as well as because he was offended by an intentional negative review of his
new book (a Dutch Literature History) in the party press. His betrayal of
the sdap raised a hell of a row, reported by every newspaper in the country. De Dood too much of an individualist never became a true communist, and in his next novel he criticized communist practices. After that he
was no longer active on the political stage. He was an author of 15 books
published under various pseudonyms, novels as well as detective-stories.
He also wrote the first radio drama in the Netherlands, some plays, regular columns, short stories, and a political brochure in 1931 (Het Plan Briand,
which also appeared in French: Le Plan Briand), hardly any best sellers. In
the 1950s he mainly worked on translations, for example, the first biography of Sigmund Freud into Dutch. His masterpiece, however, was the threevolume translation in English of The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh for
an American publisher (1958). At the same time he translated into English
a series of profiles on Dutch artists and architects, that have been distributed all over the world by the Department of Education, Arts, and Sciences.
The American weekly The Nation published a one-off article on Benelux
7
8
tussen droom en daad 1850-1950 (Amsterdam, 2009), pp. 289-301. Documents on and by
C. de Dood can be found in several record offices and also in a small collection at
the iish, Amsterdam, together with all his publications.
He died the first day of 1929, and did not live long enough to experience the real
consequences of fascism in power.
See a short biography at: http://socialhistory.org/bwsa/biografie/rodrigues; last
accessed 11 November 2013. Florrie was born as Flora Rodrigues (1893-1996).
|8 7
Disunion in 1954. His greatest disappointment, however, was that publishers in the 1950s declined his philosophical essay The revolt of science, in
which, based on the English medieval philosopher Francis Bacon, he emphatically argued for the use of common sense science in international
politics.9
Both C. de Dood and N.W. Posthumus were hard workers, promoters
of science, socialists, and definitely strongly opinionated, for better or for
worse. In 1965, five years after the death of Posthumus, Kees de Dood died
at the age of 72. Now he is largely forgotten, whereas the fame of N.W.
Posthumus remains.
In this article I shall deal with some of the meetings and collaborations
between C. de Dood and N.W. Posthumus, mainly around World War ii.
The Project for Unemployed Intellectuals

To my surprise, I found two letters in which C. de Dood remarked about
his teacher and master Prof. Posthumus.10 So they knew each other beyond the already mentioned Werkgemeenschap 7? Luckily, the municipal
Amsterdam archive (Stadsarchief) has kept a few school archives. It so happens that these include the secondary schools where de Dood had been a
student. Posthumus had been his teacher in the 1st Openbare Handelsschool
(Public Trades School), where, in the years 1908-1910, Kees de Dood had been
a mediocre student, weak in trade history and trade law (usually taught by
Posthumus), and even in Dutch!11 This did not prevent him from portraying
teachers, sometimes even for economics, in an inspired role.
Not until the Second World War did I find another mention of C. de Dood
together with N.W. Posthumus, by now in his sixties, Professor of Economic
History at the Amsterdam University, Director of the Netherlands Economic
History Archive, which included the Economic-Historical Library, and director of the International Institute of Social History,12 while his wife, Mrs.
W.H. Posthumus-van der Goot (1897-1989), was President of the Board of the
9
10
11
12
iish, Archives of C. de Dood.

De Dood used the Dutch word leermeester, implying both teacher and master, in
letters of 10 June 1948 (University Library, Utrecht, Archives P.H. Ritter Jr.) and of
4 June 1956 (National Archives of the Netherlands, The Hague, Archive 2.14.69,
Department of Arts of the Ministry of Education, Arts, and Sciences/Afdeling
Kunsten, Ministerie van Onderwijs, Kunsten en Wetenschappen, 1945-1965,
inventory no. 2691). In the first letter he cited the words as in the motto above this
article.
Stadsarchief (Municipal Archives), Amsterdam, Archive 800, Eerste Openbare
Handelsschool, inventory no. 85 and 175.
On the history of the iish: http://socialhistory.org/en/about/history-iish.
Bibliography: http://socialhistory.org/en/about/iish-bibliography; last accessed 3
November 2013.
88
International Archives for the Womens Movement (iav), housed in two

rooms in the building of the iish.
In 1940 De Dood at the age of 48 was in deep despair, as he had not held
a paid position since leaving the city council of Amsterdam in 1935. He
and his wife had even fled to Brussels, no longer feeling accepted in the
Netherlands. After their return to Amsterdam, a few years later, only a small
unemployment relief had been granted him, as the couple claimed to lack
any income, though, strangely enough, De Dood published no fewer than
five books in those years. A low point was reached when his typewriter,
bought on hire purchase, was taken back under the eyes of a visiting official of the municipal relief organization.13 In a dramatic letter of 19 July
1940 (after the German occupation had begun!) to the Ministry of Education,
he summed up his publications and all the prominent persons who could
recommend him for a decent job. He urged for state support, and if not,
suicide could be the only respectful way out of his distress.14 The 250 Dutch
guilders which have been remitted as a result seemed to have been sufficient to avoid the worst. Nevertheless, the mental problems he had were
real enough for him to visit a psychiatrist for more than a year.
Nearly the same day as the desperate letter by De Dood to the ministry,
the German occupiers, the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, took over the International
Institute of Social History. Director Posthumus had to hand over all his 16
keys. The iish was locked to the public just a few days after the closure of
the iav and the director and his staff had been dismissed.15 (In 1942 he was
also fired as professor at the University of Amsterdam.)
Posthumus had foreseen the Nazi danger, so he had sent the most valuable parts of the collection, including the original Marx-Engels Papers, to the
uk, where they stayed safely in Oxford during the war. In the two days before
the actual closure of his Institute, he managed even then to rescue 20 boxes
containing rare brochures and leaflets, which were transported to elsewhere
in Amsterdam. Equally, Posthumus considered it his duty to find work and
income for his sacked personnel. This resulted, with the help of the Ministry
of Social Affairs and of the city of Amsterdam, in an unemployment project
for iish staff. To be safe from future troubles, he cleverly invited a (more apolitical) colleague at the University, Professor N.B. Tenhaeff, to have the official
responsibility.16 In practice, 56 year-old Mrs. Annie Adama van Scheltema13
14
15
16
Stadsarchief (Municipal Archives), Amsterdam, Archive 5256, Gemeentelijk Bureau

voor Maatschappelijke Steun (Municipal Bureau for Social Relief), file no. 183740.
National Archives of the Netherlands, The Hague, Archive 2.14.69, Department of
Arts of the Ministry of Education, Arts, and Sciences, inventory no. 2043.
18 July 1940. See on the looting of the iish: Karl Heinz Roth, The International
Institute of Social History as a pawn of Nazi Social research New documents on
the iish during German occupation rule from 1940-1944, International Review of
Social History, 34 (1989), supplement.
Nicolaas Bernardus Tenhaeff had been appointed in 1938 Professor for General
History of the Middle Ages and Modern Times at the University of Amsterdam;
|8 9
Kleefstra, his closest collaborator at the iish, supervised this

project, which started the first
of January 1941, and closed not
earlier then in the autumn of
1946.17 More than 20 unemployed intellectuals found jobs
in the project, among them the
former iish members. (Some
were Jews and soon had to
go underground or try to flee
from the Netherlands, as for
example, Dr Boris Sapir, head
of the Russian Department
of the iish, who succeeded in
reaching Cuba and later the
United States.) Surprisingly,
Posthumus additionally included his former student C. de
Dood as the only outsider on
the list of personnel. So there
must have been some renewed
contact between them. As early as the beginning of 1940 he
C. de Dood. Date unknown. IISH BG B29/420
probably had De Dood also in
mind as the destitute cultural
worker for a temporary job
of collecting and editing data for research on the relation between culture
and society in history. This project, however, probably never came into fulfilment.18 On second thoughts this project could have been shipwrecked by the
closure of the iish, which resulted all in all into the suicide letter by De Dood.
What did they, what did De Dood actually do in the unemployment project? De Dood later wrote only vaguely on his contribution to the war archives that became the Institute for War Documentation.19 Only recently did
17
18
19
J.Romein was rejected for this chair, with the support of N.W. Posthumus.
Within a few years however a true friendship between these two began to
flourish.Tenhaeff in 1939 joined the General Board of the iish.
Annie Adama was the widow of the socialist poet C.S. Adama van Scheltema,
who had been a friend of Posthumus during his student years. Annie Adama
had already worked a couple of years in the Economic-Historical Library with
Posthumus. See for a short biography of Annie Adama van Scheltema (1884-1977):
http://socialhistory.org/nl/node/681; last accessed 3 November 2013.
iish, Institutional archives of the of the Netherlands Economic History Archive,
inventory no. 142.
See footnote 10, the second mentioned letter of 4 June 1956.
90
I discover a thick file in the municipal archives, which allowed me to realize how long he had worked on this, what the nature of the work was,
and the annual progress.20 The purpose was to classify and catalogue 20,000
iish brochures and leaflets that had been saved from the German robbers
at the very end. The official documents on this project concealed its real
nature; the brochures were only specified in general terms, and neither
the iish nor Posthumus was mentioned. The second task was the work on
the war catalogue, consisting of systematically arranged, typed index cards
containing references to newspaper reports on the political, military, economic, social, and cultural events of the war. The sources were dozens of
German controlled Dutch newspapers and journals, including even the
Jewish Weekly (Joodsche Weekblad, 1941-1943) and also ten German papers such
as Die Vlkischer Beobachter and the Frankfurter Zeitung (until 1943). One day
the Sicherheitsdienst became inquisitive about this work on all the newspapers. Obviously, in a strictly scientific account, nothing was explained about
Posthumuss real intentions.21 This last project can be considered as the early (1941) start of his initiative for the Institute for War Documentation. The
war catalogue with its 120,000 cards, finished in 1946, can still be seen in the
reading room of this institute in Amsterdam.
For De Dood, this work meant that he had a steady income for five years
(1941-1945). He earned 26 Dutch guilders a week, more than twice his unemployment benefit. He had, in fact, along with one other colleague, the
highest income of the team. I have the impression that the cataloguing
work of the iish material went fairly quickly, the official progress however
was slower, as can be seen in the annual reports.22 Participation and income
should have been more important. This work allowed De Dood to pay more
of his creative attention to his novel Mozes, which was based on thoughts of
Sigmund Freud. This book, that I consider as his finest work, was published
by the Wereldbibliotheek in 1947, under the pseudonym Per Olafson.
Apart from the cataloguing, done in a room of the central university
building, the Oudemanhuispoort (at the Kloveniersburgwal), the presence of
De Dood could also be noted in visitors books of the Economic-Historical
Library (ehb).23 It is possible that some work on the project (also) took place
20
21
22
23
Stadsarchief (Municipal Archives), Amsterdam, Archive 5186, Secretarie Afdeling

Sociale Zaken (Department of Social Affairs), inventory no. 2241, file 479.
iish, Institutional archives, inventory no. 308, where lists of the newspapers for the
war catalogue can be found, but nothing on cataloguing the iish brochures.
After the war Posthumus considered it a success, because the team had catalogued
as much material as would have been done in ten years under normal conditions.
(Report Het Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis tijdens de oorlog
by N.W. Posthumus, Autumn 1945, in Maria Hunink, Papieren van de revolutie. Het
Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1935-1947 (Amsterdam, 1986), pp.
326-338.
iish, Institutional archives of the Netherlands Economic History Archive, inventory
no. 441 and 537.
|9 1
in this library, as lists demonstrate that a number of the newspapers were

delivered by the Public Library at the ehb.
Maybe coincidentally, but worth mentioning as well, is that the son of
the woman who sublet two rooms in the attic in the house at the Geulstraat
to De Dood and his wife, C.M. Kuster, studied economics and corresponded
with Prof Posthumus and his substitute Dr J.C. Westerman at the ehb on an
exam in economic history. Kuster was not officially registered at that time,
as he had refused to sign a declaration to refrain from anti-German acts;
this proved no serious impediment to the requested exam.24
During the war Kees de Dood did not publish anything in the German controlled press, nor did he become a member of the Kultuurkamer (all artists had
to become a member or were not permitted to perform their art). Nearly all
De Doods books from before the war had officially been banned because of
their political content and the misconception that he was Jewish. His Jewish
wife, Florrie Rodrigo, had an even more difficult time; she lost nearly all her
family in the extermination camps. When her sister was arrested for being
in her house illegally, Florrie Rodrigo was lucky to be out at that time; otherwise, she would have been taken too. This may explain why, according to
Florrie, her husbands hair turned grey overnight during the war.
Posthumus was dismissed from nearly all his positions during the war,
and he most probably resigned on his own initiative as director from
the Netherlands Economic History Archive and the Economic-Historical
Library,25 and from the Academy of Sciences26 in 1942 when the Jewish members had been driven out of these institutions. In the last years of the war,
he lived in Noordwijk and Leiden, where he and his wife hid a Jewish child,
for which in 2008 they received the Yad Vashem medal, long after their
death. The war experiences were summarized in a doggerel commemorating his 25-year jubilee as professor (in 1947):
In the eyes of the Krauts he acted not at his best,
They horribly hated him like the pest.
His position and books were stolen by the Huns.
They took away also his means and funds.
Entlassen war der Posthumus,
So sounded the dirty German excuse.27
24
25
26
27
iish, Netherlands Economic History Archive, Bijzondere Collecties (Special

Collections) 496, N.W. Posthumus, Eerste aanvulling (First supplement), inventory
no. 3c.
The circumstances of this dismissal in spring 1942 are not completely clear, as
there are no unambiguous sources.
December 1942. Peter Jan Knegtmans, De Akademie tijdens de bezetting, in G.
Alberts and H.J. Zuidervaart (eds), De knaw en de Nederlandse wetenschap tussen 1930 en
1960 (Amsterdam, 2009), pp.13-37, 27 and 36.
iish, Archives of [daughter] Claire Posthumus, box 36, file 4. The verses were
recited in turn by W.H. Posthumus-van der Goot, her sister Annie, and others.
92
As he no longer had any official position in Amsterdam, he directed his

attention to all kinds of plans for when the war would be over, i.e. the
founding of a Faculty for Political Social Sciences and the Institute for War
Documentation, and, less known, his involvement in the establishment
of the Netherlands Society for International Affairs (Nederlands Genootschap
voor Internationale Zaken), one of the predecessors of the present ClingendaelInstitute.28 He was also a member of the Board of Commissioners at the Brill
Publishing Company in Leiden. In 1942 he had another group working on
collecting war pamphlets and resistance journals in annex buildings. This
was completely unofficial, not to say illegal, unlike the Amsterdam cataloguing project. For all this Leiden material, good hiding places had been
necessary,29 until it could be of use after the liberation in the Institute for
War Documentation. As a completely neutral scientific historian, however,
Posthumus succeeded in 1943 in publishing a voluminous book on Dutch
price history.
Study Group Werkgemeenschap 7

At his Leiden address, in April and May 1945 (and probably earlier), N.W.
Posthumus received a series of letters and documents from Amsterdam,
signed by a man called J. Franken on behalf of the Werkgemeenschap 7 (w7),
also concerning plans for after the war. This evidently offered another occasion for cooperation with C. de Dood.
The study group w7 consisted of Joop van Santen (1908-1992), economist,
active in the communist resistance and involved in De Vrije Katheder, a periodical that was duplicated at his own house; he also gave shelter to some
Jews and even a German deserter. In 1946 Van Santen became a member
of the Amsterdam city council and the Senate of the Parliament for the
Communist Party. In the early 1950s, however, he left the party because of
his dissident opinions. For w7 he wrote a rather philosophical manifesto.
His wife Joop van Santen-Moes (1911-1998) was also a member. She was a
physician and was involved in helping Jewish children and De Vrije Katheder.
After the war she played a role in the communist womens movement.
Other w7-members were the lawyer Max Geerling (1899-1972), anti-Nazi,
28
29
Itook the liberty to translate a few of these original Dutch lines: In moffenoogen
was hij niet best/Ze hadden aan hem gruwelijk de pest/Ontnamen hem zijn ambt
en boeken/Entlassen war der Posthumus/ Zoo klonk hun vuile Duitsche smoes.
N.W. Posthumus was a member of the Board of Directors. See Prospectus
Nederlandsch Genootschap voor Internationale Zaken (1947), p. 6.
Lydia Winkel and Posthumuss son Jan Huibert (1909-1991) were among
the people who took part in this. See Jaarverslag 1945-1946 Rijksinstituut voor
Oorlogsdocumentatie (The Hague, 1948), pp. 6-7; and also Lydia Winkel, Mijn werk
bij Oorlogsdocumentatie 1, Lecture, vara Radio, 7 July 1956, typescript in niod
Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam, Institutional
archives.
|9 3
who was taken hostage by the Germans; G.J. van der Heijden (1897-1982),
an apolitical businessman; Henk Beishuizen (1910-1945), a journalist for the
(resistance) newspaper Het Parool, and more importantly, Kees de Dood, who
undoubtedly mediated between the discussion group and Posthumus, and
finally, J. Franken.
J.H.A. Franken (1896-1955) was a leading commercial agent for plastics,
mainly from Germany. He had grown up in a textile milieu in Tilburg and
as a youngster he was employed by the Deli-Atjeh Handel-Maatschappij and
worked for over ten years for that firm in the East-Indies. Surprisingly,
De Dood was also an employee of the Deli-Atjeh for a short time, in the
Amsterdam head office. In the manuscript of an unpublished novel, De
Dood ironically portrayed Franken under the name of Kroon (both names
are used for foreign currencies, francs and crown). Many of the facts in the
book are realistic, though this may not be true of the portrayal of Frankens
character and gestures. He is described as a thick-set figure, but lively, not to
say hot-tempered.30
From this cooperation between De Dood and Franken (who lived in the
same Amsterdam neighborhood) earlier in the war, w7 started discussions
in September 1944 at the office of Franken at Singel 66. (De Dood worked
for his firm in that period as a pedantic business correspondent in foreign
languages, much to the irritation of the other staff.)31 The Werkgemeenschap
7 saw itself as a political, economic, social, and cultural study group, politically heterogeneous, but definitely democratic and emancipative. The intention was objective knowledge, and therefore more scientifically based
politics. This was a theme that had interested De Dood since the 1930s, and
Posthumus and Romein tried to realize it in their new Faculty for Political
and Social Sciences. This Faculty was also supposed to include institutes for
Russia and America and other areas. And with respect to the idea of adding
a Central Europe Institute, J. Franken offered a partnership to Posthumus.
The plan was that this institute would be oriented to science as well as
commerce. In the w7 files, a draft with both their names typed as signatories can be found for the establishment of a foundation for these institutes, mainly to attract financial support. The prospect of a large sum of
at least 100,000 Dutch guilders (about 543,548 in 2012), was held out to
Posthumus. Indeed, a year later, in 1946, a brochure by Posthumus was published on behalf of a Dutch Foundation for Political and Social Sciences, but
it is not certain if this is the same as the one designed by Franken.
Aside from the Singel address, Werkgemeenschap 7 had a few rooms in
a building on the Nieuwe Spiegelstraat at the corner of the Herengracht,
which had been taken from a German firm. w7 housed its library there,
partly consisting of books captured from national-socialist and German or30
31
iish, Archives of C. de Dood, manuscipt of Su, de korengaarster.

Interview Alex Geelhoed, Bussum, 29 March 2000, with J.P. Steenhoff, who, in 1945,
was a young employee of J.H.A. Franken.
94
ganizations. Books were also been offered to scientific libraries. Nationalsocialist books stored on the premises of the publishing house Allert de
Lange (de Lange had come across these when it was resurrected) were offered to the Institute for War Documentation. (Allert de Lange had published Exil authors in the 1930s, and had therefore been liquidated by the
Germans soon after the occupation began.32) C. de Dood certainly facilitated
the transfer of the books, as he had published a book with Allert de Lange
before, and another one soon after the war. In letters signed by Posthumus,
the Institute for War Documentation welcomed this offer.
A couple of days preceding the German capitulation, Franken discussed handing over the materials of the Deutsche Informations Bibliothek in
Amsterdam with Posthumus, as compensation for the German robbery of
Dutch cultural goods.33 In the first week after the liberation, w7 offered all
kinds of books to the Economic-Historical Library, this time not of nationalsocialist content, which can still be found in the iish catalogue. Franken, incidentally, was also a member of the Netherlands Economic History Archive
for a couple of years, from June 1944.
A study group such as the Werkgemeenschap 7 was not unique, particularly in the half year before the German capitulation. Several of these groups
discussed blueprints for a radical change in the Netherlands after the war,
but they did not result in anything. Nor was the newspaper issued by the w7
the only new one in May 1945.34 w7/Het Oordeel (The Opinion, or The Judgement)
was merely a one-man journal by De Dood, writing editorials, articles, and
a column under various names.35 Herman Milikowski (Jewish, survivor of
the concentration camps, later a well known sociologist), Hugo Zimmerman
(working for the Institute for War Documentation), Jan Franken, and, from
Brussels, Friedrich Weissman were among the authors of multiple pieces. The
journal grew in no more than 27 issues from an unsightly pamphlet to 16
printed pages, with photographs and photo collages. In the end, the editorial
office was moved from Frankens office to an address where another journal
(Metro) was put together by a circle around the comic artist Marten Toonder,
and this resulted in contributions by Piet Beishuizen and Dirk Huizinga.
32
33
34
35
The books published by Allert de Lange before 1940 were confiscated and the
archives were initially transported to Nazi Germany, and after the war to Moscow,
but they returned from Potsdam in 1991. The archives are now in the iish in
Amsterdam.
Letter J. Franken to N.W. Posthumus, 1 May 1945, in the morning, niod Institute
for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Dossier Werkgemeenschap 7, 249-0904. A.
Posthumus later became trustee of the Deutsche Informations Bibliothek and had the
collection transferred to the Institute for War Documentation. (National Archives
of the Netherlands, The Hague, Archive 2.09.16, Nederlands Beheersinstituut,
Beheersdossiers, 1945-1967, inventory no. 58117.)
Probably financed by Franken.
De Dood should have tried first to publish his articles in De Vrije Katheder, a more
distinguished journal. But no article can be found there under his name. Copies of
the W7/Het Oordeel-newspaper can be found at the iish.
|9 5
Werkgemeenschap 7 proved to be a group of fascinating people that for a

short time, under exceptional circumstances, had interesting discussions on
serious designs and projects. Much work had been put into it and likewise a
great deal of big talk on relations with important political figures could be
perceived. However, no trace of this can be found, either in the government
or in other press media of that time. It seems to have been overrated by the
seven members, not to say grotesque.
The historian Prof Jan Romein who, on the recommendation of his colleague Posthumus welcomed three of the w7 activists: Franken, De Dood,
and Zimmerman (the last with his proposal for the founding of an Institute
for Contemporary History), was not at all pleased with their visit. He had
not heard anything positive about De Dood before, he did not like Frankens
association with ig Farben, and he thought Zimmerman acted like a fanatic
and an inflated youngster lacking any sense of reality.36
Actually, in the 1930s and during the war, J.H.A. Franken completely depended on business relations with Nazi Germany and ig Farben. This was
not the only thing he could be blamed for. He had also been an early member of the nsb (Dutch National Socialist movement), but left the party in
September 1942, anxious about his brother who had been taken hostage
by the Germans. His political orientation was evidently no secret to the w7
nor to Posthumus, as letters show, and it did not obstruct cooperation, even
with communists.
Still, after the war Franken was called to account for the supply of
100,000 plastic combs and 50,000 small soap cases to the German army, and
was sentenced to pay a fine of Fl 4,000 and to be deprived of some of his civil rights.37 Striking is the similarity to Posthumus, who as a member of the
management of Brill Publishers also met severe criticism, but received no
penalty for providing German-Russian dictionaries to the Wehrmacht.38 In
his work for Werkgemeenschap 7, Franken seems to have been both definitely
aware of his national-socialist past as well as genuinely looking for purification through serious study and knowledge, for instance, by analyzing ig
Farben and German industry in the Nazi era.
He even contributed to the resistance movement, as his office was also
used in the last year of the war as a meeting point and safe house for members of the Vrij Nederland group and of another resistance paper, De Vrije
Katheder. In his unpublished novel the author De Dood considers the nsb
membership of Kroon (Franken) of minor importance, and even let him give
36
37
38
iish, Amsterdam, Archives J. Romein, inventory no. 16, Diaries of 11, 12, and 28 May
1945.
National Archives of the Netherlands, The Hague, Archive 2.09.09, Central Archives
for Special Criminal Jurisdiction/Centraal Archief Bijzondere Rechtspleging, cabr,
1945-1952, inventory no. 86666.
Sytze van der Veen et al., Brill: 325 years of scholarly publishing (Leiden-Boston, 2008),
pp. 105 ff.
96
shelter to a Jewish painter. This corresponds, in a way, to a grim reality in

which, according to a statement by the witness De Dood, Franken came to
rescue Florrie Rodrigo in early 1943, ignoring all personal risk, so that she
did not fall into the hands of the Germans and survived.39
War Damage Inquiry Committee

What kind of activities did C. de Dood undertake after the unemployment project of Annie Adama had been finished and the Werkgemeenschap
7 and its journal had come to an end in January 1946? One day, years later, former iish director Frits de Jong Edz., remembered that De Dood had
had some kind of involvement in what was called the Recuperatie-commissie
(Recuperation Committee).40 It took a long time to find information about
this subject. It seemed recuperation meant particularly restitution of objects of art that had been stolen by the German occupiers, particularly from
Jews.
Indeed, when Posthumus and Adama van Scheltema inspected the iish
building immediately after the German capitulation, they found nothing of
the collections, nor anything of the inventory (catalogues, bookcases, heating, curtains, carpets, desks, etc.).41 Everything had been removed to an
unknown and uncertain destiny. The story of how nearly all the stolen archives and the library returned in the years following is thrilling and has
been told elsewhere.42
In May 1945, Posthumus and Adama van Scheltema started their efforts to
bring back the stolen collections through the Western allies that occupied
Germany, and to reconstruct and furnish the Institute and submit claims
for the material damage as well. However, Posthumus probably was mainly
interested in building up the Institute for War Documentation in 1945, entrusting the iish to the hands of Annie Adama. One can nevertheless imagine that Posthumus took short walks of only minutes to his institutes on the
Amsterdam canals and to the University to watch their progress.
For the task of investigation, valuation, reporting, and finally claiming all
kinds of material war damage at the Ministry of Finance, a new division was
39
40
41
42
Testimonies by H.M. van Randwijk (resistance organization and periodical Vrij

Nederland), 22 January 1947, and by C. de Dood, 21 January 1947. Source: cabr as in
footnote 37.
Bart Hageraats, Bi(bli)ografie van C. de Dood, (Amsterdam 1892-1965) (masters thesis,
University of Amsterdam, 1987), Part II, De Dood en de letteren, p. 34.
See report Het Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis tijdens de
oorlog by N.W. Posthumus, Autumn 1945, in Hunink, Papieren van de revolutie, pp.
326-338. Also in Annual Report iish (1946), http://socialhistory.org/sites/default/files/
docs/annualreport1946.pdf; last accessed 3 November 2013.
For instance in Jan Lucassen, Tracing the past; Collections and research in social and
economic history: The International Institute of Social History, the Netherlands Economic
History Archive and related institutions (Amsterdam, 1989).
|9 7
Posthumus in 1947. ANP fotoarchief nr. 470101/20.
set up in 1945: the Commissariat for War Damage, that had as a subdivision
the Schade Enqute Commissie (sec, Committee for Inquiry Into War Damages).
Sadly, the complete archives of this institution were destroyed.43 Fortunately
though, the Ministry could trace a C. de Dood in their personnel files.44
Possibly, Posthumus, with his respectable influence, helped De Dood apply
to the sec. Indeed, from May 1, 1946 until July 1953, De Dood was a civil
servant in the Ministry of Finance, and his job in the sec was to investigate
damaged and stolen cultural goods such as paintings, books, and private
and public libraries. He earned a decent salary, not very different from that
of a school teacher. The Amsterdam sec office was at the Bunge Huis in the
center, today one of the University buildings, and later at the Keizersgracht
277, directly opposite the iish. Again, this was probably not a nine-to-five
office job. As an example, De Dood used as a contact address his private
43
44
In the Amsterdam municipal archives (Stadsarchief) a small file has been preserved
of one of the officials of the Schade Enqute Commissie. See Archive 1396.
De Dood had become seriously affected by rheumatism and was reported ill
in 1952.When most of the work had been finished in 1953 De Dood was fired
involuntary and received a redundancy fee after that. Letter Ministry of Finance to
Alex Geelhoed, The Hague, 19 June 2000.
98
home, and probably he rather was an ambulant visitor of claimants. So

he had (again) ample time for his writing. His first book after the war was
published in 1946 (Oud lied, a novel on the battle between tradition and
modernization among the inhabitants of the Jordaan quarter in Amsterdam
in the 1890s), followed by Mozes in 1947. In those years he also wrote some
books that were not published, did a few radio book reviews, and no fewer
than 25 lectures (between 1946 and 1949) for the Freethinkers movement.45
Some examples of De Doods work for the sec are the taxation of the lost
works by the Groningen artist H.N. Werkman, paintings of the Jewish owners of the famous department store De Bijenkorf46 and the looted institutions iish and the International Archives for the Womens Movement (iav),
also in the iish building. After remuneration of the iav claim, President Mrs
Posthumus-van der Goot sent a rather personal and touching letter to De
Dood to thank him for all his efforts.47 The iish claims, on the other hand,
included damage to the books and archives that had not returned already,
by far the greatest part were returned over time, but to be paid were the
cost of transport from the shelter in England, new furniture, heating, telephones, redecorating, and the high cost of reopening the safe because the
German occupiers had changed the combination lock. Finally, the iish received Fl. 82,000 (about 283,000 Euros today) compensation from the sec
and later, in the 1960s, an even greater amount of Fl. 300,000 from the WestGerman government as Wiedergutmachung.48
Conclusion
If N.W. Posthumus did not appoint C. de Dood directly or indirectly to the
War Damage Inquiry Committee to work for the Institute, then this was
in any case a main task for De Dood in his last steady job aside from his
writing.
A few final meetings of both leading figures can be put on record. In
1949, when De Dood proposed Posthumus to the committee to honor the
Dutch author Kees van Bruggen for his 75th birthday; Annie Adama was the
secretary of this committee.49 Some years later De Dood, after consultation
with Posthumus, suggested in vain to the Wereldbibliotheek the idea that he
could prepare dissertations for publishing.
45
46
47
48
49
He had been active in the Freethinkers movement as early as the 1930s.

Facts also used in the never published novel Su, de korengaarster, iish, Archives of C.
de Dood.
Letter of 23 May 1949, Atria, Amsterdam, Archives International Archives for the
Womens Movement, inventory no. 25.
See in iish, Institutional archives of the iish, inventory numbers 590-595.
iish, Collection Netherlands, small archives, Persons, Part 1/Collectie Nederland,
kleine archieven en losse stukken, Personen, Part 1, 8. Kees van Bruggen, Letters to
Annie Adama van Scheltema.
|9 9
In 1957, in the last novel he published, De Dood introduced, with great

respect, a young teacher of economics. He portrayed him as totally indifferent to student grades, associating with students in a jovial and personal
way, and even discussing politics and socialism. The teacher was not a man
of the status quo, but energetic and receptive to new ideas. Inevitably he
described Posthumus in this portrayal, even if it is romanticized.50
Posthumus, and Mrs Adama van Scheltema, finally retired at a respectable age from the International Institute of Social History in the early 1950s,
(Posthumus had already resigned from the Institute for War Documentation
in 1949, but he stayed on at the Board of Brill Publishers).
His brief 1945 cooperation with plastics trade agent Franken, though it
was at the recommendation of De Dood, remains odd. His strong ambition
to construct a new university Faculty and new institutes may have caused
him to be indifferent to the origin of the money he needed. In this respect
he acted opportunistically. But this may have been a positive kind of opportunism, particularly in the light of Posthumus goals. He surely would
not have acted against his principles, as he had demonstrated during the
war, although there were some ambiguities in his work for Brill Publishers.
Posthumus evidently considered these business activities during the War
not with the same moral standards as he did with the scientific societies he
was part of.
Jan Franken also showed some opportunism. His in my eyes genuine
work for Werkgemeenschap 7 was not without a personal interest, i.e. mingling with acknowledged anti-Nazis in order to keep out of prison and continue his business, not with Germany, but with the uk and the usa. And for
De Dood, a certain opportunism can be seen when he posed as a hack writer
always melodramatic as poverty-stricken and even on the edge of suicide
while he systematically neglected the jobs and income outside the arts he
had for most of his life, for which he should partly have been obliged to
Posthumus.
In this article on the cooperation of the author, translator and journalist
Kees de Dood with Professor Posthumus, I tried to show what archival institutions, such as Posthumuss iish and Institute for War Documentation, can
offer the historian, as well as elaborating on the detailed relationship between the two. But the archives fail to indicate if this relationship was more
extensive, or how much of it was personal. In particular, a private collection
of Posthumus is missing, though we can observe indirectly his personal involvement with De Dood and with his staff in the unemployment project.
Historical research and writing always depend on facts, including those of a
private nature. This is also true for archival collectors such as the directors
of the International Institute of Social History because they experience interesting histories as persons.
50
As Onno Brand, Grootvader, ik heb er geen vrede mee (Amsterdam, 1957), pp. 218-220.
I.5
The Persistent Life of
The British Merchant
Co Seegers
In 2013 the city of Utrecht celebrated the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of
Utrecht with a concert (in the presence of then Queen Beatrix), exhibitions,
a commemorative medal, an international congress, and a Treaty of Utrecht
Chair at Utrecht University. The city of Utrecht is very keen on explaining
that the significance of the Treaty is that it marks the birth of modern diplomacy and the road to the European Union. It represents a turning point in
European and world history. For economic historians this period may mark
a less ambitious turning point, it was the first time in Great Britain that
commercial policy dominated the political discussion and brought down
a government and commercial treaty. The commercial and financial press
played an unprecedented role in this.
Thus it is certainly worthwhile to focus on the the Economic History
Librarys (ehb) acquisition two years ago of a newspaper with a clear relationship to the Treaty and its aftermath. In June 2011 Ian Smith of Quaritch
in London offered me a recently acquired complete run of The British
Merchant.
Particular strengths of the ehb are its collections in the area of trade and
the commercial sciences, especially contemporary accounts of everyday
commercial practice, which may be compared with such internationally re-
s eeg e r s th e p e r si ste n t l i f e o f th e b ri ti s h me rc hant
|1 01
nowned collections as the Kress collection in the Baker Library of Harvard

University, and the Goldsmith collection at London University. The ehb has
a long-standing history of collecting financial and commercial newspapers,
and owns one of the largest collections of price currents. Included were also
journals and broadsheets with less specific information, which are a valuable source for merchants then and historians now. Merchants of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, no less than those of today,
required reliable information and advice.
To be more precise concerning the Quaritch offer: a complete run of The
British Merchant; or, Commerce preservd: in Answer to the Mercator, or Commerce
retrievd. The British Merchant in its original form is quite rare. The journal,
published in 102 issues (the final issue numbered erroneously 103), which
appeared 7August 1713 30 July 1714, is less known compared to later reeditions in bookform and a complete run of it is even very rare (today also
online available in Google Books).
Numbers 1-28 are individual bi-weekly numbers, each comprising a single
leaf with a tax stamp, except for No. 14, which had four leaves and therefore
escaped the stamp duty. Numbers 29-101 were published in groups of three
biweekly issues, each of six pages, thereby escaping stamp duty (No. 80 is
a single issue of six pages, as is 103 [i.e., 102]); nos. 29-103 were issued with
continuous signatures and pagination. There are also minor manuscript
corrections to pp. 17-18, 30. The journal was printed for A[bigail] Baldwin,
later for Ferd. Burleigh in London and published, as said, in 1713 and 1714.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to confirm the provenance of the document
only a small stamp of the Southampton Public Libraries. It is possible that
information was lost when the binding was replaced by a contemporary
one.
The English Short Title Catalogue (estc) records numerous partial holdings but only four complete runs: Barr Smith Library in Adelaide, Johns
Hopkins University, Minnesota University, and the Library of Congress.
There are apparently two issues of the text not mentioned by estc: our
copy conforms with those at Adelaide and Minnesota, in which Numbers
29 onwards are issued with continuous pagination; in another variant each
number is separately published, issues 1-32 are printed for Abigail Baldwin
(rather than 1-31), and issue 103 is set without signatures and paginated as
pp. 6 rather than 145-150. Evidently after mid-November 1713, the periodical was available either biweekly on Tuesdays and Fridays, or every week
and a half, as a group of three issues, allowing it to avoid the stamp tax and
correct minor errata. In 1712 a taxation of one and half sided broadsheets
was introduced. The immediate impact of this Act was considerable, and
some journals went out of business and others were strongly curtailed. At
the same time, the Act contained no precise definition of what constituted
a newspaper, and thus allowed publications of more than one sheet being
categorized as a pamphlet and to pay a much lower duty.

10 2
First page of the first issue. neha arch03691.
|1 03
Contributions
Our copy of The British Merchant was bound with 88 pages of contemporary
manuscript material and additional blanks (numbered). The binding is in recent calf. The manuscript material consists of four contributions:
1) Papers concerning the Trade to Russia in relation to Tobacco in 1705,
21 pages, comprising transcriptions of petitions and reports by the Maryland
and Virginia planters in connection with the crisis over the trade to Russia,
Peter the Great having canceled the contract in December 1704. The planters protested against the presence in Russia of British workers skilled in
tobacco processing, for fear they would give away trade secrets to a country with ample local supply of the raw materials. Queen Anne duly ordered
their return to England and the destruction of their machinery. There seems
to be another manuscript in the Yale Library. The full text is reprinted in the
William and Mary Quarterly of 1925.
2) Transcriptions of Parliamentary reports and an address relative to the
Asiento with Spain, 5-8 July 1714, 4 pages. The Treaty with Spain (signed
July 13, 1713) was preceded by the asiento agreement, by which Spain gave
to Britain the exclusive right to supply the Spanish colonies with African
slaves for the next 30 years.
3) Report of the Commissaries appointed by Her Majesty to Treat with
those of France, & to Settle the Commerce of both Nations, 9 June 1714, 39
pages. A detailed report on the process of negotiation over Articles 8 and
9 of the Treaty of Utrecht. Whitworth, Murray, and Joseph Martin formed
the British party, DIberville, Annison, and Fnelon the French. Included are
copies in English and French of 14 relevant documents: powers of negotiation, memorials, propositions, and extracts from correspondence. The report concludes with a transcript, in two columns, of the relevant Articles,
with facing observations by the Commissioners.
4) Transcriptions of several documents relating to the Recoinage of 1717,
23 pages, including Isaac Newtons reports to the Treasury of 21 September
and 23 November 1717, and a three-page table of gold and silver bullion exported, by country, from 1711 to January 1717/8. Newtons report advised
the fixing of gold relative to silver coins to a level conforming with that
of much of Europe to halt the sale of silver bullion abroad. In practice, the
bi-metallic relationship between gold and silver coins was changed, forbidding the exchange of gold guineas for more than 21 silver shillings. Due to
differing valuations in other European countries, this inadvertently led to a
drain on silver and a resulting shortage, as silver coins were used to pay for
imports, while exports were paid for in gold.
Publication of The British Merchant was the result of British skirmishes during the aftermath of the conclusion of the Treaties of Utrecht in April 1713.
Utrecht ended the War of the Spanish Succession, the war between France
(Louis xiv) and Austria (Leopold i), supported by Great Britain and the Dutch
10 4
Republic. Negotiations started in 1711 and resulted in a series of treaties

among the representatives of Louis xiv of France and his grandson Philip
v of Spain on the one hand, and representatives of Anne, Queen of Great
Britain, the Duke of Savoy, the King of Portugal, and the Republic on the
other. Besides the political treaties, a series of commercial treaties were also
signed at the same time: the Treaty of Navigation and Commerce between
France and Great Britain were the most important.
On 9 May the commercial treaty with France was formally submitted to
the British Parliament. On 14 May the Tory government appointed a committee to draft a bill to confirm the 8th and 9th articles of this treaty (see
the handwritten additions in our copy of The British Merchant no. 3). These
key clauses opening trading channels between both countries would effectively decide the fate of the whole treaty. The Treaty included a reversion
to the French import tariff of 1664 that would reduce French tolls, but this
French concession did not include the important export of English woolens.
Moreover, restrictions on British access to French ports was also a bone of
contention.
Within a week of submission of the treaty, The Trade with France, Italy,
Spain, and Portugal Considered (iish, Kashnor Collection Bro 1041/8) appeared.
The tract accused the government of selling out British commercial interests. This was the first of a flood of pamphlets threatening the governments
plans. Whig opponents and anxious traders questioned the commercial
management of the government. Such was the pressure, that on May 26 the
Mercator; or Commerce retrievd appeared, a thrice-weekly government oracle
dedicated to uphold the commercial treaty with France. The Mercator advertised itself as being founded on just authorities, faithfully collected from
authentic papers and now made public for general information. Although
opposition was increasingly gaining strength and momentum, nothing
pointed in to a defeat in the Lower House on this issue. There was still widespread support for the government in merchant circles. At that time the
Lords seemed a more threatening obstacle since Lord Halifax orchestrated
a campaign against the treaty. And on June 18, when after eight hours of
debate, the bill was defeated in the House of Commons by a mere nine votes
(194 to 185), it could almost be seen as an accident. Parliament was dissolved
on 8 August, and the first number of The British Merchant was launched one
day before: 7 August 1713.
The British Merchant appeared with the financial backing of Lord Halifax
to counter the Tory ministrys political economic arguments and defense of
the Treaty of Utrecht. The authors of The British Merchant listed that Trade
which exports Manufactures made of the sole Product or Growth of the
Country as the first good form of trade. Whereas the Tories insisted that
land was the basis of wealth, making property finite, the Whigs located its
basis in labour.
|1 05
Contributors
Internal evidence provides no clear sign of who wrote The British Merchant.
All texts are anonymous. Charles King, author of several contributions and
editor of a later edition, named Henry Martin (d. 1721) as the most important contributor. As a reward for his leading part in the ultimately rejection
of the Treaty, Martin was made inspector-general of imports and exports of
customs by the government. Other key sources came from the originals
of Sir Theodore Janssen, Sir Charles Cooke. In 1680 Theodore Janssen (d.
1748) went to England and was successful in trade. He was naturalized as an
English citizen in 1685. A tract by Janssen entitled General Maxims in Trade
particularly applied to the Commerce between Great Britain and France appeared in 1713 (iish, Kashnor Collection Bro E 5840/44Ks). It was reproduced
in the 1721 edition of The British Merchant.
Following this, Perry Gauci, in an article on the political tracts concerning the Bill of Trade with France deposited in the Bodleian Library, made
a plausible argument that these papers played a central role in the documentation necessary for contributions in The British Merchant and that these
papers were collected and annotated by Charles Cooke. In Gaucis opinion
this collection compensated for the serious deficiency in the anti Bill party.
The author of the rival Mercator, Daniel Defoe, had better access to records
and inside information.1 Other merchants who aided The British Merchant
were James Milner, Nathaniel Toriano, Joshua Gee, Christopher Haynes, and
David Martin.
Circulation of The British Merchant peaked at 7,000 copies per week (i.e.,
3500 copies per issue) in April 1714. This compared to the Mercator, which
briefly peaked at 14,400 copies per week (4,800 per edition) just before the
vote in 1713. In March 1714 the circulation decreased to 1,600 per issue.
Nevertheless, compared to other journals quite a large number.2
Publication of The British Merchant continued only until the stated aim was
achieved: Parliament voted down the disputed articles and that part of the
Treaty collapsed. The Mercator ceased publication on 20 July 1714. The British
Merchant held on for a few weeks to deal with the Asiento, which granted
the South Sea Company the right to provide slaves to the Spanish colonies.
But in fact, with its mission accomplished, The British Merchant ceased to appear by the end of July 1714.
Seven years later, in 1721, a selection of numbers was collected and edited
by Charles King in a three-volume edition with the same title. Rather than
containing advances to the theory of trade, the work represented a compilation of contemporary merchant opinion. King sought to preserve the home
1
2
Perry Gauci, The Clash of Interest: Commerce and the Politics of Trade in the Age
of Anne, in The Parliamentary History Yearbook Trust (2009), pp. 115-125.
Jacob M. Price, Note on the circulation of the London press 1704-1714, in Bulletin of
the Institute of Historical Research, 31 (1958), pp. 215-224, 221-222.
10 6
market for British-made goods, and argued that the first and best market
of England are the natives and inhabitants of England. Such ideas would
prevail in commercial policy debates until the later part of the eighteenth
century. Charles King, at that time chamber-keeper of the treasury, dedicated the concluding volume of the work to Paul Methuen, son of the framer
of the Methuen Treaty (with Portugal in 1703). He was allowed 395 pounds
from the exchequer for expenses of printing. Copies of the book were sent
to all corporations in Great Britain that sent members to Parliament.
Forty years after its first publication, The British Merchant still enjoyed
great authority, and the arguments against free trade were still valuable. A
second edition was published in 1743 and a third in 1748.
In 1728 a translation in Dutch, Historie van den Algemenen en Byzonderen
Koophandel van Groot-Britannien, was published in two volumes by the Delft
publisher Reinier Boitet. There is no specific introduction for readers in the
Republic to this Dutch edition. Its importance to Dutch trade is obvious, but
the contribution by Theodore Janssen is not included.
In 1753 a French translation, by Franois Vron Duverger de Forbonnais,
was published titled Le Negotiant Anglois; a contribution by Charles Davenant
De lusage de larithmetique politique (1698) was added. The French edition was
published with the imprint: Imprim Dresde & se trouve Paris, Chez les
frres Estienne, 1753. In 1776 a second edition with the same title (although
Negotiant was now Negociant) was published in Amsterdam by Franois
Changuion.
In 1764 a German revised edition appeared under the title Der Englische
Kaufmann, translated by Johann Lder Albrecht and published by Caspar
Fritschischen Handlung in Leipzig.
It would be expected that this edition would include information on Ken
Carpenter, Dialogue in political economy. Translations from and into German in the
18th century.3 It is not mentioned, but this work does deserve a place among
the top 50 of eighteenth-century bestsellers. More than that, The British
Merchant proved to be a perfect example of how well the old books collection of the Economic History Library and the Kashnor Collection at the
International Institute of Social History are a perfect match.4 Together they
hold one of the most important collections in the fields of economic history
and the history of economics.
3
4
Kenneth C. Carpenter, Dialogue in political economy. Translations from and into German in
the 18th century (Boston, 1977).
Catalogue of the Kashnor collection at the iish: Huub Sanders, Books and Pamphlets
on British Social and Economic Subjects (ca. 1650-1880) at the iisg Amsterdam (Amsterdam,
1988).
|1 07
Bibliographic Survey
british merchant (the); or, Commerce preservd: in Answer to the
Mercator, or Commerce retrievd to be published every Tuesday and Friday,
August 7, 1713 [- Friday July 30, 1714] (London, printed for A[bigail] Baldwin
[for Ferd. Burleigh after number 32]. [1713-1714] 102 issues (the final issue
numbered erroneously 103). neha arch03691
british merchant (the); or Commerce preservd : in three volumes /
Charles King (London: John Darby, 1721). neha ehb 7665-7667
british merchant (the). A collection of papers relating to the trade and
commerce of Great Britain and Ireland. First publ. by C. King, from the originals of T. Janssen, C. Cooke, H. Martin a.o. In three vols. (London 1743) 2nd
ed. iish e 770/1-3
british merchant (the). A collection of papers relating to the trade and
commerce of Great Britain and Ireland. First publ. by C. King, from the originals of T. Janssen, C. Cooke, H. Martin among others. In three vols. (London
1748) 3th ed.
Not in our collection historie van den algemenen en byzonderen koophandel van groot-britannien, door alle gewesten van den waerelt: behelzende eene uitvoerige verhandeling van de goederen en koopmanschappen
die van daar verzonden, en uit andere gewesten wederom ontfangen worden: waar by gevoegt zyn zeer veele merkwaerdige echte stukken en bewyzen ieder koopmanschap in het byzonder rakende; als mede de tractaten
van commercie [] door Charles King. Uit het Engels vertaalt in twee deelen
(Delft, Reinier Boitet, 1728) 2 vols. neha ehb 279/C/9-10
negotiant anglois (le); ou traduction libre libre du livre intitul: The
British Merchant, contenant divers mmoires sur le commerce de lAngleterre avec la France, le Portugal et lEspagne. Publi pour la premire fois
en 1713. Tome premier [-Tome second](Imprim Dresde & se trouve Paris,
Chez les frres Estienne, 1753) 2 vols. Includes De lusage de larithmtique
politique dans le commerce & les finances par M. [Charles] Davenant en
1698, pages clviii-cxcii. neha ehb 278/F/18-19 and neha ehb 7668-7669 DK
englische kaufmann (der); oder Grundstze der englischen Handlung,
aus dem Buche The British Merchant gezogen [...] herausgegeben von D.
Johann Lder Albrecht (Leipzig: Caspar Fritschischen Handlung, 1764) 36,
444 pages. neha 2000/688
I.6
Harry Stevens, the British
Correspondent of David
Rjazanovs Institute
On the History of Collecting
at the Marx-Engels Institute
(1927-1931)
Irina Novichenko
A meeting with Jaap Koosterman in October 1992 changed my life. I was

asked to help with a translation during his visit to Moscow. At that time, I
was a postgraduate student at the Institute of World History and had written a thesis on the history of British Christian Socialism. Jaap was surprised
to hear the topic and asked whether I knew that the International Institute
of Social History (iish) had preserved the letters of Charles Kingsley. Then
I was invited to work in the iish archives and received a proposal to represent the Institute in Moscow. Looking back after more than twenty years of
our work I am amazed at how much has been done. I hope that one day Jaap
and I will compile the history of the activities of the iishs Moscow Office.
But the time has not come yet. There is a well-known Russian song with
these words: Its still early for us to live by reminiscences.
When I started working with iish I was just a young historian and, step
by step, I acquired fantastic knowledge and experience in many fields. As
I found out, it was a tradition that came from the period when the main
social history institutions in Moscow and Amsterdam were established. The
history of the Marx-Engels Institutes (mei) work with its representative in
the United Kingdom in the late 1920s partly reminded me of my own training course. Unlike the German and French correspondents of the mei, Harry
n o v i c he nko harry s te v e ns
|1 09
C. Stevens was a young journalist who knew nothing about collecting books
and archives, but after a year or so under the guidance of D.B. Rjazanov,
the Director of the mei, he grew into a highly skilled expert. His work is
completely unknown and seems rather instructive, in particular for those
who are keen to understand the theory of building distinguished archival
and book collections like the iish and the current successors of the mei
the Russian State Social and Political Library (gopb) and the Russian State
Archive of Social and Political History (rgaspi) in Moscow. Harry Stevens
worked for the mei, and then for the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute (meli),
from March 1928 to May 1937. In this article, on the basis of correspondence between Stevens and the mei, I try to reconstruct the first years of activity (1928-1931) of the British correspondent of D.B. Rjazanovs Institute1
and to demonstrate his role in building the collection of British materials in
Moscow. The extensive citations of the documents in the text are partly constrained because they speak for themselves. This source is bright and substantial; it requires almost no comments.
Rjazanov
David Borisovich Rjazanov (1870-1938) was a man of outstanding personality. An old Socialist, one of the leaders of the Russian trade union movement, the founder of the Soviet archival system and a prominent scholar,2
he founded and then in 1921 became head of the Marx-Engels Institute in
Moscow.3 The Institute was intended to collect the literary legacy of Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, and to study and publish their texts. The mei
became a centre for the historical study of Marxism. Since Rjazanov was
convinced that it is impossible to study Marxism in isolation from the historical context, the collection included materials from all over the world
and covered the broad areas that today we classify as branches of social his-
The Marx-Engels Institute was founded in Moscow in 1921 by D.B. Rjazanov. In

February 1931, D.B. Rjazanov was arrested, charged with collaboration with a
mythical organization and exiled to Saratov for three years. In 1937 in Saratov,
Rjazanov was arrested again, charged and in January 1938 condemned to death. In
October 1931, the Marx-Engels Institute was merged with the Institute of V.I. Lenin;
the new institution was named the Institute of Marx-Engels-Lenin (imel), and the
Director was V.V. Adoratskij.
About D.B. Rjazanov (Goldendach), see: Jakov Rokitjanskij, Reinhard Mller,
Krasnyj dissident: Akademik Rjazanov opponent Lenina, zhertva Stalina. Biografieskij
oerk, dokumenty (Moscow, 1996); Rolf Hecker (ed.), David Borisovi Rjazanov und die
erste mega (Berlin-Hamburg, 1997); Jakov Rokitjanskij, Gumanist oktjabrskoj epochi:
Akademik D.B.Rjazanov social-demokrat, pravozaitnik, uenyj (Moscow, 2009).
On the history of the mei, see: Vladimir Mosolov, imel citadelpartijnoj ortodokcii:
is istorii Instituta marksizma-leninizma pri ck kpss, 1921-1956 (Moscow, 2010); Vladimir
Mosolov et al., Istorija unikalnoj biblioteki v dokumentach I svidetelstvach. K 90-letiju
Gosudarstvennoj obestvenno-politieskoj biblioteki. Ch.1. Predestvenniki. 1921-1991 gg.
(Moscow, 2011).
110
tory. Historical research, in his opinion, requires a laboratory like any other
serious science. Rjazanov built up the collection from a variety of sources.
One of the most effective means of acquisition was the purchase of materials abroad, mainly in Western European countries. From his emigrant past
Rjazanov knew well the institutions, archives and people who might be useful in the process of accumulating records.4 He traveled regularly to Europe
on buying trips and managed to create a network of correspondents authorized to acquire rare books and manuscripts for the mei.
The Institute included a number of departments or cabinets, each focusing on a specific topic: the cabinets of the history of Germany, France, the
United Kingdom, Marx and Engels, philosophy, political economy, law, etc.
Rjazanov coordinated the work of the Institute, the heads of the cabinets
maintained contacts with the correspondents, formulated the goals of their
search activities, controlled the tasks and expenses, and processed the received materials and books. In France, the Institutes correspondents were,
successively, Boris Souvarine, Leon Bernstein and Alix Guillain;5 in Germany
they were Boris Nikolaevsky, Hans Stein and Alfred Schulz; and in Austria
there was Roman Rosdolsky.6 From 1925, the flow of materials to the mei
from France and Germany was abundant. With the United Kingdom, the
situation left something to be desired.
Studying the lives of Marx and Engels, their works and ideas was hardly
possible without materials from England, where Marx spent around thirty
and Engels more than fifty years. Rjazanovs buying trips, orders at Londons
antiquarian bookshops and instructions given to various co-workers from
the mei during their stays in London brought modest results. Moreover, in
May 1927, after diplomatic relations between the United Kingdom and the
ussr were broken off all communication was interrupted and even the bookshops refused to fulfil orders. But Rjazanov came up with a clever way out
of the deadlock. He invited Max Beer to work at the mei as head of the cabinet of the history of the United Kingdom.7 After his arrival in Moscow in au4
6
7
More details can be found in: Jaap Kloosterman, Do Rjazanova. Razmylenija o

pervych bibliotekach, posvjaennych raboej istorii; Irina Tsvetkova and Irina
Novichenko (eds), Izvestnj i neizvestnyj David Borisovi Rjazanov (1870-1938): k 140-letiju so
dnja rozhdenija. Materialy naunoj konferrencii. Pervye Rjazanovskie tenija (Moscow, 2011),
pp. 73-104.
On the French correspondents of the mei see: Jonathan Beecher and Valerij
Fomichev, French Socialism in Lenins and Stalins Moscow: David Rjazanov and
the French Archive of the Marx-Engels Institute, The Journal of Modern History, 78
(2006), pp. 119-143; revised and added Russian translation Jonathan Beecher and
Valerij Fomichev, David Rjaznov i kollekcija francuzskich dokumentov v Institute
K.Marksa i F.Engelsa, in Irina Tsvetkova and Irina Novichenko (eds), Izvestnj i
neizvestnyj David Borisovi Rjazanov (1870-1938): k 140-letiju so dnja rozhdenija. Materialy
naunoj konferrencii. Pervye Rjazanovskie tenija (Moscow, 2011), pp. 119-155.
On the German correspondents see: Karl-Erich Vollgraf et al., Stalinismus und das
Ende der ersten Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (1931-1941) (Berlin-Hamburg, 2001).
See more in: Rolf Hecker et al., Erfolgreiche Kooperation: Das Frankfurter Institut fr
|1 1 1
tumn 1927, Beers first and most urgent task was to find a correspondent in
London.
Shortly before Beer received the new job at the mei, British Marxist economist Maurice Herbert Dobb8 had contacted him to ask permission to write
an introduction to the English translation of his book. Now Beer asked Dobb
to recommend someone for the position of the meis correspondent and the
latter suggested Harry C. Stevens. Unfortunately, I didnt manage to find any
publications or additional information about him. Almost every detail that
is known, he told himself. Stevens wrote to Beer on 24 February 1928 for the
first time:
I have heard from Mr. Dobb of Cambridge that he has recommended me to you as being suitable, if willing, to undertake
research work in London on behalf of the Marx and Engels
Institute. He has sent me your original letter, dated January
18th 1928, from which I get a very good idea of the kind of thing
wanted. And I write to say that I shall be delighted to undertake
the work, since it is in close connection with my own desires
and interests.9
Socialforschung und das Moskauer Marx-Engels-Instutut (1924-1928) (Berlin-Hamburg,

2000). Moses Beer Max Beer (1864-1943), like Rjazanov himself, was a self-educated
person with encyclopedic knowledge. Beer worked in different socialist newspapers in Germany, emigrated to the United Kingdom, studied at the London School
of Economics (lse), lived in the United States. In 1901 he became the Vorwrts
London correspondent, and wrote books on the history of British socialism. In
1919 Beer was named editor of Die Glocke (The Bell), a socialist periodical owned
by Alexander Parvus. He would remain in that position until 1921. Beer wrote a
biography of Karl Marx and a series of works of history that examined the changing forms of class struggle through the centuries. In 1927-1928 Beer worked at the
mei in Moscow, and in 1928 he returned to Germany and worked at the Institut fr
Sozialforschung in Frankfurt am Main.
Dobb, Maurice Herbert (1900-1976) studied at Pembroke College in Cambridge, and
later at the London School of Economics. Dobb returned to Cambridge thanks to
Professor D.H. Robertson to take up a post as University lecturer. Dobb found a position at Trinity College, maintaining his connection with the college for 50 years.
Dobb had joined the Communist Party in 1921 and was to remain a loyal member
of that organisation until the end of his life. In the 1930s he was central to the
burgeoning Communist movement at the University. One of his recruits was Kim
Philby, who later became a high-placed mole within British intelligence (for details,
see: Phillip Knightley, Philby: The Life and Views of the kgb Masterspy (London, 1988).
It has been suggested that Dobb was a talent-spotter for the Comintern. Dobb
was widely published and his works were translated into a number of languages,
including Russian. An online search of the archive of M.H. Dobb at Trinity College
brought no results concerning his correspondence with Harry Stevens. Available
at: http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0016%2FDOBB; last
accessed 21 November 2013.
Correspondence with H.C. Stevens, 1928-1937, Russian State Archive of Social and
Political History [hereafter, rgaspi], F.71, Op.50, D.192, L.1.
112
In addition to previous information, Stevens carefully enumerated that he

had assisted Dobb in the work on his recent book;10 had a general knowledge of Russian history; was involved in the workers movement; was
very strong in the Polish and Russian languages, good in French and fair
in German; was well acquainted with the British Museum Library; and had
done research work on his own account. I should be ready to start as soon
as you wish, as I am a freelance journalist and translator, and thus free in
regard to time,11 Stevens assured Beer. In one of his later letters he mentioned that he was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and
a member of the Labour Research Department.12 From the outset, he made
sure to demonstrate thoroughness and close attention to detail. He asked
for clarification on whether his monthly remuneration included expenses
on photographic work, how much time the search for material would require (because he could devote to it only a half-day), when and how his salary would be paid.
Stevens clearly expressed a request to maintain the support of Maurice
Dobb in his work: His assistance will be very valuable, and my experience
of working with him in the past was very pleasurable. He finished the letter with the affirmation: It will give me great pleasure to work on behalf of
the Marx and Engels Institute, and can say how much I appreciate the very
real honour of such work.13
Beer replied on 5 March: Your letter was clear and to the point. I am instructed to inform you that you are provisionally engaged from the 15th of
the current month. The Director trusts that the engagement will be permanent. It depends on you [].14 Beer explained that the salary would be paid
in the middle of each month through Moscow Narodny Bank, while all the
other expenses (photography, photostating, fares, postage, etc.) would be refunded following a report by the end of each month, and that the Director
was of the opinion that this work would not take more than half a day. Beer
also noted that Stevens would get letters from the Institute not only from
him, but also from the Director and his representative, in which case they
might be written in German.
In fact the working language was English. But when, in April 1928, Max
Beer left the mei and returned to Frankfurt, the question of language
emerged again. The mei proposed to correspond in German, but Stevens
had another opinion:
10
11
12
13
14
Maurice Dobb, Russian Economic Development Since the Revolution (London, 1927), 437 p.
Assisted by H.C. Stevens. (A second edition, with a new appendix, was published in
1929. The book was written and published to stress the ten-year anniversary of the
ussr, the importance of the events of November 1917.)
rgaspi, F.71, Op.50, D.192, L.1.
Ibid., D.193, L.10.
Ibid., D.192, L.2.
Ibid., L.3.
|1 1 3
If it is possible for me to make the choice, I should prefer the

language used by you to be Russian, rather than German. My
standard in regard to Russian is much higher as I have done
a good deal of translation from Russian, having lived in ussr
nearly three years,15 and consequently am fluent in reading it.
My German is more of the school-boy order, as I have had little
opportunity of practicing it on the spot.16
In the next letter from the Institute the problem of working language was
finally settled: As far as possible we shall use the English language.17
And the work started. During the first few months the exchange of letters happened to be the most intensive. Practically every day Stevens wrote
(typed) to the mei and got back his instructions. The postal service was reliable and the period between a letters dispatch and its receipt never took
more than ten days. This correspondence can be considered a separate job
in itself because Stevenss typed reports normally consisted of three to
twenty pages. The communication was conducted only in decent English
that was clear to both sides. Rjazanov never wrote to him personally and
they never met, but every report that was sent to the mei bears the distinctive pencil marks of Rjazanov and the mei instructions that were directed to
Stevens often had such phrases as Professor Rjazanov advises you, Prof.
Rjazanov visited this library before..., Prof. R. had seen the collection,
the Director sends best regards to, etc. Stevenss work was undoubtedly
under the close attention and immediate guidance of Rjazanov, although
the letters to him were signed by other people.18
Start of Stevens Work

The first task for Stevens included several points: to locate the newspapers
in the British Museum Library; to photostat the articles of Marx published in
15
16
17
18
Harry Stevens visited the ussr as a member of the British Quakers Relief Mission
that worked actively during the famine in the Volga Region in 1922-1924. His
second visit to the ussr took place in 1926; see: Maurice Dobb, Russian Economic
Development Since the Revolution (London, 1929), p. XI. An online search for additional information on H. Stevenss visits to Russia in the Ruth A. Fry Papers in
Swarthmore College Peace Collection (available at: http://www.swarthmore.edu/
library/peace/DG026-050/DG046ARFry.html; last accessed 21 November 2013) as
well as in the other archives of the British Quaker Relief mission in Russia in
1921-1924 (available at: http://search.swarthmore.edu/?q=Russia#q=Russian%20
Famine%20Relief%20; last accessed 21 November 2013) found no results. Ruth Fry,
the Honorary General Secretary of the Friends Relief Committee in 1914-1923, who
visited Russia in 1922-1924, did not mention the name Stevens in her book. See:
Ruth A. Fry, Three visits to Russia. 1922-1925 (London, 1942).
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.192, L.35.
Ibid., L.46.
The letters were signed consecutively by M. Beer, E. Czbel, R. Fox, in 1931 by V.
Adoratskij.
114
Vanity Fair and Engelss article in the Labour Standard; to check whether this
journal had another article by Engels and report to the mei; to make photostatic reproductions of The New Moral World (in case you dont find this
paper in the British Museum, try the Goldsmiths Library) and of articles
from various English newspapers quoted or referred to in Marxs Kapital.19 In
a week Stevens reported the results in details and asked for further instructions.20 This kind of work to find a newspaper or a journal with or probably with texts written by Marx and Engels, order their photostatic reproductions (or even better, to buy the selected press items of the necessary period)
and send the copies to the mei remained the most important job for years.
There was a term that was used for this material: desiderata.
Stevens acquired a feel for this work quickly and on 3 April 1928 Beer
noted: You will soon feel at home in the Marx-Engels-workshop and you
will like it.21 Stevens replied: I am already feeling very much at home in
the work, and liking it extremely.22 Stevens located, copied, looked through
and described the periodicals, evaluated the possible attribution of unsigned
texts to the style of Marx or Engels, studied the publications of the mei that
were specially sent to him, and commented on the materials that were difficult to copy or purchase. He became a key person and genuine participant
in the process of preparing and publishing mega volumes.
The first results of his activity, certainly, impressed Rjazanov and Beer.
The second letter of instructions had some requests to find and copy the
articles but also one special request. Beer wrote:
Prior to the break of Anglo-Soviet relations we were in regular
communication with well-known London booksellers who supplied our Institute with all sorts of books. With Foyle we did a
good deal of business. After the break we reduced our orders in
a very considerable degree, and for the indispensable minimum
of our wants we arranged with the Communist (not Workers)
bookshop to supply us. Up to the end of 1927 all went well. Later
on, however, great interruptions occurred, orders not receiving
any attention, and even telegrams were not answered.23
Stevens cleared up the situation with the Communist bookshop and the
order for periodicals was found. He also checked the balance and found
that some books had been sent to Moscow and that the Institute still had a
credit of a bit more than 10.24 Stevens was asked to control and resolve the
19
20
21
22
23
24
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.192, L.5.

Ibid., L.6.
Ibid., L.19.
Ibid., L.24.
Ibid., L.8.
Ibid., L.23.
|1 1 5
problems with mei book orders with other London, and later Manchester,
bookshops and antiquarians. This work took a lot of time and effort. As
the representative of the mei, he visited the managers and owners of the
bookshops, checked the orders and payments, oversaw the process of regularly sending materials and catalogues to the mei, bargained for discounts
and settled conflicts. The Workers Bookshop and W.A. Foyle became the
meis main partners in book purchases. They accumulated the book order
flows and sent the parcels by post or by arcos steamers.25 The mei negotiated also with Quaritch, Kashnor (or The Museum Book Store), among others. Unexpected problems arose only with Baker. This bookseller refused to
sell Commonweal to the mei, citing the break of diplomatic relations with the
ussr. Stevens commented on the situation: [] Just to show, how much
political prejudice remains strong here.26 From time to time Stevens complained to the mei that, in the interests of the endeavor, he couldnt say
openly for whom he was working and buying the items. In any case, he later found a way to resolve the problem with Baker.
In April 1928 Beer,27 in addition to the desiderata, set another objective
for Stevens:
We would like to complete our collection of Socialist and
Labour papers of the Eighties and Nineties. You will oblige us
by assisting us in this matter and inquiring at booksellers or
persons (old trade unionists and Socialists) likely to possess such
papers []. Kindly have us in mind whenever you happen to
come across those old labour people who have played some part
in the movement.28
This work really was complicated, demanding specific abilities, skills and
the talent to find an approach and common language with different people.
Stevens responded to the mei: I am seeing Maurice Dobb on Thursday next
and shall discuss with him what are the best steps to take on this whole
matter, it occurs to me at the moment that letters in the socialist press
would be as good a way as any.29
Every time Stevens encountered difficulties he sought to talk them over
with Dobb. They were more than on good friendly terms. In the case of
work with the mei, Stevens had no secrets from Dobb at all. Maurice Dobb
tells me, he wrote to the mei, that he has not received any duplicates of
instructions forwarded to me, although it was arranged that he should be
25
26
27
28
29
The All-Russian Co-operative Society (arcos) operated in 1920-1940.

rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.193, L.94.
Max Beer left Moscow in April 1928, but he maintained contacts with H. Stevens
and with the Institute (with D.B. Rjazanov and E. Czbel).
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.192, L.20.
Ibid., L.24.
116
kept in touch in this way. I am making it my business to keep him informed

of all that I am doing [].30 Proceeding from the previous correspondence
between Stevens and the mei that is at our disposal now, the arrangement
to duplicate to Dobb the letters sent to Stevens had never been made,
moreover, it had never been discussed. The reaction from the mei demonstrated its confusion:
We have indeed not sent copies of our letters, because it seemed
to us that neither you nor he considered it very necessary. Of
course, we can make up for this omission. Perhaps it will do if
in future we send a copy of our correspondence with you to Mr.
Dobb.31
As of April 1928, Dobb was receiving duplicates of all the letters from the
mei to Stevens. In spring 1929 Dobb visited the ussr32 as well as the mei.
When he returned to Cambridge, he found no duplicates, Stevens immediately inquired and the mei explained: As we have heard nothing from Mr.
Dobb since he left Moscow we indeed have not sent him copies of our letters to you. Of most of the letters which have been written in the meantime
copies were reserved for him and we are going to send them direct to him
by the same post.33 Maurice Dobb was not only well informed about the
activities of Harry Stevens, he regularly helped the latter with recommendations to persons and institutions, with searching for people and with advice
in any challenging task.
At the beginning of May 1928, Stevens reported that he has discussed
this question of old movement journals with Dobb, and they agree that
letters to the various movement papers now extant are one way of finding
out what can be done. They also had in mind one or two old stalwarts,
e.g. Tom Quelch, Tom Mann34 who may have something for disposal.35 By
30
31
32
33
34
35
Ibidem.
Ibid., L.30ob.
Dobb left his admiring impressions in a book: Maurice Dobb, In Soviet Russia.
Autumn 1930 (London, 1930), 30 p.
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.194, L.117.
Tom Quelch was the son of Harry Quelch, one of the first Marxists in the uk.
Tom followed in his fathers footsteps as a radical political activist, became a
founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Tom Mann (18561941) was a noted British trade unionist, a successful organizer and a popular
public speaker in the labour movement. In 1884 he joined the Social Democratic
Federation. He was a founding member of the Independent Labour Party and
took part in parliamentary elections. In 1901, Mann emigrated to Australia, but
returned to Britain in 1910. In 1917, he joined the British Socialist Party, took part
in the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and was chairman of
the British Bureau of the Red International of Labor Unions and its successor, the
National Minority Movement (in 1921-1929).
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.192, L.28.
|1 1 7
chance Stevens came upon Joseph Burgess,36 whom he knew by sight, in the
British Museum Newspaper Room, and promptly tackled him. It turned out
that Burgess had one file of the Workmens Times and apparently was not willing to dispose of it. But he asked to write and possibly to call on him shortly,
and Stevens took it as a chance to talk things over with him better. This ordinary situation revealed in Stevens some unique qualities of a true archival
collector: the ability to use any opportune moment to get in contact with
the required people; to be precise in describing the scope of his interests;
and to be persistent in maintaining acquaintances.
Rjazanov, being a genius in this field himself, certainly appreciated the
abilities of the British correspondent and decided to entrust him with the
most delicate task investigating the details of the lives of K. Marx and F.
Engels, as well as their relatives with the purpose of finding any documents,
objects or evidence that might be related to them. On 24 April 1928 the mei
asked Stevens to fulfil a new type of request:
We should ask you to look for any possible literary inheritance
(letters, documents etc) left by Edward Aveling.37 We believe
there is no need to explain to you the significance of this matter for the investigations of our Institute, as you must know
that Aveling in the course of many years was an intimate friend
of Engels. One must say that in fact there is not much hope to
find out something definite about this inheritance. Aveling,
who after the death of Eleonor lived with the actress Nilsson,
withdrew himself from the labour movement, and there is little
probability to suppose that this couple felt particular reverence
to letters or documents left from previous times. Anyhow the
matter requires definite explanation: you could find considerable help in trying to consult some old members of the Labour
movement in England. We are told that the writing table of
Marx also came into possession of Aveling, however, we are not
able to control the truth of this statement.38
36
37
38
Joseph Burgess (1853-1934) was a British journalist and Labour politician, who took
part in the creation of the Independent Labour Party and the Labour Party, and
edited and published a number of workers newspapers.
Edward Bibbins Aveling (1849-1898) was a prominent English biology instructor and
popular spokesman for Darwinian evolution, atheism and socialism, the author of
numerous books and pamphlets, and a founding member of the Socialist League
and the Independent Labour Party. For many years he was the partner of Eleanor
Marx Aveling (1855-1898), the youngest daughter of Karl Marx. She was herself a
socialist activist. In March 1898, after discovering that her partner, Edward Aveling,
had secretly married a young actress in June the previous year, she committed
suicide by poison.
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.192, L.31.
118
The next order to Stevens in this area was to arrange the photographing
of all London residences of Karl Marx.39 The literary inheritance of the relatives, friends, companions-in-arms and acquaintances was also the target of
the archival hunting, particularly the literary legacies of Maltman Barry,40
John George Eccarius,41 Professor Edward Spencer Beesly42 and Henry Hubert
Juta.43
This task was among the most difficult. Stevens was making endless
inquires in order to find something, but the progress was bound to be
very slow. He wrote letters, visited lawyers, and looked for documents at
Somerset House, where the Registrar General of Births, Marriages and
Deaths was located, but in vain. The mei constantly demanded that he
should continue the search. The first results started to appear only in late
autumn 1928, when Stevens found the heirs (the sons) of Mr. Beesly, who responded to his letter and said that they had kept the archive of their father.
The mei made this proposal: We have about 50 letters of Beesly, some of
which we might offer in exchange for Marx-letters.44 Later Stevens managed to get copies of Marxs letters. The other investigations brought nothing new, nevertheless they were continued until the last day of Stevenss
employment by the Institute.
In his search for Socialist and Labour Movement papers, Stevens proved to
be rather inventive. He started to make inquires privately in certain direc39
40
41
42
43
44
Ibid., L.32.
Maltman Barry (Michael Maltman Barry, 1842-1909) was a Scottish journalist and
political activist who described himself as a Marxist but stood in elections for the
Conservative Party; he was a friend and supporter of Karl Marx. In 1871 Barry was
appointed as Provisional Chairman of the International Workingmens Association
but, after a year, he was compelled to leave the organization. Later he continued to
be active in radical circles.
Johann Georg (John George) Eccarius (1818-1889) was a Thuringian tailor, labour
activist, longstanding friend of K. Marx and F. Engels, a member of the League
of the Just, and later of the League of Communists and the International
Workingmens Association. Here he served jointly with Karl Marx on the General
Council for a number of years. Following quarrels with Marx in 1872, he joined the
English trade union and suffrage movements.
Edward Spencer Beesly (1831-1915) was a positivist historian and one of the
founding editors of the Positivist Review, professor of history and Latin at Bedford
College for women and after 1889 at University College, and a friend of K.
Marx (was well acquainted with his circle). Beesly was chairman at the meeting
in St. Martins Hall, London (28 September 1864) at which the International
Workingmens Association was founded. In March 1867 he published an article in
the Fortnightly Review supporting the activities of the new model trade unions. K.
Marx corresponded with him.
Henry Hubert Juta (1857-1930) was a nephew of K. Marx, the son of one of his
brothers-in-law, born in Cape Town (South Africa), graduated from the University
of London, was admitted to the Cape bar and practiced there as Judge of Appeal
from 1880 to 1914.
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.193, L.20ob.
|1 1 9
tions, among members of the labour movement who were friendly and who
might possibly provide material at a very reasonable price. He had posted a
notice in the New Leader. At the same time, he tried to take advantage of another opportunity. On 8 May 1928 he reported to the mei:
You will doubtless have had the news of the death of H.H.
Champion.45 [] I also happen to have a friend at present in
London who knows his wife, Mrs. Champion, quite well. She
will willingly put me in touch with Mrs. Champion if I desire
it, and write to know whether you would like me to do so, or
whether you have someone in Australia who can take up with
Mrs. Champion the question of old files. If you would like me to
write, I should be glad of instructions as to what offers I could
make for old material.46
So he wrote to Mrs. Champion and later received some publications from
her. From that point on, Stevens did not let any death of a more or less
prominent individual in the labour movement pass him by.
How did it work? Here is just one typical example. After the death of comrade Westbury, a forty-year-old worker in the labour movement, Stevens
wrote to his relatives. Unfortunately Westbury did not seem to have left any
periodicals, but his executor, a man living a short distance from London,
wrote in answer to Stevenss letter, saying that there were a number of pamphlets and books that might be worth examining. Stevens reported to the
mei:
I went out to Harrow last night and found over a dozen books
and pamphlets originating from the 1880-90 period, which Mr.
Cole very kindly said I could bring away with me. You have given no instructions in regard to pamphlets so I am holding these
and append list of them. If any of them are considered of importance I shall send them across at once, of course.47
The collection apparently was unique because not a single title was found at
the mei and Stevens was asked to send it to Moscow as soon as possible.
45
46
47
Henry Hyde Champion (1859-1928) was a socialist journalist and assistant secretary
of the Social Democratic Federation, who took part in the formation of the
Independent Labour Party. In 1893 he emigrated to Australia.
rgaspi, F.71, Op.50, D.192, L.41.
Ibid., L.67.
120
Connections and Collections

News spread quickly and in June 1928 Stevens began to receive offers of materials. Thanks to his notice in New Leader, he acquired many journal titles,
such as Commonsense; Peoples Press (1890); The Miner, edited by Keir Hardie;48
The Democrat (1887); The Labour World, edited by Michael Davitt;49 The Workers
Cry, edited by Frank Smith;50 The Link (1887-1888); Trade Unionist (1896), edited
by Tom Mann; Christian Socialist (1884); and Practical Socialist. This flow of material was constant. Stevens regularly sent lists with detailed descriptions of
the issues (newspapers, journals, pamphlets, books) to the mei, which sent
back the lists marked with what exactly should be purchased for the purposes of completing the collection.
In October 1928, the Institute sent Stevens a list of Chartist poems (4
pages) and asked him to locate the originals and buy them or obtain photostats.51 A letter in November contained some explanations: We should like
[to] mention, as most likely you are not aware of this, that we have a large
collection of socialistic and Workers belletristica. The German and also the
French collections are very good ones, in the English are great voids which
we should like to make up.52 As a result, today the gopb has a wonderful
collection of Chartist materials.
As a rule, Stevens wrote to people who he knew were likely to have materials. The mei helped him with names, addresses and advice. Through the
mei, Stevens contacted Llewellyn Archer Atherley-Jones, a judge and the
son of Ernest Jones.53 Max Beer had not managed to connect with him, but
Atherley-Jones replied to the first letter from Stevens. Then he permitted
some materials from the collection of his fathers papers to be photostated.
On 9 June 1928 Stevens reported that he had made inquires with some old
workers, including Tom Mann, John Lincoln Mahon54 and Henry W. Lee.55
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
James Keir Hardie (1856-1915) was a Scottish socialist and labour leader, the first
Independent Labour Member of Parliament elected to the Parliament of the United
Kingdom. He was one of the primary founders of the Independent Labour Party, as
well as the Labour Party.
Michael Davitt (1846-1906) was an Irish republican, agrarian agitator, labour leader,
journalist, Member of Parliament and a founder of the Irish National Land League.
Francis Samuel Smith (1854-1940) was a British newspaper editor, became a
founding member of the Independent Labour Party, was its first parliamentary
candidate and contested a large number of elections before finally winning a
parliamentary seat in his mid-70s.
rgaspi, F.71, Op.50, D.193, L.25.
Ibid., L.54.
Ibid., D.192. L.59. Llewellyn Archer Atherley-Jones (1851-1929) was a British
politician, barrister and later a judge. He was the son of Ernest Charles Jones (18191869), an English poet, dramatist and novelist, and Chartist.
John Lincoln Mahon (1865-1933) was a trade unionist and labour politician, an early
member of the Social Democratic Federation.
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.192, L.87. Henry W. Lee (1865-1932) was a prominent British
|1 21
Mann answered that he had nothing because in his frequent travels his collection had broken up, and only provided some useful names. But Mahon
was friendlier and Stevens met with him many times, always reporting the
results of the talks to the mei. Mahon, who was one of the original founders
of the Socialist League, which succeeded the Social Democratic Federation (with
W. Morris, Belfort Bax56 and others), knew very little of Beesly, and of the
Avelings all he had to say was that, as far as he knew, there was nothing
left of them. He had known the Avelings quite well and had been in touch
with them almost until their deaths. He had met Engels and been on very
friendly terms with him, visiting him more than once. He had many interesting things to say about Professor Rjazanovs book on Marx and Engels,
which he greatly admired, though he thought that it presents a slightly different side of Engels from that which he knew. Mahon had Commonweal but
did not want to give it to anyone. He promised to get in touch with other
co-founders of the Socialist League or their descendants with a view to finding
out whether any materials had survived. Stevens wrote to the mei:
Meantime he informs me that Reeves, booksellers in Charing
Cross Road has a number of old socialist publications []. I am
getting into touch with Reeves with a view to seeing what he
has got. He (Mahon) is of the opinion that Marx has never been
understood in this country and very little on the continent,
though he says that in his view Riazanov is the best of the lot,
and there is almost nothing he could quarrel with []. He is
not a member of the Communist Party, although his son is, I
believe. He himself is a lonely survivor of the good old times.57
By the way, Stevenss opinion on Marxism in England was close to

Mahons. In one of his letters he stated: One of the worst drawbacks to
the study of Marxism in English is the fact that Capital, all three volumes,
is translated as poor and unintelligible in English as almost could be
possible.58
56
57
58
socialist who joined the Social Democratic Federation soon after its foundation,
became the full-time Assistant Secretary of the party in 1885 and soon after became
its General Secretary. He held this position until the organization dissolved itself
into the new British Socialist Party. Then Lee was a member of the right-wing split
of 1916 which founded the National Socialist Party. This group opposed the October
Revolution, and Lee wrote a pamphlet entitled Bolshevism: A Curse and Danger to
the Workers. In his last years he worked at the headquarters of the Trades Union
Congress.
Ernest Belfort Bax (1854-1926) was a British socialist journalist and philosopher,
associated with the Social Democratic Federation.
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.192, L.98-99.
Ibid., D.193, L.10.
122
At their next meeting, Mahon said that he was in possession of a long letter from Eleanor Marx, written when she began to cohabit with Edward
Aveling, which would have been in 1883 or early in 1884. It was personal
about herself, added Mahon, I think I have preserved it. If so I would present it also to the Institute. My mind at present is to collect all I have and
lend them for a year to the Marx-Engels Institute.59 Stevens asked Rjazanov
to write a personal letter to Mahon,60 which Rjaznov did.61 Mahon replied
with a very pleasant letter, and Rjazanov intended to respond,62 but never
did. When Stevens reminded him of the letter, he received this ruthless retort: Here we do not expect much, Mahon being rather old. If you find a
chance of approaching him again you might do so on occasion.63
Meanwhile the story continued. Stevens almost lost trace of Mahon, but
suddenly in January 1930 Mahon wrote him that he had collected several
letters that the mei might find of interest altogether 16 letters, of which
seven were from Engels, three from Eleanor Marx and two from Aveling,
two copies of letters by Mahon and two others from lesser known people.
There were also other documents, including one with Engelss annotation at
the side.64 Eventually the letters were delivered to the mei as a gift.
H.W. Lee responded promptly to Stevens. On the Avelings, he wrote that
there were no heirs whatsoever as far as he knew; in regard to Eccarius,
he mentioned his son, with whom he had a slight acquaintance, though
he had neither heard nor seen anything of him since; and about Barry he
wrote that Barrys son had probably emigrated to America.65 In a month or
so Lee found the old pamphlets and asked Stevens how much the Institute
could pay for them.66 Then Lee himself made an offer of thirty shillings, but
Stevens found this price excessive and advised the mei to agree to no more
than twenty. In a letter from 30 October 1928 the Institute replied:
Although we possess about one third of these pamphlets and
the price asked for is indeed no cheap one, we cannot very well
bargain with Lee. You see we do not consider our transactions
with him from a strictly commercial point only and it must
be said that the set contains some very interesting and [r]are
pieces. In case you find it possible to drop a hint regarding a
reduction in price when conversing with Lee then, of course, we
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
Ibid., D.192, L.122.

Ibid., D.193, L.9.
Ibid., L.20.
Ibid., L.64.
Ibid., L.121ob.
Ibid., D.195, L.162.
Ibid., D.192, L.122.
Ibid., L.135.
|1 23
would not mind you do so; otherwise we are willing to take the
pamphlets at price stated.67
At the end of November, Stevens noted that he had bought Lees collection
for twelve shillings.68 Lee continued regularly to offer books and materials.
Occasionally the mei declined to buy, but more often than not it was willing
to obtain the issues.
In January 1929, Stevens received these instructions:
Adolf Smith69 died on 9 November 1925. He was a close friend
of Lee. In the 1880s-1890s Smith played a prominent role in the
Social Federation, assisted in all the International Congresses
in the capacity of translator and was well acquainted with the
leading personalities of the Labour Movement. (After his death
one of co-workers being in London approached Lee regarding
the literary inheritance but Lee answered that nothing left.)
This answer might have been due to the inquiry coming from
an outsider. Our intercourse with Lee having become a little
more friendly in the meantime, we thought it would be no
harm to again ask him on this matter, and ask you to kindly
broach this matter to him in careful, diplomatic form [] next
time you have the chance of seeing him. To our view it does not
seem at all likely that Smith, having played such an important
role in the Workers Movement [] did not leave his impressions, reminiscences, etc.70
In March 1929, Stevens had dinner with Lee and asked him many questions.
But Lee said he was surprised himself by the fact that nothing was left after
the death of Adolphe Smith. Mainly because Smiths brother was Granville
Smith, a member of the Conservative Leaders Consultative Committee, Lee
thought family reasons might have prevented anything of Adolphe Smiths
becoming public property.71 Lee explained also that lately his ability to obtain books for the Institute had begun to fail. He had more or less exhausted
the supply. Nevertheless, he promised to keep his eyes and ears open for
anything that might interest the mei.
In July 1928, Stevens reported that he had obtained the address of Joseph
Edwards, former editor of the Reformers yearbook and Labour Annual. He
67
68
69
70
71
Ibid., D.193, L.25.

Ibid., L.69.
Adolphe Smith (A.S. Headingley, 1846-1924) was a journalist and socialist, took part
in the Paris Commune, returned to London and delivered lectures on the events
in Paris, argued with F. Engels. In 1916 he left the British Socialist Party and joined
the National Socialist Party.
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.193, L.122.
Ibid., D.194, L.20.
124
lives in London, and I understand he has a very fine file of documents etc.
I hope to get into contact with him. On 15 August 1928 Stevens noted that
Edwards proposed some volumes as well as his disorganized personal archive. I think Edwards must have a very good collection, judging by various
accounts,72 he added. Stevens visited Edwards and obtained a quantity of
Commonwealth Land Party pamphlets, as well as information about some people who might have material to spare. He mentioned also that Edwards had
a large collection but it was impossible to find out what else was in it.73
Stevenss attitude to his work was so constructive that he conducted
his own investigation into how other people had built their collections.
He found out that Edwards, for instance, and also G.D.H. Cole,74 had spent
hours turning over books, etc. in secondhand bookshops, possibly spending
several hours without finding anything worth buying. He concluded:
The kind of materials wanted by the Institute is the kind that
booksellers stuff away at the very bottom of their piles, regarding it as useless from their point of view. The only other thing
to be done is to collect the booksellers catalogues as exhaustively as possible, as I have already suggested in my last letter.
This can possibly be done more easily by me than by Foyle.75
Gathering the catalogues and sending them to the mei was one of Stevenss
numerous duties. In response he was receiving desiderata lists, or the
same catalogues with the notes, or the direct orders for the bookshops. The
thematic horizons of collecting had broadened and inevitably raised the
question of the acquisition profile. Stevens was the first to pay attention
to this point. The responses from the mei shed light on the Institutes acquisition policy under Rjazanov. Probably E. Czbel,76 Rjazanovs deputy,
explained:
Regarding your fear that specific lists would not necessarily
cover everything we might want we beg to say that in the nature of our work we can never definitely give exhaustive lists,
as by going through one paper, new light is thrown on a sub-
72
73
74
75
76
Ibid., D.192, L.130, 135, 142.

Ibid., D.193, L.55.
George Douglas Howard Cole (1889-1959) was an English political theorist,
economist, writer and a distinguished Labour historian, a long time member of the
Fabian Society and an advocate for the Co-operative movement. In 1925 he became
a reader in economics at University College, Oxford. In 1944, Cole became the first
Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford.
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.193, L.56.
Czbel Ern (1886-1953) was Hungarian communist who worked at the mei as a
deputy of Rjazanov (1922-1931); he was later repressed but survived, and after his
exile he even managed to return to Hungary in 1947.
|1 25
ject which we might have already considered exhausted, and we

have again to try and find more material in order to follow up
the new hint. In connection with this we should like to point
out to you that you must never mind and in no case think it a
distrust in your knowledge from our side when from time to
time we draw your attention to collections, books etc. as it is
only by such continue pointing out to each other all that which
might be of help in furthering our mutual work that we may
hope for satisfactory results. No matter if you tell us something
already known to us or vice versa. In this spirit we work with all
our correspondents and we trust that you also will appreciate
such point of view.77
Stevens tried to draw the meis attention to the current political developments in the United Kingdom and to the publications related to them, but
the same Czbel in December 1928 was more precise in regard to the collecting principles:
Our Institute is occupied chiefly with historical studies up
to the end of last century. Political events and problems of
the present day do not interest us or only in such cases when
possible to consider them from a theoretical point of view.
Besides historical questions theoretical articles on Marxism,
Socialism, Political Economy, Philosophical Questions, Workers
Movement would have to be considered. In the sphere of
Political Science, Socialism, Workers Movement, Philosophy,
Sociology, History we are interested in everything historic, theoretic, and biographic. Once more we repeat: present day political questions, polemica against socialism, do not interest us, except Marx or Engels being mentioned therein.78
The profile of the collecting was also discussed in February 1929. Stevens
wanted to know the priorities. The answer was the following: first what we
need is everything about Marx and Engels, all other questions and collections are secondary.
Regards the classification of these various items from the aspect
of their importance we beg to say, that single inquires, such as
concerned with inheritances, acquaintances of Marx, Engels,
looking for special articles, tracing of certain journals, are to be
77
78
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.193, L.63ob.

Ibid., L.93.
126
considered as the most important and the earlier these are taken in hand the better for us.79
In one of his letters Stevens mentioned that he was looking for a contact for
John Burns,80 and he received an immediate reply:
In 1925 com. Rjasanov had paid a visit to John Burns (Intercessor
was Tom Mann). According to Rjasanov, Burns possesses the best
More-Collection in the world. On occasion of this visit it was
mentioned that Burns was having a catalogue of his collection
prepared and a copy of the same was promised to Rj[asanov],
who agreed also to having the Index made on account of the
Institute. At present we still would agree to such an arrangement. Burns possesses two edition princeps of Moruss Utopia. At
the time it was also mentioned to cede the Institute one copy.
Today this is out of the question as we have already obtained
a copy. Soon after his return Rj[asanov] sent, purely as a mark
of attention, several Russian Morus-Studies and offered him the
first Russian Morus-Translation, appeared 1788. (The letter and
parcel remained unanswered and unacknowledged).81
J. Edwards provided Stevens with a letter of recommendation to John Burns
and Stevens wrote him. At the mei, they did not have high hopes: We think
him a very close character and do not expect much but of course a visit will
be quite interesting.82
However, Stevens soon reported that Burns had agreed to see him. This
short note in a letter to the mei in March 1929 was emphatically underlined
three times by Rjazanov. Stevens received these instructions:
Your expected visit to him is good news indeed. As we know
Burns possesses not only the finest More Collection but also a
most interesting collection on Labour questions and Workers
movement, he probably knew Marx and Engels, met them personally, certainly knew their friends and acquaintances, and
had precise and interesting communications with the leaders of
English Workers Movement. Perhaps it would be more advisable to start with the question of his memoirs, personal impres-
79
80
81
82
Ibid., L.181ob.
John Elliot Burns (1858-1943) was an English trade unionist and politician, socialist
and then a Liberal Member of Parliament and Minister. As a book collector, he
created a very large private library, much of which he left to the University of
London Library.
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.192, L.118.
Ibid., D.193, L.121ob.
|1 27
sions and etc., than with More Collection, but we leave it to you
to decide. By the way Burns was well acquainted with Bernstein
at a time when Engels was still alive. Should Burns feel more inclined to talk about his reminiscences on the foundation of the
2nd International this also would be excellent.83
The report on the visit to Burns arrived at the beginning of April 1929.84
Stevens spent over two hours with him, pursuing the specific points mentioned in the Institutes letters and viewing his books. He noticed that the
More Collection consisted of over 3000 volumes; there was no catalogue or
index. Concerning the Russian edition of Mores Utopia, Burns said: This,
together with the Basle German 1524 edition, is all I need to complete my
collection, and he indicated to Stevens that he would be glad to make an
exchange for either or both of these works. I should make it clear, Stevens
wrote, that Burns is a remarkable specimen of the book collector genus! Of
course, anything on More would be of interest but the general Institute publications did not arouse his keen eagerness.
It turned out that Burns did not know Marx at all but knew Engels well.
He said that Engels was very fond of him, and that he had a number of
Engelss letters. He spoke of Engels as a fine, upright gentleman and spoke
of how Engelss house at Regents Park Road was always crowded with visitors. He himself had been there many times. He knew Eleanor Marx, of
course, and Aveling, of whom he spoke in strong terms. He was indeed a
good friend of Bernstein until the war of 1914, when the latter parted with a
number of former friends. He has letters also from Liebknecht, Bebel and
many others, Stevens wrote, and in this direction there is much promise.
He also showed me a gift he had received from Engels of Marxs cigar case,
a more or less ordinary Stuttgart case. Engels had given it to him as a token
of his esteem.
Burns took Stevens rapidly over the library, which was considerable, and
Stevens noticed that the social and political side was excellent.
His collection of pamphlets and periodicals appeared to be enormous. Speaking generally, I got the impression that Burns delighted in showing visitors his books, he extended a cordial invitation to me to come again and again and look at them []. I
hope to get his permission to work in his library, which would
of course be a big concession. One factor certainly was an aid:
he apparently shows keen interest in Soviet Russia. He asked
me to let him have material on the ussr and so far I have sent
him a copy of Dobbs Economic Conditions. I must not forget that
he had very warm recollections of Professor Riazanov, refer83
84
Ibid., D.194, L.8ob.

Ibid., L.22-25.
128
ring to his visit again and again, and sending his regards to him
through me. He hopes to meet him sooner or later.85
On 10 April 1929 Rjazanov wrote to John Burns personally and sent him
some Russian publications of the mei.
In May Stevens heard nothing from John Burns. In the middle of June the
mei sent an instruction: According to Prof. Riazanov Burns possesses the
only complete series of Beehive existing, and perhaps it would not be a bad
idea to approach Burns with a view of having his file photostated as soon
as a suitable moment presents itself.86 Burns again received Stevens, explained to him that he had not found any letters from Engels yet but he had
discovered letters from Bebel, Liebknecht, Bernstein, Kautsky, the Avelings,
G.J. Harney, C.T. Craig and two telegrams from Engels.87 Stevens reported:
Burns made an interesting admission that he was keeping a diary at least just prior to the war. I rather gathered that he would
even like to visit the ussr possibly in a semi-official capacity.
He is certainly extremely interested, definitely favorable to the
ussr and might make quite a good intermediary.88
Burns gave permission to copy Beehive. Stevens transferred the volumes for
photostating to the London School of Economics (lse) and received a curious
offer from the lse Librarian, who was of course interested in the fact that
the representative of the mei was photostating the Beehive.89 He proposed
that the lse be allowed to make positives from the Institutes negatives in
exchange for a discount of five per cent on the total cost to the Institute.
If the Institute agrees to the lse proposal, Stevens wrote, I think it will
strengthen the already friendly relations existing with them.90 The mei approved the deal, saying that if Burns having no objection to this proposal
we willingly agree to their offer but should very much like to receive the
positives ourselves.91 The mei did not refuse the five per cent discount; it
only proposed to leave the negatives to the lse. Burns agreed to allow the
lse to have a copy and the lse Librarian was happy to know that they get
the negatives because they could sell positives to all the American universities [...].92 I did not find a rational explanation for this decision in the documents. The meis motives for choosing the positives in this case despite
being well aware of with the difference in value between positives and
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
Ibidem.
Ibid., L.96.
Ibid., L.101.
Ibid., L.111.
Ibid., D.195, L.54.
Ibidem.
Ibid., L.63ob.
Ibid., L.74.
|1 29
negatives (the flow of photostated and filmed/photographed materials from

England alone was enormous) remain unknown.
Stevens continued to maintain good relations with Burns. The mei was
interested in getting access to Engelss letters and fulfilled any of Burnss
wishes, sending him books, such as the Hungarian edition of Utopia and so
on.
The mei and Stevens were on more than good terms. The correspondence
(to 1931) contains no one evidence of the slightest misunderstanding or tension. Both sides were mutually attentive and respectful on all occasions.
Stevens did not refuse any work and was candid; the Institute regularly met
commitments and valued its employee. Some specific cases can confirm this
assumption. On 31 July 1928 Stevens asked for three weeks of holidays from
15 August to early September. The Institute agreed and paid for the holiday
time in advance. But Stevens tried to refuse:
In explanation may I say that I had not in the least taken for
granted that the salary would be paid for holidays also, although I knew that that was customary in the ussr. So far as my
own finances were concerned, I was going on the assumption
that payment would not be made for holidays []. And I had
no intention of raising the point, for I was perfectly satisfied to
leave the matter in that way. You will I hope understand that in
thinking thus I was taking into account the fact, of which I have
good knowledge, of the need for economy as impressed on all
institutions at present in the ussr, and that I was prepared to
accept that position.93
The response from the mei was short and definite: Economy in Russia is
never exercised at the expense of the employees and, of course, holiday
time is always paid for.94 This question was never discussed again.
There was another illustrative occasion in October 1928, when Stevens
turned to the mei with a personal request. He was going to rewrite some biographies of Russian revolutionaries (Plechanov, Stalin, Rykov and etc.) for
the British Encyclopedia and was wondering whether the Institute could help
him obtain the materials if the matter was arranged.95 The reply was positive and cautious at the same time: We shall be only too pleased to help
you with all the information we can let you have. Most reliable information
(autobiographic) is to be found in the Grant Encyclopedia []. But of this later when the question will have become acute.96 The current political situation in Moscow was not clear for the British correspondent and in this case
93
94
95
96
Ibid., D.193, L.9.

Ibid., L.20.
Ibid., L.13.
Ibid., L.20ob.
130
his past experience of living in the country did not help. Politics or political
sympathies had never been discussed in his correspondence with the mei.
At that time, he saw the Soviet state as a superior system by definition and
the mei as a centre of collective rationality, knowledge and wisdom.
In September 1928 Stevens asked the mei to send him some of its Russian
publications: Marx-Engels-Archives, Letopisi Marxizma, Pod Znamenem Marxizma,
Plechanovs volumes, etc. He proposed to cover the expenses by deducting
one pound monthly from his salary. He hoped the Institute would give him
trade rates and discounts for books. [] As a matter of fact I have a library
of nearly two hundred books dealing with Russian revolutionary history.
[] I can take steps to fill out the gaps in my library in the way I suggest.97
In its next letter the mei wrote:
With great pleasure we shall let you have the various Institutes
publications without deducting for them, just considering
these books as an accessory in your work for the benefit of the
Institute. In the course of the next few days the first lot will be
dispatched to you. Regarding Pod Znamenem Marksizma we beg to
mention that this is not a publication of the M.E.I. We have a
few stray copies of this paper which we shall let you have.98
Stevens was genuinely grateful to hear this from the mei: I hardly know
how to express my thanks for these []. Even now I have a feeling that I
ought to pay for them. Their value to me is enormous and I have already
spent two or three nights reading into the small hours of the morning. [] I
can only repeat my very grateful thanks for this considerable addition to my
own reference and study collection.99
In general, by the end of 1928 Stevens had won the absolute confidence
of the mei and this was acknowledged in one of the letters: Take your time
and make arrangements best suited to present circumstances. We have entire confidence in your tact and efficiency and feel sure that this matter as
similar other ticklish affairs will be solved to satisfaction.100
Stevens continued collecting with great enthusiasm. He placed an advertisement for old socialist publications in the Labour Research Department
(of which he was a member) and in April 1929 he received a letter from
a man named Bryan, who said that he had a very good collection of pamphlets dating back over the last 30 years. Stevens made an appointment
with him and found a remarkable collection (including a large number of
Fabian Tracts). Stevens sent the list to the mei. Each item was priced, but the
seller was willing to offer twenty per cent discount for the lot. Then a friend
97
98
99
100
Ibid., L.101.
Ibid., L.108.
Ibid., L.114. The fate of the personal library of H. Stevens is unknown.
Ibid., L.121ob.
|1 31
of Bryan, another Trade Union official named Hann also proposed quite a
few items that Bryans list did not include.101
Shortly thereafter, one more collection appeared. J.B. Askew102 died in
Moscow and his widow had a large quantity of pamphlets, books and periodicals at the disposal of the manager in the Workers Bookshop, who invited Stevens to look at this collection. Stevens spent two days sorting out
the issues and three days compiling a list for the mei. The Askew materials
partly overlapped with the Hann and Bryan collections. The Askew collection included a number of German pamphlets of the war period.
A man named Trask also came across the advertisement. He had been interested in the collection of old socialist and similar rare literature for years,
made donations to the lse and elsewhere from time to time and had assisted Cole in searching for research materials. Stevens reported to the mei:
He is keen on the idea of a socialist archives and would appear
to be quite willing to let some of his collection go at the same
price that he paid for the items he showed me a list of some
of the items and certainly they appeared to be of decided interest. He has very good collection of Fabian tracts (bound in one
large volume). In addition he made a free gift to the Institute
(W. Morris, Holyoake, and G.W. Foote). I am going down to see
Trasks collection in a weeks time. In addition I think it might
be worth while considering using him to some extent for the
purpose of searching in likely secondhand bookshops etc. for
rare literature, paying him a small commission on each find, in
order to repay him for his trouble.103
Stevens soon reported new proposals: the collections of Alexander, Taylor
and Stevens (namesake). He viewed the Stevens collection as an extremely interesting little group of publications; the Alexander collection as a
valuable one; and the collection of Taylor, one of the founders of the Shop
Assistants Union in about 1889 and a member of the Socialist League, as
an important one. Taylor had a large collection that he had to store in a
garage belonging to a friendly labour man. He had some very interesting
items. Taylor said nothing concerning the price.104 The Stevens and Askew
Collections were offered as a gift to the Institute. The mei asked for the
101
102
103
104
Ibid., D.194, L.43.

John Bertram Askew (1869-1929) was a British writer and translator, who translated
some of the work of Karl Kautsky from German to English. Becoming a socialist,
he went to live in Germany. Askew separated from his first wife, and in June 1911
a German court ruled that the marriage was dissolved. In 1912 he married his
second wife, Anna Askew, from Berlin. After his death the legitimacy of his second
marriage was debated as a question of the conflict of laws in British courts.
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.194, L.45.
Ibid., L.50.
132
addresses of the donors so it could send them letters of thanks. As for the
other collections, the orders were the following: Alexander collection to
buy with reduction if possible, Hann Collection to buy, Bryan Collection
this is the most interesting of all to buy, Trask and Taylor Collections to
buy.105 All the collections were acquired.
The accumulation of this enormous material raised the question of how
it was to be shipped to Moscow. Stevens proposed to pack it all and ship by
Soviet arcos steamer, which was considerably cheaper than book post. But
before anything was shipped from London it was necessary to get a license
to import the materials. The Workers Bookshop obtained this license and
arranged shipment with arcos. The mei reported in a month that all the
boxes had arrived safely.
The Bishopsgate Institute

In carrying out the orders of the mei, Stevens managed to gain access to
all institutions and private collections. He worked in the British Museum
Library, London School of Economics Library, the Guildhall Library, Labour
Research Department Library, the Goldsmiths Library, the Library of Trade
Union Congress and Labour Party, London University Library, official state
institutions (Home Office), the Manchester Foreign Library and Co-operative
Union, among others, describing their collections and ordering copies of the
necessary materials. However there was one library where, despite all his incredible efforts, he could not secure permission to work the Library of the
Bishopsgate Institute. This case had a partly tragic shade.
The meis first request for Stevens to visit the Bishopsgate Library arrived
at the end of October 1928:
In the Bishopsgate Library are kept the general papers and
Minute Book of the First International for the years 1866-1869.
Now it is a long cherished wish of ours to obtain photocopies of these papers but this is not an easy thing. The librarian
a certain Mr. Gos? seems to have very peculiar, one might be
even allowed to say hostile feelings for this treasure, he has not
the least inclination whatever to show these manuscripts to
anybody. Many years ago R. Postgate106 had access to these pa105
106
Ibid., L.93.
Raymond William Postgate (1896-1971) was an English socialist, journalist and
editor, social historian, and a founding member of the British Communist Party
in 1920. He left the party after falling out with its leadership in 1922, when the
Communist International insisted that British communists follow the Moscow
line. He was one of Britains first left-wing former-communists, and the party came
to treat him as an archetypal bourgeois intellectual renegade. He remained a key
player in left journalism in the 1920s. His sister Margaret married the socialist
writer and economist G.D.H. Cole.
|1 33
pers (he mentioned about it in the appendix). Nevertheless we

have tried to get hold of the papers, a.o. a co-worker of ours,
a com. Kosminsky,107 when at London, was instructed to try his
luck. After much trouble and difficulties he really did succeed
in receiving the manuscripts for a few hours only, even made
some notes from them, which appeared in our Russian edition
of the Archives. But, of course, this did not at all satisfy us and
we have repeated our endeavors again and again. Friends coming from England have been consulted, among them the delegation of Trade Unions, especially their secretary Fred Bramley.108
Promises were made, but the change of government, the death
of Fred Bramley etc. have left us where we were with our wish.
Now we would ask you and your friend com. Dobb to think the
matter over. Dobb as an old Oxfordian most likely enjoys special
privileges and might even insist of having the papers shown to
him. We should like to point out that it would not be propitious
to our case were it to be known that the interest in these papers
emanates from Russia, as the librarian seems to be a formal
Russian-Eater.109
Stevens and Dobb discussed the possible approaches to the Librarian Mr.
Goss.110 Reporting on the results of their talk, Stevens reflected on the point
and formulated his personal evaluations of some well-known people:
Whilst dealing with this more personal side of my work, which
involves personal letters to various individuals of all shades of
opinion (Laski111 a Fabian dilettante professor; Cole a Guild
Socialist, but is now hardly friendly! And so on) I may express
the hope that the Institute will take a patient view of developments. Sometimes it is quite a ticklish matter to handle.
Cole, for instance, is the brother-in-law of Postgate (his wife is
Postgates sister) and Postgate is hardly persona grata with the
107
108
109
110
111
Evgenij Alekseevich Kosminskij (1886-1959) was a historian, well-known specialist

on medieval British agrarian history, and academician who worked at the mei in
1924-1926.
Fred Bramley (18741925) was the second General Secretary of the British Trade
Union Congress (tuc).
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.193, L.22.
Charles William Frederick Goss was librarian of the Bishopsgate Institute from
1897 to 1941.
Harold Joseph Laski (1893-1950) was a British political theorist, economist, author,
and lecturer. He was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926
to 1950. Laski was Britains most influential intellectual spokesman for Socialism
in the interwar years. He was perhaps the most influential intellectual in the
Labour Party. Laski was an executive member of the socialist Fabian Society during
1922-1936.
134
Communist Party here! Indeed, one might almost describe the

position as being in the nature of a feud. I myself have had a
public polemic with Postgate more than once, and it has hardly been an exchange of compliments and mutual adulation!
So that it will be seen that sometimes a delicate situation is
bound to arise. When some time ago I got Dobb to pursue a clue
Postgate had supplied in regard to Barry, Postgate expressed
himself very antagonistically to material going out of the country. Indeed in regard to the Bishopsgate Library, Postgate, who
might otherwise have been very useful, is useless to apply to
just because he is Postgate.112
In February 1929 Stevens reported that he had discussed the Bishopsgate
Library situation with G.D.H. Cole, particularly the possibility of copying the
documents there. They came up with the idea that if the British Museum or
the lse obtained permission to photostat in order to have a copy publicly
available, two copies could be taken at the same time, one of which would
go to the mei. Cole wanted to get in touch with the authorities of the British
Museum and lse but it was clear that nobody would pay for this work. In
that case, probably, the Institute would be willing to pay for the work, as
Stevens carefully worded in his letter to the mei. He continued:
I think you perhaps underestimate Coles position and ability to
help. Since 1926 he has been a professor at Oxford University,
and moreover he is in touch with many people, Tawney,113 Laski,
and other lse folk, as well as such people as the British Museum
Trustees Ramsay Macdonald and could pull many strings. The
only point is whether he himself is interested enough in the
job, and I think he has been interested in it. The position now
is that he is going to discuss the matter with certain of the lse
people, and see what can be done.114
Stevens also reported on other aspects of the matter at hand. For instance,
Cole
gave voice to a regret that he did not see the Institute Archives
a regret which should imagine is shared by a large number of
people here except through Postgate occasionally. And he indicated his willingness to exchange duplicates with the Institute
112
113
114
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.193, L.117.

Richard Henry Tawney (1880-1962) was an English economic historian, social
critic, and an important proponent of adult education. From 1917 to 1931, he was a
lecturer at the London School of Economics.
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.193, L.154.
|1 35
as he had done previously. And finally he inquired whether

Prof. Ryazanov was coming to England again, to which I gave
an ambiguous answer! I think perhaps you do not realize that
Cole has now completed his transposition from being the enfant terrible of the Labour and Socialist movement of being a
thoroughly respectable, respected University professor. In this
latter capacity he certainly can put one in touch with many
more people, and I do think his interest is valuable.115
The Bishopsgate Library copying scheme proposed by Cole and Stevens
was approved by the mei:
With the utmost interest we are following your intercourse
with Cole, for the present we beg to say, that we are quite willing to pay for the photostating work of the Bishopsgate Library
material, if an arrangement with British Museum or London
School of Economics as outlined by you could be come to. Pay
we must all the same, and the cost of a second copy would be
not too much if thus we were to get hold of the papers. Please
let us know how things are getting on.116
The British Museum authorities and lse Library supported the proposal but
the Bishopsgate Library nonetheless refused. Recommendations from prominent scholars and even the reopening of official relations between the uk
and ussr in July 1929 did not change Mr. Gosss mind.
In November 1929 Ralph Fox,117 who had joined the meis British cabinet
in August 1929, mused in a letter to Stevens that the exchange of ambassadors was unlikely to ease political tensions much or reduce the Labour
Cabinets personal dislike of the ussr. He wrote:
On the other hand there are individuals in the Government
or closely connected with it, who are sympathetic to closer
relations and would probably be willing to help in such case.
Of these the most promising is Trevelyan, the Minister of
115
116
117
Ibid., L.156.
Ibid., L.167ob.
Ralf Fox (Ralph Winston Fox, 1900-1936) was a British journalist and novelist, author
of several books, including biographies of Lenin and Genghis Khan, member of the
Communist Party of Great Britain (since October 1920, on the recommendation of
A.F. Rothstein); he visited Soviet Russia several times. In 1922, for six months, he
worked as a member of the Quakers Relief Organisation, then he lived in Moscow
while working for the Communist International in 1925, 1926, 1928. In July 1929 he
was sent to work for three years at the mei; he returned to London in July 1932. For
details, see the biography of R. Fox that he wrote himself rgaspi, F.495, Op.198,
D.391, L.36. Fox was killed in Spain during the Spanish Civil War.
136
Education. He could be approached through Tawney. Again,

Strachey118 is a friend of Trevelyan119 and his neighbor. Strachey
knows our Institute, is sympathetic and at the same time has
other influence, literary and conservative, through his family
connections and through the Spectator. Which might affect Goss.
Trevelyan, owing to his position, should have weight in an affair
of this kind. It could be pointed out that the Soviet Government
never refuses permission to historians of other countries to
consult its archives and that English historians, including H.W.
Temperley,120 librarian and historian of the Foreign Office, have
benefited by this. See what you can do on these lines, while we
on our side will see what pressure we can bring to bear from
other directions. You might further sound Tawney, Cole and
others as to the possibility of publicity regarding Goss, in case
of the further refusal.121
Stevens wrote letters, visited scholars and politicians and asked them to
help, but all these efforts brought no change. Finally Rjazanov lost patience
and on 4 March 1930 sent a personal letter to G.P. Gooch,122 H.J. Laski, R.H.
Tawney, H.W. Temperley and Ch. Trevelyan.
I take the liberty of approaching you on a matter which is of the
greatest importance, not only to the Marx-Engels-Institute, but
I think you will agree to all those who are doing research work
connected with the Working Class Movement and the History
118
119
120
121
122
Evelyn John St. Loe Strachey (1901-1963) was a British Labour politician and writer,
the son of John Strachey, editor of The Spectator. Strachey joined the Labour Party
in 1923 and was editor of the Socialist Review and The Miner, a Member of Parliament
in 1929-1931. Strachey was one of the most prolific and widely read British MarxistLeninist theorists of the 1930s. He broke with the Communist Party of Great Britain
in 1940.
George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876-1962) was a well-known British historian, elected
a Fellow of the British Academy in 1925. In 1927 he took up a position as Regius
Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University; in 1940 he was appointed
Master of Trinity College and served in this post until his retirement in 1951.
Harold William Vazeille Temperley (1879-1939) was a British historian, Professor
of Modern History at the University of Cambridge from 1931, and Master of
Peterhouse, Cambridge. Temperleys field was modern diplomatic history, and
he was heavily involved as editor in the publication of the British Governments
official version of the diplomatic history of the early twentieth century.
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.195, L.67.
George Peabody Gooch (1873-1968) was a British journalist, diplomatic historian
and a Member of Parliament for the Liberal Party from 1906 to 1910. He never held
an academic position, but after the First World War Gooch became an influential
historian of Europe of the period. For about ten years from the mid-1920s onwards
he was involved, with Harold Temperley, in the publication of the official British
diplomatic history.
|1 37
of Socialism. The question is that of the literary inheritance

of George Howell and particularly the Minute Books of the 1st
International which were in Howells possession and are now
being kept at the Bishopsgate Library.123
Rjazanov gave a short outline of the history of the collection and how the
documents happened to end up in the Reference Library of the Bishopsgate
Institute. [] And now a very important source of historical knowledge is
being kept hidden from the investigators and [for] what are seemingly inexplicable and insufficient reasons, he fumed. Rjazanov mentioned that in
1910 the curators of the Anton Menger124 legacy, Vienna, to which among
others also belonged the well-known scholar Ludo Moritz Hartmann,125
on the inducement of August Bebel charged me to write the History of
the International and give all the important documents. He had worked
in many archives and with many collections, and the first volume of the
Records was almost ready for publication, but he could not publish without seeing the minutes of the missing years, which were being kept in the
Bishopsgate Library. Rjazanov continued:
These minutes would not only by themselves be a most important part of the work in preparation but they are sure to contain
indications of other most important sources, which, so long as
I am not aware of the contents of the minutes, might slip my
notice. Should the Bishopsgate Institute continue in its policy
to withholding these documents from the world I shall have to
publish the first volume which is already long overdue, with a
note to the effect that it is impossible to complete this important historical work owing to the inexplicable attitude of the
Bishopsgate Institute. I therefore ask you for your valuable assistance in this affair. I am sure that once the directors or trustees of the Bishopsgate Institute have the facts brought to their
123
124
125
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.195, L.35.

Anton Menger von Wolfensgrn (1841-1906) was an Austrian juridical expert and
social theorist, a university professor for the law of civil process in Vienna from
1874 until 1899, where he was also the Vice Chancellor from 1895 to 1896. His name
is also famous in connection with the collection of original socialist literature
in Vienna. Menger collected everything that he could procure and began a book
tour through Paris, London and Berlin, where his special socialist collection
was unique in the world for the time. Mengers private library was acquired by
the Sozialwissenschaftlichen Studienbibliothek der Kammer fr Arbeiter und
Angestellte fr Wien in the 1920s.
Ludo Moritz Hartmann or Ludwig Moritz Hartmann (1865-1924) was a prominent
Austrian historian, diplomat and social democrat; in 1901 Hartmann even joined
with the Socialist Workers Party. In 1918 he was appointed associate professor of
history and the archivist for Austria and soon after became the first Ambassador of
the Republic of Austria in Germany.
138
notice in an authorative fashion they will be the last to consent

to such an obscurantous policy. Your help in procuring for me
permission to get these papers photostated for the mei would
be deeply appreciated by the Institute and myself.126
Rjazanovs appeal did not fall on deaf ears, and in June 1930 Dr. Gooch,
Prof. Powicke,127 Prof. Laski, Prof. Temperley, Prof. Clapham,128 G.D.H. Cole
and Mr. Tawney signed a letter, which Stevens forwarded.129 A month later, in July, the Librarian of the Bishopsgate Institute, Mr. Goss responded
laconically to the organized public pressure and again refused to release
the documents. The Governors some time ago decided not to place for the
general use of the public the material relating to the 1st International, he
explained.130 When Rjazanov was arrested in February 1931, the mei still had
no access to or possibility of copying the records. Rjazanov would never see
the documents from the Bishopsgate Library.
In all fairness to Mr. Goss, it should be said that he was carrying out the
decision of the Governors of the Bishopsgate Library and these documents
were not shown to anyone, not just the mei. On the other hand, no one was
as interested in these papers as Rjazanov was at that time. It was probably
pure coincidence that Soviet Ambassador Ivan Majskij only obtained access
to these documents and paid for copies in 1942, the year after Mr. Goss left
his post.131
In addition to short notes and telegrams Stevens typed and sent twentyeight detailed reports to the mei in 1928. He worked with extraordinary ardency. The list of his duties looks impressive: to constantly put together the
desiderata lists; to locate, describe and copy the publications and collections; to find, order and buy the items; to oversee the orders and settle problems with booksellers; to arrange the shipment of the materials; to visit
various institutions and private individuals to negotiate or to describe their
holdings; to look for rare archives and collections; to carry on an extensive
126
127
128
129
130
131
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.195, L.35-37.

Frederick Maurice Powicke (1879-1963) was an English medieval historian, a
professor at Belfast and Manchester, and from 1928 until his retirement Regius
Professor at Oxford. From 1919 to 1928 he was Professor of Medival History at the
Victoria University of Manchester, serving as Fords Lecturer in English History at
Oxford for 1927. In 1928 he became Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford,
remaining in the post until 1947. He was President of the Royal Historical Society
from 1933 to 1937.
Sir John Harold Clapham (1873-1946) was a British economic historian, the first
Professor of Economic History at Cambridge University from 1928 to 1938, and
Vice-Provost of Kings College, Cambridge from 1933 until 1943.
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.197, L.42.
Ibid., L.92.
For details see Vladimir Mosolov, imel citadelpartijnoj ortodokcii: is istorii Instituta
marksizma-leninizma pri ck kpss, 1921-1956 (Moscow, 2010), p. 410.
|1 39
correspondence, etc. Everything seems to indicate that in the autumn of

1928 Stevens began to feel seriously overburdened.
But only in February 1929 did he presume to complain for the first time
that he had too many things to deal with simultaneously, such as the Home
Office Records, the Webb Collection at the lse, the Bishopsgate problem,
the desiderata and so on. He wrote to the mei:
I dissipate time and energy flying from one to the other, it is
better to work a good deal and to get over the ground quickly
by concentrating on one thing [...]. Obviously there is a limit to
the amount I can do in my half-time, even with the utmost generosity! At present my danger is that the work is so absorbing
that I find myself involuntarily devoting more time to it.132
The reaction of the mei proved that nobody in Moscow had expected such
efficiency and enthusiasm from the British correspondent:
The question you raise regards limit of amount of work to be
done in your half-time does not surprise us at all, we also had
the impression of your working more than half-time. We even
considered [...] of proposing to you to work for us the whole day
but just now we cannot make this proposition to you partly because our staff here at present would not be sufficient to cope
with more material, and partly for the reason of our English
cabinet being for nearly a year already without scientific manager. Therefore, not being able to change the present situation we beg to say the following: the directions and hints you
receive from us are not orders in strict senses of the word, i.e.
not bound to be executed within a certain time limit, except
in such cases where this is specially stated. [...] We have already
told you that it is not our system to hurry our co-workers, and
if the material has grown considerably, this does not mean that
everything must be done at the same time.133
Stevens wrote in response:
I must first thank you for your clear understanding of the position and must assure you that I have been working roughly
along the lines you indicate, especially in regard to fitting in my
various forms of work. [] I fear it would have been impossible in any case for me to have considered the suggestion of full
132
133
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.193, L.165.

Ibid., L.181ob.
140
time work if it has arisen because of my commitments to the

direction of translation!134
In one of his next letters Stevens added: I regard my work for the Institute
as a big honour [].135 In November 1929 his salary was increased by thirty
per cent and he expressed thanks: I am grateful [...] I was already being
drawn more and more into making the Institute work...that will get considerably more than half a normal working day.136
Changing Relationship
In August 1929 Stevens began to receive letters from the mei signed not
only by E. Czbel, but also by Ralf Fox, who became the head of the cabinet of British history. In July 1929 Fox was sent by the Communist Party
of Great Britain to work at the mei for three years, the aim being to give
me an opportunity to develop my theoretical education, Fox noted in his
autobiography, I have been a teacher of History of the Labour Movement
and Comintern in kutv137 since 1930 and in the Lenin School since 1931.138
His main duties at the mei were to prepare Marx and Engels English texts
for publication, to process the British materials, to communicate with
Stevens and provide him with all kind of information. There is no doubt
that Stevens and Fox knew each other, but they were hardly friends.
They both first came to Russia with the British Quakers Relief mission in
1922, both were young journalists, members of the Communist Party, and
worked mainly in London. Initially at the mei Fox tried to interfere in the
details of Stevenss work and give advice, but he very soon recognized the
evident professional superiority of Stevens, who in any case always considered the smallest remarks from E. Czbel to be more important than Foxs
instructions.
From September 1930 onward, the actions of the mei became more and
more incomprehensible. Stevens reported frequently and appropriately as
usual, the salary and the bills were paid. However, news from the Institute
arrived rarely, only once or twice per month, and then completely stopped.
No one even reacted to Stevenss complaints. At the end of March 1931,
Fox briefly informed Stevens: The academic character of the work of the
134
135
136
137
138
Ibid., D.194, L.10.

Ibid., L.32.
Ibid., D.195. L.31.
The Communist University of the Toilers of the East or kutv in Russian
Kommunisticeskij universitet trudjaichsja Vostoka, a training college of the
Comintern in Moscow (1921-1938).
rgaspi, F. 495, Op.198, D.391, L.34. The personal file of Fox, Ralph (Foks Ralf
Samojlovic). Foxs wife, Madge Palmer also worked at the mei as a librarian and
stenographer.
|1 41
Institute is to be overcome. In future the emphasis of the scientific work is

to be on the period of imperialism, including the post-war period.139
By that time Rjazanov was already in prison, the mei was closed, and
many employees had been dismissed. In September 1931, when the process
of merging the Marx-Engels Institute and Lenin Institute into the combined
Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute (meli) was almost finished, a new director V.V.
Adoratskij140 wrote to Stevens in Russian: We decided to write you in
Russian [].141 The archival files not only preserve the letters in Russian
but also short handwritten translations of Stevenss reports that someone
definitely did for Adoratskij. This small detail tells its own tale about the
professional level of the new Institutes leaders. How Harry Stevens worked
with them until May 1937 is worth telling separately, because it is a completely different story.
Harry Stevens thus worked as the British correspondent of D.B. Rjazanovs
Institute for three years (1928-1930). The collection of British printed materials in the State Social and Political Library (the successor of the meis
cabinets library) is enormous, even without the archival part that is preserved at the rgaspi, which is also considerable. The main part of it was
collected before 1931. Looking through the dozens of huge inventory books
it is possible to reconstruct the exact list of books, manuscripts, letters,
newspapers, journals, and pamphlets that arrived from London in those
years. This research will probably be done one day. For now there is other
indirect evidence that can clearly illustrate the great work done by Stevens.
The Library preserves around 1000 titles of British newspapers and journals
(some of which are extremely rare), and ninety-five per cent of them were
acquired before 1940. The collection of British pamphlets includes a few
thousand items. It is also worth mentioning that, ironically, the collections
that were considered concomitant, secondary and supplementary to those
relating to Marx and Engels in the period when Stevens was active, are now
appreciated as the most important and invaluable ones. It is really unfair
that we know so little about Harry Stevens, to whom we should be endlessly
grateful.
139
140
141
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.196, L.67. R. Fox continued to work at the Marx-Engels-Lenin
Institute, formed in October 1931, until June 1932, when he left for the United
Kingdom.
Adoratskij Vladimir Viktorovich (1878-1945) was a Soviet communist, historian
and political theorist. In 1920-1928 he became assistant manager of the Central
Archives Board, then worked in the Institute of Lenin; from 1931 to 1939 he was
director of the Institute of Marx-Engels-Lenin, in 1932 he was elected a member of
the Academy of Sciences of the ussr.
rgaspi, F. 71, Op.50, D.196, L.78.
I.7
The Importance
of Friendship
The Shared History of
the iav/iiav and iish
Francisca de Haan
and Annette Mevis
A Short History of the iav/iiav

The Institute in Amsterdam, nowadays known as Atria, Institute on Gender
Equality and Womens History, is one of the oldest womens libraries and
archives in the world. It was founded in December 1935 by three Dutch
feminists who had each been or still were active in the national and international womens movement: historian Johanna W.A. Naber (1859-1941), international feminist and peace activist Rosa Manus (1881-1942), and economist Willemijn Posthumus-van der Goot (1897-1989). The International
Archives for the Womens Movement (Internationaal Archief voor de
Vrouwenbeweging, iav), as the Institute was known until 1988, collected
books, journals, photographs, and archives. The collection held in Atria still
bears the name of iav.
The International Archives for the Womens Movement opened its doors
to the public on 19 December 1936, with a festive event at which 77-yearold Johanna Naber was one of the speakers. The iavs goal was to promote
knowledge and scientific study of the womens movement in the broadest
sense, a goal to be realized by establishing a library and archive in which
the cultural heritage of women would be gathered and preserved, and by
publishing books about the past and present of the national and interna-
d e h a a n a n d M e v i s i mportanc e of f ri e nds hi p
|1 43
The official opening of the iav on 19 December 1936, Keizersgracht 264 in Amsterdam.
N.W. Posthumus sitting far right, third from right Rosa Manus, fourth from right
Johanna Naber, and fifth from right Willemijn Posthumus-van der Goot. Atria, collection IAV no.100014639; photographer unknown.
tional womens movement.1 At the official opening the Institute also presented its first publication, a brochure written by historian Jane de Iongh
(1901-1982) entitled Documentatie van de geschiedenis der vrouw en der vrouwenbeweging (Documentation of the history of woman and the womens movement). Describing the new Institutes acquisition guidelines and research
policies, the brochure stated:
The Archive aims to bring together a collection of sources in
whatever form [...] that will contribute to the knowledge of
womens role in history in general, and more particularly in
the era of social development in the Western world when the
struggle for the political, economic and social emancipation of
women began.2
1
2
Jaarboek Internationaal Archief voor de Vrouwenbeweging I (Leiden, 1937), pp. xii-xvi.

Preface in English.
Jane de Iongh, Documentatie van de geschiedenis der vrouw en der vrouwenbeweging
(Leiden, 1936), p. 9 (Our translation, FdH and AM).
144
The iav grew steadily in the following years, until the Nazi occupation of
the Netherlands brutally interrupted this process. In June 1940, just a month
after the Nazis occupied the country, German officers paid two visits to the
iav. On 12 July 1940, the Sicherheitspolizei removed the entire contents of the
iav and subsequently transported them to Berlin.3 iav founding President
Rosa Manus was questioned by German police officers several times. She
was finally arrested in August 1941 and held for some weeks in the prison
for political prisoners in Scheveningen, near The Hague. Thereafter, she was
transported from one prison to another in Germany for a period of seven
weeks, finally to be incarcerated in Ravensbrck, the main Nazi concentration camp primarily intended for women prisoners. It is now believed
that she was killed in a Euthanasie-Anstalt (Euthanasia institution) in
Bernburg in 1942.4
The re-opening of the iav took place in October 1947, with Willemijn
Posthumus-van der Goot succeeding Rosa Manus as president. Many efforts were made to trace and retrieve the stolen iav property, but with only
minor success. From the second half of the 1970s, spurred by the United
Nations proclaimed International Womens Year (1975) that furthered the
rise of the womens movement and a developing interest in womens history, the iav went through a period of spectacular growth. It received government funding, and in 1981 could move to larger premises. In 1988 it
merged with the Information and Documentation Centre for the womens
3
Francisca de Haan, A Truly International Archive for the Womens Movement

(iav, now iiav). From its Foundation in Amsterdam in 1935 to the Return of
its Looted Archives in 2003, Journal of Womens History, 16:4 (2004), pp. 148-172.
Documents concerning the closing of the Institute and the looting of the collection
by the German police, Atria, iav Collection, archive iav, inv. no. 53 [hereafter, archive iav]. Regarding the iish, Peter Manasse writes: The fate of the International
Institute for Social History during World War II is well known. In July 1940, the
sd closed the Institute and denied access to Director Posthumus. In January 1941,
Rosenberg independently decided to take over the Institute for use as a depot for
other stolen collections. The Institutes collections were subsequently shipped
to Germany. Peter Manasse, Preservation of Historical Records and a Pro-Active
Approach to Collections, in The Return of Looted Collections (1946-1996). An Unfinished
Chapter (Amsterdam, 1997), pp. 118-121, 121.
For more details see Chapter 8 by Myriam Everard, in Myriam Everard and
Francisca de Haan (eds), Rosa Manus. Internationalist Feminist Peace Activist (18811942): Essays, Pictures, Documents (tentative title, book to appear in 2015). Although
contemporaries (during and in the early years after the war) mainly described
Manus as a victim of Nazi anti-Semitism, she was arrested and detained as a
political opponent of the Nazis because of her international, pro-peace and antifascist activism in the 1930s; her arrest and imprisonment preceded the deportations and mass murder of Dutch Jewry, which began in July 1942. For more
details about Rosa Manus and her activities, see De Haan, A Truly International
Archive, and Myriam Everard, Manus, Rosa, in Els Kloek (ed.), 1001 vrouwen uit
de Nederlandse geschiedenis (Nijmegen, 2013); or Myriam Everard, Manus, Rosa, in
Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland, available at: http://www.historici.nl/Onderzoek/
Projecten/DVN/lemmata/data/Manus; last accessed 18 August 2013.
|1 45
movement (idc) and the feminist journal lover to form the International
Information Centre and Archives for the Womens Movement (abbreviated in Dutch as iiav). An important element of this process of change and
growth for the iav was when its archival department came into being in the
1980s, which played a significant role in the development of womens history as a recognized academic field in the Netherlands.5
Broader Historical Context

The establishment of the iav in 1935 was part of a larger trend in the interwar years to create private (as opposed to state) archival institutes to collect and keep the records of social and political groups whose records were
in danger of disappearing or being destroyed by state powers that regarded
them as unwanted or dangerous.
First, with the Western so-called first wave of feminism ebbing away and
its pioneers retiring from public life or passing away, it was necessary to create institutes where their papers and those of womens organizations could
be properly kept. In a letter in 1936, the iavs first librarian, E. (Bep) Ferf
formulated this as follows:
It is a great pity that so many documents about the difficult period in the beginning of the struggle for the vote and rights for
women, have been destroyed. Therefore we hope to convince
the women of the world that here in Holland we have a safe
place and that everything: books, letters, pamphlets a.s.o. can
be send [sic] to us to build up a library, where the women interested in the womens movement will have the possibility to
study this movement in past and present.6
It is no coincidence, therefore, that a number of such initiatives were taken
at this time, with the founding of the Womens Service Library in London in
1926 later renamed Fawcett Library and now The Womens Library and
of the Bibliothque Marguerite Durand in Paris in 1931 as major examples.
Second, feminists were deeply worried by the assaults on and further
threats to womens rights by right-wing, authoritarian and fascist governments in Europe at the time. They were involved in efforts to defend womens rights, both nationally in the Netherlands, for example, iav founders
Francisca de Haan and Annette Mevis, The Making of the Collection Internationaal
Archief voor de Vrouwenbeweging (iav). Seventy-Five Years of Collecting,
Receiving, and Refusing Womens Archives (1935-2010), in Theo Vermeer, Petra
Links and Justin Klein (eds), Particuliere Archieven. Fundamenten in beweging. Jaarboek 12
(s-Gravenhage, 2013), pp. 150-168.
Letter in English from the iav Librarian, E. Ferf, to Phyllis Lovell, October 9, 1936.
Quoted in De Haan, A Truly International Archive, p. 148.
146
Rosa Manus, Johanna Naber and Willemijn Posthumus-van der Goot participated in efforts to defend womens economic rights and internationally, at
the League of Nations.7 The establishment of womens libraries and archives
was part of this attempt to oppose the dangerous political trend at the time,
both by safekeeping the movements documents and by using these institutes as springboards for informed action against reactionary policies. These
historical factors were all part of the iav founders motives to set up their
institute.
The books and documents of feminists and womens organizations, however, were certainly not the only ones in danger of disappearing or being
destroyed in the interwar period: so were the books and collections of
other progressive, especially left-wing, individuals and organizations. Thus
economic historian N.W. (Nien) Posthumus took the initiative to establish
the International Institute of Social History (iish), intended as a safe place
for books and archives that were under threat by fascism, Stalinism, and
Nazism.8 This is where the shared histories of the two Amsterdam institutes, the iish and the iav, started.
Professor Posthumus was well established and well connected, and
had a talent for setting up (important) historical institutes: the list of his
initiatives, besides the iish, includes the Netherlands Economic History
Archive (Nederlandsch Economisch-Historisch Archief, neha, 1914), and the
Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Instituut voor Oorlogs-,
Holocaust- en Genocidestudies, niod, originally the Rijksinstituut voor
Oorlogsdocumentatie, riod).9 The iish was founded on 25 November 1935.
It was located on Keizersgracht 264, and opened its doors to the public on 11
March 1937.
It is not clear who was responsible for the iish/iav cooperation the way it
emerged,10 but both personal connections and shared political views played
10
Entries Maria Grever on J.W.A. Naber, and Francisca de Haan and Annette Mevis
on W.H. Posthumus-van der Goot, in Biografisch Woordenboek van het Socialisme en de
Arbeidersbeweging (bwsa), available at: http://socialhistory.org/bwsa; last accessed 18
August 2013. Carol Miller, Geneva the Key to Equality. Inter-war Feminists and
the League of Nations, Womens History Review, 3, no. 2 (1994), pp. 218-245. On Rosa
Manuss role in the League of Nations, see various articles in Everard and De Haan,
Rosa Manus.
Jan Lucassen, Tracing the Past. Collections and Research in Social and Economic History: The
International Institute of Social History, the Netherlands Economic History Archive and Related
Institutions (Amsterdam, 1989), p. 14.
In his efforts to establish the iish, Posthumus was bijgestaan door een staf met
als bibliothecaresse de weduwe van zijn studievriend Adama van Scheltema, Annie
Kleefstra. In de persoon van de directeur van de Centrale Arbeiders Verzekeringsen Depositobank Nehemia de Lieme vond hij een onmisbare steun voor de verwezenlijking van zijn plannen wat betreft de financiering. Entry N.W. Posthumus,
bwsa, also for the other data mentioned here, available at: http://socialhistory.org/
bwsa/biografie/posthumus; last accessed 17 August 2013.
Neither the article of 9 January 1937 in the Algemeen Handelsblad referred to below
|1 47
a role. iav founding President Rosa Manus by 1935 had been active in the
womens movement for almost three decades. She was an exceptionally talented organizer, and one of her first major projects was the Tentoonstelling
De Vrouw 1813-1913 (Exhibition Woman 1813-1913), which she co-organized together with Dr Mia Boissevain. Professor Posthumus was a member of the commission responsible for the exhibitions Historical Division
(Historische Afdeeling),11 as was Johanna W.A. Naber.12 Two of the three
later iav founders, therefore, Naber and Manus, worked with Professor
Posthumus as early as 1913 on a historical womens movement project (and
Naber had been Manuss feminist mentor since 1908).13 Willemijn van der
Goot, the youngest iav founder and the Institutes secretary, in December
1930 became the first Dutch woman with a phd in economics. Her advisor
was Professor Posthumus, and the two were married less than a month later, in January 1931.14 Rosa Manus and the Posthumus couple also lived close
to each other and, as various letters show and Willemijn Posthumus-van der
Goot later said, there was a personal bond between them.15
In 1930 Rosa Manus began to create what she called a feministic library.
As she explained in a letter to the American feminist, social work pioneer
and peace activist, Jane Addams:
Her [Aletta Jacobss] papers and intimate letters as well as her
library have come to me and I am organising in my office [in
the Vrouwenclub-Lyceumclub] a feministic library in connection
with my own books and it is my intention to make this library
useful to the women of the world.16
11
12
13
14
15
16
nor Posthumus-van der Goot in a 1981 interview adequately mention Rosa Manuss
role in the process of establishing the iav. For us, her key contribution has only
become fully clear after the return of her archives (part of the iav archives stolen
by the Nazis in 1940 and returned to Amsterdam in 2003). Mirjam Elias, Interview
met mevrouw W.H. Posthumus-van der Goot. De generatie van de verwende
meisjes, in Jaarboek voor Vrouwengeschiedenis, 2 (1981), pp. 222-235.
Catalogus van de Tentoonstelling De Vrouw 1813-1913 Meerhuizen- Amsteldijk Mei-October
1913 (Amsterdam, 1913), p. 27.
Entry J.W.A. Naber in bwsa, available at: http://socialhistory.org/bwsa/biografie/
naber; last accessed 17 August 2013.
Myriam Everard, Chapter 1, Rosa Manus: The Genealogy of a Dutch Jewish
Feminist, in Everard and De Haan, Rosa Manus.
See their entries in bwsa, available at: http://socialhistory.org/bwsa/; last accessed 17
Augustus 2013
Letters for example in archive iav inv. no. 105. Ik heb echter weinig persoonlijk
kontakt met hen gehad, behalve met Rosa Manus. Zij woonde vlakbij en had een
enorme begaafdheid om met verschillende soorten mensen om te gaan. [The latter refers to the generally elite character of the liberal womens movement]. Elias,
Interview met mevrouw W.H. Posthumus-van der Goot, p. 230.
Letter to Jane Addams 29 July 1930, Atria, iav Collection, archive Rosa Manus, inv.
no. 68.
148
According to a well-informed article in the Amsterdamsche Dameskroniek

(Amsterdam Ladies Chronicle) of January 1937, sometime in the early
1930s Professor Posthumus, director of the neha in Amsterdam, asked
Rosa Manus if she would consider depositing this library in the EconomicHistorical Library (part of the neha). Prof Posthumus probably asked this
in 1932, when Manus, following the death of her father, left her rooms in
the Vrouwenclub-Lyceumclub and moved with her mother to the Jacob
Obrechtstraat in Amsterdam. Manuss answer to Posthumuss question,
however, was a resolute no because she had no intention of letting another institute eat up her precious books and papers, even if the housing
conditions and care for the materials would be excellent.17
A few years later, the iish was established. Posthumus-van der Goot, who,
together with her husband, Prof Posthumus, devoted a great deal of time
and energy to womens work and position in society, then went to Rosa
Manus to inform her that the iishs board wanted to make available several
rooms for a separate library for the womens movement. That is something
else, Rosa Manus reacted. I would be in favour of that, if we then make
it into a separate institute. In that case our library will remain a separate
whole [n afzonderlijk geheel] but will also be accessible for everyone.18
It now seems likely that, in addition to those already mentioned, Jane de
Iongh, historian, neha Librarian until 1935 and iish board member, also
played a role in the process of conceiving of the iav as an independent institute and/or of creating space for that separate institute within the iish. Jane
de Iongh had become involved in the womens movement via Rosa Manus
in 1934, in the context of actions against the government policies to curtail
womens economic rights. In 1935, De Iongh spent time in England to do
research for a book about the history of the movement. She and Rosa Manus
had by then become friends. In a letter of 5 November 1935, Manus invited De Iongh on behalf of Posthumus-van der Goot and herself to become a
board member of the soon to be established iav. Jane de Iongh, because she
was also an iish board member, could be a helping link, Manus wrote:
We will send you, as soon as we are ready, the memorandum
and articles of association, so you can make yourself familiar
with the kind of work involved here. This Friday well have our
first visit to the notary and soon then the foundation will be a
fait accompli. This is so much fun really and I certainly believe
that after all youve been the animator of something like this;
since it all got going when you came to talk to me about those
things last year.19
17
18
19
Ro van Oven, Van en voor vrouwen, Amsterdamsche Dameskroniek, 30 January 1937

(our translation and paraphrasing, FdH and AM).
Idem.
Carbon copy of a letter from Rosa Manus to Jane de Iongh, 5 November 1935,
|1 49
The Treaty of Friendship, signed on 24 February 1936. Atria, archive iav, inv. no. 146.
Even though Manus was not very specific here, it is clear that Jane de Iongh
played a role in the process leading to the establishment of the iav. Her
involvement in building up the new Institute is underscored by the fact
that she accepted the invitation to become iav board member and wrote
Documentatie van de geschiedenis der vrouw en der vrouwenbeweging (Documentation
of the history of woman and the womens movement), a brochure outlining
the iavs acquisition guidelines and research policies, as mentioned above.
archive Rosa Manus, inv. no. 96, one of a series of letters between them (translation Aleid Fokkema). See further Thea den Hartog, Jane de Iongh (1901-1982). De
historische verbeelding van het feminisme, in Jaarboek voor Vrouwengeschiedenis, 14
(1994), pp. 181-192.
150
The cooperation between the iish and iav was made official in an agreement, the Treaty of Friendship, signed on 24 February 1936.20 According to
this document, the iish would provide on loan to the iav all its materials related to the womens movement. To house these collections as well as those
the iav continued to acquire, the iish made available to the iav two rooms
with all related facilities, and agreed to cover part of the iavs operational
costs (for heating, cleaning, the use of telephone, etc.). The iav agreed to
catalog the material made available by the iish according to the iishs system, and to allow iish visitors to see its materials. (For the original text and
more details, see the photograph of the Treaty of Friendship).
A letter from iav president Rosa Manus to Willemijn Posthumus-van der
Goot (who was abroad) in April 1936 captures her appreciation, as well as
the good atmosphere between her and the Posthumus couple:
At this very moment we are actually sitting at a desk in the
i.a.v. [] We are very pleasantly sitting here in the sun and
are very pleased with these beautiful rooms. Please do tell the
Professor that the green filing cabinet is a jewel, for which I am
deeply grateful to him.21
Not Just Smooth Cooperation

The two institutes, then, were off to a very good start, and relations generally remained cordial, even as leadership changed over time. However, and
probably unsurprisingly, in later years there were some important issues
due to financial restraints as well as disagreement over which of the two
institutes was entitled to certain documents.
The initial offer of two rooms for a separate womens movement library
within the iish building and the related financial support made it possible
to set up the iav. The significance of this arrangement is further illustrated
by the fact that in the period from 1935 to 1981, the iav was housed away
from the iish for only nine years, from 1960 to 1969. The iav much regretted that separation. The official reason why the iish in 1960 asked the iav
to move from the Keizersgracht to a school in the Balboastraat was that it
needed the iav rooms for its own employees.22 Still, it seems likely that the
20
21
22
Document in archive iav, inv. no. 146. Atria received the signed document in 2012
from the granddaughter of Fernanda Schreuder-Feith, iav librarian from 1947
to 1950. Other, not signed versions were already present in the iav archive. The
contract was not notarized, but was a deed with a seal (op zegel) (minutes Board
Meeting iav 11 February 1936), archive iav, inv. no. 1. Treaty of Friendship is our
term for this document, FdH and AM.
Letter in archive iav, inv. no. 105 (Our translation, FdH and AM).
Discussed in a letter of 4 January 1960 from iav treasurer Lien Kleinhoonte, to her
fellow board members, archive iav, inv. no. 36.
|1 51
iish policies regarding the iav were also related to its then directors views
and priorities. Historian Adolf Rter, Nien Posthumuss successor as iish
director, appears to have been the least iav-friendly of the iish directors.23
From 1947 until 1953 the iish paid the iav an annual sum of fl. 600 (six hundred guilders), as well as providing the two rooms and paying for the costs
related to the iav functioning there. Rter ended the additional yearly subsidy in 1953.24 Two years later, in 1955, he tried to get the iav to leave, efforts
the iav leadership successfully opposed, with support from the Amsterdam
Bureau for Organization and Efficiency (Bureau voor Organisatie en
Efficiency van de Gemeente Amsterdam). The iav leadership regarded their
being housed within the iish as so crucial that in a confidential letter from
1955 they referred to this whole issue for the iav as one of to be or not
to be.25 Once the iav had been forced to live on its own in 1960, it tried
to improve its connections with womens organizations such as the Dutch
Association for Womens Interests, Womens Labor and Equal Citizenship
(Nederlandse Vereniging voor Vrouwenbelangen, Vrouwenarbeid en Gelijk
Staatsburgerschap), and in 1961 explored the possibility of moving in with
the Amsterdam Public Library (Openbare Leeszaal). An iav report about that
potential development tellingly stated: That is why it is better not to make
known such plans to the Institute of Social History, since that might give
the Institute a motive to sever ties that the Institute might like to see severed but the iav certainly not.26
Friction also occasionally arose between the iish and the iav about their
core business, the collecting and keeping of archival collections. Table 1 lists
a number of collections that are partly stored in the iish and partly in the
iav, sometimes for clear reasons, in other cases less so, and in a number
of cases not without this having been contested. Generally speaking, since
the womens movement and the labour movement had some very different
strands but important overlaps as well, especially in the case of left-feminist
women and their organizations, it is not always easy for archive creators
to decide what is the best place for a collection, the iav or the iish. A striking example is that of the left-wing Nederlandse Vrouwenbeweging (Dutch
Womens Movement, nvb), founded in 1946 as a broad womens movement
23
24
25
26
In 1951 and 1952, Posthumus and Rter co-directed the iish. Posthumus stepped
down on 31 December 1952.
Hence the year immediately after Posthumus had retired. Annual Report 1953,
archive iav, inv. no. 38; see also the letter from Rter to IAV, 20 April 1953, and the
striking reply from Posthumus-van der Goot, 30 April 1953, archive IAV, inv. no. 27.
See letters 1955 in archive iav, inv. no. 33. The to be or not to be were their
words.
Report 8 November 1961, archive iav, inv. no. 33, p. 2: Daarom is het ook tegenover het Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis beter voorlopig geen ruchtbaarheid aan
dergelijke plannen te geven om het Instituut niet een mogelijk motief te verlenen
de banden te verbreken die het Instituut misschien wel, maar het i.a.v. zeker niet
verbroken zou willen zien.
152
to democratize society, including the fight for womens rights, to prevent a

revival of fascism, and to work for permanent peace. On the one hand, in
the postwar years iav president Willemijn Posthumus-van der Goot refused
to include the nvb journal in the iav collection because of her anti-communist sentiment. On the other hand, the nvb had its own concerns and it appears to have been difficult for them to decide where to deposit the organizations archive: did they want to make an alliance with the (bourgeois)
womens movement, represented by the iav, or with the labor movement,
represented by the iish? In the early 1980s, iav archivists were in contact
with the nvb about their archive, and in their annual meeting of 27 April
1985 the nvb decided to deposit their papers in the iav.27 Sometime after
1985, the nvb changed its mind and decided to store its collection in the
iish instead of the iav without informing the iav of this change. A further issue in relation to the nvb archive is that in 1983, the Dutch National
Archives and the iish, as part of a broader attempt to demarcate which institute acquired which papers, had agreed that archives in the field of the
womens movement were to go to the iav.28 In light of the agreement between the National Archives and the iish, the question is whether the latter, once the nvb announced that its archive would go to the iish, pointed
out to the NVB that the iav might be the appropriate institute for its papers?
In addition, despite agreements outlining which archives in principle belonged where in this case both the 1936 Treaty of Friendship between the
iish and iav and the 1983 agreement between the National Archive and iish
there is always a gray area, so that ad hoc decisions about archival destinations have to be made, which, in retrospect, may not always be the best.
And thirdly, the all too human factor of what Jacques Derrida called archive fever undoubtedly also played a role, and may sometimes have clouded judgement in the competition for some collections. Archive fever is the
strong desire to possess certain documents for their intrinsic worth, their
ability to highlight the historical role of particular individuals or groups,
to help create or substantiate a particular narrative, or to increase the archival institutes name and fame. A January 1937 article in the Dutch national newspaper Algemeen Handelsblad about the newly opened iav called a
Library for International Feminism strikingly referred to iav founder Rosa
Manuss verzamelijver (collectors fervor), outlining how her strong desire
to collect materials laid the foundation for the iavs collection. Rosa Manus,
27
28
Document containing agreements about processing the archive of the nvb, 27 May
1985, archive iav, inv. no. 443.
Verslag van een informeel gesprek over de afbakening van het acquisitieterrein tussen het Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (iisg) en het
Algemeen Rijksarchief (ara) op 28 november 1983, point 5 Archieven op het terrein van de vrouwenbeweging: naar het iav, zolang daar een deskundig archiefbeheer wordt gegarandeerd. The iav in 1988 received a copy of this document from
iish archivist Atie van der Horst.
|1 53
the article explained, soon after she became involved in the national and
international womens movement started to collect material
related to the womens movement in all its phases. She continued this collecting for decades, and the many congresses she attended supplied her with a rich variety of materials. In addition,
she acquired many important works published in this field, and
this collection after Dr Jacobss death [in 1929] was complemented with all the feminist literature this pioneer had owned.29
The newspaper article continued to observe how Rosa Manuss collectors
fervor reminiscent of Derridas term archive fever developed from a
young womans hobby into a systematic bringing together and categorizing of insignia and menus, brochures, pamphlets, periodicals, annual reports, documents, letters, biographies, etc.30 We cannot but assume that
others involved in first creating and then consolidating and expanding the
two institutes, the iav and the iish, were and are affected by the same fever,
with the joys and sorrows it may have led to An example of archive fever might be how Jaap Kloosterman, then iish acting deputy director of collections, dealt with documents belonging to Willemijn Posthumus-van der
Goot, co-founder of the iav. Her papers have been stored in the iav since
1990. In the spring of 2011, Jaap Kloosterman accepted Claire Posthumuss
personal papers, which also included some items and documents belonging
to her mother, Willemijn Posthumus-van der Goot (for example, her phd degree, a diary, and pictures).31 However, according to the principle of provenance generally maintained in the archival world, these items belong in
Posthumus-van der Goots personal archive in the iav collection.
Nonetheless, while there remain some unresolved issues regarding a
number of womens collections, the overall tone of this history is positive.
The iavs forced exile in the 1960s (for so it felt) ended when in May 1967
Frits de Jong, Rters successor as iish director, offered the iav space in the
iishs new Amsterdam premises at Herengracht 262 (where the iish and iav
moved in 1969). iav president H.P. Hogeweg-de Haart wrote a deeply appreciative letter to Professor de Jong, emphasizing how delighted we are about
your proposal [] which will not only end the isolation in which the iav
found itself for years due to its location at the citys periphery, but will also
allow us to renew the old ties with the iish.32
29
30
31
32
Annlen, Bibliotheek voor internationaal feminisme, Algemeen Handelsblad, 9

January 1937, Saturday supplement.
Idem.
On the Waterfront. Newsletter of the friends of the iish, 2012, no. 23, p. 3; preliminary list
archive Claire Posthumus.
Letter H.P. Hogeweg-de Haart to Professor de Jong, 20 July 1967, archive iav, inv. no.
166.
154
In 1981 the iav moved to a nice building at Keizersgracht 10, which was
necessitated by the Institutes unprecedented growth as a result of the active womens movement and the related strong interest in womens history. Good relations with the iish remained, however, as was exemplified
in the 1990s. For half a century, the location of many archives the Nazis
had stolen from West-European countries during ww ii, including those
belonging to the iav and iish, remained unknown. In 1992, many of these
archives turned out to be stored in a so-called secret archive in Moscow,
where they ended up after the Red Army took them as war loot from Nazioccupied territory. When it became clear that the iav archives in Moscow
would not be returned to Amsterdam any time soon, if ever, iish director
Jaap Kloosterman in 1994 used his connections and resources to have all the
iav papers in Moscow recorded on microfilm (33,663 exposures on 14 films),
and gave these microfilms to the iav (the iav original materials were only
returned to the Institute in Amsterdam in 2003). Historians Myriam Everard
and Mineke Bosch, in an article about Feminism as War Trophy, aptly concluded that Jaap Kloosterman deserves a place of honor in the annals of the
Dutch womens movement.33
Conclusion
Our essay has explored the shared history of the International Institute of
Social History and the International Archives for the Womens Movement
in Amsterdam. It has shown that the iishs material support for the iav has
played an absolutely crucial role in the latters history. The significance of
this support is further highlighted when we contrast the iavs relative success with contemporary efforts in the usa in the mid-1930s to establish a
World Center for Womens Archives, which failed after a couple of years for
a number of reasons, but primarily lack of financial support.34
As discussed above, the combination of having good personal relations
and holding similar political views was behind the iish-iav cooperation. In
the end, key to this shared history has been the fact that from the beginning
in 1935, iish directors such as founder N.W. Posthumus, Frits de Jong, and
certainly not least Jaap Kloosterman, have actively supported the iav/iiav,
thus acting in the spirit of the probably unique 1936 Treaty of Friendship.
33
34
Annette Mevis, Womens Archives Recovered, in The Return of Looted Collections

(1946-1996). An Unfinished Chapter (Amsterdam, 1997), pp. 115-117, 116; Myriam Everard
and Mineke Bosch, Feminisme als oorlogstrofee. De vooroorlogse iav-archieven in
Moskou, in Jaarboek voor Vrouwengeschiedenis, 14 (1994), pp. 193-200, 197.
Briefly mentioned by De Haan, A Truly International Archive, p. 152; analyzed
in more detail in Dagmar Wernitznig, Memory is Power. Rosa Manus, Rosika
Schwimmer, and the Struggle about Establishing an International Womens
Archive, in Everard and De Haan, Rosa Manus.
|1 55
Table 1: Shared Archives iish/iav

Archive or Collection
Bond van
Leeraressen bij het
Huishoudonderwijs
Rooie Vrouwen
iish (in m1)

2.50
iav (in m1)

0.72
Facts from iav

The iav received this in 1975.
30
0.68
Jo van Gogh-Bonger
33 letters
8 letters
Frederika Meijboom / 4.50

Meyboom
Henritte van der
0.75
Meij
Brecht van den
7.50
Muijzenberg-Willemse
0.05
Received in 1979, 1988, 2004, and 2007 by various

donors to the iav.
The iav received the letters in 1985 from A. van
Gogh-Vonhoff, Wassenaar.
0.02
1.50
Annie
Romein-Verschoor
Mathilde WibautBerdenis van
Berlekom
Clara Wichmann
0.72
0.02
The bulk of the material ending up in the iish

was due to a misunderstanding by the executor
(correspondence in the iav-acquisition file).
Family matter. The iav received its part in 1978
from her son Jan-Erik Romein.
Given to the iav by A.J.C. Wibaut-van Gaskel, who
had inherited these papers.
everything
nothing
Claire Posthumus
Not yet on 0.12

the website
iish
In archive
0.24
H. Ploeg
(nos. 7-22)
unknown
7.36
Anna Catharina
Ploeg-Ploeg
W.H. Posthumus-van
der Goot
Nederlandse
Vrouwenbeweging
(nvb)
16.50
0.36
Offered to the iav in 1959 and gladly accepted, in

writing. Mies Campfens of the iish told the iav
that it was the father of Clara Wichmann who
offered the archive to the iav, but the daughter
wanted it to go to the iish.
Donated by Claire Posthumus to the iav in 1990
and 2000.
The iav received this in 2003 from Anneke
Linders, at her specific wish.
Donated to the iav by her daughter Claire
Posthumus in 1990.
The iav received some records in 1993 and others
in 2003 from Jolande Withuis.
II
THE european
collections
of the IISH:
acquisitions
and catalogues
II.1
A broken mirror
The library of Ferdinand
Domela Nieuwenhuis
Bert Altena
Personal libraries can be useful sources for biographies, if only because they
show their owners fields of interest. They indicate whether these owners
were committed collectors, which books they perused, and which remained
unread. If a library contains all the works of Shaw, but none of Shakespeare,
or only scientific publications and detectives, the biographer is in a good
position to make or corroborate hypotheses about the owners cultural
predilections. If books are full of remarks, they are a good source for intellectual history. Without remarks, it is difficult to know what a book meant
to the possessor. Last year Jan Willem Stutje accused Ferdinand Domela
Nieuwenhuis of having been an anti-Semite. One part of his generally very
weak argument was that the revolutionary had possessed some nasty antiSemitic books. As long as we do not know why Domela Nieuwenhuis had
acquired these books and what they meant to him, this part of Stutjes accusation is without grounds. As this contribution will show, we also need to
establish whether it was Domela Nieuwenhuis himself who bought these
books. Is his library still intact, did he personally own all the books? This is
not an irrelevant question, because the catalogue of his library contains several works published during the 1920s and 1930s, therefore, after his death.1
1
About the importance of personal scientific libraries: Hans-Peter Harstick and

Gerald Hubmann, Die Bibliotheken von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels: annotiertes
a lte na a b roke n mi rror
|1 59
1913
Our story begins in the second half of 1913, for it was then that preparations for the founding of three institutions took off: on 14 July for the association Het Nederlandsch Economisch-Historisch Archief (neha,
founded on 2 April 1914), followed on 8 November by the opening of the
Rotterdam academy for trade (now part of Erasmus University Rotterdam).
Lastly, in December preparations started to found the Ferdinand Domela
Nieuwenhuis-Foundation, aimed at providing the aging anarchist leader
with an appropriate pension. This Foundation officially came into being on
1 July 1914. Linking these organizations is Nicolaas Willem Posthumus, coinitiator and secretary/director of the neha, first professor of economic history at Rotterdam, founder of the iish, and from 1933 onwards involved in
the affairs of the fdn Foundation.2
One of the nehas aims was to collect archives and documents on the economic history of the Netherlands. It ended up being located in the Hague
because that was between the contending academies of Amsterdam and
Rotterdam. There it would house many business and other archives, and
was also a significant economic-history library. From the very start, secretary/director Posthumus, who had been active in social-democratic circles,
tried to engage representatives of the social-democratic movement in the
activities of the association. Among the members of the first advisory board,
we find F.M. Wibaut, and the diamond workers union became a donating
member. Its president, Henri Polak, and social-democrats Henriette Roland
Holst and Anke van der Vlies were among the early members of neha.
When trying to acquire archives Posthumus took a broader look than just
trade unions. In 1915 he asked Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis to bequeath
his papers to neha, but was not successful. In the early 1920s he started to
collect archives from trade unions and so proposed Edo Fimmen as a member of the board of neha.3
Verzeichnis des ermittelten Bestandes (Berlin 1999 [Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe IV,32]),

pp. 7-23, p. 17. Jan Willem Stutje, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis. Een romantische
revolutionair (Amsterdam and Antwerp, 2012), pp. 193-199. For a critique of the
charge of anti-Semitism: Rudolf de Jong, Was Domela antisemiet? Biograaf Jan
Willem Stutje slaat de plank mis, de AS, 180 (winter 2012), pp. 44-58.
Jaarverslag van het bestuur over het jaar 1914, in: neha-Jaarboek 1 (1916), pp. xviiixxvii, xviii; Albert de Jong, Beknopte geschiedenis van het F. Domela Nieuwenhuisfonds,
1914-1966 [s.l. 1966?], p. 8.
The Hague: Jaarverslag van het bestuur over het jaar 1914, in: neha-Jaarboek
1 (The Hague, 1916), p. xix. Members: id., pp. xxxii-xxxiii. Algemeen Handelsblad,
3/4/1914; Posthumus: Leo Noordegraaf, Nicolaas Willem Posthumus, 1880-1960.
Van gloeiend marxist tot entrepreneur, in id., Ideen en ideologien. Studies over
economische en sociale geschiedschrijving in Nederland. II (Amsterdam, 1991), pp. 727-751;
Domela Nieuwenhuis: N.W. Posthumus to F. Domela Nieuwenhuis, iish, archive F.
Domela Nieuwenhuis, 185; Fimmen: minutes board meeting, 27/5/1922, iish, nehaarchive 1.
160
In 1928 Posthumus received a message from Arthur Lehning that Max

Nettlau wanted to sell his library and collection of manuscripts. He reacted
without delay, but with crucial consequences as far as neha was concerned.
He thought Nettlaus collection an excellent addition to the library of neha.
Another important argument was that Nettlau should be prevented from
selling his collection to the Moscow-based institute of Marxism-Leninism.
Posthumus also planned to move most of the neha library, enriched with
the Nettlau-collection, to Amsterdam. In his eyes that was the only appropriate location for a library of European importance. Moreover, since
1922 Posthumus changed his university appointment from a professorship
in Rotterdam to one in Amsterdam. He must have been frank about the
character of this new acquisition to the executive board of neha, because
two members voiced objections. They feared that such an addition would
make neha less appealing to contributing benefactors. Posthumus, however, overruling these objections started negotiations with the municipality
of Amsterdam. He told the municipal executive that 30,000 guilders were
needed to buy the library and that Rotterdam-based members already had
donated more than 10,000 guilders. But they were kept in the dark about the
plans to move the library to rival Amsterdam. At the same time, Posthumus
also tried to collect money from the Amsterdam economic elite while hiding the true nature of the Nettlau collection. In a letter to the Amsterdam
chamber of commerce, he stressed that this library contained many books
about modern economic history as well as books about social and cultural
history and history in general. A donation of 5000 guilders would be welcome. In the end he received what he wanted, he was able to purchase
Nettlaus collection (but he would have to wait ten difficult years before it
came to Amsterdam), and the municipality agreed to host the Economic
History Library at Herengracht 218-220. The other side of the coin, however,
was that he lost his financial base in Rotterdam. Z.W. Sneller, his successor at the Rotterdam academy, left the board of neha in fury. He started to
build his own library in Rotterdam. Rotterdam businessmen withdrew their
donations to sustain Snellers initiative.4
4
Message: minutes of executive board, 9/3/1928, iish, neha-archive 6; objections:

minutes board, 24/3 and 26/4/1928, iish, neha-archive 1; Posthumus to chamber of
commerce Amsterdam, The Hague 18/5/1928, iish, neha archive 130; Posthumus to
municipal executive, The Hague 23/5/1928 ibid. Rotterdam members: Posthumus to
J.H. Wilton, [s.l.] 14/6/1928, ibid. Location: Posthumus to Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
[s.l.] 21/10/1930, iish, neha archive 132. Sneller: minutes neha, 11/5/1929, iish, neha
archive 17. Withdrawal Rotterdam members: R. Mees to Posthumus, Rotterdam
16/11/1931, iish, neha archive 41. Complete withdrawal Sneller: Z.W. Sneller to
Posthumus, Rotterdam 26/1/1933, iish, neha-archive 43. In general on the Nettlau
collection: Maria Hunink, De geschiedenis van een bibliotheek. Max Nettlau
en Amsterdam, in Maria Hunink et al. (eds), Over Buonarroti, internationale avantgardes, Max Nettlau en het verzamelen van boeken, anarchistische minister, de algebra van de
revolutie, schilders en schrijvers. Voor Arthur Lehning (Baarn, 1979), pp. 317-367 (German:
id., Das Schicksal einer Bibliothek. Max Nettlau und Amsterdam, International
|1 6 1
Posthumus and his library had become players in European archival acquisitions and libraries. Their main competitor was the Moscow Institute of
Marxism-Leninism, which had already acquired most of the international
correspondence of Domela Nieuwenhuis. It was unfortunate for Posthumus
that many Rotterdam-based contributors withdrew at a time when the consequences of the deepening economic crisis were felt. Companies that were
members of neha went bankrupt, and others reviewed their expenditures.
What a Rotterdam businessman called the years of champagne were clearly over, even the Philips Company had to be begged to give at least a very
small (25 guilders) contribution. Moreover, Dutch public authorities also began to wind down their subsidies. As a result, the neha and ehl budgets had
to be reduced. The Posthumus imperium began to face difficult times.
The library of Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis

It was therefore fortunate that the Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis
Foundation was looking for a new home for the museum and library
of Domela Nieuwenhuis. It had received the library because of the help
it had given to the anarchist mentor and his family. In his will Domela
Nieuwenhuis had also stipulated that this library should be available to
workers, so that they could consult and read the books. This decision was
the ultimate proof of the importance Domela Nieuwenhuis attributed to education. In June 1920, after the anarchist had died, the library was packed in
boxes and sent to the Domela Nieuwenhuis Foundation, which stored it on
the ceiling of the headquarters of the revolutionary trade union movement,
the Nationaal Arbeids Secretariaat (nas). These boxes were still unpacked,
when in 1922 a formal contract stipulated the Foundation to be the owner
of Domelas books, his archive, certain gifts to him from the labour movement and furniture from his study. The idea was to bring everything together in a special Domela Nieuwenhuis Museum. In 1923 the Foundation had
collected enough capital (ca 55,000 guilders, today the value of 388,636)
from which Domelas widow would receive a yearly annuity. The secretary
of the Foundation, W. Beek, cried out in relief that the revolutionary workers of the Netherlands now need not be ashamed of the forum of the international labour movement.5
A special committee was formed to collect funds for the museum. Beek
once more urged the workers to donate again to prevent long-term storage
of Domelas books in boxes. An economic crisis had set in, however, so
Review of Social History, 27/1 (1982), pp. 4-42). The problems within neha are not
mentioned in this otherwise very well researched essay.
Albert de Jong, fdn-Fonds, pp. 35-36. Circular Albert de Jong, Amsterdam Feb./
March 1923 and circular W. Beek, April 1923; minutes national congress of the
Foundation, 29/4/1923, in: iish, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis-Foundation
archive, 1.
162
Beek had to wait until 23 November 1924 before the museum could open.
With the financial aid of the union of bricklayers assistants, the foundation
was able to buy Alberdingk Thijmstraat 7. There the library was open every
Sunday afternoon (because the books were not to be lent out), and after
July 1, 1926, when the librarian lived on the floor above the museum, it was
open three evenings a week.6
According to initial plans, the librarian would receive a salary of
1600 guilders, but he would have to pay rent for his living space. For the
cataloguing of the library, a yearly sum of 1000 guilders was calculated.
Before the cataloguing could start, however, hundreds of books needed
to be bound or rebound. Even done by admirers of Domela Nieuwenhuis,
this work still would cost a great deal of time. Since the cataloguing proved
to be difficult, progress was even slower than anticipated. In 1933 the
Foundation tried to speed up the process by hiring an unemployed clerk,
but the candidate declared himself incompetent to do this job. Meanwhile,
the economic crisis affected both the Foundation and the museum because
income declined and maintaining the museum and hiring a new librarian
remained expensive.7
On 3 April 1933 Domela Nieuwenhuis widow died. As a consequence
the Foundation now had 1200 guilders annually to spend on the museum
and library. Nevertheless, it was clear that this sum was not enough to give
the library of Domela Nieuwenhuis the professional attention it needed.
Therefore, a special committee of the board of the Foundation began
to study possibilities for including the museum within a professional
institution. On the advice of Dr Molhuysen, director of the Royal Library,
the board contacted Posthumus, who was quick to react. He was especially
interested because the Foundation offered in addition to a large library a
considerable sum of money to maintain and expand it. Within a few weeks
an agreement was drawn up. The library would remain owned by the
Foundation, but would be housed in the garden house of the Economic
History Library as a separate library. The books could not be lent out. The
director of the ehl should act as librarian of the library, and every year the
Foundation would allocate the sum of at least 1200 guilders at his disposal.
The committee of the Foundation was very happy because it thought that
through an association with a large professional library both the museum
and library would benefit: more people would be consulting the books
and, moreover, no one less than Posthumus would act as unpaid librarian.
6
7
Financial report fdn Museum, 4/11/1923-31/12/1924; annual report 1925 in: iish,
Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis Foundation archive, 62.
Minutes congress Foundation 29/4/1923 in: iish, Ferdinand Domela NieuwenhuisFoundation archive, 1; Annual report museum 1926-1927 in: ibid., 62; annual report
Museum 1931, ibid.; Rapport van de commissie ingesteld door het F. Domela
Nieuwenhuis-fonds in zake het toekomstig beheer van de Bibliotheek van wijlen
Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, Amsterdam 7/7/1933 [rapport 1933], in: ibid. 65.
|1 6 3
F. Domela Nieuwenhuis Museum at Alberdingk Thijmstraat 7, November 1925.

Source: Rijksdienst voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, Cesar Domela archive,
The Hague. Used by permission.
Now the Domela Nieuwenhuis Foundation could easily leave the care of
the library in his hands. The fact that he will take care of buying additions
in our opinion is an advantage, because that is a very difficult task indeed,
which better can be fulfilled from a scientific and unbiased standpoint.
Also Cesar Domela Nieuwenhuis was glad the library was at last in capable
hands.8
But what should be added and how should new acquisitions be
catalogued? This question was the more important, since only part of the
library was catalogued. Apparently, Posthumuss assistant Annie Adama
van Scheltema even considered the library as good as uncatalogued. It
is not likely that the board of the Foundation had clear answers to these
questions, but it certainly had some ideas about what should be added to
the library. It believed the lacunae in the library should be filled, especially
books, brochures, and periodicals that were contemporary with Domela
Death widow: Albert de Jong, fdn-Fonds, p. 23. ehl: Rapport 7/7/1933, in:
iish, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis Foundation archive, 65. Cesar Domela
Nieuwenhuis to Annie Adama van Scheltema, Paris 2/3/1934, in: iish, archive iish,
331IV.
164
Nieuwenhuis, as well as adding journals, periodicals, brochures and books

from the time since his death. They thought the librarian should try to
buy books in the areas the library was already specialized in. How these
additions should be catalogued precisely, remained unclear. Posthumus
changed this in that he started talking about the library as the basis of a
monumental Domela Nieuwenhuis Library, acquiring materials on a
broader scale than the Foundation had in mind. Since the Foundation seems
to have trusted him completely, Posthumus soon started to give a very broad
interpretation to his vision of what the Domela Nieuwenhuis Library should
be. He must have been convinced that this library should remain with the
ehl for a very long time; he did not worry about questions of ownership and
reported every year what he had bought, but not what he was planning to
buy nor what his general policy was.9
On 25 February 1934 the museum reopened in its new premises. The
library books were shelved according to the still unfinished catalogue.
What can be said about the library? It contained no less than 11,000
volumes, that at least is the number which is mentioned in the 1920s and
early 1930s. It is difficult to believe that all these volumes could be housed
in the garden house (Albert de Jong has given the impression that indeed
they were), therefore, it might be possible that part of the library was
housed somewhere else on the premises of the Economic History Library.
Posthumus immediately noticed that there were some very rare books
among the library holdings, including Nettlaus handwritten biography of
Bakunin. Nevertheless, he thought that in order to make this library truly
outstanding, many books, periodicals, and archives should be added. As
Nettlau pointed out, since Domela was not a professional collectioneur, his
library was uneven and lacked balance. Domelas brother Adriaan had seen
the library in the old museum and thought it chaotic, without any system.
Coincidence had played a large role in bringing this library together,
resulting in a maze.10
Posthumus started acquiring new additions without delay. In 1934 he
purchased 15 letters from the Multatuli Domela Nieuwenhuis correspondence, three collections of posters from the Commune, amounting to
139 items, French journals from the 1848 revolution and the Commune,
Pougets Pre Peinard (1895), and Gustav Landauers Der Sozialist (1909-1914).
He was also on the lookout for old anarchist newspapers and photocopies
9
10
Rapport 7/7/1933, in: iish, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis-Foundation archive,

65. Uncatalogued: Adriaan Domela Nieuwenhuis to Cesar Domela Nieuwenhuis,
Rotterdam 30/10/1934 in: Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, archive
Cesar Domela, 48.
Account of the re-opening of the library: iish, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis
Foundation archive, 67. Annual report fdn Museum 1934, ibid., 68. De Jong, fdnFonds, p. 40. Hunink, Geschiedenis van een bibliotheek, p. 332. Adriaan Domela
Nieuwenhuis to Annie Adama van Scheltema, [Rotterdam] 19/3/1934, in: iish,
archive iish 284.IV.
|1 6 5
from the spd archive in Berlin and the Marx-Engels archive in Moscow, and
he purchased six French brochures by Lenin. All these acquisitions could
have been seen as an indication of his plans. The following year the number
of books and brochures that should be considered foreign to the Domela
Nieuwenhuis Library had increased: a German translation of Adam Smith,
Lehr-Frankensteins Produktion und Konsumtion in der Volkswirtschaft, or K. Luxs
Studien ber die Entwicklung der Warenhuser in Deutschland. In 1936 he bought a
number of anti-Semitic books and publications about the Dreyfus affair. All
these anti-Semitic books are now in the Domela Nieuwenhuis library. The
books may have come from the collection of Augustin Hamon, which had
been acquired by Posthumus in that year. Apparently there were no objections from the Domela Nieuwenhuis Foundation.11
These were only made in 1938, after Posthumus had purchased important
archives: letters from Karl Marx ( 549.83), Lassalle ( 207.90), two volumes
by Stirner with letters ( 167.04), and the archive of Albert Grzesinski,
former head of the Berlin police ( 1016.505). It was this last acquisition to
which the board of the Foundation objected. A police archive was the last
thing that should be kept in a Domela Nieuwenhuis Museum. Posthumus
was not amused at the Foundation blocking his activities, especially since
this archive had been very expensive. He angrily replied that the Domela
Nieuwenhuis Library should also contain publications that had been
published after 1919, and even archives of adversaries. If the Foundation
stuck to its position, the next year he would try and buy back for the newly
founded International Institute for Social History the Grzesinski archive.
The Foundation was alerted, however, and now stipulated that no books
should be bought that had been published after 1919, and that either the
ehl or iish should reimburse them for the Grzesinski archive. After this
interruption, it was agreed that the Foundation would still provide funds
for the acquisition of archives from the collection of Eugen Oswald: four
letters from Engels, seven from Marx, 13 from Karl Blind, one from Julius
Frbel, three from Alexander Herzen, one from Lajos Kossuth, one from
Colonel Picquart, one from Jules Michelet, two from Carl Schurz, and five
from Louis Blanc (totalling 402).12
During the row over Grzesinski, the secretary of the Foundation, W. van
Blijenburgh, also noticed that the books had been shelved incorrectly, between the already catalogued books he saw new volumes. What about the
Librarys catalogue? Apparently Annie Adama van Scheltema, who would
become custodian of the museum and take care of the library, had started
11
12
Lists of acquisitions in the annual reports of the museum in: iish, Ferdinand
Domela Nieuwenhuis Foundation archive, 68. Hamon: ibid. Annual report 1935; see
also Boris Souvarine to Posthumus, Neuilly 7 and 12/1/1935. in: iish, archive iish,
193B.
Annual report fdn-Museum 1937, 1938 and 1939, in: iish, Ferdinand Domela
Nieuwenhuis Foundation archive, 68.
166
to think about an appropriate system of cataloguing as soon as the Museum

opened. Newly purchased books were immediately catalogued according to
her system and new brochures were systematically listed in a notebook.13
In 1935 she and Posthumus decided that the catalogue should be integrated
with the catalogue of the iish, which was located at Keizersgracht 264 (one
canal away from the ehl). It is not known whether books from the Domela
Nieuwenhuis Library had been transferred to the iish. In any case, the existing catalogue was discarded, for Van Scheltema judged it completely unsystematic and deemed its fiches too big for the iish system. So a new catalogue was begun. The books on the shelves were alphabetized, which made
Van Blijenburgh think they lacked order. In 1936 Adama van Scheltema reported that some cases had already been completed, but that cataloguing
this library was a major undertaking. In 1937 she reported that half the library had been put on fiches, but then the work stopped because of austerity measures. Only in 1939 was a new collaborator appointed, but he would
start with cataloguing the newest acquisitions, so that these could be put
into place amongst the books of the International Institute. The books of
the library would be stamped with d.n.f. The Foundation approved this
proposal as long as the fiches with these titles would also be stamped; it
urged Posthumus to buy books for the museum even if the Institute was
already in the possession of those titles. It also stipulated again that a line
should be drawn in 1919, that Posthumus was only allowed to acquire newer
publications on anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism.14
After 1945
All in all, in 1940 Posthumus had acquired for the Foundation archives, at
least 99 posters and 675 books, plus an unknown number of brochures.
The cataloguing of the library was well under way, but not completed.
Apparently the nazi occupation left the Museum untouched, but all the
books from the Institute still in Amsterdam were carried away, and it is not
entirely clear whether they were all returned after the war. It might be that
among them there were books from the Domela Nieuwenhuis Library, but
that does not seem likely. Indeed, Albert de Jong has written that in 1945
the library in the garden house was found to be intact. There is no mention
of any loss in the archives, and in 1954 it became clear that the Institute
contained part of the library and that the remaining part still was kept in
the now derelict garden house. The Institutes catalogue and the catalogue
of the Domela Nieuwenhuis Library were destroyed, however, and it would
13
14
See for cataloguing problems at the iish during these years: Maria Hunink, De
papieren van de revolutie. Het Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1935-1947
(Amsterdam, 1986), pp. 103-104.
Annual reports fdn Museum 1934-1940, in: iish, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis
Foundation archive, 68.
|1 6 7
take many years for a new catalogue to be ready. At that time the Institute
may have also decided to purchase books according to the requirements of
a subject catalogue. Thus, in the present catalogue there are three copies
of Domela Nieuwenhuiss biography of Jean Paul Marat, because according
to the new system of the Institute, such a book belonged under the headings of anarchism, France, and the French Revolution. This meant that the
Institute needed many books because in some instances even three copies
were not enough.15
This affected the Domela Nieuwenhuis Library too, because the
Foundation also suffered from the occupation. Assets had been confiscated
or were lost because they had been invested in mortgages for buildings of
the revolutionary trade union movement. These had been sold during the
war. Unlike the experience of other institutions, the Foundation never saw
most of these investments back. The Dutch judiciary denied all its claims.
In 1966 Albert de Jong wrote that only 28,000 had been rescued from a
capital that in 1940 had totalled 53,000. He said that in 1966 the original
capital would have been worth 100,000. In 1953, however, the Foundation
could not maintain the museum and the library. Therefore, it started negotiations to move the museum and the library to the iish. It also wanted to
deposit the archive of F. Domela Nieuwenhuis there. Four years later the
Institute found enough room to host the museum and library, and a contract was drawn up in February 1957. It was agreed that the Institute would
purchase what Posthumus had bought in the 1930s with the Foundations
money. The sum agreed was 1000, and it was also agreed that this money would be used to pay for moving the museum to the Keizersgracht. In
1940 the archives alone cost more than 1000, in 1957 the value of that sum
would have been 2555. The Institute promised to catalogue the library, a
duplicate of this catalogue could be added to the Institutes library. The new
director of the Institute, A.J.C. Rter, translated this promise for his own
board as: The archive and the separate collection of social-historical works
are an integral part of the collections of the Institute.16
In the Institutes catalogue, it is still possible to see which books are in
the Domela Nieuwenhuis Library because their signature starts with dn.
While 853 brochures have been catalogued as belonging to the library of
Domela Nieuwenhuis, only 3037 volumes of books (some dn signatures con15
16
Minutes executive board iish 22/12/1945 and Overzicht van het Internationaal
instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis tijdens den oorlog (December 1945), in:
iish, archive iish, 331. Hunink, Papieren van de revolutie, pp. 151-158. De Waarheid,
19/2/1954. Albert de Jong, Geschiedenis van het Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis
Fonds (1968), p. 131, archive Albert de Jong.
Albert de Jong, fdn-Fonds, p. 34; Albert de Jong to A.J.C. Rter, Heemstede
12/6/1953 in: iish, archive iish 364; Rter to De Jong, Amsterdam 4/6/1954 in:
ibidem, 357; Arthur Lehning to Rter, Amsterdam 4/2/1957 ibidem; contract
Foundation - Institute, Amsterdam 12/2/1957, ibidem; translation: minutes of the
board of the iish, 23/11/1956 in: ibidem 331III.
168
tain multi-volume books) can be found. This includes what was added from
the acquisitions of the 1930s, which totalled 675 books, of which 281 have
a dn signature, and 302 have been put on the shelves of the Institute. Nine
others have an ehl signature and five may have gone to the library of the
International Archive for the Womens Movement. In all, 83 books have not
been found. Estimating from the current catalogue, the original Domela
Nieuwenhuis Library probably contained 2756 books. That is very different
from the 11,000 volumes that were reported in the 1920s. How can this be
explained? Possibly the term volumes may be ambiguous. Were the periodicals and newspapers included among the 11,000 volumes? Probably. That
would mean there were 39 volumes of Recht voor Allen and De Vrije Socialist.
Other serials in the library have not been catalogued fully. There are also
some multi-volume books on the shelves and have dn numbers, but are
not in the catalogue, and there are book series of which only one or two
volumes have been catalogued. That is the case for the entire collection of
Reclam books Domela Nieuwenhuis possessed. However, these omissions
cannot account for the loss of 8244 volumes. At most they come to 500 volumes. Even if we count the brochures as volumes, there is a gap of about
6900 volumes. Our basic number of 11,000 may be an overestimate, but the
extent of the library was certainly known, as once in 1924 the museum exhibited it.17
This leaves three other possibilities. First: the library was damaged during
the occupation. Alas, we have no corroboration of this. Second: there was
undoubtedly some negligence, but that could only explain a small part of
the loss. Third: some of it is in the Institute. Although a loss of at most 6900
books to the library of the Institute seems almost incredible, it is certain
that some books from the Domela Nieuwenhuis library were deliberately
moved to this library. They can be recognised by the stamp f.d.n. Fonds
and/or by a different catalogue number (or start of that number, such as
ges) written with pencil on the front page. These are books which had already been catalogued in the 1920s. Of the 138 books Domela Nieuwenhuis
mentions in his correspondence with family members, 91 have been found
in his library. Four others now are in the possession of Institute, but the
rest either was not in the iish library or could not be traced back to Domela
Nieuwenhuis. How many books were removed to the library of the Institute
can no longer be determined because the cataloguing was far from complete by 1934, and during the war the new librarys catalogue and that of
the Institute were destroyed. After the war the Institutes library was largely
returned, but since the Institute was seriously understaffed (in 1959 only
60,000 titles from its library had been catalogued), it might well be that in
the chaos it became impossible to tell which book belonged to the Domela
Nieuwenhuis Library and which did not. After all, we need to keep in mind
17
Number: circular [Amsterdam April 1923] in: iish, archive Ferdinand Domela
Nieuwenhuis-Foundation 1; Albert de Jong, fdn-Fonds, 35.
|1 6 9
that a large part of this library was not yet stamped and therefore could not
be recognized as belonging to the Domela Nieuwenhuis Museum.18
As long as there was no complete catalogue of the library, there was ample opportunity to remove books without it becoming known. Was there
also a motive? Here we encounter the personalities of Posthumus and especially Annie Adama van Scheltema, librarian of the Institute and curator of
the museum. She was very concerned with the well-being of the Institute
and went to great lengths to further its interests. But her curatorship of the
Domela collection became less important than her position of the Institutes
librarian. Thus, she advised Bernard Damme not to donate his papers and
publications to the Museum, but to the Institute instead, where they would
be more useful. She and Posthumus had instituted some new procedures.
Newly bought libraries were incorporated into the library of the Institute.
Apparently, Adama van Scheltema was not very good at distinguishing between a library that had been purchased and a library that was just on loan.
Moreover, Posthumus idea of developing the Domela Nieuwenhuis library
into a first class socio-economic library did not promote maintaining that
distinction. Nevertheless, removing books from the Domela Nieuwenhuis
Library was a breach of contract with the Foundation, and it certainly went
against the wishes of the Foundation to keep the Domela Nieuwenhuis
Library intact. The Foundation, however, did not have a clear-cut strategy
regarding the library, especially since it also wanted to add to the library.
Additions were made that had nothing to do with Domela Nieuwenhuis,
and the Foundation tried to stop Posthumus and Van Scheltema from doing
that. It certainly would have been upset if it discovered that some books had
been removed to the library of the Institute.19
In the end, even if the original library did not show the owner was a
good collector, it certainly reflected his personality. Although Domela
Nieuwenhuis published some important theoretical articles, he was never
a theoretician pour lart de la thorie. Practical things were much more important to him, and that probably is reflected in his library. As far as the
Domela Nieuwenhuis library is concerned, 1933-1957 were a period of uncertain encounters between the world of labour and the completely different
world of academic students of labour. That encounter has not been beneficial to the inheritance left behind by Domela Nieuwenhuis.20
18
19
20
Bert Altena and Rudolf de Jong (eds), en al beschouwen alle broeders mij als den verloren
broeder. De familiecorrespondentie van en over Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis. 1846-1932
(Amsterdam, 1997), pp. 673-678.
Damme: A. Adama van Scheltema to B. Damme, Amsterdam 7/11/1951 in: iish,
archive iish 663.
F. Domela Nieuwenhuis, Le Socialisme en danger (Paris, 1897).
II.2
The archives of
Hendrik de Man
A tragedy
Wouter Steenhaut
In the Flemish cultural journal Warande en Belfort (1967) Gust De Muynck1

conveyed an emotional portrait of his brother-in-law in his contribution
Rik de Man. De tragedie van een vervreemding [Rik de Man. Tragedy of a
divestment].2The article figured among the successive attempts by the family and friends to rehabilitate the Belgian socialist politician and theoretician Hendrik de Man after so many years among the general public and the
Belgian establishment, which after the Second World War had sentenced
him in absentia for collaborating with the Nazi forces of occupation.
August De Muynck (1897-1986): married to Hendrik de Mans sister, the writer

Yvonne de Man; teacher-monitor at Broodwood Labor College in New York (1925)
and the socialist Arbeidershogeschool (Labour academy) in Brussels; national chairman of the Arbeiders Jeugd Centrale [workers youth movement]; director of the
Nationaal Instituut voor Radio (nir) (National Institute of Radio) (1931-1958); socialist city council member in Antwerp; active in the clandestine socialist underground
press during the Second World War; director of the Social Affairs Department of
the European Economic Community (1958). Available at: http://www.odis.be; last
accessed 29 March 2014.
Gust De Muynck, Rik de Man. De tragedie van een vervreemding, Warande en
Belfort, Tijdschrift voor letterkunde, kunst en Geestesleven, 4 (1967), pp. 245-258.
ste e n h a u t T h e a r chi v e s of He ndri k de Man
|1 71
I could similarly describe as a tragedy the wrenching fates of the archives

of Hendrik de Man following his death in 1953. To qualify this bold statement, the final will and testament of Hendrik de Man and the subsequent
decisions by his heirs to distribute the archive among several archival institutions and other entities in Belgium and abroad are understandable in
the context of the political and personal rehabilitation that his family and
friends relentlessly endeavoured to achieve following his conviction in 1946
and even after his death in 1953. But the archivists in particular should accept that they are accountable for this tragedy of archives. With two exceptions, they readily consented to the dispersion of the homogeneous archive
fund at the time, notwithstanding this violation of the principle of archival
origin. The adage possession means ownership is embedded in our profession as well.
Life
Although Hendrik de Man (1885-1953) hailed from an Antwerp liberal and a
Flemish petit-bourgeois family, he joined the Antwerp Socialistische Jonge
Wacht [socialist young guard] in 1902 and espoused a rigid Marxist line. After
failing his studies at the Universit Libre de Bruxelles and the University of
Ghent, in 1905 he moved to Leipzig, where he became a correspondent for
the Leipziger Volkszeitung. At the University of Leipzig he studied philosophy,
economics and history. In 1907 he and Karl Liebknecht founded the socialist youth international, where he served as the international secretary until
1909. Upon returning to Belgium in 1910, he became the national secretary
of the Centrale voor Arbeidersopvoeding [Workers' Education Association].
At the outbreak of the First World War, he volunteered for the Belgian army.
After the war he became the director of the socialist Arbeidershogeschool
[Labour Academy] in Brussels in 1921 and in 1923 became a professor at the
University of Frankfurt am Main. He abandoned Marxism and wrote several
important social-theoretical works, including Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus
(1926), Der Kampf um die Arbeitsfreude (1927), Aufbauender Sozialismus (1931), and
Die Sozialistische Idee (1933). After Hitler seized power, de Man was dismissed
from his teaching position at the Frankfurt university. Back in Belgium, he
ran the socialist partys research service, the Bureau voor Sociaal Onderzoek
[Bureau of Social Studies] and launched the Plan van de Arbeid [Labour
Plan] to solve the economic depression in a national context. He served
as minister of public works and eliminating unemployment (1935); minister of Finance (1936), culminating as national chairman of the Belgische
Werkliedenpartij [Belgian workers party] (1939).
Following the Belgian surrender on 28 May 1940, he was convinced that
the Germans would be victorious in Europe. In his manifest of 28 June 1940,
he disbanded the socialist party and its affiliate organizations and aimed,
as soon as Belgium gained some independence from Hitler, to establish an
authoritarian, corporative state structure around King Leopold iii. De Man
17 2
Hendrik de Man and Vali von Orelli, Greng, 1951 or 1952. Collection Amsab-isg.
regarded this new political context as the dawn of a social revolution. He

became an advocate of the syndicated unity movement, the authoritarian
Unie van Hand- en Geestesarbeiders [Union of manual and spiritual workers], founded in November 1940 and controlled and supported by the Nazi
forces of occupation. When it became clear that Belgium would not recover
its political sovereignty, and that he was politically useless to the Nazis, he
went into voluntary exile in Haute-Savoie in 1941-1942. In 1944 he was granted political asylum in Switzerland, where he ultimately settled in Greng
bei Mrten. In 1946 he was convicted in absentia by the Brussels council of
war for collaboration and was sentenced to 20 years in prison, ordered to
pay 10 million francs (about 250,000) in damages to the Belgian State, and
stripped of his military rank. On 20 June 1953 he and his wife Vali von Orelli
were killed in an automobile accident.3
History of the Archives

Immediately after his death, the family received a proposal from Ger
Schmook, at the time curator of the Archief en Museum van het Vlaams
Cultuurleven [Archive and museum of Flemish culture] (amvc) in Antwerp,
to start a de Man fund within his institution. The family responded
Wouter Steenhaut and Guy Vanschoenbeek, Hendrik de Man, in Nieuwe

Encyclopedie van de Vlaamse Beweging (Tielt, 1998), pp. 1993-1997.
|1 73
somewhat cautiously,4 since they were contacted around the same time by
Annie Adama van Scheltema, who asked them to donate the archive to the
International Institute of Social History (iish) in Amsterdam. According to
this legendary iish librarian, who had contacted de Man several times in
Switzerland about what he intended to do with his archive and library, he
had promised in writing to bequeath it to the iish.5 While his family wanted
to respect his final will and testament, it was far from specific. Therefore,
they transferred only 10 to 20 crates directly from Mrten to Amsterdam.
Lumbered as they were with the in memoriam project, the family believed they could preserve the memory of Hendrik de Man by dispersing
his archive among different institutions, hoping to arouse greater interest
among researchers. Such a distribution was moreover expected to enhance
the physical safety of the different archival donations. From an archival and
scholarly research perspective, however, this measure massacred the archive of Hendrik de Man.
The first, most dramatic division of the archives into three large collections was in the 1950s: donation to the iish in Amsterdam in 1953; to the
amvc in Antwerp in 1956; and in 1959 to the Oorlogsarchief [war archive] in
Anderlecht, which later merged with the Algemeen Rijksarchief van Belgi
[National Archives of Belgium] in Brussels. The fourth large archive collection was donated only in 1969 to the Navorsings- en Studiecentrum voor de
Geschiedenis van de Tweede Wereldoorlog (ncwoii) [Centre for Research
and Studies on the History of the Second World War] in Brussels and was
part of the action plan of the son-in-law of Hendrik de Man, Yves Lecocq,
who launched his opration des archives with the intention of compelling
the Belgian establishment to agree to rehabilitate Hendrik de Man, who in
his view had been wrongly convicted of collaborating with the Nazi forces
of occupation.6
Even before the Second World War, the zealous iish librarian Annie
Adama van Scheltema had met with Hendrik de Man personally in Brussels.
She hoped for his guidance and support on her quest for archive and library
materials in Belgium. Although the exact time of her visit can no longer be
verified, her action would be remarkable, had it taken place after December
1937. On 9 December 1937 in Brussels the socialist insurance company La
Prvoyance Sociale officially established the Nationaal Instituut voor Sociale
Geschiedenis [National Institute of Social History] based on the iish model.7 That Hendrik de Man had previously opted for an international insti4
5
6
Letter from (Jan de Man) to Ger Schmook, June 28, 1953 -n.p.- Amsab-isg, Gent,
Document collection of the de Man family.
Letter from (Jan de Man) to Beck, August 30,1953 - n.p.- Amsab-isg, Gent, Document
collection of the de Man family.
Testimony from Yves Lecocq in Actes du colloque international sur loeuvre dHenri de
Man. Organis par la Facult de Droit de lUniversit de Genve, les 18, 19 et 20 juin 1973.
(Geneva, 1974), p. 206.
Jacques Lust, Wouter Steenhaut et al., Een zoektocht naar archieven. Van nisg naar
174
tute over a national institute of his own socialist movement related to his
international role and renown, his personal vanity, and his role by then as
a Cavalier seul [solo operator] in the Belgian socialist movement, which
supported the initiative of the Nationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis
(nisg).
In 1951 Adama van Scheltema contacted Hendrik de Man again, requesting a copy of his Petitie aan de Voorzitter van de Senaat (Petition to the
President of the Senate) and a complimentary copy of his most recent memoires Cavalier seul. She also reminded him of his promise to entrust his correspondence with Mussolini to her institute. She glorified her institute as
a unique centre dedicated to scholarship, with immensely important collections on the social and political history of the Netherlands, Belgium,
England, Germany, and France, [] entirely different from the Marx-Engels
institute in Moscow, which admittedly holds illustrious collections but is
inaccessible to [scholars from] Western countries.8 Most letters, especially
the most important ones, from his old archive, however, had been lost: []
some were pillaged and destroyed, others seized by the Justice, which was
basically the same.9 Later, a very large share of his archive turned out to
have been preserved after all.
De Mans life in exile in Switzerland was difficult. He tried to eke out a
living by delivering lectures, doing translations, writing books and articles,
and sometimes by selling important archival documents. Financial need led
him to sell the correspondance with Mussolini about his book Au del du
marxisme to his affluent close friend Auguste Lambiotte.10 But he remembered his promise: final will and testament has ensured that the meagre surplus would be transferred to your institute [].11 The passionate
iish librarian must have been overjoyed at reading this final will and testament. And she was probably still more delighted, when he informed her
two months later that he had come into a magnificent collection of correspondence from the estate of Hector Denis,12 entrusted to him when Denis
passed away. This collection comprised letters from e.g. Bakunin, Alexander
Herzen, Paul Lafargue, Csar De Paepe . He hoped to write an article about
this for the iish journal, for adequate reimbursement (which is not as
8
9
10
11
12
amsab. (Ghent, 1997), p. 12.

Letter from Adama van Scheltema to Hendrik de Man, August 29, 1951- Amsterdam
- Amsab-isg, Gent, Fonds Lecocq-de Man, vol. I, nr. 452.
Letter from Hendrik de Man to Adama van Scheltema, October 4, 1951 - Greng par
Morat - iish, Amsterdam, Adama van Scheltema archive.
The heirs of A. Lambiotte later returned these letters to the Lecocq-de Man family.
Amsab-isg, Fonds Lecocq-de Man, vol. I, nrs. 1324-1325.
Letter from Hendrik de Man to Adama van Scheltema, October 4, 1951, - Greng par
Morat - iish, Amsterdam, Adama van Scheltema archive.
Hector Denis (1842-1913) sociologist, statistician, professor, and vice-chancellor at
the Universit Libre de Bruxelles, socialist representative.
|1 75
immaterial for me, as I would like it to be!),13 which Adama van Scheltema
promised he would receive, as soon as the Institutes Review was published.14
As stipulated in the final will and testament of Hendrik de Man, Jan de
Man and his sister Elise Lecocq-de Man brought a section from his personal
papers and this treasure trove of correspondence to Amsterdam in 1953, after having verified that the iish was a responsible and reputable institute.
De Mans personal papers cover the period 1920-1940 and comprise thousands of documents contained in 550 folders of correspondence, clippings,
memos, and lecture notes, seed materials for his books and articles, manuscripts for his books and studies, such as Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus,
Der Kampf um die Arbeitsfreude, and his phd thesis Das Genter Tuchgewerbe im
Mittelalter. The files on his political involvement concern his activities within the Belgian workers party in the period 1933-1940 and his participation
in Belgian governments (1935-1940). An index to this archive was compiled
by H. Riethof.15 In 1972 the donation was supplemented by five articles by
Hendrik de Man and some related documents. In November 1974 his family added several journals, some correspondence, and additional reports
and documentation concerning the deployment of E. Vandervelde, L. de
Brouckere, and H. de Man to the Russian front in 1917. His family had initially offered this file to the Soviet Union, which did not accept it.16
The bequest by de Man is described by the iish in its 1953 Annual Report as
the greatest gift the Institute had the good fortune to receive this year.
Institute librarian Annie Adama van Scheltema was particularly delighted
at the unique collection of 270 letters, most of which were addressed to
Hector Denis. This collection comprises e.g. 22 letters from C. De Paepe
from 1865-1888, including the manuscript of H. Deniss eulogy upon the
death of C. de Paepe and a school notebook from C. de Paepe (religious instruction), 23 letters from J.J. Altmeyer from after 1866, 9 letters from Ch.
De Coster from 1869-1879, 1 letter from Bakunin to the editors of La Libert
from 1870 (4p.), 1 letter from A. Herzen to L. Fontaine (1864), 3 letters from
B. Malon from 1876-1878 to C. De Paepe, 2 letters from E. Bernstein (1880),
1 letter from G. von Vollmar (1885), 1 letter sent by A. Schlesinger from
prison (1876), 2 letters from M. Schlesinger (1876), 3 letters from V. Arnould
(1869, 1879, and 1886), 4 letters from L. Brentano (1902-1907), 1 letter from
A. Cipriani (1894), 1 letter from J. Jaurs (1890s), 1 letter from P. Hger 1879,
1 letter from D. Halvy (undated), 2 letters from A. de Potter (1901), 1 let13
14
15
16
Letter from Hendrik de Man to Adama van Scheltema, December 24, 1951, - Greng
par Morat - iish, Amsterdam, Adama van Scheltema archive. The draft of this letter
is in the Fonds Lecocq-de Man, vol. I, nr 454 (Ghent, Amsab-isg).
Letter from Adama van Scheltema to Hendrik de Man, January 15, 1952,Amsterdam - Amsab-isg, Ghent, Fonds Lecocq-de Man, vol I, nr. 455.
H. Riethof, Index of the collection of Hendrik de Man (Amsterdam, 1969), 67 p.
Letter from Jan de Man and Elise de Man to the Ambassador of the Netherlands in
Brussels, April 27, 1972, - Anderlecht -, iish, Amsterdam. Letter from Elise de Man
and Yves Lecocq to J.M. Welcker, October 30, 1974, - Brussels -, iish, Amsterdam.
17 6
ter sent by L. de Brouckre sent from St. Gillis prison in 1896.17 With the
Metamorfoze grant toward conserving and maintaining collections, the iish
decided in 2012 to digitize the archive of Hendrik de Man.18
On the sixth anniversary of the death of Hendrik de Man (20 June 1959),
another large portion of his archive was donated to the Oorlogsarchief
[war archive] in Anderlecht, at the time still a separate branch of the
Algemeen Rijksarchief [National Archives of Belgium].19 The archive covers the periods 1938-1942 and 1945-1950 and contains lectures, manifests
(1940-1942), publications, files with reports, clippings, notes, and correspondence about his secret peace missions, the disbandment of the
Belgian workersparty and its affiliates, the establishment and operation
of the Unie van Hand- en Geestesarbeiders [Union of manual and spiritual workers], the publication of a Flemish and/or French union daily or
weekly, the establishment in June 1941 of the national Vrij Belgi [free
Belgium] movement. The postwar files gathered by de Man, his family, and
his most loyal friends concern the trials conducted against de Man, his
motion for review of [the rulings in] these cases, followed by the petition
to the Senate, press clippings, and copies of expressions of sympathy and
gratitude. This archive was inventoried by Dr H. De Schepper and comprises 3,038 items.20
As described above, immediately after Hendrik de Man died, curator Ger
Schmook proposed setting up a dedicated de Man fund at the amvc. Only
on 1 August 1956 did Jan and Elise de Man transfer ownership of part of
the archive to the City of Antwerp, where Hendrik de Man was born. This
first donation consisted of books and brochures, personal mementos, photographs, sports equipment, including his skis and a mountain hiking stick,
an army uniform with a helmet, cap, and sabre, and medals and diplomas.
It did not yet include written or personal documents. After all, the archive
overall remained dispersed among family members and friends.
From 1970 the heirs increasingly transferred archive materials to the
amvc. The final supplement was provided in 2003, shortly before the inventory was concluded. In 2002 Mrs de Man-Flechtheim also donated a part
of her father-in-law's personal library to the Amsab-Instituut voor Sociale
Geschiedenis Amsab-isg in Ghent (Amsab-Institute of Social History). Her
son Piet de Man still holds e.g. a couple of books, personal correspondence
and New Years letters from H. de Man. Photocopies of such letters were in17
18
19
20
1953 annual report of the International Institute of Social History. (Amsterdam, 1954), p. 20.
Lists of these letters that were donated are also in the Document collection of the
de Man family at the Amsab-isg (Ghent).
Available at: http:// http://socialhistory.org/en/node/3578; last accessed 19 December
2012.
Letter from Jan de Man and Elise de Man-Lecocq to Sire (King Leopold iii),
January 1, 1970, -Anderlecht -, Amsab-isg, Ghent, Docucument collection of the de
Man family.
Hugo De Schepper, Inventory of the collection of Hendrik de Man (Brussels, 1977), 100 p.
|1 77
cluded in the document collection of the de Man family, which is also kept
at the Amsab-isg.21
As recommended by Leen Van Dyck, director of the amvc-Letterenhuis,
now rightly identified as the literary archive and museum of Flanders, the
Antwerp city council entrusted the archive on 24 July 2001 to the AmsabInstituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (Amsab-isg).22 The inventory, compiled
by Dr W. Steenhaut and J. De Clerck, comprises 1,646 described items, 936
photograph descriptions, and 26 material relic descriptions.23 Contrary to
the other archive sections, which each relate to a specific, isolated period of
de Mans life and career, this archive is the most comprehensive. It covers
albeit not always exhaustively for each period all of de Mans life, ideas,
work, and actions.24
The archive consists of correspondence, memos, clippings, official documents regarding his family and youth; seed materials for his lectures and
articles, official documents, and personal correspondence from his student
and early activist period until 1914, as well as e.g. a file on his dispute with
Edward Anseele about the article Die Arbeiterbewegung in Belgien, which
he published in 1911 together with Louis de Brouckre in the German journal Die Neue Zeit. The First World War period contains personal, official, and
military documents and correspondence about the situation and living conditions at the front; his deployment together with Emile Vandervelde and
Louis de Brouckre to Russia in 1917; his mission as a member of a Belgian
government delegation to the United States (1918). The files from the interwar years concern e.g. his stay in the United States and Canada (1919-1920),
his stints teaching at the Akademie der Arbeit (Darmstadt, 1922-1926), at the
University of Frankfurt am Main (1929-1933), and at the Universit Libre de
Bruxelles (1933-1940), the Arbeidershogeschool (Labour Academy) in Ukkel,
Centrale voor Arbeidersopvoeding (Workers Education Association), the
Plan van de Arbeid (Labour Plan), membership of the government (19351940), seed materials for his many lectures, articles, and university courses,
manuscripts of his publications and correspondence with publishers. Very
few of these items cover the war years 1940-1944, and overlap with the archive sections at the ncwoii and in the Algemeen Rijksarchief. His exile in
Switzerland (1944-1953), however, is extensively documented in correspondence with his friends and family, his diary, the memos about his financial
expenses, his candidacy for university appointments in South Africa and
Switzerland, his work as a translator, and his countless speeches and radio
21
22
23
24
Wouter Steenhaut and Jose De Clerck, Inventory of the document collection of the de
Man family, (Ghent, 2003), 34 p.
Amsab-Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Bagattenstraat 174, 9000 Ghent.
Wouter Steenhaut and Jose De Clerck, Inventory of the archive of Hendrik de Man
(Ghent, 2003), 310 p.
Items from the years he spent in Flims (1926-1927) and in Haute-Savoie (November
1941 - August 1944) are missing from this archive.
17 8
lectures. This period also reveals

a little-known side of Hendrik de
Man, namely the avid amateur
fisherman. This hobby culminated in two books, as well as several articles and lectures.
The assertion that this archive
section is exceptionally specific
and is of Flemish cultural importance due to the abundance
of archival materials concerning
his scholarship, lectures, publications, and the almost complete
selection of his articles and contributions merits qualification.
The bulk of de Mans publications and the corresponding files
are present in this archive section but should certainly be complemented by those at the iish.
Following the initial division of this archive into three
large archive collections, the
Hendrik de Man at his cabin, 20 June 1943.
family still held a lot of archive
Collection Amsab-isg.
materials. After consulting an
old friend of Hendrik de Man,25
Georges Lefranc,26 his family decided in 1969 to disseminate the holdings among various national institutions in the countries where de Man had lived, worked, or been a militant
an operation that in a sense highlighted, especially if it were somewhat
orchestrated, the step beyond nationalism by mankind; in fact, he died
stateless, subsequent to a decision by the Belgian government in 46-47, and
his biographical work Cavalier seul was seized at the time.27 The dispersion
of the archives among different countries gave the family the unique opportunity to enrage the Belgian government. The archives became a venting
device, an expression of vengeance, discontent, and fury at the conviction
and inhuman treatment of de Man by the Belgian government and at the
absence of any form of rehabilitation.
25
26
27
Testimony from Yves Lecocq in Actes du colloque international, p. 207.

George Lefranc: French socialist and union activist, friend of H. de Man, professor,
historian of the French labour movement.
Letter from Yves Lecocq to G. Lefranc, October 20, 1969, - Anderlecht - Amsab-isg,
Ghent, Document collection of the de Man family. Hendrik de Man was sentenced
again in 1948 by the Belgian state for illegally publishing his memoirs Cavalier seul.
|1 79
Yves Lecocq conceived his project as follows:

[] documents (to be selected according to the recipients)
would be bequeathed by the heirs to various institutions (universities, war archival funds, etc.), both national and foreign
(possibly contacted in advance via the intermediary of diplomats
from these countries recognized in Brussels). The letter requesting
that such documents be transmitted recalled, with some objectivity, 1st how de Man was treated by the Belgian authorities
(sentencing and consequences involving loss of nationality, etc.)
after the Second World War, then, 2nd the specific reasons these
countries received the bequest as decided.
Overall, according to Yves Lecocq, archives and documentation were to
be donated to 12 countries: the Federal Republic of Germany (University
of Frankfurt am Main), the German Democratic Republic (University of
Leipzig), the United States (University of Seattle and another institute to
be designated by the American historian Peter Dodge), Canada (University
of Montreal or Archives Nationales), Austria (University of Vienna), Great
Britain (Labour Party archive), France (institute to be designated by G.
Lefranc), Scandinavia (institute to be designated by the governments of the
three Scandinavian countries), the Netherlands (International Institute of
Social History), the Soviet Union (Marxism-Leninism Institute), and Italy and
Switzerland (archive of the city of Morat/Mrten). Archival documents and
documentation from the Second World War and the period of the trials and
the petition to the Senate requesting that his conviction be reviewed would
be given to official Belgium and more specifically to the newly founded
ncwoii in Brussels.
Yves Lecocq hoped that this operation would be brought to the attention of the Belgian government, possibly via the press, especially the letter
that the Foundation In Memoriam Hendrik de Man sent to the respective
Brussels embassies of the countries concerned.28
Only in November 1971 did Jan de Man and his sister Elise send these
letters to the different embassies in Brussels. After several reminders, the
countries contacted replied to the offer from the family of the deceased.
Austria wisely advised against separating the archives. Expressing this same
scholarly concern, Great Britain, after consulting the Labour Party, proposed
donating the documents assigned to them to the iish, upon which the family decided to entrust these archive documents to the fund at the amvc.
The Czechoslovakian institutions were not in a position to accept such
archive donations. The Soviet Union, which was to receive documents including the texts and the Russian translations of the speeches de Man deliv28
Letter from (Yves Lecocq) to Cher Jan, October 27, 1969, - n.p.-, Amsab-isg, Ghent,
180
ered in French to the Russian troops at the front in Galicia, as well as some
other documents from this deployment to Russia, did not respond. Nor
did Poland. Canada, France, Italy, the United States, Switzerland, and the
Federal Republic of Germany accepted. The Federal Republic of Germany
placed the bequest with the Archiv fr Soziale Demokratie der FriedrichEbert-Stiftung in Bonn-Bad Godesberg. The articles that de Man published
in the Leipziger Volkszeitung in 1907-1908 were entrusted to the Staatsarchiv
in Dresden. Whether all these donations actually took place remains unclear.29 The State Department archive in Washington, D.C. is said to have
received personal documents and a few articles by Hendrik de Man from
1907 and 1908 from his family. A photocopy of the correspondence between
Mussolini and de Man from 1930 about his publication Au del du Marxisme
was henceforth entrusted to the Archivio Storico Ministerio Affari Esteri in
Rome. The report on his journey to explore Newfoundland in 1919 and some
personal notes from before 1920 were transferred to the Public Archives of
Canada (Ottawa). In 1972 the Bibliothque Nationale in Paris received several off-prints of his articles from the period 1934-1935 and 1939, a letter from
1939 from the French author Jules Romains to de Man, and two letters from
de Man to a French publisher (1953).
A small donation was given to the Museum of the Dynasty in Brussels,
including a note by de Man about the royal family and some documents
concerning the Werk Koningin Elisabeth voor onze Soldaten (The Queen
Elisabeth charity for our soldiers) which de Man chaired.30
It would be difficult today to compile an accurate account and obtain a
clear impression of these modest donations to institutions in Belgium and
abroad. All institutions would need to be contacted and possibly inspected
on site. Copies or prints of the documents were added by the family to the
archive sections at the Algemeen Rijksarchief in Brussels, the ncwoii/cegesoma in Brussels, the amvc/Amsab-isg in Ghent, and the document collection of the de Man family (Amsab-isg).
29
30
The Schsischer Hauptstaatarchiv in Dresden informed us that no documents

of H. de Man were held there (letter from Dr Wiegand to Wouter Steenhaut,
December 11, 2001,- Dresden. Nor does the Sksische Landesbibliothek, Staatsund Universittsbibliothek Dresden have an archive on H. de Man. (E-mail from
Eberhard Blcher to Wouter Steenhaut, 17 January 2002).
Letter from Jan de Man and Elise Lecocq-de Man to Sir John Beith, ambassador of
Great Britain in Brussels, n.d., Anderlecht; Letter from J. von Alten, Chief Council
at the German Embassy, to Jan de Man and E. Lecocq-de Man, May 12, 1972,
-Brussels; Letter from M. Bourke, Third Secretary at the British Embassy, to Jan de
Man and E. de Man-Lecocq, May 10, 1972, -Brussels- Amsab-isg, Ghent, Document
collection of the de Man family; Testimony from Yves Lecocq in: Actes du colloque
international, p. 206; Michel Brlaz, Les archives Henri de Man, Bulletin van
de Vereniging voor de Studie van het Werk van Hendrik de Man,26 (2000), pp. 69-73; De
Schepper, Inventory, pp. 6-7.
|1 8 1
In 1970 a small archive was donated to the town of Mrten in Switzerland

(Freiburg canton), where de Man and his wife Vali lie buried.31 The documents concern the period 1940-1953 and basically constitute a unit with
the archives at the Algemeen Rijksarchief, the ncwoii/ cegesoma, and the
amvc/Amsab-isg. They complement one another or overlap because of the
many prints or copies.32 The archive contains a file of correspondence of de
Man with the Swiss authorities, socialist federal councillor Ernst Nobs, and
leader of the socialist party of Switzerland Dr Hans Oprecht, press clippings,
and bills. Another volume contains the diary he kept of his escape on 17
August 1944 from his chalet la Patton in Haute-Savoie where he had remained in seclusion ever since he left Belgium in November 1941 until he
crossed the border at St. Gingolf on 1-2 September in 1944. The diary ends
on 15 November 1944. A cover reflects the original statements by various individuals, such as F. Masereel, H.R. Holst, G. and M. Sarton, and G.D.H. Cole,
in favour of reviewing the proceedings; a sealed cover with a handwritten
note from de Man: Note on my ties with King Leopold (1948); covers with
notes and letters from the period 1944-1947 e.g. to Leopold III, P.H. Spaak,
and to his friend Aug. Lambiotte; the programme from 19 June 1940; notes
regarding the prisoners of war and his visit to the Belgian cities after the
surrender; sheets from his appointment book for May 1940 etc.33 In 2002 the
late Dr M. Brlaz compiled a new, very exhaustive inventory of this archive
fund, which comprises only 122 items. His efforts led the complete archive
to be photocopied and entrusted to Amsab-isg following his death.34
The donation of the fourth large archive collection on 31 December
1969 to what at the time was the Navorsings- en Studiecentrum voor
de Geschiedenis van de Tweede Wereldoorlog [Centre for Research and
Studies on the History Second World War] (ncwoii), currently the Studieen Documentatiecentrum Oorlog en Hedendaagse Maatschappij (cegesoma) (Centre for Historical Research and Documentation on War and
Contemporary Society), in Brussels,35 was similarly part of the opration des
archives, undertaken by Yves Lecocq.36
The next day, on 1 January 1970, Jan and Elise de Man notified King
Leopold iii in writing about the distribution of their fathers archive, specifi-
31
32
33
34
35
36
Inventaire sommaire des documents dposs aux archives de la ville de Morat (Canton de
Fribourg) en 1970, compiled by the Foundation In Memoriam Hendrik de Man.
See also De Schepper, Inventory, p.10.
The archive at the Mrten municipal archive is also described in: Herman
Balthazar, H. de Man archive, (Brussels,1971) and in De Schepper, Inventory.
Michel Brlaz, Archives de la Ville de Morat. Fonds Henri de Man (Grand-Lancy/Geneva,
2002), 74 p.
New name: Studie- en Documentatiecentrum Oorlog en Hedendaagse Maatschappij
[Research and documentation centre on war and contemporary society] (cegesoma), Luchtvaartsquare 29, 1070 Brussels.
Letter from (Yves Lecocq) to Cher Jan, October 27, 1969, n.p - Amsab-isg, Ghent,
182
cally of their donation to the ncwoii in Brussels, and of their reason:[]

to give future historians the opportunity to appreciate the action by Henri
de Man, in a more equitable way than have the special tribunals set up in
the aftermath of the war; it would be equally appropriate to operate with
the same respect that the deceased always expressed for His Majesty []
The main purpose of their letter, however, was to inform the king that the
archive donated contained some notes about his contacts with Hendrik
de Man. They immediately assured the king that these documents would
remain sealed and would not be available for scholarly research until five
years after his death.37
Only on 28 April 1970 did the heirs receive a reply from Count Gobert
dAspremont Lynden,38 [] as the emissary of the individual to whom you
have addressed an important letter on the previous 1st of January. The
count requested that Jan de Man meet with him.39 We have no information
about the outcome.
This archival section corresponds closely with the holdings in the
Algemeen Rijksarchief and also consists of what is known as defence material. Most of the documents are copies, produced by de Man, his family, and
his most loyal friends, and of which the originals are still held by the other
archive developers. Since the inventory was compiled by Dr H. Balthazar on
1 September 1970,40 the de Man family presented three more donations to
the ncwoii/ cegesoma in the period 1972-1974.41 These last additions were
inventoried by Dr D. Martin. The archive concerns the period 1935-1953,
comprises 776 items, and is especially important for any research on the
war years. Only four volumes concern the period before the Second World
War, particularly his reintegration and promotion among the ranks of reserve officers (1935-1939), his activities in the Werk Koningin Elisabeth voor
onze Soldaten (the Queen Elisabeth charity for our soldiers), his peace missions (1938-1939) at the instruction of King Leopold iii, and the reactions to
his article Genoeg sabotage op de onzijdigheid [Enough sabotage of neutrality] that appeared in the journal Leiding (October 1939).
The volumes about the early months of the Second World War include
e.g. reports, memos, entries in appointment books and diaries, and accounts about the eighteen-day campaign, the surrender, and the political
restructuring of Belgium, including, for example, de Mans programme of
19 June 1940. The volumes of correspondence from the period 1940-1944
37
38
39
40
41
Letter from Jan de Man and Elise de Man-Lecocq to Sire, January 1, 1970,Anderlecht-, Amsab-isg, Ghent, Document collection of the de Man family.
Count Gobert dAspremont-Lynden belonged to the Cabinet of His Majesty from
1936 until 1945, Chief Marshall of the Court from 1954 to 1962 and honorary
ambassador.
Letter from Count Gobert dAspremont-Lynden to Jan de Man, April 28, 1970, Brussels -, Amsab-isg, Ghent, Document collection of the de Man family.
Herman Balthazar, H. de Man archive (Brussels, 1971), 55 p.
De Schepper, Inventory, p. 11.
|1 8 3
were arranged chronologically, in some cases classified by subject. The volumes that are of immense importance on the war period include Unie van
Hand- en Geestesarbeiders (Union of manual and spiritual workers), Belgian
workers party, the daily and weekly Le Travail, and miscellaneous reports
(1940-1943). The volumes on the postwar period cover the anti-Hitler resistance and H. de Man, correspondence (1945-1952), the trials and motions for
review, expressions of sympathy, articles on and about de Man etc. The archives donated later are about the ties between Leopold iii and de Man, as
well as miscellaneous correspondence.
The Amsab-isg recently acquired a few additional archives, some of which
included the personal papers of Hendrik de Man.
In 2007 his grandson Tyl Lecocq donated the first volume of the Fonds
Lecocq-de Man.42 This archive, on which the late Dr M. Brlaz compiled an
exhaustive inventory,43 contains 1,811 items, including 1,358 items for which
Hendrik de Man (1,284 items) and his wife Valrie von Orelli started the archive. These primarily cover his period of exile in Switzerland (1944-1953). In
addition to correspondence with various individuals, including Adama van
Scheltema and various publishers, this section contains some memos, family correspondence (1927-1939), his diary (1941-1942), personal documents,
and the correspondence from 1930 between Mussolini and Hendrik de Man
about his book Au del du marxisme. The second section contains documents
from after his death, such as condolences, a necrology, newspaper articles,
the operations and correspondence of the actual In Memoriam Hendrik de
Man commemorative foundation with institutions in Belgium and abroad
(including the iish) about distributing and donating his archives.
The late Dr M. Brlaz also assembled an almost complete reconstruction
of originals and photocopies from the correspondence of Hendrik de Man
with his most loyal friends Auguste and Rose LambiotteDemeulemeester.44
Besides the correspondence, this documentation file contains memos and
photographic materials, as well as items from after the deaths of Hendrik
42
The second volume of this archive is still held by the Lecocq family. This volume
(1,684 items) comprises mainly the combined family correspondence of Hendrik
de Man with Elise de Man and Yves Lecocq; correspondence between H. de Man
and publishers; personal papers of H. de Man and Vali von Orelli; death and estate,
correspondence with archive institutions; personal correspondence of Elise de Man
and Yves Lecocq with others; cf. Michel Brlaz, Fonds Lecocq-de Man. Vol II, (GrandLancy/Geneva, 2006), 490 p.
43 Brlaz, Fonds Lecocq- de Man. Inventory, Vol. I (Grand-Lancy/Geneva), 2003, 224 p.
44
Rose Demeulemeester (1891-1964): daughter of the Bruges beer brewer and socialist senator Victor Demeulemeester; married to the Belgian-French industrialist
Auguste Lambiotte (1892-1966) in London in 1919. Like Hendrik de Man, he was
a fly-fishing aficionado; donated his father-in-laws vast collection on the Paris
Commune to the Royal library in Brussels.
184
de Man and Auguste Lambiotte. This file contains 1,136 items and is kept at
the Amsab-isg.45
The impressive work of the late Dr Michel Brlaz was part of his relentless
effort to assemble the most comprehensive possible collection of archives
and documents on and about Hendrik de Man. His ultimate objective was an
integral reorganization of the archives of Hendrik de Man and a globally exhaustive inventory to encourage scholarly research about the life and ideas
of Hendrik de Man. Following his death in 2006, his own vast files of documentation, as well as his library, were entrusted to the Amsab-isg.46
In pursuing its specific mission, the Amsab-isg has a longstanding special
interest in Hendrik de Man and archives and documentation files related to
him. The institute has, for example, retrieved the remaining archive from
the Bureau voor Sociaal Onderzoek (Bureau of social studies),47 of which
Hendrik de Man was the director. This fund comprises his correspondence
admittedly incomplete with a great many persons in Belgium and abroad.
In 1997 the library of the Ecole Ouvrire Suprieure (Haute Ecole Libre
Ilya Prigogine) in Brussels donated a small file of correspondence between
Hendrik de Man and Lon Delsinne to the Vereniging voor de Studie van het
Werk van Hendrik de Man [Association for research on the work of Hendrik
de Man],48 consisting of 39 letters from the period 1909-1934. This is in effect an incomplete selection of the personal papers of Lon Delsinne. Dr M.
Brlaz compiled an inventory of these items as well.49
The small archive that Hendrik de Man mentioned in his letter to Adama
van Scheltema has now expanded into a voluminous archive comprising
thousands of items dispersed among different institutions, greatly complicating any inventory efforts. All these difficulties should, however, be
considered in the context of the new technologies of the computer age.
Gathering the archives physically may no longer be necessary: perhaps a virtual assembly will be sufficient. We imagine a future, in which institutions
45
46
47
48
49
Michel Brlaz, Le Fonds Lambiotte-de Man (Grand-Lancy/Geneva, 2000), 115 p.

Michel Brlaz archive (Amsab-isg, Ghent, D/2008/508).
The Bureau voor Sociaal Onderzoek (Bureau of Social Studies), founded in 1933,
was originally assigned mainly to draft the Plan van de Arbeid (Labour Plan) and to
prepare the Pontigny Conference. In 1935 Hendrik de Man was succeeded as director by Max Buset. The prewar archive of the Belgische Werkliedenpartij (Belgian
workers party) has been lost, except for the historically valuable reports from the
meetings of the party executive and the general council (1892-1940). These reports
may be accessed at: http://www.amsab.be. They are an indispensable source for any
study on Hendrik de Man.
Lon Delsinne (1882-1971): a journalist and later also director of the socialist daily Le
Peuple (1913-1948); director of the socialist Arbeidershogeschool (Labour Academy)
succeeding Hendrik de Man (1922-1944); active in the clandestine socialist press;
minister of Supplies (1944-1945); professor at the Universit Libre de Bruxelles
(1948).
Michel Brlaz, Correspondance Henri de Man-Lon Delsinne (Geneva, 2000), 15 p.
|1 8 5
feature their de Man archives digitally, with a central search engine conducting full-text searches of all documents among all institutions at once.
II.3 Trying to find a

masked man
An unfinished
investigation*
Marien van der Heijden
and Franck Veyron
A photograph of a man with a well-tended hairdo and mustache, strong

arms folded over his broad bare chest. His name: Coeurderoy evidently not
the well-known anarchist writer Ernest. The photograph1 belongs to Lucien
Descaves collection of portraits of Communards2, and caught our attention
when we prepared this collection for digitization (a project made possible by
the agreement Jaap Kloosterman reached with the sns reaal banking and
*
1
2
Thanks are due to Alix Heiniger

iish, call nr. bg A3/364.
Lucien Descaves (1861-1949), writer and libertarian sympathizer, witnessed the
Paris Commune as a child. In the mid-1890s he started to gather documentation
for several novels and plays on the Commune and the fate of her activists in
exile (such as La Colonne (Paris, 1901) and Philmon, vieux de la vieille (Paris, 1913)).
This eventually led to an important collection of primary and secondary source
material, much of it extremely rare or unique, including an extensive collection of
letters and manuscripts of Louise Michel. Besides collecting documents, Descaves
also interviewed veterans of the Commune, and edited and published the memoirs
of Gustave Lefranais. Descaves sold his Commune collection to the iish in 1936,
after long negotiations. See: Maria Hunink, De papieren van de revolutie (Amsterdam,
1986) p. 48-51.
va n d er h e i j d e n a n d v e y r o n tr y i ng to f i nd a mas ke d man
|1 8 7
insurance company, by which

some of the iishs most famous
collections are being digitized).
Most of the Communard portraits in the Descaves collection
were made by the photographer
Eugne Appert just after the
Commune was defeated, late
May 1871, during their internment by the victorious forces
of the Versailles government.
This picture is something else:
a posed portrait of a proud man,
trying to show off; a sportsman,
perhaps a boxer or wrestler?
Descaves, the passionate collector and documentalist, pasted a
newspaper clipping to the back
of the picture, undated and without source. After many attempts,
we finally were able to trace it
in Gallica, the French digital library, to Le Gaulois, 30 May 1912.
The article states that Coeur
deroy was indeed a sportsman, even a famous wrestler
LHomme Masqu (the Masked
Coeurderoys portrait from the Descaves
Man), and tells a story fit for a
collection. iish BG A3/364.
novel by mile Zola. Coeurderoy
was an employee of a commercial firm, cordial and courteous,
with a promising career ahead of him. He was exceptionally strong and active in sports. As the anonymous Homme Masqu, he triumphed in the
wrestling arenas during the last years of the Empire, drawing large audiences and evoking rumors about his identity; a famous artist, a prince perhaps? Coeurderoy kept his identity secret at the behest of his employers,
who eventually asked him to cease fighting, which was seen as improper for
a commercial employee like him. Then disaster struck: un drame bouleversa son existence, un soir de printemps. After a party, Coeurderoy and some
friends noisily walked through the streets of Paris, excited by drinks. A policeman appeared, and started to arrest them. Coeurderoy, fearing for his
business career, gently tried to persuade the policeman to let them go free,
promising they would go home quietly. The policeman refused, and brutally grabbed Coeurderoys collar. Unfortunate one, Coeurderoy exclaimed,
this will be your death! He effortlessly lifted the unfortunate policeman
188
up and threw him against a wall, crushing his skull. Coeurderoy escaped
after the incident, but had to live in hiding afterwards. He only resurfaced
during the infamous Commune, which enrolled this penniless fugitive killer smoothly among its ranks. At the end of the Commune, Coeurderoy was
executed together with a bunch of rascals, a shameful death for a man who
was born honest, the newspaper article concludes: sa force dangereuse
avait perdu lhomme masqu.3
All this was written over 40 years after the supposed facts, based on a
story told by some anonymous source. The story fascinated us, and we started looking for documentary evidence in libraries, archives, and in the ever
growing number of digitized sources found on the internet. Perhaps we
would spoil a good story. But on the other hand, some of it might be true.
Our investigation is far from finished, but we think we have already found
enough to tell an interesting tale.
Paris
The oldest document was found in the population register of Sens, where
Coeurderoy was born on 4 January, 1832, and registered as Edouard Jean.4
Later in life he would also be known as Jean-Baptiste Edouard. His father
was a farmer, later also listed as landowner. In 1852 Coeurderoy was registered as a law student, still living with his parents. One year later, he left his
hometown. In November 1854 he appears in the Paris police archives, being
condemned to eight days in prison for rebellion, his first of many brushes with the authorities. In May 1859 Coeurderoy was in trouble again: he
was sentenced to a month in prison for having beaten policemen. In both
cases, the backgrounds are unknown. During these years, Coeurderoy made
his living as a cloth merchant. He ran into another type of trouble in the
second half of 1862: his firm, the Socit Gouguenheim & Coeurderoy, rue
de Mulhouse 3, went bankrupt, as is registered in the Gazette des Tribunaux5.
From here on, the trace becomes vague. According to some later sources he
became a saltimbanque, a fairground acrobat or strong man. It is tempting to think of Daumiers sketches of fairground artists, and of the stories
by Jules Valls, both dating from these very years.
And then, during the 1867 Universal Exhibition held in Paris, a mysterious masked wrestler appeared in Les Arnes athltiques, a roofed wooden
3
4
L. Saint-R., La petite histoire des sports: lhomme masqu. Vision parisienne, in:
Le Gaulois, 30 May 1912.
Sens : nmd (1832-1832) 5 Mi 884/ 6 1832-1832 (Archives dpartementales de
lYonne, Auxerre). We found it thanks to his short biography in Jean Maitrons
indispensable collection of biographies of Communards (Dictionnaire biographique du
mouvement ouvrier franais, Deuxime partie, 1864-1871: la Premire Internationale
et la Commune, tome V (Paris, 1968), p. 138-139. Maitron also pointed us to the
documents in the police archives mentioned later.
Gazette des Tribunaux, 2 July 1862.
|1 8 9
stadium close to the Opra. Wrestling was an upcoming sport, attracting

large audiences, and very fashionable with the cultural elite. It was not just
fighting, but a theatrical spectacle as well. Wrestlers were cast in a role,
and given evocative stage names, such as Bonnet le Boeuf, Le Gant des
Alpes (The Giant of the Alps); Deligne, Le Terrible Boulanger (The Terrible
Baker); Lacaille, Le Lutteur dacier (The Fighter of Steel); Alfred, Le Joli
modle parisien (The Pretty Parisian model); Stockmann, Le Rempart de
la Belgique (The Bulwark from Belgium); and Paul le ngre, LAnguille
sngalaise (Paul the negro, The Senegalese Eel).6 A shrewd impresario
invented a new character: Le Lutteur Masqu (The Masked Wrestler). His
identity was kept secret. He wore gloves, a bodysuit, and a satin cap over
his head. He was large, extremely muscled, and defeated his opponents effortlessly. Reports of his fights mention his small hands and the cautious
way he would lift his adversary and throw him to the ground, trying not to
hurt him too much. The brothers Goncourt, wrestling aficionados, saw him
fight on the evening of 18 September (after visiting an exhibition of paintings by Gustave Courbet, which they found very disappointing). In their diary, they noted: a t un spectacle tonnant et tout inattendu, que ce gros
Farnse de Bonnet [his opponent], tendu, aplati par terre, rendu inerte, la
puissance de sa masse brise sous cet homme, tte de satin noir, couch
presque doucement sur lui avec la pese lgre et fantastique dune chimre
et dun cauchemar.7
The masked wrestler was an immediate success. His fights were covered
by the press; masked wrestlers appeared in cartoons, songs, and stories.
Speculations about his identity were rife. Several candidates were mentioned, but never was a definitive identification made. To complicate things
further, the masked wrestler was such a success that the impresario of the
rival sports stadium LHippodrome introduced another masked wrestler,
LHomme masqu (the Masked Man). The impresario of the Arnes athltiques sued him for unfair competition, but the case was dismissed; the
ruling judge decided that the competition was good for both impresarios.8
And even more masked wrestlers appeared: Le Masque Noir (The Black
Mask) and Le Masque Rouge (The Red Mask). After some time the novelty
wore off and there were rumors of match-fixing. The Masked Wrestler disappeared without a trace. Could he have been Coeurderoy? We may never
know. One of the contemporary reports on Coeurderoys death during the
final days of the Paris Commune, May 1871, states that he was the ex-lutteur masqu, while another explicitly states that he was not.9 To the truth-
6
7
8
9
Edmond Desbonnet, Les rois de la lutte (Paris, 1910).

Edmond et Jules Goncourt, Journal des Goncourt. Mmoires de la vie littraire. Troisime
volume, 1866-1870 (Paris, 1888) p. 165.
Journal des dbats politiques et littraires, 11 October 1867, p. 2.
Jules Pau, La Dlivrance de Paris. Rcit complet des journes de mai (Paris, 1871) p. 68; Le
Figaro, 3 June 1871.
190
M. Lix, Une soire lArne athltique. Lutte de lHomme Masqu contre Marseille
jeune, from LUnivers illustr 1867, p. 608. Collection Marien van der Heijden.
fulness of these reports we will return later. The newspaper clipping from
the Descaves collection proves that it was a persistent story among wrestling experts, but it cannot be taken as conclusive evidence.
What Coeurderoy did between 1867 and the start of the Paris Commune
is not clear. He may have had jobs in the military. But in 1870 his name
appears in documents again, as a member of the Garde Nationale Mobile,
Seine infrieure. In December he was awarded a medal. In 1871 he had
risen to lieutenant colonel or colonel, serving in the Seventh Bataillon of
the forces defending the beleaguered Paris against the troops of Versailles.
He was not one of the ideological or political leaders of the Commune, and
left no written statements as to his views and actions, as far as we know.
From the fragmentary evidence in reports by witnesses and in files from the
Versailles government, he emerges as a hardline Communard, full of energy and sometimes aggressive.10 In the last weeks of the Commune, he may
have tried to destroy buildings to prevent them from falling into the en10
For instance: Paul Seigneret, sminariste de Saint-Sulpice, fusill Belleville le 26 mai 1871.
Notice rdige daprs ses lettres, par un directeur du Sminaire de Saint-Sulpice (Paris, 1875
[3me dition]) p. 338
|1 9 1
emy hands. Based on later reports from police spies, the Versailles government charged him with attempts to set fire to the two theaters of the Opra
and the Htel des ventes, and of involvement with the attempt to blow up
the powder storage of the Invalides, which would have been a spectacular
explosion.11
There are several contemporary brief reports about Coeurderoys last
hours, fighting the soldiers of the Versailles army, better equipped and
more numerous than the forces of the Commune. Some of them have him
dying on a barricade, others say he was executed. In the most elaborate report, the nergumne (firebrand) Coeurderoy fights on a barricade in the
rue Rochechouart, and kills an innocent wine merchant with a rifle shot.
Wounded and leaning on an 18 year-old girl named Louise Breteuil, who did
not cease to shoot during the retreat, he makes his way to a barricade on
the rue du Chteau-dEau, where the two of them are caught and immediately shot.12 The killing of an innocent wine merchant and the introduction
of a murderous girl are typical of the horror scenarios invented about the
Commune and the Communards. They were repeated for many years to justify the ruthless killing by the forces from Versailles of thousands or tens of
thousands of Parisians during the Semaine sanglante (Bloody Week), and
to paint a spectral picture of the abominable horrors of the Commune.
Exile
In the case of Coeurderoy, the reports of his death were greatly exaggerated:
he was not killed at all. He had escaped to Switzerland, and the story of his
death was kept alive to protect him from immediate prosecution. This route
was not easy, but feasible. Many Communards made it to Geneva, where
they could live without threat of expulsion as long as they did not commit a
crime a situation quite strange to our twenty-first century minds, soaked
with the rhetoric of the war against terrorism.
In July 1871 we find Coeurderoy on the terrace of the Caf du Nord in
Geneva, enjoying a drink in the company of other refugees. The episode is
described in the memoirs of Maxime Vuillaume, the indispensable chronicler of the community of Communards in Switzerland and one of the refugees on the terrace. The men exchange the stories of their escapes, and
then it is Coeurderoys turn. Vuillaume relates: Et toi? dis-je Coeurderoy.
Coeurderoy va nous raconter son histoire, quand un coup de coude me fait
retourner vers mon voisin, Massenet [another refugee]. Quoi? Diraiton pas le pre Gaillard... L. En face de nous, avec Claris? Father Gaillard
and Claris were two prominent Communards. They were invited to join the
table, and of course they started telling their stories. Coeurderoy never got to
11
12
Archives de la Prfecture de Police de Paris, BA 431, Fonds du cabinet du Prfet de

police. Rfugis Genve, folio 44.
Le Petit Journal, 3 June 1871, p. 2.
192
speak.13 For a researcher it is extremely frustrating to be so close, yet to get

nothing. Our subjects story is about to be told, it literally is on his lips, with
a writer of memoirs present. Then other people, perhaps more important,
come along and spoil the moment. We would not have minded if Gaillard
and Claris had walked by the terrace a bit later... Now all we have is one sentence in another article by Vuillaume: Coeurderoy made his way out of Paris
bravely, not minding the informers, swearing to choke them between his
strong arms.14
Still, Coeurderoys early years in Switzerland proved to be the best documented period in his life. The community of exiles was closely observed by
the Swiss press and authorities; and by French spies, almost outnumbering
the exiles and writing detailed reports to their superiors in Paris.15 Several of
the exiles wrote their memoirs.16 And then there were the historians of the
Paris Commune, such as Lucien Descaves, gathering stories and collecting
documents,17 and the Swiss historian Marc Vuilleumier, who published extensively on the exiled Communards.18
From the start, Coeurderoy was active in the community of French exiles in Switzerland. He participated in the meetings where possibilities of
reviving the Commune were discussed, and was member of exile organizations such as the Section de propagande et daction rvolutionnaire socialiste in Geneva, and of groups associated with Bakunins International.
He was present at the tumultuous Congrs de la Paix et de la Libert in
Lausanne, in late September 1871. French police spies linked him to rumors concerning attempts to organize an uprising in France, arms trade,
and the sale of objects stolen from Paris during the Commune. Coeurderoy
had several other activities that can be documented. He gave lessons in
boxing and fencing, tried to set up a Society for Mutual Aid, and ran his
house as a pension for exiles. This seems to have been a business he liked.
Late March 1872, Coeurderoy opened a brasserie, restaurant, and board-
13
14
15
16
17
18
Maxime Vuillaume, Mes cahiers rouges au temps de la Commune (Paris, 1911 [cinquime
dition]), p. 362-369.
[Il] tait parti bravement, se souciant peu des mouchards quil jurait dtouffer
entre ses bras musculeux. Maxime Vuillaume, Comment je me suis souvenu, in
LAurore, 5 March 1907.
Archives dEtat de Genve, Dossier dexpulsion. Cote : Etrangers J n97; Archives de
la Prfecture de Police de Paris, BA 431 and BA 483.
For example: Gustave Lefranais, Arthur Arnould, Souvenirs de deux Communards
rfugis Genve, 1871-1873. Prsentation par Marc Vuilleumier (Genve, 1987);
Aristide Claris, La proscription francaise en Suisse 1871-72 (Genve, 1872).
Unfortunately the Lucien Descaves papers held at the iish do not contain further
information on Coeurderoy himself.
Such as: Marc Vuilleumier, Les exiles communards en Suisse, in Cahiers dhistoire
(Lyon, vol. 22, 1977) or Lexil des communeux, in: La commune de 1871: lvnement,
les hommes et la mmoire (St Etienne, 2004). See also the recently published collection
of articles by Vuilleumier: Marc Vuilleumier, Histoire et Combats. Mouvement ouvrier et
socialisme en Suisse, 1864-1960 (Genve: 2012).
|1 9 3
ing house in Plainpalais, at that time just outside Geneva proper. He ran
this with his wife (it is not certain if they were married), who, at the time
of the Commmune, had defended by herself a barricade for a whole day.19
According to Lucien Descaves documentary novel about the French exiles
in Switzerland, Coeurderoys wife came from the Alsace. She was tall and
had an ample figure, and was therefore nicknamed lphantine. Descaves
describes how the two frequently quarreled. When the argument became
serious, Coeurderoy would say Lets go downstairs. Then lephantine followed him to the basement, where they gave each other a beating. After
some time, the two would come upstairs again, relieved, and, in Descaves
words, happy to have protected the outward respectability of the community of exiles.20
Coeurderoys and lphantines place (Brasserie de Plainpalais) was frequented by many exiles, and several times political meetings and memorial
banquets were held there. From an espionage report sent to Paris, we know
that there were two large rooms, each with a capacity of a hundred people,
one with two billiard tables, and a garden with a stage for an orchestra and
27 tables for outside dining, if the weather permitted. A separate, smaller
room was reserved for the exiles. For 10 francs a month, they could become
a member. The money was used to buy French newspapers, which the exiles
could read and study before they were passed on to the other customers a
day later.21 How Coeurderoy was able to finance this enterprise is not clear.
A predictable rumor held that he had made a great deal of money during
his time as official of the Commune.22
Still, Coeurderoys life was not without trouble, to put it mildly. In
August 1872 the court in Paris sentenced him in absentia to be deported
to a fortified prison for attentat contre le gouvernement et dans le but
dexciter la guerre civile, port duniforme militaire et darmes apparentes, usage de ces armes, construction de barricades, arrestations illgales et
complicit darrestations illgales, exercice dun commandement dans des
gardes armes23 His brasserie had competition from the Marmite Sociale
and the Buvette de la Commune (exploited by Gaillard pre him again!),
both in Geneva and catering for the exile community. Coeurderoy was sentenced for a fraudulent bankruptcy in some business venture of which no
details are known. The exiles frequently quarreled, and where there was a
fight, Coeurderoy often was not far away. He was involved in a series of incidents.24 He was reported to have threatened someone with a gun in the
19
20
21
22
23
24
iish, Lucien Descaves Papers, inv. nr. 311.

Lucien Descaves, Philmon vieux de la vieille. Translated from the fifth edition (Paris,
1913) p. 93-94.
Archives de la Prfecture de Police de Paris, BA 431, folio 131.
Le Figaro, 23 September 1872.
Archives de la Prfecture de Police de Paris, BA 483, Insurgs contumace, folio 37
and folio 283.
See: Archives dEtat, Genve, Dossier dexpulsion. Cote: Etrangers J n 97; Journal de
194
garden of his brasserie, threatened to kill policemen, and publicly insulted

Geneva and the Genevans on a Sunday afternoon! His brasserie apparently
did not respect the regulations for selling drinks, operated outside of regular opening hours, and caused frequent nuisances to the neighbors, who felt
terrorized by its owner. Il ne se passe pas une semaine sans que le Mairie
signale les excentricits du Sieur Coeurderoy qui a continuellement des discussions et des disputes avec ses voisins; quelque fois son extravagance va
jusqu menacer de mort ceux qui ont des difficults avec lui, according
to a police report from August 1872.25 Another police report from the same
month gives details. A night watchman came by Coeurderoys brasserie after
midnight, and saw people still playing billiards. As the doors were closed,
the watchman climbed a wall and entered the brasserie from the garden.
The people inside had stopped playing billiards, but were drinking. The
watchman told Coeurderoy that he was in violation, whereupon Coeurderoy
asked him how he had entered. Where I could, the watchman said. If
you did not enter through the door, you are dead, Coeurderoy replied, in
an eerie echo of his supposed remark to the policeman in the newspaper
article pasted to the back of his photograph. Not much happened further, as
alerted gendarmes had arrived to escort the watchman out. Coeurderoy and
his wife kept insulting them as they left.26
In May 1873 the Genevan authorities had had enough. Coeurderoy was
expelled not from Switzerland, but from the canton. In a letter of 21
May one of the very few examples of his own writings found until now
Coeurderoy explains to the head of the Department of Justice and Police
that the accusations are all untrue, and adds in a defiant manner:
Les plaintes: je mets au dfi qui que ce soit de les motiver
devant moi en votre prsence. Jamais ltranger & Genve, je
ne me suis occup de politique active de socit secrte. Tout se
qui sest fait chez moi a eu lieu au grand jour. Les noms de ceux
qui y viennent nont rien de cach.
If the expulsion order cannot be withdrawn, Coeurderoy asks for some time
to settle his affairs in Geneva:
Dautre part larrt dexpulsion me donne trois jours. Or, le
dimanche est nul, le lundi jai t arrt, jai donc une dernire
journe. Jai des dettes payer, du vin, un loyer, et un mobilier que je ne puis jeter la rue. Je ne vis pas en cosmopolite,
puisque jessaie de travailler et de me fixer Genve. Voulez-
25
26
Genve, 20 May 1873; Le Figaro, 23 May 1873.

Archives dEtat, Genve, Dossier dexpulsion. Cote: Etrangers J n 97.
Ibid.
|1 9 5
vous me donner au moins le temps absolument ncessaire pour

paratre votre bureau et faire face mes obligations. 27
The expulsion was not withdrawn, and Coeurderoy moved to La Chaux-deFonds, in the canton of Neuchtel.
La Chaux-de-Fonds was not a strange choice. It was a French-speaking
city in the Jura, a region with a strong anarchist-socialist movement (the
Fdration jurassienne). This was the tendency Coeurderoy was close to.
More exiles of the Commune lived there probably too few to form rival
factions, but enough to form a pleasant group of companions. Coeurderoy
worked as agent for a Parisian textile firm. According to an 1878 report, he
lived with a woman, Marie-Barbe Hunsinger, and an 18-year-old son.28 We
are not sure if Marie-Barbe was lphantine, nor if the son was his, hers, or
theirs. Coeurderoy continued giving lessons and demonstrations in boxing
and fencing. In 1874, he published an eight-page brochure, Lescrime, singing
the virtues of fencing in developing an imposing physique, improving the
intellect and preserving health. Although the brochure keeps strictly to its
subject, there may be a personal touch in some passages:
Voyez marcher un tireur dEscrime; on sent dans son allure
lhomme qui a confiance en lui, et se trouve prt faire face au
danger ou aux ventualits mauvaises. [...] Combien, plus dune
fois en leur vie, ont pu regretter de ne pas avoir tout prt un
moyen de dfense contre une agression brutale. Jen appelle surtout ceux qui ont voyag. [...] Je crois quun pre peut se sentir
heureux davoir pu apporter dans la vie de ses enfants un capital de joies et de scurit; il peut tre fier de se sentir revivre
dans un fils bien organis, qui allie la vigueur llgance des
formes et des manires, fier de pouvoir prsenter la patrie un
homme digne delle et de ses institutions.29
The last fragment suggests that Coeurderoy had left his revolutionary
days behind. He seems to have settled, and there is not much we know
of his later life. There is an intriguing report on the famous French wrestler Rambaud, stage name la Rsistance, who visited La Chaux-de-Fonds
in 1876 and accidentally met his old friend Coeurderoy.30 We do not know
what they talked about. In 1878 Coeurderoy returned to Geneva, trying to
get a residence permit. His case was supported by his French employer,
27
28
29
30
Ibid.
Ibid.
douard Coeurderoy, Lescrime (Chaux-de-Fonds: Impr. du national suisse, 1874).
Quotes from p. 5, 6, 7.
Edmond Desbonnet, Les rois de la force: histoire de tous les hommes forts depuis les temps
anciens jusqu nos jours, avec 733 photographies et dessins (Paris, 1911), p. 52.
196
who declared that Coeurderoy had always been a bit rebellious and hardhanded, but righteous and generous. Another character witness, perhaps
the prominent radical politician Georges Favon, member of the Grand
Conseil (the Genevan cantons parliament), stated: Je vous assure que cest
un des hommes les plus travailleurs et les plus honntes de la proscription franaise et quil a t victime, lors de son expulsion, de haines trs
caractrises.31 As far as we know, Coeurderoy was given his residence permit. In 1879 he was among the Communards given amnesty by the French
government. But according to a newspaper article from 1880, Coeurderoy
was one of the refugees whose life in Switzerland was so good they would
not take the risk of having to accept a lesser position after returning to
Paris.32 He became a frequent visitor of the meetings of the Grand Conseil in
Geneva, and seriously considered naturalization.33
Paris
But Coeurderoy did not stay in Switzerland, and he did not become wealthy.
The last traces we have recently34 found concern his death in a Paris municipal hospital on 1 April, 1909, and his cremation at Pre-Lachaise on 4 April.35
La Fraternelle des Anciens Combattants de la Commune, the association
of veterans of the Commune, invited its members to attend.36 Later in April,
Maxime Vuillaume published some memories of recently deceased ex-Communards, including Coeurderoy, described and honored as a brave and fearless man, a real fighter. Vuillaume had encountered him in Paris a few years
earlier, still a Hercules, but old and tired. Coeurderoy died as a poor man,
like most of the ex-Communards. He made a living by walking from building site to building site, selling tools to stonemasons. Il travailla ainsi jusqu ce que lge vint le plier tout fait et le coucher enfin dans sa bire.37

31
32
33
34
35
36
37
Daniel-Franois Ruchon, Georges Favon et les rfugis de la Commune Genve,

Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto. Revue europenne des sciences sociales, v. xi, 1973, n. 29, p. 121.
Le Figaro, 10 July 1880.
Ibid.
We found these traces just a week before the deadline for this article. They offer
obvious possibilities for further research which we unfortunately have not yet
been able to carry out.
Mairie du 10me Arrondissement, Paris, Acte de dcs, 2 April 1909; LAurore, 4
April 1909; LHumanit, 3 and 4 April 1909. The newspapers give 2 April as the date
of death, the death certificate 1 April.
LHumanit, 4 April 1909.
Maxime Vuillaume, Vieux souvenirs. Ceux qui sen vont, in: LAurore, 13 April
1909, p. 1.
|1 9 7
More to be found
So what do we know, after scraping all these fragments together from archives in Amsterdam, Paris, and Geneva, from so many books, brochures,
journals, and newspapers? We can say that the newspaper clipping on the
back of his portrait is inaccurate in most details, completely wrong in some
aspects, and impossible to prove in others. But it paints a surprisingly accurate character of the Coeurderoy we got to know. For a figure of such modest historical importance, Coeurderoy left behind many traces in a vast array of documentary sources. Ongoing digitization projects are making more
sources available as we speak. We are sure that there is more to be found,
and we will try to find it. Still, we may never be able to reconstruct his complete life. We may never know if he was the masked wrestler or not. We
may even find documents that raise new questions we cannot answer.
In fact, this has already happened. On the internet, we found a sales catalogue of portrait photographs of Communards from the collection of Jules
Perrier, another great collector of Commune documents and memorabilia.38
Among the portrayed Communards listed was our friend. Unfortunately, the
photograph itself was not shown, and has been sold to an unknown buyer.
According to the description from the seller, the portrait was taken at the
atelier of Paul Metzner & Fils, in La Chaux-de-Fonds, and had a dedication
on the back: a son ami Perrier, Coeurderoy (Retour de lInde).39 So after all
our investigations, we are again confronted with a photograph this time a
photograph we cannot even see with something on the back that fires our
imagination. Back from India? What did he do there?
38
39
See for instance Marc Vuilleumier, A la bibliothque publique et universitaire: le

communard Jules Perrier et ses collections, in: Muse de Genve, n 112, February
1971.
http://darreau.com.pagespro-orange.fr/SDV/2008/commune-liste.html; last accessed
21 October 2013.
II.4 La Rosa de Foc

Collecting Anarchist
Materials
Andrew H. Lee
Fortunately, the International Institute of Social History in

Amsterdam possesses the richest collection of material on
Spanish anarcho-syndicalism in the world.1
The research institution that collects anarchist materials faces several conundrums. While the majority of these are not unique to anarchist materials, the anti-governmental/anti-authoritarian politics of libertarian
movements often compound these problems.2 What follows is a brief examination of the questions that arise in institutional collecting. This is followed
by an examination of the importance of the Internationaal Instituut voor
Sociale Geschiedenis (iisg) as a center for research on these movements, focusing on those based in Spain. These will be peppered with some opinionated (and personal) observations derived from my dual careers as a librarian
and a researcher on anarchism, drawn from the research for my dissertation on the Spanish anarchist Federica Montseny.3
John Brademas, Revolution and Social Revolution: A Contribution to the History

of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Movement in Spain: 1930-1937, (Ph.D., Brasenose
College, Oxford, 1953), p. 1. Every publication mentioned in this essay is in the collections of the iisg. The one exception is noted below.
Libertarian in my usage definitely does not include the movement that originated
in the United States, which advocates free trade and essentially unregulated capitalist markets.
Andrew H. Lee, Mothers Without Fathers or Nothing More than a Woman: Gender
and Anarchism in the Work of Federica Montseny, (Ph.D., New York University,
le e la ros a d e f oc
|1 9 9
Anarchy and Authority

Too often the question arises Why collect the records of the movement?.
Anarchism as a movement waxes and wanes. As a political ideology it has
been popular and yet is simultaneously widely misunderstood and often reviled. Anarchy, the desired condition, is popularly understood to be synonymous with chaos. The definition given by The American Heritage Dictionary is
1. Absence of governmental authority or law. 2. Disorder and confusion.4
These definitions present anarchy in a negative light, though the first is indeed what anarchists seek. Millions around the world have participated in
libertarian movements, striving to better their lives, and anarchism continues to attract popular as well as scholarly interest. These operate in a symbiotic relationship that creates materials which become part of the historical
record. It is the responsibility of the institution that seeks to document social movements to collect this material in all its incarnations.
This is often an uphill struggle for numerous reasons. Understandably,
governments and funding institutions oppose the movement in its various
forms and as a consequence create problems, especially financial, for the research institution that seeks to collect and document anarchy. Additionally,
other left-wing social movements have sought too often successfully to
ignore, dismiss, isolate, or repress libertarian ideas. A further and more
complicated problem for collection development is that many adherents of
anarchism understandably distrust institutions, especially those connected
to the state. Understandable because frequently such collections are used
not to further knowledge of anarchism but for surveillance: to police and
repress it. The institution that makes available anarchist materials for researchers also makes them available for the state and the police it is unavoidable but necessary. The equality sought by anarchists must also be applied consistently and thus given to its natural enemies.
The conflict between anarchy and authority can also make the arrangement and organization of the material difficult. One widely known problem is, in the vocabulary of cataloguing, the question of authority control:
just who or what is responsible for creating a work? People change their
names in order to reflect a newer or different outlook on life. Malcolm Little
changed his name to Malcolm X and then near the end of his life to El Hajj
Malik El Shabazz reflecting his trajectory as a Muslim. Anarchists repeatedly
published materials using pseudonyms, not always to avoid police repression. Springing from an anticlerical exaltation of classical Greece and Rome,
one common practice was adopting pseudonyms based on specific classical
names such as Espartaco and Diogenes. The use of names derived from nature was another. Montseny sometimes wrote using the pseudonym Blanca
2012). To be crystal clear: I am speaking only for myself, neither for my employer
nor any other institutional affiliation.
Anarchy in The American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd ed. (New York, 1994, [1992]).
20 0
Montsan (healthy mountain).5 Montsenys father Joan Montseny i Carret

adopted pseudonyms that often linked to his natal name of Montseny by
invoking mountains. The name Federico Urales was the most widely known
and he also published under Sharfenstein as well as numerous others.6
Material
Further complicating the issue are not only the standard title changes
and publisher changes (Generacin Consciente became Estudios and moved
from Alcoy to Valencia), but also the political problems of censorship and
the frequent repression of anarchist serials. While La Revista Blanca experienced censorship, it was never suppressed in part due to their name El
Luchador, on the other hand, suffered severely at the hands of the state.7
The Barcelona-based Soldiaridad Obrera, simultaneously the national newspaper of the anarcho-syndicalist Confederacin Nacional del Trabajo (cnt)
and the principal newspaper of the Catalan Regional Federation, not only
went through five series in less than thirty years but also experienced frequent suspensions.8 Another complication is the popularity of the title
Solidaridad Obrera for the newspapers of other cnt regional federations.9
How can you provide authority control with such a multitude of names and
organizations?
5
Mabel was another frequent pseudonym, mostly in Montsenys articles published

in El Luchador in the early thirties.
6
Montseny is the name of a Catalan mountain, hence her fathers use of Federico
Urales (Urals) and Ricardo Sharfenstein (sharp stone). Sharfenstein is identified
as Urales in Federica Montseny, Prlogo to Federico Urales, Los hijos de amor
(Toulouse, 1951). Montsenys biographer Susanna Tavera suspects that the names
of both of La Revista Blancas literary correspondents, Paris Descleuse and Madrids
Augusto de Moncada, were really pseudonyms for Urales. Susanna Tavera, Federica
Montseny, La Indomable 1905-1994 (Barcelona, 2005), p. 68.
7
Montseny states that the title La Revista Blanca (The White Review) helped avoid suppression, even though the title was an homage to the French anarchist journal
La Revue Blanche. Federica Montseny, Mis primeros cuarenta aos (Barcelona, 1987), p.
40. Apparently La Revista Blanca was going to serialize Montsenys first novel, La
tragedia de un pueblo, but it was censored and never published. Cambio de novelas,
La Revista Blanca 1, no. 1 (1 June 1923), p. 23. Censorship of La Revista Blanca during
the Primo de Rivera dictatorship was a regular occurrence but not as severe as the
censorship and suppression of the weekly El Luchador (1931-1933) would be under
the Second Republic (1931-1939). The weekly El Luchador was outspoken, moreover,
due to a weekly publishing schedule, it contained news that was more current
and frequently incurred the repression of the censor. Mara Dolores Saiz, Prensa
anarquista en el primer bienio republicano: El Luchador (1931-1933), in Jos Luis
Garca Delgado (ed.), La segunda repblica espaola: El primer bienio (Mxico, d.f., 1987),
pp. 315-334.
8
The indispensible source for understanding the publication history of Soli is
Susanna Taveras Solidaridad Obrera: el fer-se i desfer-se dun diari anarco-sindicalista, 19151939 (Barcelona, 1992).
9 The iisg has Solis from Andaluca, Asturias, Catalonia, Galicia, and the Levante.
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There is the problem of graphics or images. Rarely is the same level of

cataloguing applied to the graphic elements of a printed work as to the text.
While museums collect works of art by anarchists, generally the same artists work in anarchist publications was not collected by museums. Nor was
it recognized as equally important as the text (and often highly valuable)
by the institutions that did collect such publications. Check the iisg catalogue for Marn Civera Martnezs El sindicalismo: Historia, filosofa, economa
or Carmen Condes Por la escuela renovada. iisgs catalogue provides publication information, but neither record mentions the artwork of Josep Renau,
whose name is on both covers. Adding his name does not quite fulfill the
ability to search for image-related information in the print publications.
Does one add to the catalogue records words in an attempt to describe
Renaus images? The tools of Civera Martnezs book are perhaps easier to
describe than the two figures on Conde. One way is to provide thumbnails
of the covers in the catalogue record, but no one has quite developed a completely successful way to combine access to both images and text.
Pamphlets are doubly cursed. The brevity of pamphlets, their small size,
generally inexpensive cost, and lack of complexity are what make them
popular sources of information often combined with an attractive cover.
They are easily carried and concealed when necessary in a pocket or
bag. Ephemeral publications, they are also thin and consequently difficult
to store upright on bookshelves. To help with shelving, sometimes institutions bind several pamphlets together creating a collection in a single volume. This type of pamphlet volume often brings together disparate authors, subjects, and publishers and the milieu of a pamphlet series is lost
irretrievably. If a researcher is only looking for a specific title this is not
an issue. The difficulty in the handling of pamphlets combined with their
brevity makes the tasks of processing and cataloguing seem to be almost
not worth the effort. The frequency and topics in a pamphlet series can be
lost in pamphlet binding. The researcher can use the titles in a series to
recognize the specific concerns and popular understandings and mentalities
of a particular movement. The prevalence of health topics in many Spanish
series, such as the Cuadernos de cultura, is evident when one lays out the list
of titles published.
There are the increasingly important issues of preservation and conservation. Anarchist movements rarely had sufficient funds to be able to use
the best quality materials. Most anarchist material was cheaply printed
on newsprint made from wood pulp. Very acidic, with age it not only becomes a rich sepia but also highly brittle. Leafing through a bound journal
becomes increasingly problematic as pages crack, split, and break. Standard
practices such as binding journals helps keep them together in sequence
but often removes valuable content, such as covers. Often that content is
artwork, reinforcing the unfortunate valuation of text over image in most
libraries systems of organization and control. Binding also involves trimming, and that too sometimes removes content, especially inserted mate-
20 2
rials (subscription blanks, flyers, handbills) and marginalia. Microfilm offers

the possibility of increasing access and preserving the material of the libertarian movement while it also loses information that is based in the materiality of that culture.
iisg collection
Having identified several of the problems facing institutions that collect this
material, I turn to look at how an institution has dealt with some of these
conundrums. This is the iisg, which I fondly refer to as the Mecca of social
history collections. The iisg is legitimately renowned throughout the world
for its collections. There are few other institutions with such vast and wellconnected (thanks to authority control) collection of materials about social
movements from well beyond their immediate national boundaries. The
range and depth of the iisgs collection more than justify the international
in its name, and nowhere more so than in its holdings on anarchism. While
there are collections that have particular strengths or are notable for holding the records of some illustrious names or leading organizations, these
almost always reflect local or national orientation. The reasons for this parochialism are generally historically specific to the institution, albeit often
unacknowledged if they are even examined. The proudly acknowledged historical background of the iisgs vast collections is firmly rooted in its specific history and intimately connected with that of the Netherlands.
The Netherlands successfully maintained its neutrality during the First
World War, which helped make it an attractive location for migrs in
the tumultuous period after the war. The continuing perception of the
Netherlands as a more tolerant society, however problematic, meant that
it became a haven for a diverse group of political refugees and records.
Another positive by-product of the Netherlands image is the corresponding and continuing perception of the Institute as neutral in ideological and/
or factional fights. As a consequence there were numerous opportunities to
acquire materials from and about individuals and of movements that might
otherwise have been seized by antagonistic authorities and/or destroyed
by these authorities or in World War ii and the ensuing social revolutions.
Thus, and even more importantly for the preservation of historical documentation, this positive experience of political refugees led to the migrs
encouraging their compaer@s to deposit their material in Amsterdam for
safe keeping. One notable example of this is Max Nettlau. This acquisition was so important that the iisg was almost named the Max Nettlau
Institute.10 Nettlaus 1935 agreement to sell the iisg his extensive collection not only gave the Institute the largest accessible collection of anarchist
materials in the world; it did something that is immeasurable. It enabled
10
See the Institutes webpage on Nettlau, available at: http://www.iisg.nl/collections/

nettlau/index.php; last accessed 12 November 2013.
|203
the iisg to transcend the libertarians suspicion of institutions. The ongoing relationship between Nettlau and the iisg was pivotal in establishing
the Institute as the repository of choice for anarchists to deposit materials; moreover, it opened doors that otherwise would have been closed. His
extensive network of correspondents and personal relationship with anarchists in the Americas as well as in Europe spread a positive view of the
iisg across the globe. These individuals and organizations in turn responded
positively to requests from the Institute for materials and frequently sent
materials without being solicited by the iisg, further enhancing the iisgs
reputation and expanding its collections.11 This became especially important
in the case of Spain, the center of the worlds largest and most significant
libertarian movement at the time. Here Nettlau still played a crucial role in
soliciting materials as well as assuaging concerns. Francos brutal repression
in the areas under his control made the rescue of material imperative.12
Montseny
My research centered on the works of Federica Montseny i Ma, a leading
militant in Spain during the Second Republic until her 1939 escape into exile. Montsenys parents, Federico Urales and Soledad Gustavo published the
important anarchist review La Revista Blanca in Madrid from 1898 until 1905.
After moving to Barcelona, Montseny convinced her parents to resume publication and in 1923 the semi-monthly second series of La Revista Blanca began. The publication attracted contributions from around the world, including prominent anarchists such as Nettlau, Charles Malato, Maria Lacerda
de Moura, Pedro Esteve, Jean Grave, mile Armand, Adrin del Valle, and
Han Ryner. La Novela Ideal, a series of short novellas, was launched in 1925,
and they published complete novels as well. Nineteen thirty-one saw the introduction of the weekly El Luchador followed by a second, longer series of
novellas titled La Novela Ideal, and numerous pamphlets on a wide range of
topics.13
Montseny was a major contributor to the familys publishing operations.
La Revista Blanca published all three of her novels, in addition to her fifty-six
11
12
13
This is not to claim that everyones response was positive or that action was taken
in time. For a specific example see the Nettlau correspondence with the Spanish
anarchist Soledad Gustavo (ne Teresa Ma i Miravet). Though an important
figure in her own right, Gustavo is remembered today primarily as the compaera
of Federico Urales and mother of Federica Monsteny. Gustavo administered the
familys publishing enterprise and Nettlau encouraged her to deposit the archives
at the iisg because of the Second Republics impending defeat in the Civil War.
Unfortunately the deposit did not occur.
One example of what was lost is the daily correspondence between Montseny and
Germinal Esgleas, her compaero for over fifty years. She assumes the Nationalists
burned it. Montseny, Mis primeros cuarenta aos, p. 51.
These publications are all available at the iisg, though the two series of novellas
have some gaps. See the listing available at: http://socialhistory.org/en/collections/
la-novela-ideal-and-la-novela-libre; last accessed 12 November 2013.
20 4
titles in the two novella series, and hundreds of articles, essays, and reviews
in the two journals. The publications, while available in Spain, and despite
the popularity of the novellas, are relatively scarce inside and outside the
country. In addition to the problems of pamphlets examined earlier, another issue is the lack of respect accorded popular or light fiction by many.
Serious institutions simply did not collect popular material in keeping with
the perspective that fiction is ephemeral, of no lasting value, especially the
type of romances that Montseny wrote.
Luckily the Institutes collection development policy does not exclude the
ephemeral or popular. The collections at the iisg hold most of Montsenys
publications. It has complete runs of La Revista Blanca and El Luchador, all
three of her novels, almost all of her contributions to the two novella series except one La Novela Libre.14 Equally important are the various editions
of other works that were published either in exile or in Spain after Franco.
These often include new prologues by Montseny that are useful sources
of information, especially the pamphlets published during her exile in
Toulouse.
Spanish Libertarians
As noted by John Brademas, the excellence of the Institutes collections
of material on Spanish libertarians is without question. Until the death of
Franco, it was the one place you could find such depth of materials. Outside
of Spain (forget the possibility of such research inside fascist Spain), there
were microfilm sets one could consult, collections of materials that were
often based on what an individual gathered in a finite amount of time, more
of a cross section rather than the iisgs profound and ongoing collecting.15
That the most significant academic English language general histories of
the Civil War appear to have not consulted the riches readily available in
Amsterdam, may explain their uneven treatment of the Spanish libertarian
movement.16
14
15
16
Curiously, that one title is La vampiresa, which was not held (or at least listed in the
catalogues) by any of the twenty odd collections I used in my research. It is owned
by the Biblioteca Nacional de Espaa. I finally acquired a personal copy from a
Spanish book dealer for 50 about one hundred times its original price.
One such collection is that of Burnett Bolloten who had worked in Spain for the
United Press International syndicate during the Civil War. Bollotens materials
were acquired by the library of the Hoover Institution in 1949 and are the core of
his first book, The Grand Camouflage: The Communist Conspiracy in the Spanish Civil War
(New York, 1961).
The first serious academic study was John Brademas 1953 dissertation cited earlier.
Brademas work was never published in English, but was published in Spain
in 1974. That uneven treatment by earlier historians kept suspicion of Englishspeaking researchers strong through the eighties. On one of my first research trips
members of the cnt were very wary until I presented a fairly full membership dues
book for the Industrial Workers of the World. That instantly transformed me from
forastero to compaero.
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The ongoing history of the Institutes active global collecting of anarchist materials enables the diligent researcher to recognize the truly international imagined community of anarchists. Not only is the researcher
in Amsterdam able to trace references and locate these in other Spanish
publications, but also to locate and use those from France and elsewhere
in Europe. I was able to read through French publications, including finding specific references to Montseny. But the truly global nature comes when
one is searching in the Institutes catalogues for those references that always seem to arise in researching libertarian movements. These references include one by Montseny, just a sentence, to a review of her work
in Solidaridad: peridico quincenal de los Trabajadores Industriales del Mundo, published in Brooklyn, New York. The libertarian movements interconnected
nature reflects what is loosely referred to as an anarchist Atlantic.
The global nature of the iisgs collecting means that the potential research materials at the iisg are limited only by the researchers time and
language skills. Certainly the career of Diego Abad de Santilln is a prime
example. A significant portion of his correspondence at the Institute is
from his two exiles in Argentina. There are his letters to Federico Urales
in their joint attempts to set up a publishing/distribution agreement, and
Abad de Santillns letters from Germany with accounts of his activities in
the Asociacin Internacional de los Trabajadores. Priceless to me was a letter to Nettlau from Abad de Santilln denouncing the publication of stupid novels by Urales. But the collection also includes other interesting materials such as a circular letter warning fellow anarchists that a book dealer
is a thief and a 1924 letter from the California-based Comit Pro-Presos de
Texas.17 Nothing unusual about that, as libertarian records are usually full of
appeals for financial aid for social prisoners. Such finds can be little sparks
lighting hidden parts of history. The Max Nettlau letters include a thank you
note for a contribution he made to a political prisoners fund. What was remarkable was that it came from the small New Jersey town in which I live.
However, the actual physical collections and the level of access, processing, and conservation could not exist without the unsung and often invisible work of the men and women who labored to make and provide access to
these collections. They collect the publications, manuscripts, posters, photographs, paving stones, etc. They maintain relationships and contacts, and
then try to make all the material accessible and useable for researchers. I
am not thinking only of the iisgs dedicated staff but also the activists, organizations, and fellow members of the Fdration internationale des centres
dtudes et de documentation libertaires. Libertarian documentation centers consciously strive to document and preserve the history of anarchism.
These include the Centre Internationale de Recherches sur lAnarchisme in
17
The Comit was created to help a group of men arrested in Texas in 1913 when
they tried to go to Mexico to fight against Victoriano Huerta. They were finally
released in 1926.
20 6
Switzerland, Spains Pavell de la Repblic and Ateneu Enciclopedic Popular

(both in Barcelona), while in the United States the Labadie Collection at the
University of Michigan and New York Universitys Tamiment Library all have
important holdings. But none of these come close to the holdings of the iisg
thanks to Nettlau, Annie Adama van Scheltema-Kleefstra (the Institutes
amazing and courageous first librarian), and her successors.18
Members of the libertarian movement appreciate the efforts made by the
iisg to preserve its history, to document it, and as importantly to make it
accessible to all. The effort made by the iisg to salvage and ensure the safety
of the archival collection of the cnt included sending them immediately out
of Paris to London the same day as an agreement was signed with Mariano
Rodrguez Vzquez. These were brought to Amsterdam in 1947 and an agreement was signed with the cnt in 1994 for the iisg to be the custodian of
the archives.19 Though there was a brief occupation of the iisg by members
of the cnt, the relationship has been a good one. The staff at the Institute
make every effort to help researchers far beyond the time a researcher is
in the building. They know the collections, the subject areas, and the resources beyond the Netherlands. This too has long been a strength of the
collections: the people who lovingly built them for the future while helping those in the present. Jaap Kloosterman continued this tradition. While
reading a bound French anarchist periodical containing a strongly worded
denunciation of Federica Montseny by another prominent anarchist, I noticed a marginalia that stated hands off in neat cursive penmanship. Jaap
Kloosterman told me the bound volume was Nettlaus and the hands off
was in his hand. This is typical of Jaaps generous sharing of knowledge
with those who would be interested.
18
19
In his dissertation John Brademas thanks Annie Adama van Scheltema-Kleefstra,

but also remarks that perhaps my greatest debt is to Mrs. Anne Diaz of the
Institute, and her daughter, Miss Elizabeth Diaz. The hospitality of the Diaz home
in Holland for several months made it possible to finish the thesis. I believe they
also typed the text of his dissertation.
Inventario de los archivos de la Confederacin Nacional del Trabajo (cnt) (1870-1872, 1922,
1931-), 1936-1939 (Amsterdam, 2000), p. xiii.
II.5 The Key to the

Librarys Collection
Rules and Practices*
Coen Marinus
Organization of Knowledge
The tool people have used for centuries to order knowledge and make it
accessible is the catalogue. According to the general definitions this is a list
of books and other documents, compiled based on specific rules with reference to their location. In the fourth millennium before Christ, clay tablets were already used as information medium and shelved in the library
on numbered racks. The most famous library in antiquity was the one in
Alexandria, founded at the start of the third century before Christ. The enormous book rolls were classified systematically by theme.1
A breakthrough in the multiplication and dissemination of knowledge
was the invention of printing in the fifteenth century. Books became less
vulnerable and could get lost less easily. Therefore the production and distribution of books could soar.2 Literacy increased and there was a great
*
1
2
With thanks to Ursula Balzer and Ditty Mulder.

Papyrus sheets or sometimes parchment sheets, glued together to a strip sometimes many metres in length. This could then be rolled up on a stick, to be stored.
Jan Luiten van Zanden, Explaining the Global Distribution of Book Production
Before 1800, in Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten van Zanden (eds), Technology, Skills and
m a r i n u s ke y to t he li b rary s c olle c ti on
|209
need for libraries. With the foundation of university libraries in the sixteenth century, printed catalogues made their appearance. The instrument
for registration of and access to the collection. Actually the catalogue is the
hinge point between bookshelf and knowledge production. Catalogues were
mostly organized systematically. An alphabetical register was not yet a moot
point. In some cases an author catalogue was published,3 mainly as an aid
for the librarian. A major drawback of the printed catalogue was the rapid
ageing. Often loose folio sheets were added, because of which staff was continually occupied ordering what became eventually a loose-leaf catalogue.
At the end of the nineteenth century an adequate solution was found in
making descriptions on much smaller sheets and bind these together in a
solid cover. This was the birth of the catalogue card still in the form of the
famous Sheaf catalogue (Leidse boekje).4
Regulation
As libraries grew larger, a need for regulation arose. Attempts were already
made in the sixteenth century to develop a set of rules, but it did not get
serious attention until the nineteenth century. That was necessary by then,
because collections could not longer be encompassed in simple lists. Before
that, books were usually shelved in order of acquisition or by subject and
the librarian was the catalogue, an omniscient guide. At its foundation in
1935, iisg used placement by country, incidentally not without a comprehensive discussion.5 The genesis and further development of regulation led
from the outset to hefty opposites in cataloguing traditions, in which the
Anglo-Saxon and Prussian systems vied for the largest influence. In addition,
every self-respecting library kept their own house rules.
Anglo-American Tradition: Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (aacr)

The first attempt at creating uniform rules was made in 1841 by Antonio
Panizzi (1797-1879), the Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, the
the Pre-Modern Economy in the East and the West (Leiden, 2013), pp. 323-340.
The Bodleian Catalogue (Oxford University) was the first catalogue in 1620 where
bibliographic descriptions were alphabetically ordered by author name or first
word of the title.
A sheaf of cards bound together (so-called fiches) with titles ordered alphabetically.
New acquisitions could easily be interspersed in the right place. The English term
for this system is Sheaf cataloque.
Founder-director N.W. Posthumus (1880-1960) and his staff spent much time on
determining the ordering principle. No existing system was sufficient for the very
specialized collections. Staff member Arthur Lehning consulted collector Max
Nettlau, but his ideas were not feasible. The eventual choice of system would
mainly be based on the proposals of Hans Stein, head of the German cabinet. Maria
Hunink, De papieren van de revolutie: Het Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis
1935-1947 (Amsterdam, 1986), pp. 102-103.
210
largest library in the world at that time. He drew up his famous Ninety-One
Cataloguing Rules6 and therewith laid the foundation for the modern catalogue. The title page was the starting point for Panizzi and thus the primary
source for the description.7 Later in the nineteenth century Charles Ammi
Cutter (1837-1903), the founder of the classification system of the Library of
Congress (lcc), elaborated Panizzi s ideas. Cutter mainly emphasized the
manageability of the catalogue and the importance of the cohesion between
the various works, which is called the collocation function.8 Panizzi and Cutter
are seen as the founders of the Anglo-American regulations. The influence
of Cutter can be seen clearly in the so-called aa-code, the Anglo-American
Rules from 1908, an English-American project to bring more unity to the
very diverse cataloguing practices.
Prussian Tradition: Preussische Instruktionen (pi)

A different tradition of regulation evolved in German-speaking countries. A
start with further standardization was made by Friedrich Althoff (1839-1908)
in Prussia. As senior official (Ministerialdirektor) in the ministry of culture, he
was co-developer of the Prussian and German education systems. Althoff issued a decree in 1888, in which the Knigliche Bibliothek in Berlin, later
Preuische Staatsbibliothek was asked to multiply the titles of their acquisitions as a service for the Prussian University libraries. This would hugely
increase the standardization of bibliographic records and eventually led in
1899 to the publication of the so-called Preussische Instruktionen.9 One of the
distinguishing features compared to the AA-code was that according to the
Instruktionen titles with more than three authors resp. with one or more corporate authors were sorted in the catalogue based on the grammatical order.10 This meant that prepositions were ignored and that the first independent noun was chosen as heading.
6
7
9
10
Catalogue of Printed Books in The British Museum, vol. 1 (London, 1841), pp. V-IX
[hereafter, Ninety-One Rules].
Donald J. Lehnus, A Comparison of Panizzis 91 rules and the aacr of 1967
(Urbana, IL, 1972), available at: https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/3872/gslisoccasionalpv00000i00105.pdf ?sequence=1; last accessed 2 May
2014.
The collocation function means that all works of an author, irrespective of
the different forms in which the authors name appears in the publications,
must be brought together in a single standardized form: the uniform heading.
Federatie van Organisaties op het gebied van het Bibliotheek-, Informatie- en
Dokumentatiewezen (fobid), Regels voor de titelbeschrijving, 3: Regels voor catalogusbouw
(Den Haag, 1994), p. 30 [hereafter, Regels voor catalogusbouw, 3].
Instruktionen fr die alphabetischen Kataloge der preussischen Bibliotheken und fr den
preussischen Gesamtkatalog vom 10. Mai 1899 (Berlin, 1899).
Any organization or group of persons or organizations with a name that identifies
the organization or group thus, is considered to be a corporation/corporate
author. Par. V 101 in Regels voor catalogusbouw, 3 (Den Haag, 1981), p. 171.
|21 1
Battle
Despite all good intentions to agree on uniform regulation, practice was refractory. Even Panizzis rules from 1841 could not change much in that respect. The rules had become more and more extensive, due to consecutive
editions of Cutters rules which resulted in much fatter tomes with the AA
Rules from 1908 onwards. Partly due to the explosive growth of the libraries
in the early twentieth century an urgent need for new rules and detailed
specifications grew. In 1941 exactly 100 years after Panizzis Ninety-One Rules
the American Library Association (ala) published the provisional second
edition in two parts of their ala-Rules, with no less than 324 rules. They were
by no means innovative, but reworked on the previously established rules,
which prompted for even more rules. There was a broad discussion, with a
battle between supporters of overall innovation and opponents who pleaded for a review. Eventually a new revision was prepared in 1943, with the
question which information must be on the catalogue card and in which
bibliographic order. The title page was chosen as the source for the simplest
details on which to base description and identification of the book. This resulted in simpler rules for author and title entry, which were published in
1949 by the ala. Seymour Lubetzky (1898-2003) who had supplied a large
contribution to the debate with his Cataloguing Rules and Principles11 was a
major cataloguing theorist at the Library of Congress, in the tradition of
Panizzi. He campaigned for consistent and logical accumulated catalogues,
in which purpose and method are adapted to modern needs. Lubetzky incidentally disagreed with a trend in the library world that was of the opinion
that the cataloguer should adhere strictly to the prescribed rules for efficiency considerations and is not allowed to think or interpret.12
Breakthrough
Lubetzkys Cataloguing Rules and Principles were the prelude to the big breakthrough, which took shape with the first international conference on cataloguing, the International Conference on Cataloguing Principles (iccp) in
1961 in Paris, organized by the ifla.13 Here the so-called Paris Principles were
approved.14 A milestone in the history of cataloguing, although the confer11
12
13
14
Seymour Lubetzky, Cataloging Rules and Principles: A Critique of the A.L.A. Rules for Entry
and a Proposed Design for their Revision (Washington dc, 1953).
Seymour Lubetzky, Development of Cataloging Rules, Library Trends (1953), pp.
179-187.
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (ifla) founded
in Edinburgh 1927, is the leading international body representing the interests of
library and information services and their users.
Statement of Principles adopted by the International Conference on Cataloguing
Principles Paris, October 1961, available at: http://www.nl.go.kr/icc/paper/20.pdf; last
accessed 2 May 2014.
212
ence could not resolve the many points of contention. The Principles were
based on a relatively limited view of the function of the catalogue. The central theme of the conference was the determination of the main entry. The
user should be able to find a book by title and author, and in accordance
with the ideas of Panizzi and Cutter the catalogue should show which works
of a certain author and in which editions were present in the library. What
to do for instance in the case of multiple authors or in the case of only a corporate author? The Anglo-American perspective with the texts of Lubetzky
may have had great influence, but compromises had to be reached. The final text of the Principles turned out to be multi-interpretable and a source of
discussion. The official annotated text that appeared in 1970 needed many
pages to explain the Principles of 1961 which were barely six pages.15 The discussion was mainly about whether or not to include the corporate author
and if so, in which form. The Americans had a tradition of including corporate authors under name of city and wanted to stick to that,16 although the
Principles prescribed that corporate authors must be ordered by name, like
Lubetzky had suggested. For the time being, the German-speaking countries
stuck to the Prussian tradition where the corporate author was concerned, a
tradition which did not recognize this as an entry. There was still a long way
to go. Nevertheless the Principles would mean a caesura for cataloguing. But
for a proper international exchange of bibliographic data more agreements
were necessary. A big step was set in 1969 at the International Meeting of
Cataloguing Experts (imce) in Copenhagen,17 where it was decided to standardize the order of punctuation in the bibliographic description. The draft
publication of the International Standard Bibliographic Description (isbd) appeared in 1971 and was thus the first step towards international exchange of
bibliographic data, a preliminary conclusion of the breakthrough with the
Principles.
iisg and Regulation

During the first years after iisgs foundation in 1935, a catalogue was not yet
in place. To start with it, it was important to shelve the already extensive
collection in an orderly manner.18 It was decided to order the collection ac-
15
16
17
18
Eva Verona et.al., Statement of Principles Adopted at the International Conference on

Cataloguing Principles, Paris, 1961: Annotated Edition with Commentary and Examples
(London, 1971).
Piet de Keyser and Egbert De Smet, De Paris Principles, dood of springlevend?,
meta (2011), no. 8, pp. 19-23.
Arthur Hugh Chaplin, Dorothy Pauline Anderson and Suzanne Honor, Report of the
International Meeting of Cataloguing Experts, Copenhagen, 1969 (s.l. 1970).
The foundation of iisg was partly the result of an initiative of the Dutch Economic
Historical Archive (Nederlands Economisch-Historisch Archief neha), where iisg
founder N.W. Posthumus was the director. The social-historical department of the
Economic-Historical Library, the neha book-room based in Amsterdam since 1932,
|21 3
Photo of the cataloguing department Keizersgracht, 1964. iish BG B26/595
cording to geographical principles, taking the historical evolution of each

country into account, and place these in cabinets.19
Although a start had been made in 1937 by the German cabinet to catalogue books and brochures, cataloguing was not underway until well after
World War II, when external funding was made available in 1959. But librarian Annie Adama van Scheltema had already designed a course in cataloguing in 1937,20 based on the Prussian method as used by the university library
19
20
was ceded on loan to the Institute in that year, as well as the library of Ferdinand
Domela Nieuwenhuis. These libraries, together with the already acquired
collections of amongst others Max Nettlau and Max Adler, made for an extensive
iisg collection from the start.
Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Jaarverslag, 1936, p. 21 [hereafter,
Jaarverslag IISG]. The ordering of the books in the Dutch, German and Russian
cabinets progressed so well, that the books could be shelved systematically
grouped by sub department and within that, alphabetically. This has the big
advantage that, even though the alphabetical catalogue is not yet finished, library
staff can still check whether a required book is available. This arrangement can at
least somewhat mitigate the objections, which go hand in hand with the absence
of a catalogue.
Annie Adama van Scheltema-Kleefstra (1884-1977) was the widow of the poet of
the sdap Carel Adama van Scheltema who died in 1924, because of this she had
got to know many key figures from Dutch social democratic circles.
214
Alfabetische catalogus van de boeken en brochures van het Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale
Geschiedenis Amsterdam. Boston : Hall, 1970. - 12 vols. + supplementen (location reading
room)
of Amsterdam. In practice however, little came of this. The librarian of iisg

was more interested in acquiring collections and has certainly contributed
to the librarys holdings, but she was less interested in the library profession.21 Furthermore, cataloguing had no great priority. Staff members could
of course easily retrieve materials they had shelved themselves. Arthur
Lehning (1899-2000), head of the French cabinet, would later remark that
he had learned more about the history of socialism by ordering his cabinet
than he had from books.22 It wasnt until 1938 that the entry Cataloguing
made its appearance on the budget. Special in this context is, that the
German occupation, for lack of a proper catalogue, catalogued a large part
of the collection in 1940, before moving it to Germany.23 In 1949 two people
with the diploma of the Central Association for Public Reading rooms and
Libraries (Centrale Vereniging voor Openbare Leeszalen en Bibliotheken)
were appointed. The catalogues created by the Germans turned out to be
unusable, but did come in handy to research material that was lost. The fifties were characterized by moderate cataloguing output. There was a big
21
Maria Hunink, De geschiedenis van een bibliotheek. Max Nettlau en Amsterdam,

in Maria Hunink, Jaap Kloosterman, Jan Rogier (eds), Over Buonarroti, internationale
avant-gardes, Max Nettlau en het verzamelen van boeken, anarchistische ministers, de algebra
van de revolutie, schilders en schrijvers : voor Arthur Lehning (Baarn, 1979), pp. 317-366;
Maria Hunink, Das Schicksal einer Bibliothek. Max Nettlau und Amsterdam,
International Review of Social History, 27 (1982), pp. 1-39.
22 Hunink, De papieren van de revolutie, p. 103.
23
See SS-Obersturmfhrer Dr. Prinzing. Memorandum over het Instituut.
Amsterdam, 24 augustus 1940 [iisg-archief], in Hunink, De papieren van de revolutie,
pp. 303-309.
|21 5
turn-over among cataloguers and within the cabinets, priority was given to
ordering and systemizing of the material.24 Nonetheless some progress was
made. In 1951 the books from the German cabinet were fully catalogued. In
the same year a duplication machine could be bought, making the retyping of cards superfluous.25 This also offered the opportunity to supply duplicated cards to the Central Catalogue.26 After 1959 production increased
enormously due to a gift of 1.3 million guilders from the Ford Foundation
for improving access to the collections.27 Because of this financial injection,
staff was increased with about 75%28 and production was increased from a
few thousand records per year in the early fifties, to over 27,000 titles in
1964, when the project funds were depleted and the Ford-project was closed.
A huge catch-up was made, which was rewarded in 1970 with the publication of the so-called Hall-Catalogue.29 This printed catalogue appeared, with
financial support from De Centrale,30 after a long period of preparation.
In the regulations, the iisg rules followed the rules as laid down by the
National Advisory Board on Libraries (Rijkscommissie van Advies inzake het
Bibliotheekwezen) in 1924.31 In 1948 the aforementioned Board decided on
a substantial review of the rules and after careful discussion published the
new rules in 1953. The most important change was to let go of the Prussian
tradition with selection of title based on the grammatical principle without
entries for corporate authors. iisg, with its extensive German and Russian
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
Jaarverslag iisg, 1955, p. 3.

The Central Catalogue (cc) was founded in the Hague in 1920 in order to have
an overview of all books and periodicals (ccp) held by Dutch libraries. This
resulted in an enormous number of copies of catalogue cards in the Royal Library
(Koninklijke Bibliotheek kb). In the seventies and eighties these were added to
the Joint Automated Cataloguing System (Gemeenschappelijk Geautomatiseerd
Catalogussysteem ggc) via an automated process and made available to the
public as the Dutch Central Catalogue (Nederlandse Centrale Catalogus ncc).
The Ford Foundation was founded in 1936 with gifts and legacies from Henry
Ford and his son Edsel, but is independent from the Ford Motor Company. The
foundation is a charity organization whose goals are the promotion of democracy,
the combat against poverty, stimulation of international cooperation and progress.
Alfabetische catalogus van de boeken en brochures van het Internationaal Instituut voor
Sociale Geschiedenis Amsterdam, 12 vols and 5 vols supplement (Boston: Hall, 1970,
1975, 1979). The catalogue appeared in 12 volumes and contained 300,000 titles.
Supplements followed later. The first supplement appeared in 1975, in 2 parts
with 50,000 new titles; the second supplement was published in 1979 in 3 parts,
containing the titles from 1975 till 1978.
De Centrale Arbeiders-, Verzekerings- en Depositobank, eversince 1965 De Centrale
Levensverzekeringsbank N.V., established in 1904 on an initiative of Nehemia
de Lieme. According to the statutes at least 55% of the pure profit benefitted the
labour movement. De Centrale merged in 1990 and became Reaal Groep.
Rijkscommissie van Advies inzake het Bibliotheekwezen, Regels voor de
titelbeschrijving (Leiden, 1924). The first Dutch rule set dates back to 1912. In 1953 the
completely revised 5th edition was published of the Regels voor de titelbeschrijving.
216
Example of Prussian catalogue card
collections, only partially followed the new rules. It retained the Prussian
rules for anonymous works and titles of periodicals. During the period after
the war, when catalogues were still far from perfect, this sometimes was
an advantage when searching the enormous collection of unique periodicals
with mostly similar titles. Many a title for instance, started with Rote, like
the publication Rote Fahne, which according to Prussian alphabetization
was shelved as Fahne, Rote. Therefore one did not need to search all titles
starting with the word Rote, instead it sufficed to search for Fahne to find all
Rote Fahne titles together.
Nevertheless the iisg house-rules were determined by a mixture of AngloSaxon and Prussian rules, together with the institutes own additions. The
discussion about regulation as took place at almost every library would
continue for years. At iisg this was not so much about the cataloguing tradition to be followed, as about the correct interpretation and application of
the Prussian rules.
Standardization and Automation with isbd and marc

Meanwhile developments continued. After the official annotation of the
Principles of 1971 by Eva Verona, a Croatian cataloguing expert, many publications appeared in which all issues were again meticulously threshed
out. In spite of, or maybe due to, these voluminous works many ambiguities were cleared and taken on board by the conference in Copenhagen.
|21 7
Between the Principles (Paris, 1961) and imce (Copenhagen, 1969) it became
clear that automation was to play a substantial role in library catalogues
too. The Anglo-Saxon countries (usa, Canada and England) came in 1967
with their new modified Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (aacr-2) and the
German speaking countries followed in the mid-seventies with their Regeln
fr die alphabetische Katalogisierung (rak).32 The trend towards standardization
soared high. In 1971 a draft version appeared of the International Standard
Bibliographic Description for Monographic Publications, followed by the First
Standard Edition of the isbd(m) in 1974.33 In that year ifla, supported by unesco, initiated the Universal Bibliographic Control Project (ubc) in order to
stimulate the exchange of bibliographic data. In the Netherlands the rules
were also revised and conformed to the starting points as accepted by the
Principles. In 1975 the first preliminary edition of the isbd(m) for the Rules of
Catalogue Maintenance appeared, under the wings of fobid.34
Now that the choice of main heading had been standardized and the descriptive part defined by strictly prescribed punctuation, the next step could
be taken by capturing the data in machine readable format. The system
for this was naturally designed by the Library of Congress, with their millions of catalogue cards that could no longer be processed manually. This
Machine Readable Catalogue (marc) was a model for the rest of the world
and is still the leading library format used world-wide. The International
Organization for Standardization (iso) contributed among other things, by
developing standards for bibliographic abbreviations.35
iisg went along with the developments and introduced the new isbd
rules in 1978. For works published prior to 1 January 1978, the Prussian rules
still applied. This resulted in two catalogues. In addition there was an order administration, fed with isbd titles mainly from national biographies
which grew into a new catalogue, the so-called Working catalogue. This
32
33
34
35
For the developments, see Monika Mnnich Interview, Cataloging & Classification
Quarterly, 33 (2001), no. 2, pp. 3-17.
There are different isbds for the various categories of bibliographic material, such
as the isbd(a) for old books (a = antiquarian), the isbd(m) for monographs and the
isbd(s) for serial publications.
Federation of Organizations in the field of Libraries, Information Management and
Documentation (Federatie van Organisaties op het gebied van het Bibliotheek-,
Informatie- en Documentatiewezen fobid), established in 1974. The national
association of nationwide library organizations: association of public libraries
(Vereniging van Openbare Bibliotheken vob), Dutch Association of professionals
in the library, information and knowledge sector (Nederlandse Vereniging van
Beroepsbeoefenaren in de bibliotheek-, informatie- en kennissector nvb), the
partnership of thirteen Dutch University libraries and the National Library of the
Netherlands Koninklijke Bibliotheek (ukb).
iso (International Organization for Standardization) founded in 1947 develops
International Standards and has published more than 19.500 International
Standards covering almost all aspects of technology and business. From food safety
to computers, and agriculture to healthcare.
218
turned out to be practical, because on arrival a book was immediately given

a shelfmark. It significantly improved the findability and it became easier
to locate books that were not yet catalogued or not yet available because a
classification code still needed to be assigned. The disadvantage of this approach was, that the creation of a definitive complete description lagged
behind.
As far as automating the catalogue was concerned, the most obvious
course was for iisg to participate in the national project for integrated automation of catalogues (Project voor geIntegreerde Catalogus Automatisering
pica), established in 1969 by the National Library (Koninklijke Bibliotheek)
in cooperation with various academic libraries.36 The institute requested
membership in 1978, and a year later wrote a plan of work.37 Many discussions followed on the use of automation in general, and in particular on whether the Institute, with its unique collection, would benefit
at all from connection to a national system such as pica. It was unlikely
many titles could be derived and pica had no experience with transliteration. Nonetheless the Institute signed an agreement with pica in 1982,
concerning participation in the shared automated cataloguing system
(Gemeenschappelijk Geautomatiseerde Catalogiseersysteem ggc). This
was followed in March of that year by the Advice concerning Proposals on
the implementation of pica within iisg (Voorstellen omtrent invoer van
pica in het iisg), but in spite of that the discussion on whether or not to
join continued. Pica had a hand in this too, by promising all kinds of modules which in practice did not work. Thus the university libraries of the
Amsterdam University and Free University stopped participating fairly soon,
in spite of pressure from the ministry, which supported pica both financially and policy-wise. In the end iisg did not select pica either. The collection
required an integrated library system in order to be able to guarantee the
accessibility of all components.
In 1984 the Institute started an enquiry into the most suitable form of
automation, based on premises formulated by the committee of external
experts earlier that year. A significant subsidy amount, supplied by the
Ministry of Education and Science (o&w),38 made it possible to develop a tailor-made automated system. The plan of work was completed by the end of
1986 and Geac Computers Inc. was asked to develop a system in which all
material types could be catalogued.39 The automation also meant the end of
the Prussian rules, the Institute completely switched over to the isbd rules.
36
37
38
39
Anton Bossers, Samenwerkende bibliothecarissen en technische innovaties: Pica van 19692002 (Leiden, 2005).
Notulen Bibliotheekcommissie 1977-1985 (iisg archief 675-676).
From the budget Intentioneel apparatuur schema (ias) voor het para-universitaire
onderzoek. Ministerie van Onderwijs en Wetenschappen, 1985 (Jaarverslag iisg,
1986, p. 17.
Ibid.
|21 9
Promotion of the Catalogue

The Institute had embarked on the road to full automation and therewith
easy international exchange of bibliographic data.40 Panizzi and Cutter had
contributed to this by already pointing out in the nineteenth century the
importance of uniformity and usability of the catalogue. Jaap Kloosterman
played a big role in the regulation of the iisg catalogue. His innovative
mind, coupled with an interest in cataloguing and automation, were fundamental in making the collections of the Institute available. It turned out
Jaap was well-equipped to combine flexibility with the strictly prescribed
cataloguing rules. In the spirit of Lubetzky, he saw the importance of data
structure and international exchange thereof and could shape that very efficiently in practice. Thus, at the beginning of the eighties, he led the discussion which culminated in the purchase of the Geac 8000 library system.41
This system was capable of making the many materials in the iisg collection
such as books and archives as well as vanes, objects and photos available, standardized based on (uk) marc and according to isbd rules. An external agency was asked for the data entry, from catalogue cards, of nearly
600,000 book titles and 60,000 periodicals titles. Special projects for the audiovisual material and archives followed later.42 This laid the basis for exchange of data and the migration to other systems. On Jaaps initiative, iisg
joined the Research Libraries Information Network (rlin) of the Research
Libraries Group (rlg) in 1997. In 2006 rlg merged with oclc, a partnership
of libraries around the world from which WorldCat arose, the worlds largest bibliographic database, with over 2 billion holdings. Catalogue cards had
turned into digital records from which any word could be found.
But more was necessary to cope with the rapid technological developments and the changing user requirements. ifla had already decided on a
study in the mid nineties, into user functionalities, which resulted in the
frbr report.43 This was built on the ideas of Lubetzky, the great advocate of
grouping titles in different languages, editions and manifestations. The ifla
study led in 1990 to the Statement of International Cataloguing Principles
40
41
42
43
Rahmatollah Fattahi, Relevance of Cataloguing Principles to the Online

Environment: An Historical and Analytical Study (Ph.D., University of New South
Wales, Sydney, 1997), available at: http://profsite.um.ac.ir/~fattahi/THESES1.HTM;
last accessed 2 May 2014.
In 1995 iisg migrated to a new integrated library system by Geac Computer
Corporation, Ltd., Advance. In 2010 the Open source system by Evergreen was
selected.
Circulaire 14 January 1987 from the deputy head of Collections to all concerned.
iisg-archief nr. 676, map IV.
ifla Study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records,
Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, (ifla Series on Bibliographic Control;
19 (Munich, 1998). The frbr Final Report was first published in print in 1998 by
K.G. Saur as volume 19 of ubcim publications, new series, as well as pdf and html
files on the ifla Website.
220
(icp) as replacement of the Paris Principles that were nearly fifty years old by
then. The broadly-based new Principles are meant for all material types with
the user as the central point. Based on this, a new international cataloguing standard was implemented at the start of 2013: Resource, Description &
Access (rda),44 suitable for all object categories, types, sources and content.
The starting point is to make the bibliographic data accessible as broadly
as possible and with more freedom in applying the rules.45 Discussion on
primary or secondary entries is no longer necessary, the limit on number of
authors has been abandoned as well as the prescribed abbreviations, which
have been abolished. The new regulations are expected to make an important contribution to the bibliographic metadata infrastructure.46
Finally
The nineteenth century theoreticians Antonio Panizzi, Charles Ammi
Cutter, and later also Seymour Lubetzky were mainly concerned with keeping bibliographic data manageable and this still is a guide for new developments in the Internet world of mass availability and broad interchangeability. The enormous amount of information in all forms demands linkage and
structure. International standards are an aid in structuring metadata, with
the Internet as central focus. The identification and collocation of sources
remains an issue. Admittedly isbd has lost some importance, the once strictly prescribed dots and commas are no longer important for the presentation standard, but are still meaningful as part of the structure of separated
data fields. The method of cataloguing will certainly as far as access to
and presentation of data are concerned still remain subject to change, but
without rules it is not possible to find a structured way of inputting, saving
and exchanging bibliographic data.
44
45
46
rda is developed by The Joint Steering Committee for Development of rda (jsc)
and is published by The American Library Association, The Canadian Library
Association (cilip: Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals).
Advice to the fobid Committee concerning the application of rda in the
Netherlands / rda Working party of the fobid. Committee, 1 March 2011, available
at: http://www.fobid.nl/sites/fobid/files/0000_FCO_RDA.pdf; last accessed 2 May
2014.
Since the launch of the new Principles, Ingressus (service provider for libraries)
has added the basic knowledge for the new cataloguing method to their course
programme. Peter Schouten, Catalogiseren in het frbr-tijdperk : basiskennis voor
titelrecords (Rotterdam, 2003).
II.6
From Ice Age to
Global Warming
The Libraries of the
Amsterdam iish and
the Friedrich-EbertStiftung (fes)
Rdiger Zimmermann
In April 1962 Adolf Rter, director of the iish in Amsterdam since 1950, received an unexpected visit. Herbert Allerdt, the house lawyer of the German
Social-Democratic Party, had come to see him. He demanded nothing less
than a handover of the spd party archive, against refund of the purchase
price paid in the special emergency situation after the Nazi seizure of power. When the archive was sold in 1938, the desperate situation of the migr
spd had allegedly been improperly exploited.1
Adolf Rters response to the proposal was a sharp refusal. From this
time on, a regular ice age set in between the iish and the German SocialDemocrats. The atmosphere was poisoned for years. Despite this, however, suggestions in the spd party leadership of suing the iish were rejected: the legal conditions in which the spd party archive had been sold
in 1938 were quite unambiguous. Disappointed at this failure to have the
archive returned, a quite new vision arose in the spd milieu: to establish
Mario Bungert, Zu retten, was sonst unwiederbringlich verloren geht. Die Archive der
deutschen Sozialdemokratie und ihre Geschichte (Bonn, 2002), p. 80. Paul Mayer, Die
Geschichte des sozialdemokratischen Parteiarchivs und das Schicksal des MarxEngels-Nachlasses, Archiv fr Sozialgeschichte, 6/7 (1966/67), pp. 5-198.
zi m m e r m a n n f r o m i ce age to glob al warmi ng
|223
Willy Brandt lays the foundation stone of the Archiv der sozialen
Demokratie, Bonn 12 December 1967. Photo: J.H. Darchinger.
Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.
a major archive of social-democracy of their own. Despite warning voices

not to create a situation of competition with Amsterdam, the treasurer of
the spd, Alfred Nau, persisted in founding a new institute.2 Other factors of
course also played a role: the ideological struggle between the East German
Communists and the West German Social-Democrats favoured the decision
to establish an independent research centre in West Germany.
All those involved soon agreed on the goal: to have under the aegis of the
Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (fes), a body politically independent of the spd, a
major international library and a great national archive of the workers
movement. What remained initially unclear was the financing. It was the
privatization of the Volkswagen company in 1961 that cleared the way: by a
2
Horst Heidermann, Vorbedingungen und berlegungen bis 1969, in [fes], Das

gedruckte Gedchtnis der Arbeiterbewegung (Bonn, 1999), pp. 15-20.
224
political decision, the proceeds of privatization had to be used to promote

science and research. With the resources of the Volkswagenwerk foundation, a building site was obtained in Bonn, and the internal structure of the
planned archive of social-democracy decided.3
In 1967, party president Willy Brandt laid the foundation stone. In June
1969, the new building was occupied.
The party executive transferred its historical material to the new Archiv
der sozialen Democratie at the fes. The holdings of the archive were readily visible: they fitted into two filing cabinets. The library however was far
more extensive: some 22,000 volumes migrated two kilometres south
from the spd headquarters to the fes. Most of these came from the private possession of anti-fascist activists in the workers movement who had
been able to safeguard their collections under the Third Reich. The newly
founded spd library, initially in Hanover and then in Bonn, had not been
able to benefit from the books retrieved from the old spd library. The party library, which under the Weimar republic enjoyed protected status, had
contained the private libraries of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In 1933
this library remained in Berlin. Only a very small proportion of the books
could be rescued and sent abroad, along with the party archive itself. The
Staatsbibliothek in Berlin systematically plundered the spd library, the rest
of the collection was scattered. Those volumes that were retrieved after the
War were transferred to the party library of the sed.4 After reunification,
the German Social-Democrat Party renounced restitution, instead agreeing
to the foundation of an Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der
ddr within the Federal archive (sapmo).5
At the fes, there already existed in 1969 an excellent special collection,
containing international scientific publications on problems of the Third
World. The combined library initially contained just 50,000 volumes. The
new foundation was supported up by an effective appeal in the media to
activists in the workers movement to send materials to Bonn. This appeal came just at the right time. The association of former worker-athletes,
which was still well organised, began a wide-ranging action of collection
among its elderly members, who brought to light many forgotten newspapers, pamphlets and minutes of meetings. Fifteen years later, this almost
complete collection had become the most used component of the library.6
3
5
6
Rdiger Zimmermann, Das gedruckte Gedchtnis der Arbeiterbewegung bewahren. Die

Geschichte der Bibliotheken der deutschen Sozialdemokratie. 3rd expanded edition (Bonn,
2008), pp. 58 ff.
Franois Melis, Auf der Suche nach der SPD-Bibliothek 1945/46. Eine spte
Wrdigung von Paul Neumann, in C.E. Vollgraf et al. (Hg.), Die Marx-EngelsWerkausgaben in der udssr und ddr (1945-1968) (Hamburg, 2006), pp. 95-140.
Gnter Benser, Was geschah mit den Archiven und Bibliotheken von Parteien und
Organisationen der ddr? (Berlin, 2008), pp. 28 ff.
Arbeitersportbewegung. Ein Bestandsverzeichnis der Bibliothek der FriedrichEbert-Stiftung, in Arbeiter-Turn- und Sportbund (1893-2009) (Bonn, 2012), pp. 205-333.
|225
In anticipation of the planned Archiv der sozialen Demokratie, the fes

had since 1965 placed substantial sums at its disposal for the acquisition of
old materials, and bought books in reserve. The national and international antiquarian market would in future years be the terrain on which the
fes sought to achieve its ambitious goals. For a long time, all major antiquarians made their catalogues available to the fes, so that the library could
have preferential choice. This aggressive purchasing behaviour particularly
offended smaller institutions. The aim of all its efforts was to approach the
iish as closely as possible in its collection. In this ambitious project, the
printed catalogue of the iish served as compass for its own success.7
Since the founding of the Archiv der sozialen Demokratie initially did not
involve the expectation of any great gains in the archival sector, the main
focus of acquisitions was initially the library. This policy was supported very
vigorously by the head of the fes research institute, Horst Heidermann. A
trained economist, the later administrative head of the fes had a great interest in the literature of the international workers movement, had worked
on its bibliography and also given a new home to the former traditional
publishing house of the spd, J.H.W. Dietz Nachfolger, under the umbrella of
the fes.8
The importance of the library was also expressed in its staff complement.
There were sometimes 36 full-timers working in the library. The Bonn acquisition strategy exactly paralleled the acquisition policy in Amsterdam.
Printed primary sources for the German and international workers movement were to be comprehensively collected. The spectrum covered the
whole range, from the purely trade-unionist workers movement through
to anarcho-syndicalist tendencies. Scholarly secondary literature on the international workers movement was to be collected with a high degree of
completeness. For literature on social history, the Bonn library acquired a
critical selection. For literature on the German workers movement, the fes
library sought worldwide completeness. Independent and non-independent
literature on the German workers movement was documented from 1976
in a separate bibliography.9 In contrast to Amsterdam, researchers did not
Manfred Turlach, Am Anfang, in Das gedruckte Gedchtnis der Arbeiterbewegung

(Bonn, 1999), pp. 21-29. Horst Ziska, Die Bibliothek der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung
in den 70er und 80er Jahren. Ein Rckblick, in Das gedruckte Gedchtnis der
Arbeiterbewegung (Bonn, 1999), pp. 29-35 (complete on: library.fes.de/fulltext/
bibliothek/00699toc.htm); last accessed 1 June 2014; Rdiger Zimmermann,
Manfred Turlach (1932-2006), in Gnter Benser (ed.), Bewahren Verbreiten
Aufklren (Bonn, 2009), pp. 339-344; printed catalogue: Alfabetische catalogus van de
boeken en brochures van het Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam,
12 vols and 5 supplementary vols (Boston, 1970, 1975, 1979).
8 Rdiger Zimmermann, Der Verlag Neue Gesellschaft und seine Bcher 1954-1989. Horst
Heidermann zum 80. Geburtstag (Bonn, 2009), pp. 7-30.
9
Bibliographie zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung. Bibliothek der FriedrichEbert-Stiftung (ed.) (Bonn, 1976 ff.)
7
226
play a role in the acquisition of materials. This was due among other things
to the advice of Werner Krause, who had worked for a long period at the
iish, and enforced a strict separation in Bonn between archive and library
professionals and researchers. Werner Krauses great achievement in
Amsterdam included indexing the personal papers of Julius Motteler. This
was long seen in Bonn as a model for the indexing of political personal papers. In Werner Krauses opinion, the internal organization of the iish had
not proved itself. The Amsterdam researchers had always been interested
in good results for their own research, and had neglected the indexing of
archival materials.
There was one area where the fes library renounced from the start competing with the Amsterdam institute: acquisition of literature on Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels, and of expensive first editions of the old masters.
What were the reasons for this? In 1968, the fes took over sponsorship of
the Karl-Marx-Haus in Trier. In Marxs birthplace, under the direction of
Hans Pelger, the foundation was laid for a small special library with Marx
and Engels as its focus. With the transfer of the Daniel-Nachlass (1971) and
the purchase of the so-called Adams collection (1974), the Trier book collection suddenly gained scientific importance. In 1981, the special library received a worthy place in its own study centre at the Karl Marx house. In
2009, the executive of the fes took the decision to integrate the Karl-MarxHaus library into the Bonn library. In December of that year, the entire Trier
library was moved to Bonn. Close to 100,000 volumes migrated from the
Moselle to the Rhine. Among this large quantity, however, literature by and
about Marx and Engels formed only a small component. Even with the considerable extension from Trier, the Bonn library could not match the wealth
of the Amsterdam Marx-Engels holding. But despite this, today a genuine
special collection on the founders of scientific socialism is at the disposal of
researchers in Bonn.10
In the sector of systematic microfilming of primary sources of the German
and international workers movement, the fes library played a dynamic
role from the start as a co-founder of the microfilm archive of the Germanlanguage press. With generous resources from donations and public funds,
the library succeeded in building up an excellent collection for scholarly research.11 The library soon became one of the leading libraries in Germany
with high-quality microfilmed complete sources. Microfilmed sources from
Polish libraries, those in the GDR, and from American, Spanish, Swiss and
Scandinavian institutions, particularly stood out. Yet attempts to involve the
Amsterdam institute in common microfilm projects had only modest suc-
10
11
Rdiger Zimmermann, Bibliothek der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (Bonn) bernimmt

die komplette Bibliothek des Karl-Marx-Hauses (Trier), ProLibris, (2010), 1, pp. 8-10.
Hermann Rsch, Walter Wimmer, Rdiger Zimmermann (eds), Deutsche
Arbeiterpresse auf Mikrofilm. Ein Bestandsverzeichnis der Bibliothek der Friedrich-EbertStiftung (Bonn, 1992).
|227
cess. Mutual animosities were still too great. At the sessions of the coordination committee of the ialhi, the director of the fes library, Horst Ziska,
failed to win over the director of the Amsterdam institute, Rein van der
Leeuw, for a common microfilm project.
In the Federal Republic, Social-Democratic newspaper collections in smaller archives had surprisingly survived the Nazi inferno, and were now microfilmed for reasons of safety. With this new medium, the feslibrary was
able to close the gaps that war and fascism had torn, and offer an outstanding collection in a single place. The technical equipment in Bonn was of a
correspondingly high quality. In contrast to the original Amsterdam collections, which users had often found painfully full of gaps, the Bonn microfilm collection offered a good substitute. Years later, the systematically obtained microfilm collection provided the basis for a comprehensive project
of digitalization.
Scientific librarianship in Germany was guided to a great extent by the
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (dfg), which placed substantial special
funds at its disposal. It proved of great advantage that since 1975 the dfg
promoted the library of the fes as a specialist library, enabling it systematically to acquire and catalogue the non-conventional literature of parties
and trade unions.12 Starting in 1975, colleagues from the library undertook
systematic acquisition trips, funded by the dfg, to collect materials of
parties and trade unions. These pamphlets, business reports and minutes
generally appeared outside of the regular book trade and could only be obtained by unconventional means. The collecting work of the dfg encompassed all political tendencies, so that the fes library today is also a special library for all varieties of civic movements. These include conservative,
Christian-Democratic and liberal parties and trade unions. Publications on
the environmental movement were also very intensively collected. With the
collection of publications from the radical right, the fes displays a certain
reservation, since in this area, the Bibliothek fr Zeitgeschichte in Stuttgart,
and the library of the Institut fr Zeitgeschichte in Munich, are the specialists in Germany. Because of the excellent holdings in the iish, the library
decided not to collect materials that were also present in the id-archive in
Amsterdam (Knastarchiv, raf).
With the rise of the internet as worldwide medium of communication,
the library extended its national collecting task to the archiving of sources
in digital media, although print media surprisingly still play a leading role
for parties and trade unions. The collecting and cataloguing of non-conventional sources is time-consuming and consumes much in the way of resources. Over the years, however, systematic collecting activity has changed the
12
Rdiger Zimmermann, Und erbitten wir einen ersten Bericht bis zum Ende
des Jahres. Die Hilfe der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft beim Aufbau
der Bibliothek der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, in Das gedruckte Gedchtnis der
Arbeiterbewegung (Bonn, 1999), pp. 36-54.
228
character of the library to that of a party and trade-union library. Perhaps

this is where the differences between the Amsterdam and the Bonn libraries
are greatest today.
The exceptional growth of the fes library since the late 1970s is primarily the result of its taking over other libraries that have closed. Most large
German organizations have separated from their libraries, as they could no
longer cover the costs of maintaining these, or no longer wanted to. This
has been the case since 1978 with almost all German trade unions, starting in that year with ig Bau, Steine, Erden, at that time headquartered
in Frankfurt am Main.13 It was followed in 1979 by the Nahrung, Genuss,
Gaststtten union, located in Hamburg.14 Other unions followed: the transfer of the library of the ig Medien from Stuttgart overshadowed all others
on account of its special exclusiveness.15 After 1933, the Nazis had systematically robbed the German trade-union libraries, taking large quantities
to Munich and Berlin. Despite the bombing of these two cities during the
Second World War, many collections remained intact, and could be returned after the War to their legitimate proprietors by a process of restitution. Many years later, there was then a unification under the aegis of the
fes library.16
The fes library experienced its greatest growth by the transfer of the library of the Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (dgb), when some 130,000 volumes were brought from Dsseldorf to Bonn. Similarly important was the
transfer of the libraries of the international trade-union federations from
Switzerland, where German general secretaries used their power position and gave their libraries into German hands. The dgb had handed
over its foreign policy in the Third World to the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.
Cooperation with international trade union federations has always formed
part of the key political tasks of the fes worldwide. The library of the
fes persistently profited from this political climate. In this connection, we can mention the transfer of the libraries of the Internationaler
Metallarbeiterbund (imb)17 and the Internationale Graphische Fderation
13
14
15
16
17
Anne Brhausen, Ruth Meyer, Rdiger Zimmermann (eds), Baugewerkschaften in der

Bibliothek der sozialen Demokratie/Bibliothek der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2nd expanded edition (Bonn, 1986).
Quellen zur Gewerkschaftsgeschichte der Nahrungs-, Genussmittelarbeiter und
Gastwirtsgehilfen. Ein Bestandsverzeichnis der Vorluferorganisationen der Gewerkschaft
Nahrung-Genuss-Gaststtten (Bonn, 1984).
Angela Rinschen, Festschriften der ig Medien und ihrer Vorluferorganisationen. Ein
Bestandsverzeichnis der Bibliothek der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (Bonn, 1998).
Detlev Brunner, 2. Mai 1933. Der Sturm auf die Gewerkschaftshuser und das
Schicksal der Gewerkschaftsbibliotheken, in Verbrannt, geraubt, gerettet! (Bonn,
2003), pp. 23-29; Rdiger Zimmermann, Berlin Offenbach Washington Bonn.
Das Offenbach Archival Depot und die Gewerkschaftsbestnde der Bibliothek der
Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, akmb-news. Informationen zu Kunst, Museum und Bibliothek, 8
(2002) 2, pp. 11-17.
Walter Wimmer, Felicitas Kallus (eds), Die Eiserne Internationale. Periodikaverzeichnis
|229
(igf).18 Both libraries excelled in terms of their copious international collections. According to the assessments of trade-union experts, by the takeover
of several trade-union libraries and an acquisition policy systematically pursued for many years the fes library developed into the greatest trade-union
library in the world.
It was above all the acquisition of complete libraries that led the fes holding to grow to over a million volumes. Each volume was properly catalogued
bibliographically piece by piece, rather than just being crudely filed according to documentary principles. It was fine bibliographic cataloguing
that made for the quite particular special value for international research,
since the former proprietors lacked the resources for state of the art cataloguing. Despite good personnel and staffing, the fes library would not have
been in the position to shoulder this task. Only with generous support from
the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft did it become possible to master
the incoming flood of books. The dfg also supported the cataloguing of the
Bibliothek der Arbeiterwohlfahrt, which was newly built up in Hamburg
and Bonn after the end of the War. The cataloguing of the Bibliothek der
Naturfreunde was also financed; this had been built up in Hofgeismar over
many years, with great commitment of old activists, and could no longer
maintain itself financially as an independent organisation.
It was not only organisations that provided materials to the fes library
through to the turn of the century. Individuals also donated their holdings.
Two collections particularly stand out. The art collector and former dgb official Kurt Hirche19 left in his will, his priceless collection of the expressionist artists who in the early years of the Weimar republic had been with the
anti-parliamentary left. The renowned scholar of Communism, Hermann
Weber, gave the Trotskyism archive he had built up at Mannheim university, which contains a full range of printed material from the anti-Stalinist
opposition.20
Forty years after its foundation under the aegis of the fes, the character
of the library had completely changed. The library was no longer a nationally limited political library. Instead it reproduced the broad scope of the
old German labour movement, which, thanks to the Enlightenment, was
marked by a high output of literature.
In 1987 the eighteenth congress of the International Association of Labour
History Institutions (ialhi) was held in Bonn, organised by the library direc-
18
19
20
des Bestandes Internationaler Metallgewerkschaftsbund (imb) in der Bibliothek der FriedrichEbert-Stiftung (Bonn, 1994).
Graphische Presse in der Bibliothek der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Ein
Periodikabestandsverzeichnis der Internationalen Graphischen Fderation (Bonn, 1991).
Angela Rinschen (ed.), Dokumentation der Sammlung Prof. Dr. Kurt Hirche in der
Bibliothek der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (Bonn, 2000).
Anne Brhausen, Gabriele Rose (eds), Das Trotzkismus-Archiv (Sammlung Hermann
Weber) in der Bibliothek der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Ein Bestandsverzeichnis (Bonn, 2007).
230
tor Horst Ziska.21 At this congress, the new administration of the iish with
Eric Fischer and his deputy Jaap Kloosterman were present for the first time.
With the new Amsterdam administration, the climate between the two institutes, which had continued to be perceived in Bonn as cool, perceptibly changed. Soon incredible news came from Amsterdam to Bonn about
modernisation projects in the library field: card indexes would be abolished
and replaced by digital catalogues. In the early 1990s, this information interested the Bonn library. The administration of the fes pressed the Bonn
library management to undertake serious steps of modernisation. The introduction of new technologies here would mean economising on staff.
What were the causes for this? The political turn of 1989 had wide-ranging effects for library, archival and historical research in the fes. Both library and archive owed the generous support they received to the Cold War
conflict. Social-Democrats in the Federal Republic were unwilling to leave
to the East German Communist leadership the interpretation of the history
of the German workers movement. The promotion of a historical remembrance of the German workers movement in Bonn was an expression of
this attitude. In 1989 the parameters changed. After the winning of the
Cold War, the fess interest in continuing to invest resources and staff indiscriminately in historical projects declined. Though the new management
did not want to turn its back on historical work, the costs of this had to be
substantially brought down, so as to release resources for projects in East
Germany. It was the library that particularly felt this pressure. Management
advisers even questioned the entire project of a major library of the national and international workers movement at the fes, and recommended that
the library be offloaded.
In this extremely difficult situation, the experiences of the Amsterdam library played a particular role for that of the fes in its own modernisation
process. In several discussions at the iish, Jaap Kloosterman shared his experiences with the Bonn modernisation team. Papers were translated
from Dutch into German. In Bonn, the adage heard very soon was: We do
it just like they do in Amsterdam, but completely differently. Much of the
Amsterdam experience was directly adopted: thus the Bonn library chose
the same contractor for the conversion of conventional metadata into digital.22 On many things, however, the Bonn team took a different path from
the Amsterdam. Thus the fes library maintained its intellectual subject classification of its books and continued to allocate keywords.
21
22
18. Tagung der International Association of Labour History Institutions (ialhi) vom 14. 17.
September 1987 in Bonn. Texte der Vortrge (Bonn, 1990).
Anne Brhausen, Manuelle Offline-Konversion im Allegro-Format in der Bibliothek
der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn, in Retrokonversionsprojekte Planung und
Durchfhrung. Referate und Materialien aus einer Fortbildungsveranstaltung des Deutschen
Bibliotheksinstituts (Berlin, 1997), pp. 36-42.
|231
It was the Amsterdam philosophy, however, i.e. the pragmatic way of

proceeding in the modernisation process, that influenced the Bonn team
and encouraged it to depart from the perfect German way. No other than
Jaap Kloosterman was responsible for the new spirit of bilateral cooperation. With his appointment as director in 1993, the ice melted, giving way
to a friendly interchange with the purpose of cooperation. An agreement
on reciprocal lending between the iish and the fes library in February 1998
stands as a symbol of the new relations. Further common projects followed.
In 1999, the two establishments exchanged staff members for a limited
time.23 The difference from the ice age could not have been more striking.
The fes library was open to further stimulation from innovative projects
of the iish. Amsterdams digital Occasio project implemented in 1994 was
godfather to the efforts of the Bonn library to collect on a mass scale the
digital press services of parties and trade unions, and conserve these for a
long term. Jaap Kloosterman promoted this in Bonn in May 2000.
Since the 1990s, the two libraries in Amsterdam and Bonn have taken different paths. This holds for both modalities of usage and the building up
of holdings. The Bonn library is fully integrated into the national library
system and adapted to complex national library norms. Integration with
German data banks has allowed a substantial rise in inter-library lending,
with over 10,000 orders per year. In terms of inter-regional literature supply,
the fes library today is the specialist library in Germany with the strongest
performance. On top of this has been an effort to improve service, which
has greatly improved the information supply for over 600 collaborators of
the fes both in Germany and abroad.
The real distinction between the two libraries, however, is expressed in
the composition of their holdings. The Bonn library is obligated to its sponsor, which links it to German Social-Democracy and the German trade unions. On top of this is the very precisely defined collecting commission of
the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (dfg). For Bonn, the focus of interest continues to remain parties and trade unions in all their varieties. The
library thus remains strongly focussed on the old industrial countries. The
turn of the iish to the global south has not been followed by the library
of the fes in the same form; indeed it could not take this step. Only in one
special sector has the Bonn library built up a substantial Third World collection: it collects in full materials from establishments that cooperate
worldwide with the fes as one of the largest NGOs, and places their publications digitally on the internet (along with all its own publications).
These more than a hundred partner organisations include for example the
Centro Estudios Democrticos de Amrica Latina (cedal) in Costa Rica, the
Cooperative Union of Tanzania, the Partai Perserikatan Rakyat (ppr, United
23
International Association of Labour History Institutions (ialhi) 1999, Amsterdam

xxx. Conference. Coen Marinus, Staff Exchange among ialhi Members, available at:
http://www.ialhi.org/amsterdam1999-presentations; last accessed 30 October 2013.
232
Peoples Party) in Indonesia, the Partido Radical Social-democrtica (prsd)

in Chile. In India, the fes collaborates with individual trade unions and umbrella associations, scientific institutes for labour market research and labour law, as well as media bodies and networks of journalists. From an early
date the fes cooperated in South Africa with the African National Congress
(anc). The fes was one of the first non-government organisations to become
active in Vietnam in the late 1990s. In recent years, collaborators of the fes
have documented in detail the foreign work of the foundation.24 This foreign work finds bibliographic reflection in a bibliography published by the
library.25
There is no longer any talk in Bonn about catching up and overtaking
Amsterdam. Collegial cooperation has replaced competition in the digital age. A prototype of this today is the eu-backed project Heritage of the
Peoples Europe (hope), which links the digital collections of European institutions of social history and the history of the workers movement. The
two libraries in Amsterdam and Bonn have made here a decisive contribution to the new age.
24
25
Patrik von Zur Mhlen, Die internationale Arbeit der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Von den
Anfngen bis zum Ende des Ost-West-Konflikts (Bonn, 2007). Erfried Adam, Vom mhsamen Geschft der Demokratiefrderung. Die internationale Entwicklungszusammenarbeit
der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (Bonn, 2012). Andreas Wille, Klaus-Peter Treydte, Volker
Vinnai, Die Arbeit der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in wichtigen Schwellenlndern. Chile,
Indien und Sdafrika (Bonn, 2009). Norbert von Hofmann, Volker Vinnai, Hermann
Benzing, Die Arbeit der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Indonesien, Tansania und Zentralamerika
seit den 1960er Jahren (Bonn, 2010). Hans-Joachim Spanger, Bernd Reddies, Die Arbeit
der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in der udssr/Russland und in der Volksrepublik China (Bonn,
2011). Jrgen Eckl, Kooperation mit Gewerkschaften und Frderung von Wirtschafts- und
Sozialentwicklung. Zentrale Ttigkeitsfelder der internationalen Arbeit der Friedrich-EbertStiftung seit Beginn der 1960er Jahre (Bonn, 2012). Hans Schumacher, Wechselhafter
Halbmond. Die Arbeit der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in der Trkei (Bonn, 2012).
Bibliographie der Verffentlichungen der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (Bonn, 1979 ff.)
II.7
Does a History
Research Institute
Need Its Own Archive?
Karl Heinz Roth
At the beginning of the 1980s, a group of West German social scientists, historians, political scientists, biologists, psychologists, and doctors gathered
to initiate an interdisciplinary project on the history of health and social
policy during the global economic crisis and the Nazi dictatorship. The
members of this group had played an active part in the extra-parliamentary
movement of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as making a contribution, albeit a late one, to overcoming the authoritarian post-Nazi structures in West
Germany and West Berlin. At this point they took up positions as publicists,
scientists, doctors, teachers, and psychotherapists in central areas of social
life, endeavoring to gain acceptance in their everyday professional work
for their alternative ideas. To this end it was deemed useful to carry out an
exhaustive and interdisciplinary analysis of the old encrusted structures in
their various professions. To coordinate their activities, they first founded a
society, the Verein zur Erforschung der ns-Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik,
and set up a documentation site, called Dokumentationsstelle zur ns-Sozialpolitik.1 A few years later they came into contact with a critically-minded
1
Archiv der Stiftung fr Sozialgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts [hereafter sfs-Archiv],

Collection Verein zur Erforschung der ns-Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik.
roth own arc h i v e ?
|235
sponsor, who was willing to give the initiative generous support. Since the
middle of the 80s, in the shortest possible time, a research institute was developed, dedicated to the multidisciplinary historical analysis of the first
half of the twentieth century. The leading representatives of some established institutions of a similar kind for instance, the Munich Institut fr
Zeitgeschichte and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung were not so happy to feel
this fresh wind from northern Germany, but a substantial minority of their
staffs enjoyed it.
Hamburger sfs
On the basis of these ideas, the Hamburger Stiftung fr Sozialgeschichte des
20. Jahrhunderts was founded in the summer of 1986. It provided the institutional framework for establishment of an interdisciplinary Institute for
Social History. Its departments grew out of the society and the documentation site, in which initiative groups, in particular those based in Hamburg
and Berlin, introduced their first research projects, which took a critical
look at Nazi health and social policy as well as the history of large companies since the Great Depression. Immediately after the founding of the
institute, these original fields of research were consolidated, and new points
of emphasis were added, which covered specific areas of scientific history,
in particular population policy, social and patriarchal racism, the social utopias of genetics, and the systemic nationalism of the history writing process, as well as the special questions of national-socialist crisis management
and the Cold War.
The research department of the Institute was to provide the framework
for coordinating these various fields of study. For this purpose, a clearly organized, efficiency-oriented and non-bureaucratic structure was aimed at.
This was more easily said than done. One requirement that was easily put
into practice was that all those employed, including those working externally on research projects, would not merely pursue their own interests
but were committed to taking part in discussions on other fields of study.
Furthermore there was agreement that research results would be published
speedily. The framework was thus given, as was quickly recognized by the
experts from the iisg in Amsterdam Eric Fischer, Jaap Kloosterman, and
Marcel van der Linden who had agreed to advise us.2 To support the research projects and the publications department, a documentation site
was to be developed, so that all those involved could fall back on a wellequipped research library. In this way, the research department of our foundation profited from the experiences which the management of iisg had
made in the previous years while reorganizing their own institute. Fischer,
2
Karl Heinz Roth, Aktennotiz, Betr. Besuch beim Internationalen Institut fr

Sozialgeschichte in Amsterdam (iisg) am 21./22. November 1988. sfs-Archiv,
Eigenregistratur, No. A.3.8.11
236
Kloosterman, and Van der Linden made it perfectly clear that a concept of
interdisciplinary research based on the interlinking of personnel was no
guarantee in the medium term that the various groups involved would
not simply go their own way, hiding behind their own research apparatus.
Certainly they were supposed to develop their own individual dynamics and
style of work. But only when the documentation department maintained
control and kept an overall view of the various research teams, could it be
assured that related projects and guest scientists of the foundation would
be able to join in the work. Furthermore, the scheduling of the publications
department and of the journal subordinate to it 1999. Journal of Social
History of the 20th and 21st centuries had a healing and coordinating influence, since it was able, in its functions as editor, reader, and advisor, to deal
with the research teams on an equal footing.3 We received excellent help in
the early years of our foundation, taking to heart the advice given by the experts and our friends in Amsterdam. Looking back on 27 years of foundation
history, we can say that this direction setting was to a large extent responsible for the foundation being able to establish itself as the outsider in the
field of historical and social research.
In this context the early contact with the representatives of the iish was
a happy accident. Theo Pinkus, an informal adviser from Zrich, urged
our foundation to join the ranks of the International Association of Labour
History Institutions (ialhi), of the Austrian International Conference of
Labour Historians (ith), and to contact the iish staff from the beginning.
So we came into contact with Kloosterman, Fischer, and Van der Linden
at the end of 1987. They advised not only the internal architecture of our
institution, but were also highly interested in some of our research topics,
especially the destruction of the labour movements in German dominated
Europe during World War ii. In 1988 we started extensive research on the
spoliation of archives and libraries by Nazi institutions in the occupied
countries. Some of our findings, including the fate of the iish Library itself,
were published in 1989 in the International Review of Social History.4 A long lasting co-operation followed. Eric Fischer was elected chief of the Scientific
Advisory Board. Jaap Kloosterman relieved him in the beginning of the
1990s, and some years later Marcel van der Linden joined the Executive
Board of our foundation as vice president.
3 See sfs-Archiv, Eigenregistratur, Section 5.1.4

4
Karl Heinz Roth, Searching for Lost Archives. The Role of the Deutsche
Arbeitsfront in the Pillage of West European Trade-Union Archives, International
Review of Social History, 34 (1989), 2, pp. 272-286; Karl Heinz Roth, The International
Institute of Social History as a Pawn of Nazi Social Research. New Documents
on the History of the iish during German Occupation Rule from 1940 to 1944,
International Review of Social History, 34 (1989), Supplement, pp. 1-88.
|237
Own Archive?
Does a dynamic medium-size research institute for history and social science, which does a balancing act between the scientific community and
new social movements, need its own archive? This was a controversial question that had to be answered quickly, because the forerunner of the foundation, the documentation site, had since 1984 compiled comprehensive
dossiers on the history of fascist health, social, and economic policy. Jaap
Kloostermans advice helped greatly in solving this problem. He argued that
we were between two stools, as it were, and recommended that we carefully
assess the pros and cons of setting up an archive. It could not be our intention to make the waters of public and private archives muddier than they already were. The archive was to be limited to the framework of our research
foundation, thus procuring, taking stock of, and storing material needed by
the respective research projects. Similarly eliminated was the option, within the scope of current research projects, of putting our own signature to
reproductions procured from donor archives whether microfilms, microfiches, photos or paper copies and thus sparking off a great deal of intense rivalry with the guardians of the original documents. Nevertheless,
it seemed wrong to throw reproductions of unpublished material procured
Files on the Nrnberg Doctor Trials. Photo: Hamburger Stiftung fr Sozialgeschichte.
238
by the various research teams in the bin, when work on the projects was
over. And if they could be sorted and exhibited according to the location
and signature of the donor archives, then they could be continuously added
to with material from related projects and stored for future research. In the
medium term, this saved enormously on costs, which compensated for secondary archiving work as well as gradually reducing the cost of expensive
trips to other archives. In recent decades, extensive collections stemming
from approximately 120 German, European and overseas primary archives
have indeed come into being.5 In doing so, fragments often spread over several donor archives could be brought together and edited as a whole for
example the files and related material on the Nrnberg doctor trials. Their
immaterial value has also grown inasmuch as the original archives were often made inaccessible, due to a variety of political or technical reasons, so
that today consulting them is only possible using secondary sources.
In addition, Kloosterman pointed out that in the course of ongoing research work original material always accrues, which cannot simply be
passed on to other public or private archives. This includes original sound
recordings and transcripts of oral sources, original documents, diaries, and
material collected by interview partners, as well as important original material made over to the research teams either by purchase or donation. This
prediction by Kloosterman has also come true. In the archive of our foundation, significant sound and video recordings, questionnaires, and additional
written reports by contemporary witnesses can be found. In addition, there
is much valuable correspondence by letter and numerous diaries dating
from both World Wars, as well as original material from business companies and grass roots initiatives, which quite simply must be preserved. In
some of these rescue operations, we always saw Jaap Kloosterman as our
role model, a man who has done splendid work at the highest level in this
field, saving written accounts of underground social-revolutionary currents
in Europe and overseas.
The balancing act undertaken by the archive of our foundation finds
particular expression in the case of our own documentation. Over the past
decades the filing department of our foundation has grown immensely. In
addition, there are the files of the research projects and publications department, which document the genesis and development of our major plan to
edit the social strategies of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront,6 to publish the reports of the us military government examining Germanys large banks and
5 See sfs-Archiv, Bestandsbersicht, available at: http://www.stiftungsozialgeschichte.de.

6
Hamburger Stiftung fr Sozialgeschichte (Hg.), Sozialstrategien der Deutschen
Arbeitsfront, Teil A und B, bearb. von Michael Hepp (Karsten Linne/Karl Heinz Roth,
Mnchen etc. 1991 ff.).
|239
i.g. Farben,7 and also cover the general plan for the East8 and the trial of
the doctors in Nrnberg.9
At the beginning of the 1990s, the material conditions of the foundation
worsened drastically. We managed to save the foundation, however, with
the help of new international sponsors and safeguard its future by achieving guest status at the University of Bremen. In this new context, there has
been significant progress in improving the contents of the archive.10 But no
change has been made to its basic approach to research and its threefold
tectonics. In this respect Jaap Kloosterman may regard our archive as one
of those adopted children that he helped and advised in the decisive constructive phase.
8
9
10
Dokumentationsstelle zur nsa-Sozalpolitik (Hg.), omgus. Ermittlungen gegen die

Deutsche Bank (Nrdlingen 1985); Dokumentationsstelle fr ns-Sozialpolitik (Hg.),
omgus. Ermittlungen gegen die i.g. Farben ag (Nrdlingen 1985); Hamburger Stiftung fr
Sozialgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Hg.), omgus. Ermittlungen gegen die Dresdner
Bank (Nrdlingen, 1986).
Mechtild Rssler, Sabine Schleiermacher unter Mitarbeit von Cordula Tollmien
(Hg.), Der Generalplan Ost, Berlin 1993.
Angelika Ebbinghaus & Klaus Drner (Hg.), Vernichten und Heilen. Der Nrnberger
rzteprozess und seine Folgen, Berlin 2001.
An overview of the finding aids is available at: http://www.stiftung-sozialgeschichte.
de; last accessed 2 May 2014.
II.8
A Manuscript Found
at the Institute*
Kees Rodenburg
When Jaap Kloosterman stepped down as director of the iish in 2008, he

took over collection development for the Spanish department from the author of this article. This brought him back to one of his old areas of interest, namely social history of Spain, especially the part most prominently
represented in the Spanish collections of the Institute: anarchism and anarchosyndicalism. The latter movement was organized before and during
the Spanish Civil War as the powerful Confederacin Nacional del Trabajo (cnt),
uniting hundreds of thousands of industrial and agricultural workers.
After all, in 1979 Jaap had published the booklet Waarom verloren wij de
Revolutie? De nederlaag van het Spaanse anarchosyndicalisme in 1936-1937 [Why did
we lose the Revolution? The Defeat of Spanish anarchosyndicalism in 1936-1937], featuring texts by Aleksandr Shapiro and Albert de Jong as Part 3 in the Archief se-
The author is grateful to Heiner Becker for making available from his personal
collection the letters from Shapiro. In The Russian Anarchists (Princeton, nj, 1967, see
p. vi), Paul Avrich uses the spelling Alexander Schapiro, because he was in the West
throughout most of his career and used this spelling in non-Russian texts as well.
The official transliteration Aleksandr Shapiro has been used throughout in the main
text.
r o d e n b u r g a m a n u scr i p t f ou nd at the i ns ti tu te
|241
ries issued by Het Wereldvenster

publishers. Other parts issued
that year were Brief aan een
Fransman [Letter to a Frenchman]
by Mikhail Bakunin, De Russische
Revolutie [The Russian Revolution]
featuring texts by e.g. Rosa
Luxemburg and Emma Goldman,
and Tegen de volksvertegenwoordiging: manifesten 1848-1850 [Against
parliament: Manifestos] by Anselme
Bellegarrigue. In 1982 Kroonstad
1921: de derde revolutie [Kronstadt
1921: The third revolution] appeared as Part 5 in the series.
Each part included a brief introduction by Jaap (Redactioneel)
and a bibliographic note with
suggested reading. Jaap added
notes and a biographical index
to the texts. Understandably, he
drew on the vast collections of
Aleksandr Shapiro, date unknown.
the Institute in producing these
1
IISH BG A12/911.
editions.
In the late 1970s Jaap worked
closely with Arthur Lehning at
the Bakunin department that prepared the Archives Bakounine, an edition
of the collected works of the Russian anarchist. During this same period,
Lehning published five titles at Het Wereldvenster, comprising some collections of essays and commentaries, and Bakoenin: een biografie in tijdsdocumenten [Bakunin: A biography in period documents]. In 1979 this publisher issued a
Festschrift in honour of the eightieth birthday of Arthur Lehning, co-edited
by Jaap.2 This edition included two texts by Aleksandr Shapiro about the cnt
politics during the Spanish Civil War.3 Jaap preceded these articles with a
In Part 3 (p. 15) of the Archief series an announcement appeared that an issue would
be dedicated to the May uprising in Barcelona in 1937, although it never appeared.
The May uprising was an effort by the Barcelona proletariat to halt the rise of the
Stalinists in Spain. In 2004 Tegen de volksvertegenwoordiging was reissued by Voltaire
publishers with virtually no changes. Ivo Gay, the editor at Voltaire publishers,
operated in the same capacity at Het Wereldvenster.
Maria Hunink, Jaap Kloosterman, Jan Rogier, Over Buonarroti, internationale avantgardes, Max Nettlau en het verzamelen van boeken, anarchistische ministers, de algebra van
de revolutie, schilders en schrijvers: voor Arthur Lehning (Baarn, 1979). Indicated below as
Hunink et al., Over Buonarroti.
Alexander Schapiro, Twee artikelen over de Spaanse klassenoorlog (1936-1937), in
242
detailed introduction about Shapiro relating to these articles. He described

in very general terms Shapiros course of development, considering in particular his revolutionary concepts, or rather his views on the issues concerning the transition stages that characterize a revolution.
Addressing Shapiro in this book dedicated to Lehning was only logical, as Lehning had met him at the founding congress of the International
Working Mens Association (iwma) in late 1922 and then again in the years
1932-1935, when they served together on the iwma secretariat. He regarded
Shapiro as his political mentor.4 In Grondslagen [Foundations], the theoretical
journal he issued for the Nederlandsch Syndicalistisch Vakverbond [Dutch
Syndicalist Trade Union Confederation], Lehning published various articles
by Shapiro, including, in 1932, Economische reconstructie [Economic reconstruction] about the practical preparation and implementation of social
reconstruction after the revolution. Some of these articles were previously
published in Solidaridad Obrera, the cnt journal. They reflected special consideration for the situation in Spain.5
Aleksandr Shapiro (1882-1946) and the Social Revolution

Who was Aleksandr Shapiro and what makes him so interesting? He was
born around 1882 in Rostov on the Don River. Shortly after he was born,
his father Moses Shapiro had to flee Russia with his family because of his
political activities as a member of the revolutionary organization Narodnaya
Volya [The Peoples Will]. He settled in Constantinople, where he met people in
anarchist circles. In the late 1890s the family moved to London, where they
made contact with the Yiddish-speaking anarchists of the East End responsible for the Arbeyter Fraynd [Workers Friend] journal.6
Little is known about Shapiros personal life, but regarding his period
in London, we have what Fermin Rocker (1907-2004), the son of anarchosyndicalist Rudolf, wrote about him in his memoires. He describes him as
a highly erudite man of many facets with a cosmopolitan background and
witty and fun-loving as well. He also writes that he had a rather determined
and uncompromising nature.7 During those years Aleksandr, after studying
4
5
6
7
Hunink et al., Over Buonarroti, pp. 275-316. The introduction covers pages 275-303.
According to Toke van Helmond in her introduction at: Arthur Lehning, Spaans
Dagboek 7 oktober-5 november 1936 (Oude Tonge, 1996), p. 13.
Grondslagen: anarcho-syndicalistisch tijdschrift. The journal was published from 1932
until 1935. A reprint appeared in 1978 at Anarchistische Uitgaven publishers
in Amsterdam. See Vol. 1, No. 5, 1932, pp. 97-110. From the early 1930s Shapiro
emphasized the need in Spain to think about what kind of society would emerge
from a revolutionary process and advised against limiting this to rhetoric about
the anarchist ideal.
This is the transliteration used at the iish and the British Library for this title and
Rockers publishing company.
Fermin Rocker, The East End Years: A Stepney Childhood (London, 1998), p. 49.
|243
engineering, worked at the physiological lab of Augustus Waller, the inventor of the electrocardiogram. He is credited on the list of publications
from this lab.8 Following a brief stay in Paris around the turn of the century, where he joined the tudiants socialistes rvolutionnaires internationalistes,
a group that tried to connect anarchism with syndicalism, he returned in
1901 at the instigation of Kropotkin to London, where he joined the group
of Russian anarchists living there. Between 1906 and 1907 he helped publish Kropotkins series of pamphlets Listki Chleb i Volja [Pamphlets of Bread and
Freedom]. These Russian anarchists living in England maintained ties with
Russian anarchosyndicalists in Odessa. He also served on the secretariat
of the Federation of Yiddish-speaking Anarchist Groups, which dispatched
him as their representative to the International Anarchist Congress, held
in Amsterdam in 1907. He was elected together with Rocker and Malatesta
to the Bureau de correspondance of the Anarchist International founded at
that Congress. Until 1910 he edited the Bulletin de lInternationale Anarchiste
issued by the Bureau. He worked as a translator at the First International
Syndicalist Congress, which was held in London in 1913. In 1915 Shapiro
spoke out against the war from an internationalist perspective in a manifest
issued in conjunction with e.g. Emma Goldman and Domela Nieuwenhuis.
Meanwhile, he replaced Rocker (who was serving a prison sentence) as
editor of the Arbeyter Fraynd, until he was imprisoned as well in 1916.
After his release and the February Revolution in Russia he campaigned to
have Russian revolutionaries repatriated in a joint effort with a committee, on which the secretary Georgy Chicherin later became the Peoples
Commissioner for Foreign Affairs.
On 31 May 1917 Shapiro arrived in Petrograd, where he joined the anarchosyndicalist group Golos Truda [Voice of Labour]. He contributed to the
homonymous journal and publishing house, which brought forth many anarchist and syndicalist publications, mostly translations. He also worked as
a translator for the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs of Chicherin, whom he
knew from London. With the rising Bolshevist repression of the anarchists
and their organizations, Shapiro became increasingly determined to arrange the release of imprisoned comrades. He and Aleksandr Berkman, the
organizers of Kropotkins funeral in February 1921, presented a list of prisoners to the English anarchist journal Freedom. In an open letter to Lenin,
they together with Emma Goldman and a few others protested the prosecutions resulting from the Kronstadt rebellion. Thanks especially to his ef8
See A.H. Sykes, A.D. Waller and the University of London Physiological
Laboratory, Medical History, Vol. 33, 1989, p. 224, n. 47. Between pp. 226 and 227 is a
photograph of the staff at Waller, including Shapiro. Consulted on website http://
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1035821/pdf/medhist00059-0073.pdf; last
accessed 19 June 2013. Tom Keell (1866-1938), the editor of Freedom and partner of
Lilian Wolfe (see Note 23) was a test subject at this lab. This is clear from a letter
from Shapiro to Keell, 22 January 1914, written on stationery of the Waller lab.
Private collection of Heiner Becker.
244
10 January 1922, in Stockholm, from left to right: Goldman, Berkman,

Gensen, Shapiro and a Swedish comrade. IISH BG A5/499.
forts, several anarchist prisoners were released and sent into exile abroad in
1921. That same year in June, he teamed up with Berkman, Goldman, and
Alexei Borovoy to write a pamphlet, which Rocker published anonymously in Berlin that same year as Die Russische Revolution und die Kommunistische
Partei. Jaap published the Dutch translation of this work in Part 2 of Archief:
De Russische Revolutie.9 In 1922 this group arrived (without Borovoy) in Berlin,
where Shapiro worked with representatives of anarchosyndicalist organizations from other countries to prepare to form the iwma. More of an idealist
than the others, he returned to the Soviet Union before completing this mission.10 He was arrested soon after arriving there. Thanks to an internation-
9
10
Jaap Kloosterman, De Russische revolutie en de Communistische Partij, in Rosa

Luxemburg et al., De Russische Revolutie (Baarn, 1979), pp. 61-95.
During the Spanish Civil War the roles were reversed: Shapiro, disillusioned by his
experiences in the su, would vehemently oppose the cnt policy of collaborating
with the communists. Emma Goldman, however, was more amenable to
compromise (Berkman was no longer alive by then). For a carefully considered
discussion of Goldmans vacillations, see Alice Wexler, Emma Goldman in exile:
From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War (Boston, 1989), pp. 206-233. On
Goldmans involvement in the cnt during the Civil War, see David Porter (ed.),
Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution (New Paltz, ny, 1983). See her
correspondence with Shapiro there as well.
|245
al campaign he was released and sent into exile, returned to Berlin just in
time to experience the foundation of the anarchosyndicalist International
in December 1922, running the secretariat of this organization together
with Augustin Souchy and Rocker (until 1925).
Shapiro was never prominent as a militant activist like Emma Goldman
and Aleksandr Berkman, as he was busy with jobs that required his full
attention. Until then, he had operated mainly behind the scenes as secretary in the aforementioned Bureau de correspondance of the Anarchist
International, where according to Rocker he did most of the work.11 And
the same held true, according to Souchy, for his work on the iwma secretariat.12 Shapiro provided the anarchosyndicalist International with a formidable theoretical potential, according to Jaap.13 And in the international
anarchosyndicalist press this potential started to assess the lessons to be
learned from the Russian Revolution. Jaap has summarized this as follows:
Shapiros position is distinctive, in that he does not follow the usual course
in these circles of examining the revolution from an anarchist perspective,
but instead considers anarchism from the perspective of the proletarian
revolution.14 Shapiro believed that a revolutionary process should not be
considered from the abstract ideal of anarchism, but as a process of transitions. A theory of the revolutionary process was deemed necessary.15 The
anarchosyndicalist trade union drove that process. Shapiro was convinced
that in addition to that trade union, the factory (or farmers) council was
pivotal and insisted that all workers should be able to participate, regardless
of their backgrounds. This view was by no means generally accepted within
the anarchosyndicalist movement. It illustrates the extent of his aversion to
dogma. He also openly condemned the influence of anarchist ideological organizations on trade unions, which he believed needed to be able to operate
autonomously.16 The iwma, of which the ultimate objective was a stateless
society, based on the principles of libertarian federalism, was in Shapiros
view optimally equipped to elaborate a new political, economic, and social
system, free of capitalist exploitation and oppression.17
Soon after the Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed in 1931 and the
cnt restored, a revolutionary situation occurred that drew the interest of
11
Quoted in the introduction by Jaap Kloosterman at: Alexander Schapiro, Bericht

ber die Confederacin Nacional del Trabajo (cnt) und den Aufstand in Spanien im
Januar 1933, in Claudio Pozzoli (ed.), Jahrbuch Arbeiterbewegung, Band 4 (Frankfurt/
Main, 1976), p. 160, n. 4. Hereafter identified as Pozzoli, Jahrbuch Arbeiterbewegung.
12
Ibid., p. 161, n. 8.
13
See his Redactioneel in Aleksander Schapiro and Albert de Jong, Waarom verloren
wij de Revolutie? (Baarn, 1979), p. 10.
14 Hunink et al., Over Buonarroti, p. 283.
15
Ibid. p. 284.
16
Ibid. p. 286-287
17
See e.g. Alexander Schapiro, De politiek der Internationale, in Grondslagen, vol. 1,
no. 1, 1932, p. 4.
246
the iwma, since the cnt was the largest trade union confederation in the
International. In April 1932 Shapiro was re-elected to the secretariat of
the International and in mid December 1932 arrived in Barcelona, where
together with Eusebio Carb he was expected to reorganize the organizations Iberian secretariat. His timing was perfect. The cnt had serious internal problems, and on 8 January 1933 in various parts of the country a
poorly organized uprising broke out, known primarily for the tragic events
in Casas Viejas.18 Shapiro endeavoured to investigate the actions of the cnt
and the circumstances of the uprising. The report he subsequently wrote for
the International (Rapport sur lActivit de la Confdration Nationale du Travail
dEspagne, 16 dcembre, 1932 26 fvrier 1933) got him a place in academic historiography on Spanish anarchosyndicalism. No hay mejor fuente para
ambos problemas, according to John Brademas.19 Jaap published a German
translation of much of the report in Part 4 of the Jahrbuch Arbeiterbewegung,
adding an extensive introduction, in which he analysed the struggle that
Shapiro faced over which course to pursue within the iwma and the anarchosyndicalist movement in Spain.20 In his Rapport, Shapiro criticizes the
revolutionary spontaneity repeatedly manifested by the anarchists in Spain
in those years. The practical angle of the revolution, he believed, needed to
be considered.
In 1934 Shapiro returned to Paris, where he lived and worked. In the autumn of 1936 he was briefly in Barcelona, where Arthur Lehning spoke with
him upon his arrival on 7 October. He noted: Alexander is also pessimistic
about where this is headed. Also in terms of the political course; too many
foolish mistakes are being made.21 Shapiro carefully monitored the developments in Spain, where in November 1936 the cnt had joined the national
government. His observations appear in the texts published in Waarom verloren wij de Revolutie? [Why did we loose the Revolution?] and in Over Buonarroti
[On Buonarroti]. Those unable to obtain copies can nonetheless learn about
his sharp style of argumentation in some texts posted online.22 In all texts
18
The uprising in this village in the province of Cdiz was struck down so violently
that it caused great consternation in the country.
19
There is no better source for both problems [transl. K.R.], John Brademas,
Anarcosindicalismo y revolucin en Espaa (1930-1937) (Esplugues de Llobregat, 1974), p.
40, n. 46.
20 Pozzoli, Jahrbuch Arbeiterbewegung, pp. 159-194. He annotated both the introduction
(pp. 159-170) and the Rapport extensively. In a note Shapiro harshly criticized
Federica Montseny, the subsequent minister during the Civil War.
21
Arthur Lehning, Spaans Dagboek (Amsterdam, 2nd print 2006), p. 24. The cnt had by
then joined the regional government of Catalonia.
22 http://robertgraham.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/alexander-schapiro-open-letterto-the-cnt/; last accessed 19 June 2013. This open letter was published in the
summer of 1937 in Le Combat Syndicaliste. Cf. Hunink et al., Over Buonarroti, p.
311; http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/pk0q0r; last accessed 19 June 2013. This
article originally appeared in Le Combat Syndicaliste, 1.10.1937; http://robertgraham.
wordpress.com/2008/06/28/alexander-schapiro-anarchosyndicalism-and-anarchist-
|247
(not just these), he staunchly opposes opportunism and compromise. He

also expresses remarkable consideration for morale as a psychological factor required to guarantee the dynamics of a revolution.
In June 1939 Shapiro emigrated to the United States. He was disillusioned,
as may be assumed and is confirmed in a letter that he wrote Lilian Wolfe
on 11 November 1938, in which he mentioned the deception of that (i.e.
Spanish, KR) war.23 He died of a heart attack in New York on 5 December
1946.

Crtica de la cnt
In his introduction to the two articles by Shapiro reprinted in Over
Buonarroti, Jaap announces the publication of a collection of Shapiros articles entitled Crtica de la cnt: Artculos 1923-1937. The same announcement appears in the Archief issue Waarom verloren wij de Revolutie? with the additional
note that it is in press at Ruedo Ibrico publishers in Barcelona.24 This title,
however, is nowhere to be found in the library catalogues. The answer appears in the inventory of this publishing houses archive, stored at the iish
under the name of its publisher, Jos Martnez Guerricabeitia. Inventory
number 1259 lists a text by Shapiro. This entry is in fact Crtica de la cnt.
A collection of articles critiquing the cnt seemed appropriate for the
fund of Ruedo Ibrico exile publishers, founded in 1961 by Jos Martnez
(1921-1986) and four others in Paris to enable the anti-Francoist opposition
in Spain to publicize its views.25 The founders hailed from various political
backgrounds. Jos Martnez had anarchist roots; although he abandoned
organization/; last accessed 19 June 2013. The English translation of this originally
Russian text from September 1917 was previously published in Paul Avrich (ed.),
The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution (Ithaca, ny, 1973), pp. 87-88.
23
Personal collection of Heiner Becker. Lilian Wolfe (1875-1974) was on the staff of
the Freedom Press group. Shapiro wrote her after Lehning had sent him a postcard
reporting that he had visited her in the Whiteway Colony. Shapiro writes that this
notice reminded him of their common struggle from before and during the First
World War. They had both opposed the war. In 1916 Wolfe had published an appeal
to evade military service in the anarchist journal The Voice of Labour. She and her
partner Tom Keell were subsequently arrested. From 1920 until Keells death in
1938, they lived in the Tolstoyan Whiteway Colony, Gloucestershire.
24 Hunink et al., Over Buonarroti, p. 275; Shapiro & De Jong, Waarom verloren wij de
Revolutie?, p. 14
25
For an account in English of the history of Ruedo Ibrico, see the iish website:
http://socialhistory.org/en/collections/ruedo-iberico. For an account in Spanish of
the archive, see: http://socialhistory.org/en/collections/archivo-de-jose-martinez-yfondos-ruedo-iberico. The iish acquired the archive in 1982. Both Arthur Lehning
and the Spanish anarchist exile living in the Netherlands Francisco Carrasquer
helped establish the contacts between Martnez and the iish, according to the
correspondence that his friend Martnez had with Lehning. See his letters from 10
and 11 March 1981 to Lehning and Carrasquer, Martnez archive, inv. no. 473. This
file consists exclusively of the copies of letters from Martnez.
248
the movement early on, he remained independent, heterodox, and libertarian throughout his lifetime. He was the driving force behind the publishing
company. In the mid 1970s the integration of various oppositional movements in Spanish politics led him to drift away from those movements and
to explore more anti-capitalist courses. He briefly set his sights on the cnt
but was soon disappointed.26 In September 1979 by then the publisher was
based in Barcelona Martnez published the book cnt: ser o no ser: la crisis de
1976-1979, two thirds of which consisted of a critical essay he wrote (under
a pseudonym) about the actions of the cnt in the years following Francos
death.
A series of articles by Shapiro would be a nice historical complement
to the contemporary critique written by Martnez. In a letter dated 5 April
1979 Martnez wrote that he intended to publish the book after the summer and before the Fifth cnt Congress, which was scheduled for December
that year.27 Such a collection presented an opportunity for Jaap to produce
a coherent survey of Shapiros publications in journals of the movement after the iwma was founded, with the intention of assessing the lessons from
the Russian Revolution and applying them to the situation in Spain. In the
process, he subconsciously did justice to the intention that Shapiro shared
in a letter to William Wess of 19 January 1922.28 Shapiro had written this
letter during his stay in Stockholm,29 after he left the Soviet Union together
with Emma Goldman and Aleksandr Berkman. The following passage is very
revealing:
What I want is to raise the main question: the lessons of the
Russian Revolution and the problems of the next revolution.
Must anarchist tactics be reconsidered in the light of the bolshevic experiments? We have got at the bottom of centralism
thanks to the Russian debacle. We must get at the bottom of
federalism. What is the federalism everyone talks about, with
nobody concretising it. Are there any pitfalls in the federalist
structure? What should we replace the dictatorship of the proletariat with on the morrow after a successful revolution? What
is the actual role of labour organisations the day before and the
day after the revolution? Need we have trade (or industrial) unions at all after the revolution? Is not the factory Committee
26
27
28
29
See Freddy Gomez, Jos Martnez, diteur, libertaire et htrodoxe : Portrait dun homme
singulier. Consulted on website: http://www.ruedoiberico.org/articulos/index.
php?id=17; last accessed 2 July 2013.
Jos Martnez to Jaap Kloosterman, Martnez archive, inv. no. 459.
William Wess (1861-1946), anarchist and until Word War I an adherent of
Kropotkin, active in trade unions and around the Freedom group and the Arbeyter
Fraynd, friends with Lilian Wolfe.
Personal collection of Heiner Becker. The archives of the iish also contain several
letters from Shapiro, which have not been used here.
|249
the only economic body capable of increasing and developing

production? and thousands of other questions the solution of
which by anarchists would be a titanic work that might give
greater guarantees that the next revolution would not fail as
the Russian one did.

The collection addresses the issues raised above:30 a detailed expos of the
motives that led to the founding of the iwma; the role of the anarchosyndicalist trade union as a vanguard organization; the polemic with the pure
anarchists that was relevant to the Spanish situation, because of the actions
of the Federacin Anarquista Ibrica (fai), which had been founded in 1927
to guarantee that anarchist principles would prevail within the cnt; the
importance of autonomy for workers organizations, before and after the
revolution; the need to ensure that provisional institutions did not block
the dynamics of the course of events during the transition stages in a revolution; the challenge of economic reconstruction after the revolution. The
collection focuses heavily on the confidential Rapport about the 8 January
1933 uprising, which, aside from its analysis of the cnt actions, offers an
important perspective on the Spanish Revolution.31 The other articles were
written specifically with regard to the course of events in Spain, encompassing e.g. a polemic with the syndicalist movement, of which Cultura Libertaria
was the publicity organ,32 as well as two commentaries on the December
1933 uprising.
Soon after the Civil War broke out, he campaigned against the counterrevolutionary politics of the communists that instigated the uprising of
Barcelonas proletariat in May 1937. From May until December 1937, Shapiro
wrote several sharply worded articles in Le Combat Syndicaliste, the journal of
the French anarchosyndicalists, nearly all of which were published here.33
Shapiro vehemently supported the view of the rank and file,34 which following the collapse of central rule had gained control of much of the produc-
30
31
32
33
34
See Figure 3 with the table of contents for the collection.

See Jaap Kloosterman, Notes pour le recueil dAlexandre Schapiro, 21.4.77, Martnez
archive, inv. no. 1259, file 1. This concerned an initial plan for the collection, which
was ultimately expanded to include several articles written and published in Le
Combat Syndicaliste from 1933 onwards.
This open letter was added as an annex to the Rapport.
See note 22 above for an article (Open letter to the cnt), which was not accessible to
Jaap, when he was compiling the collection.
See e.g. Shapiro, Notre prtendu dsaccord avec la cnt. Pour mettre les choses au
point, in: Le Combat Syndicaliste, 19.11.1937. Reproduced in the present collection
and in Hunink et al., Over Buonarroti, pp. 309-316. In an article he sent Tom Keell on
1 October 1932, Shapiro referred to the guiding principle of the First International:
The emancipation of the workers must be the task of the workers themselves.
Private collection of Heiner Becker.
250
tion means in Barcelona and other parts of the Republic.35 He also criticized
the lack of democracy in the movement.
Crtica de la cnt concludes with a report from the iwma Extraordinary
Congress, which was held in Paris from 6 to 17 December 1937, with Shapiro
attending as the representative of the French anarchosyndicalists.36 He was
then silenced in France. Only De Syndicalist [The Syndicalist], the journal of the
Nederlandsch Syndicalistisch Vakverbond, of which Albert de Jong was the
editor, ran some of his articles.37 The table of contents lists some documents
that in some cases were annexes to the Rapport or served as a background to
the articles published.
The 42-page typed introduction that Jaap generated for the collection,
however, is of particular interest.38 This introduction comprises a biography of Shapiro and a thoroughly documented analysis of his views and is
far more detailed than the two published in Over Buonarroti and Jahrbuch
Arbeiterbewegung. In addition to the two stated sources, the above biographical sketch of Aleksandr Shapiro is based mainly on the unpublished introduction. According to Wayne Thorpe, an eminent historiographer on revolutionary syndicalism, who had a copy of the Materiales, this is the best source
on Shapiro.39 This is what he wrote in 1989, and it appears to hold true to
this day.
Why was the book never published, despite all the work invested in it,
and the importance it instils? Marianne Brll, who previously worked for
Martnez, suspects that he had been overburdened by the enormous task of
publishing cnt: ser o no ser. Moreover, the publishing company had fallen on
hard times. During the Transicin period in Spain, the contemporary fund
was impossible to launch on the market. Financial problems precluded taking the risk that a book about a historical subject would entail. Marianne
added: I know this bothered Martnez ().40
35
36
37
38
39
40
This contrasts with the perspective of the key figures of the movement: in the early
days of the Revolution, cnt member Jos Ester Borrs heard Federica Montseny tell
some others: This sombrero is too big for us. Oral remark from Francisco Olaya to
the author, Paris, ca. 2005.
See also Shapiro & De Jong, Waarom verloren wij de Revolutie? pp. 17-55.
Ibid., pp. 57-75.
Introduccin: Materiales sobre Alexander Shapiro, Martnez archive, inv. no. 1259, File
4. This introduction includes over 5 pages comprising a bibliography (Principales
fuentes). The same file contains 75 notes in some cases very detailed and
interesting to the articles in Spanish.
Wayne Thorpe, The Workers Themselves: Revolutionary Syndicalism and International
Labour 1913-1923 (Dordrecht [etc.], 1989), p. 292, n. 6. Jaap benefited from being
able to use Shapiros oral remarks to Arthur Lehning as the foundation for his
biographical data. See Pozzoli, Jahrbuch Arbeiterbewegung, p. 161, n. 8.
Ich weiss, dass Martnez sich in dieser Sache nicht gut fuelte (). E-mail
from Marianne Brll to the author, dated 22.3.2013. The same fate befell Arthur
Lehnings publication: Bakunin: teora y prctica. See Martnez archive, inv. no. 11471148. The translator of both manuscripts was Francisco Carrasquer (1915-2012). For
a tribute to Carrasquer, see: http://www.tijdschrift-de-as.nl/documenten/de_AS_180.
pdf, p.17.
|251
Table of contents for the unpublished collection. IISH Martinez archive, inv. no. 1259.
II.9 Did Castoriadis

Suppress a Letter
from Pannekoek?
A Note on the
Debate regarding
the Organizational
Question in the 1950s*
Marcel van der Linden
Council communism derives from an undercurrent of international communism that became more widely known mainly thanks to being labelled
by Lenin as a growing pain. Council communism a term that appears to
have been in use since 19211 arose from the defeat of the German revolution of 1919-1920 and has existed in several versions. The most radical one
was primarily a Dutch creation: the Group of International Communists
(gic), formed in 1926, took Marxs statement that the working class should
liberate itself to mean precisely that and therefore rejected altogether any
direct interference from intellectuals and other non-proletarians in the
class struggle. By far the most renowned proponent of this view was the
astronomer Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960).2 The gic-ers were the monks of
Thanks are due to Alice Mul for a critical reading of the first draft, and to Lee
Mitzman for the translation from Dutch and French.
1
Frits Kool (ed.), Die Linke gegen die Parteiherrschaft (Olten, 1970), p. 525.
2 The gic view appears to have been devised by the teacher Henk Canne Meijer
(1890-1962). On Pannekoeks conversion to the gic view, see: Anton Pannekoek,
Herinneringen. Herinneringen uit de arbeidersbeweging. Sterrenkundige herinneringen. With
contributions from B.A. Sijes and E.P.J. van den Heuvel. Compiled and edited by
va n d e r l i n d e n D i d Ca sto r i adi s s u ppre s s a Le tte r?
|253
Marxism, to quote Henk Sneevliet.3 They published journals and organized

discussion meetings, but they never tried to take charge in incidents concerning the workers struggle. The gic resolved the organizational question, which socialists had debated ad infinitum, by denying it. The workers
would come up with their own solution, once the time was right.4
In 1972 Jaap Kloosterman published a meticulously prepared edition of selected writings by Pannekoek. In his critique in the postscript, he argued
that the scientific socialism of Pannekoek and his kindred spirits was a
pseudo-theory of the proletarian revolution based on ideological awareness of the bourgeois. The gic was therefore not the start of a new type
of labour movement that it believed it was, but the latest version of the old
labour movement, at a time when the consumer society was extending its
control of the economy to cover all of everyday life. Once the true new labour movement based on workers councils came to fruition, its ultimate
implementation of the revolutionary core of Marxs theory would irrevocably coincide with the demise of Marxism. Their radical economism had
led the council communists to deeply underestimate the intrinsic organization idea so that the activism of the old movement was not overcome but
was transformed into inactivism [...].5
Exactly what the new-style activism advocated by Jaap would entail remains unclear here. As will be explained below, however, his critique of
Pannekoek relates to a more longstanding tradition of radical-leftist critiques of Dutch council communism. I will illustrate this based on a specific
example. Jaaps theses include clear references to the work of the French
theoretician, writer, and film maker Guy Debord (1931-1994), whose ideas
in turn derive from French revolutionary-socialist circles of the 1950s. Jaap
knew Debord personally, corresponded with him, and, together with his
friend Ren van de Kraats, produced a Dutch translation of Debords magnum opus La Socit du spectacle.6 When Jaaps Thesen ad Pannekoek was
B.A. Sijes, J.M. Welcker and J.R. van der Leeuw (Amsterdam, 1982), p. 215.
Cajo Brendel, Die Gruppe Internationale Kommunisten in Holland. Persnliche
Erinnerungen aus den Jahren 1934-1939, Jahrbuch Arbeiterbewegung, 2 (1974),
pp. 253-63, at 253-254; Frits Kool, Die Klosterbrder des Marxismus und die
Sowjetgesellschaft: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Rtekommunismus, in G.L.
Ulmen (ed.), Society and History: Essays in Honor of Karl August Wittfogel (The Hague
[etc.], 1978), pp. 259-280.
For details, see [Philippe Bourrinet], The Dutch and German Communist Left: A
Contribution to the History of the Revolutionary Movement, 1900-1950 (London, 2001). This
uncorrected and anonymized version of the authors phd thesis was published
against his wishes. An authorized version is forthcoming from the publisher Brill,
Leiden, in the series Historical Materialism.
J. Kloosterman, Nawoord. Thesen ad Pannekoek, in Anton Pannekoek, Partij,
raden, revolutie. Compiled and annotated by Jaap Kloosterman (Amsterdam, 1972),
pp. 227-233.
Guy Debord, De spektakelmaatschappij. Translated by Jaap Kloosterman and Ren
van de Kraats (Baarn, 1976). Originally published as La Socit du spectacle (Paris,
254
published, Debord, by his own admission, knew little about Dutch council
communism, but the theses corresponded with the theoretical perspective
that the French philosopher devised.
Debords perspective was the outcome of many dialogues and confrontations with other radicals, including members of the group Socialisme
ou Barbarie, of which he was briefly a member in 1960-1961. In the 1950s
Socialisme ou Barbarie had gradually drifted away from Marxism, because its
structured ideas blocked an open interpretation of historical and political
processes. At the same time, the group engaged in lengthy debates about
the organizational question. It can hardly have been a coincidence that
Socialisme ou Barbarie in the course of these debates also came into contact
with the Dutch council communists, who had joined forces with former adherents of the aforementioned Sneevliet in the Spartacusbond back in 1944.
I will introduce both groups in a bit more detail. Socialisme ou Barbarie (19491967) is certainly one of the most interesting organizations emerging from
the twentieth-century radical left. The socio-barbarians, as they were
sometimes known, were never very numerous. At their peak, they may
have comprised one hundred (predominantly male) members, and editions
of their journal sold about one thousand copies.7 But Socialisme ou Barbarie
was also an exceptional forum, of which the participants over time included
countless highly vocal intellectuals. The first that merits mention is the now
world-renowned Cornelius Castoriadis alias Pierre Chaulieu (1922-1997), the
philosopher, economist, and psychoanalyst of Greek heritage who was an
important force in the debates from the outset of the organization until its
dissolution.8 Another influential member was the co-founder and philosopher Claude Lefort alias Montal (born 1924; member 1949-1958), who became known mainly for his ideas about democracy and human rights. Other
intellectuals who figured in the group interactions for brief or extended periods during the 1950s and were internationally acclaimed thanks to their
publications included the psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche (1924-2012; member
1949-1950), the sociologist Benno Sternberg alias Sarel (?-1971; member 19491967), the literary theoretician Grard Genette (born 1930; member 1957-58),
1967). Selected letters from Debord to Jaap have been published in Guy Debord,
Correspondance, Vol. 5: Janvier 1973-Dcembre 1978 (Paris, 2005) and Vol. 6: Janvier
1979-Dcembre 1987 (Paris, 2006).
The best account appears in Philippe Gottraux, Socialisme ou Barbarie. Un engagement politique et intellectuel dans la France de laprs-guerre (Lausanne, 1997). Another
highly informative source is Andrea Gabler, Antizipierte Autonomie. Zur Theorie und
Praxis der Gruppe Socialisme ou Barbarie (1949-1967) (Hannover, 2009). Marcel van der
Linden offers a concise history in Socialisme ou Barbarie: A French Revolutionary
Group, 1949-1965, Left History, 5: 1 (1998), pp. 7-37.
On Castoriadis, see his biographical website http://www.agorainternational.org/;
last accessed 8 July 2013. After fleeing Greece in 1945, Castoriadis used pseudonyms, as he did not become a French citizen until 1970.
|255
as well as the inventor of post-modernism, the philosopher Jean-Franois

Lyotard (1924-1998; member 1954-1963).
This unlikely concentration of intellectual talent, combined with input
from militant employees such as Jacques Gautrat alias Daniel Moth (born
1924; member 1952-1962?), turned Socialisme ou Barbarie into a laboratory for
radical ideas. Although the group definitively disbanded in 1967, it nonetheless inspired part of the protest movement during the May rebellion in Paris
the next year.9 In 1977 the following reflections about the intellectual endeavours of Socialisme ou Barbarie appeared in Le Monde: This work though
hardly known to the general public nonetheless deeply influenced many
militants in May 1968.10
The influence of Socialisme ou Barbarie was never a paragon of unity. Group
members expressed divergent views on many subjects, instigating major
controversies time and again. Sometimes this led individuals to leave the
organization; occasionally a small group would embark on a joint new effort. The most important rift in Socialisme ou Barbarie occurred in September
1958, four months after the coup by the colons and the army in Algeria, with
former General De Gaulle advancing as the strong man in France. The discernible trends toward more repressive government intervention gave rise
to strategic debates within Socialisme ou Barbarie, as well as in many other
political forums. The socio-barbarians proved deeply divided on the question as to whether the time had come to form a new revolutionary party,
and especially, what the optimal balance was between spontaneity and organization. The arguments advanced during the debate on that topic were
fundamental and surfaced directly and indirectly in the protest movements
later on.
Some of these debates in the 1950s included outsiders as well: two Dutch
council communists from the Spartacus group who were on good terms
with Socialisme ou Barbarie.11 The question about the balance between spontaneity and organization was far from new to the Dutch. Within the council communist movement (in which the gic had been a kind of outlier), debates about this issue had been ongoing since the 1920s, and the positions
adopted covered a broad spectrum. At one extreme were those strongly in
favour of a council democracy promoted by a revolutionary vanguard, while
at the other extreme were the proponents of non-intervention in the class
conflict, based on the principle that the working class should be entirely
9
10
11
The influence is very clearly visible in: Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Le
Gauchisme, remde la maladie snile du communisme (Paris, 1968).
Entretien avec Cornlius Castoriadis, Le Monde, 13 December 1977.
They published their interpretation of the events as several Letters from France
in the journal of the Spartacusbond: [Cajo Brendel and Theo Maassen,] Splitsing in
de Franse groep Socialisme ou Barbarie: Brieven uit Frankrijk, Spartacus, 18: 21-25
(11 October 6 December 1958). See also on this subject Marcel van der Linden,
Ein Bericht niederlndischer Rtekommunisten ber die Spaltung von Socialisme
ou Barbarie (1958), Sozial.Geschichte, 22: 3 (October 2007), pp. 103-127.
256
responsible for its own liberation; they regarded the old labour movement (trade unions, labour parties of whatever political affiliation) as totally
obsolete and believed that a new labour movement was emerging, based
on autonomous activity.12 To my knowledge the vanguard party position
did not surface as exactly that within Spartacus in the 1950s, although most
members favoured promoting the class struggle actively through propaganda and solidarity. A minority within Spartacus supported non-intervention,
including the two members maintaining contact with Socialisme ou Barbarie:
Theo Maassen (1891-1974) and Cajo Brendel (1915-2007). Both had previously
belonged to the non-interventionist gic in the 1930s, although Maassen had
been excluded from the organization back then.13
Spartacus members had followed the rise of Socialisme ou Barbarie from the
outset. As early as 1949-1950, they published an excerpt of the principle
statement by the French revolutionaries in their own journal.14 Only in 1952,
however, did they get in touch with each other. In September of that year,
Spartacus wrote to the French, briefly introducing the group and announcing
its national conference on 25-26 October. The letter continued: If you could
possibly have one or a few comrades attend this discussion, we would be
delighted.15 This invitation was immediately accepted. Socialisme ou Barbarie
dispatched Ren Caul (alias Neuvil),16 whose immense satisfaction with the
meeting led him to propose another gathering.17
The contacts then intensified. Spartacus members, especially Cajo Brendel,
henceforth made regularly trips to Paris, while socio-barbarians visited
Amsterdam occasionally as well, such as on Whitsun in 1954, when a delegation of five arrived.18 At that point, considerable criticism had arisen within Spartacus of the majority view expressed in Socialisme ou Barbarie, coming
from Cornelius Castoriadis and his kindred spirits. In the autumn of 1954
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
For an account of these debates, see: Marcel van der Linden, On Council
Communism, Historical Materialism: research in critical marxist theory, 12: 4 (2003),
pp. 27-50. The key text of the non-interventionists was: [Henk Canne Meijer,] Das
werden einer neuen Arbeiterbewegung, Rtekorrespondenz, No 8-9 (April 1935), pp.
1-28; English translation: The Rise of a New Labor Movement, International Council
Correspondence, 1: 10 (August 1935), pp. 1-26.
On Maassen, see: Jaap [Meulenkamp], In het harnas gestorven, Daad en Gedachte,
10: 6 (June 1974), pp. 16-17; and on Brendel, see my necrology in Sozial.Geschichte, 22:
3 (October 2007), pp. 196-200.
Socialisme of Barbarij, Spartacus, 9, 38 (3 December 1949) 10: 3 (11 February
1950); originally: Socialisme ou Barbarie, Socialisme ou Barbarie, No 1 (March-April
1949), pp. 7-46
Tjeerd Woudstra, Aux camarades de lOrgane Socialisme ou Barbarie, 22 September
1952; Archive of Stan Poppe (iish), box 27.
Aux camarades du groupe Spartacus, 15 October 1952; Poppe archive, box 27.
Ren to Cher Camarade Cajo, undated letter received on 13 November 1952;
Archive of Cajo Brendel (iish), box 2.
Discussies met kameraden uit Belgi, Duitsland en Frankrijk, Contact in eigen
kring. Intern orgaan van de Communistenbond Spartacus, No 31 (September 1954); Stan
Poppe to A. Pannekoek, 17 June 1954, Archive of Anton Pannekoek (iish), box 52A.
|257
one member (presumably Brendel) noted that over this past summer, the
longstanding deep-seated differences between the majority of the French
group and Spartacus have become more pronounced, while a minority within the French group, which does not embrace the party stand, has on the
other hand moved closer to Spartacus.19 He attributed this to the massive
strikes held in France in August 1953.20
The adherents of Spartacus did not quite know how to respond to theoretical criticism from an intellectual of Castoriadis stature, as their organization consisted mainly of blue and white collar workers without a university
education.21 But they did have their own minence grise: Anton Pannekoek.22
In the autumn of 1953 he received a complete set of all previously published
issues of Socialisme ou Barbarie from Brendel and thus had cause to put in
writing his well-intentioned critique of the movement behind Castoriadis.23
On 8 November 1953 Pannekoek, by then eighty years old, wrote the
French that while he sympathized with their group in many respects, his
view differed from theirs on two essential points: the assessment of the
Russian Revolution of 1917 and the matter of the vanguard party. Unlike
Socialisme ou Barbarie, Pannekoek did not consider this Russian Revolution to
be a proletarian uprising that had later degenerated to a bureaucratic state
capitalism. He was more inclined to regard the revolution from the outset
as a bourgeois effort that could never have given rise to a socialist society.
Pannekoek adamantly rejected the idea of a vanguard party. In his view, revolutionaries should not form a party but should stick to disseminating propaganda and interfering in theoretical debates. Their task was not to lead
the struggle for liberation; their sole mission was to launch a universal appeal for control for workers.
Socialisme ou Barbarie published Pannekoeks letter, together with a response from Castoriadis.24 In his reply, Castoriadis focused on the question
19
20
21
22
23
24
Discussies met kameraden.

Ibid.
Brendel believed: The worker element is far better represented in our group.
Yes, they have even admitted to me that [workers are] virtually absent [from their
organization]. The ones who are not students or intellectuals are still white collar
workers and officials in corporate industry. Two are office workers at Renault, and
one runs the office at some large metal factory near Paris. I have met one comrade
among them, who works for an insurance company. Cajo Brendel to Dear comrade Pannekoek, 1 November 1953, Pannekoek Archive, box 8.
On Pannekoek, see: Corrado Malandrino, Scienza e socialismo. Anton Pannekoek (18731960) (Milan, 1987), and John Gerber, Anton Pannekoek and the Socialism of Workers
Self-Emancipation 1873-1960 (Dordrecht, 1989).
Discussiegroep, partij en raden. (Een briefwisseling tussen Anton Pannekoek en
Pierre Chaulieu), Daad en Gedachte. Marxistisch discussieorgaan, 2: 5 (October 1954), p.
55.
Anton Pannekoek, Lettre Chaulieu, Socialisme ou Barbarie, No 14 (April-June
1954), pp. 39-43; Pierre Chaulieu [Castoriadis], Rponse au camarade Pannekoek,
Socialisme ou Barbarie, No 14 (April-June 1954), pp. 44-50.
258
of the vanguard organization. In his view, revolutionaries who did not form
a party would pave the way toward a bureaucratic dictatorship such as the
Soviet Union. In fact, the only safeguard against such an error is to apply
the idea in practice, just as the only safeguard against bureaucratization is
to engage permanently in anti-bureaucratic action and to demonstrate that
a non-bureaucratic organization of the avant garde is possible in practice.25
Pannekoek later clarified aspects of his view in a second letter, dated 15
June 1954. This one was not published in Socialisme ou Barbarie. In 1971 Cajo
Brendel argued that this was because that letter displeased Castoriadis, and
he had therefore suppressed it.26 At the start of the present century, this
accusation was repeated in a slightly different wording by Henri Simon, a
former member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.27 The allegation seemed unfounded from the outset, because Socialisme ou Barbarie did run a response from
Theo Maassen on the same subject at a later date.28 Proper refutation was
impossible in the 1970s and thereafter, however, because Castoriadis could
by then no longer recall the circumstances under which this letter was
not published.29 Two documents that Pannekoek has left us definitively
prove that the accusation is untenable. The first document is a letter from
Castoriadis to Pannekoek, dated 22 August 1954, announcing the publication of Pannekoeks second letter in Socialisme ou Barbarie. This letter also
mentions a third letter from Pannekoek, dated 10 August 1954, which I
have so far been unable to locate. The other document is a draft version of
a fourth letter from Pannekoek to Castoriadis, dated 3 September 1954, in
which Pannekoek writes that his second letter was not written with great
care and was not intended for publication. He also reiterates the essential difference of opinion with Castoriadis, thereby clarifying the view that
Jaaps Thesen ad Pannekoek countered over forty years ago.
25
26
27
28
29
De mme que la seule garantie contre lerreur consiste dans lexercice de la

pense lui-mme, de mme la seule garantie contre la bureaucratisation consiste
dans une action permanente dans un sens antibureaucratique et en dmontrant
pratiquement quune organisation non bureaucratique de lavant-garde est possible. Chaulieu, Rponse.
Cajo Brendel (ed.), Une correspondance entre Anton Pannekoek et Pierre
Chaulieu, Cahiers du communisme de conseils, No 8 (May 1971), pp. 15-35.
Henri Simon (ed.), Pierre Chaulieu (Cornlius Castoriadis), Anton Pannekoek: correspondance 1953-1954 (Paris, 2001).
Theo Maassen: Encore sur la question du Parti, Socialisme ou Barbarie, No. 18
(January-March 1956), pp. 95-99. See also Cornelius Castoriadis, Postface la
Rponse au camarade Pannekoek, in Castoriadis, Lexprience du mouvement ouvrier,
Vol. 1 (Paris, 1974), pp. 261-263. Castoriadis also published, as Brendel had done
previously (Une correspondance, pp. 32-35), Pannekoeks second letter on pp.
271-276.
Castoriadis, Postface, p. 263.
|259
Documents
Letter from Castoriadis to Pannekoek, 22 August, 195430
Paris, le 22 aot 1954.
Cher camarade Pannekoek,
Excusez-moi de rpondre avec un certain retard votre lettre du 15 juin;
jtais absent de Paris et nai voulu vous rpondre quaprs en avoir discut
avec les camarades de notre groupe. Entre temps, jai galement reu votre lettre de 10 aot, avec larticle sur lthique marxiste, dont nous avons
aussi discut.
Concernant votre lettre du 15 juin, nous avons unanimement dcid de
la publier dans le prochain numro (15) de Socialisme ou Barbarie. Elle
pourra certainement aider les lecteurs mieux comprendre votre point
de vue, aussi bien sur la question du parti que sur celle du caractre de la
Rvolution russe. Quant moi, je ne pense pas personellement avoir ajouter quoi que ce soit dimportant ce que jai crit dans le No 14. A vous
seulement je voudrais faire remarquer que je nai jamais pens que nous
puissions vaincre le P.C. en copiant ses mthodes, et que jai toujours dit
quil fallait la classe ouvrire ou son avantgarde un mode dorganisation nouveau, qui corresponde aux ncessit de la lutte contre la bureaucratie, non seulement la bureaucratie extrieure et ralise (celle du P.C.) mais
aussi la bureaucratie intrieure potentielle. Je dis: il faut la classe ouvrire
une organisation avant la constitution des Conseils, vous me rpondez: il
ne lui faut pas une organisation du type stalinien. Nous sommes daccord,
mais votre thse exige que vous montriez quun organisation de type stalinien est la seule organisation ralisable. Je pense dailleurs que sur ce terrain
la discussion ne peut pas avancer beaucoup; jai lintention de reprendre la
question partir du texte intellectuels et ouvriers qui a t publi dans
le No 14 de Socialisme ou Barbarie, et jespre pouvoir publier un article
l dessus dans le No. 16. Jose penser qu ce moment l nous pourrons reprendre la discussion dune manire plus fconde.
[...]31
Fraternellement
Pierre Chaulieu
P.S. Cest la suite dun malentendu que vous croyez quune erreur est glisse dans la traduction de votre lettre. Lexpression (p. 40, ligne 13 du No 14)
nous navons que faire dun parti rvolutionnaire est un gallicisme qui signifie nous navons pas besoin, nous ne pouvons pas nous servir dun parti
30
31
Pannekoek Archive, box 11.

A paragraph about the work of Marxologist Maximilien Rubel has been omitted.
260
rvolutionnnaire cest une traduction assez proche de votre anglais we

have no use for ....
Translation
Paris, 22 August 1954
Dear Comrade Pannekoek,
I apologize for the delay in replying to your letter of 15 June; I was not
in Paris and wanted to reply to your letter only after discussing it with the
comrades of our group. In the meantime, I have also received your letter
of 10 August, including the article on Marxist ethics, which we have discussed as well.32
As far as your letter of 15 June is concerned, we have agreed unanimously
to publish it in the upcoming issue (15) of Socialisme ou Barbarie. It will certainly help readers understand your point of view better, both regarding the
question of the party and that of the nature of the Russian Revolution. As
for myself, I do not personally think I need to add anything of importance
to what I wrote in Issue 14. Please let me share with you alone that I had
never thought that we could overcome the Communist Party by copying its
methods, and that I have always said that the working class or its avant
garde requires a new method of organization that meets the needs of the
fight against bureaucracy, not merely the realized, external bureaucracy
(that of the Communist Party) but also the potential, internal bureaucracy.
I say: the working class needs an organization before forming Councils
you respond: it does not need a Stalinist type of organization. We agree, but
your thesis requires that you show that a Stalinist type of organization is
the only organization attainable. I think, moreover, that advancing in this
area of the discussion will be difficult. I intend to take up the question
again based on the text intellectuels et ouvriers published in Issue 14 of
Socialisme ou Barbarie,33 and I hope to be able to publish an article on the subject in Issue 16. I even believe that at that point, we will be able to resume
the discussion more fruitfully.
[...]
With fraternal greetings
Pierre Chaulieu
P.S. Due to a misunderstanding, you believe that there is an error in the
translation of your letter. The expression (p. 40, line 13 of Issue 14) [which
reads literally] all we need is to form a revolutionary party is a French
wording that in fact means we do not need, we cannot help ourselves with
32
33
As mentioned above, I have so far been unable to locate this letter.

R. M., Intellectuels et ouvriers: Un article de Correspondance (traduit de
lamricain), Socialisme ou Barbarie, No. 14 (April-June 1954), pp. 74-79.
|26 1
a revolutionary party this translation closely approximates your English

expression we have no use for...
Draft reply from Pannekoek to Castoriadis, 3 September 195434

Sept. 3. 1954
Dear Comrade Chaulieu. Thanks for your letter of August 22. []35
As to the other question point, my letter of June 15: in writing it it was
not my intention that it should be printed, or rather: it was my idea that
it would not be printed, so that I have the remembrance feeling that it
was not written with the utmost great care. If, however, you think that by
some of its parts it will may clarify the ideas, then I advise to [x]36 select and
print these parts only, in order that my remarks do shall not occupy too
much space. I think have the impression that the exposure of my views in
my Workers Councils may give a broader and more general basis.37 I will
send you a reprint of one of its chapters which lately has been prepared and
published by our English friends of the i.l.p.38 There is something abrupt in
it, since my the arguments are based on the former chapters that here are
missing lacking; but they i.l.p. comrades apparently had the idea that just
for the passive unrevolutionary English workers a [x] little bit treatment discussion is very may be a healthy stuff.
I have the impression that we stand at opposite extremes of opinion
about proletarian class action, both by each emphasizing special one of its
sides. Always the fact appears that some (often few) persons come forward
stand out in activity, in speech, in courage or in clearness of view vision, in
speech or in rapidity of action; these combined [x] persons together constitute an actual avant-garde [x] which we see appear in every action. They become factual leaders; they may incite the activity of the masses, and by their
broader view can give good advice for in the actions. When they combine
into fixed groups or parties with established programs these fluid relations
become petrified. Then as leaders ex officio they feel themselves responsible
and wish to be followed and obeyed. At the other side it appears we see that
in all massal or revolutionary actions there appears a deep common feeling,
not clearly conscious as shown by the fluctuations in taking part in the
34
35
36
37
38
Pannekoek Archive, box 108.

A paragraph about the work of Marxologist Maximilien Rubel has been omitted.
[x] = illegible word crossed out.
Anton Pannekoek, Workers Councils (Melbourne, 1950).
Anton Pannekoek, The Way to Workers Control (London, 1953). This is a reprint of
Chapter 6, Section II, of Pannekoeks Workers Councils. The British Independent
Labour Party, founded in 1893, was a small leftist socialist organization, which
until 1932 had figured within the Labour Party and then went off on its own, until
it rejoined the Labour Party in the 1970s and was transformed into a lobby group.
262
action , but based on very real conditions, [x] securing the unity of action
needed for positive results. Here the leading personalities become unimportant accidentals. The real and lasting gain of progress of society consists
in what the total class, the working masses change in their inner character (acquiring independence, defiance, losing their servility); and this takes
place [x] only by their own activity and initiative, not by following others.
Between these two points of view the practice of the class struggle may take
all its kinds grades of intermediate or combined forms.
There may still be made a remark on massal actions. Looking at the present life conditions in our Western countries it may seem (and is widely
accepted) that such massal actions ever more become impossible and unnecessary. Impossible because of the enormously increased power and violence of the governments backed by big capital. ([x]If an industrial region
should be [x] in the hands of the workers an one atom bomb may destroy it).
Unnecessary because working and living conditions, as well as [x] political
rights for the working class become ever better and more secured (see usa).
Yet we are convinced certain that the threat of now in capitalism is heavier
and more dangerous than ever before. Now world-war is the its most important side of form and it. The impending destruction of mankind and and
misery of mankind threatens the entire population, not only the workers
[x] intellectuals and trades people as well as workers, though these are latter form the most numerous part. So massal actions will be necessary more
than in the past, and they loose their strict class character of such as they
had in the past (Belgium, Russia). They are the only form way in which the
majority masses of the peoples may take action exhibit their will in what
constitutes their life-interest. Yet you never find them mentioned, not neith
neither in political discussions and papers, notr in revolutionary socialist
reviews. Is it the fear to be identified with Russian communism? Or, more
generally the fear of all leading groups for the working masses taking action
themselves?
II.10 Matriarchy
and Socialism
French Precedents*
Francis Ronsin
In his study on Bachofen,1 Walter Benjamin mentioned the ties between the
great anarchist geographer Elise Reclus and the Swiss scholar.2 Such a relationship did not surprise Benjamin, since communism even seemed to him
(Bachofen) inseparable from gynaecocracy.3 Benjamin therefore highlighted the influence that Bachofen had on Engels and Lafargue, and joined the
This study results from an extended period of working with Jaap Kloosterman,
from his involvement in receiving and processing the personal papers of Jeanne
Humbert at the iish, through his participation in planning the international
research seminar Socialisme et Sexualit. Thanks are due to Jenneke Quast.
Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815-1887), a scholar of law and anthropologist, wrote Das
Mutterrecht (1861) which is regarded as an important early work in modern social
anthropology.
Walter Benjamin, Johann Jakob Bachofen, written in 1935; first published in
France in Les Lettres nouvelles, n 11, 1954. Here I use the anthology Walter Benjamin,
Ecrits Franais (Paris, 1991), pp. 123-142.
Ibid., p. 139. Benjamin mentions Bachofens work Le Matriarcat, whereas Mutterrecht
(1861) was translated as Le Droit maternel. Bachofen never used the term matriarchy but refers to a gynaecocracy. At one time he considered using this term for
the title of his book.
r o n si n m atri arc hy and s oc i ali s m
|26 5
debates about maternal rights published in the German social-democratic

organ Neue Zeit.
This observation by Benjamin is unquestionably relevant. In all fairness
to him, however, let us recall the French tradition of correlating praise for
the matriarchy (or at least the destruction of the patriarchy) with the hope
of radically transforming the foundations of society, extending to socialism
and communism, which preceded the publication of the work by Bachofen,4
and which evolved without any input from him or Engels.
Fourier,5 together with the Saint-Simonians, closely associated socialism
with the emancipation of women from male dominance and, at least with
respect to those Saint-Simonians who supported Enfantin, glorification of
sexual freedom. Pauline Roland, one of the leading figures in the struggle
for the feminist and democratic causes, was among them. She moulded
these ideals into a form of matriarchy, both in general awareness and in
practice.
A Saint-Simonian
Born in 1805 at Falaise (Calvados), Pauline Roland, already an adherent of
Saint-Simonianism, moved to Paris in 1832. She rapidly became prominent
in Saint-Simonian circles there. She considered virginity to be poorly compatible with the theories she supported. She addressed this problem as
a perfect Saint-Simonian: I would not agree to marry any man in a society, which did not acknowledge me as a full equal of the one with whom I
united, or rather to whom I sold myself. I do not aim to dominate through
cunning but to achieve perfect quality and freedom.6 She thus beckoned
into her bed a follower of the Father Enfantin, Adolphe Guroult, whom
she was told was in need of affection. She then proceeded to wonder about
maternity just as rigorously: I want to be a mother, but with a mysterious
paternity.7 In April 1834, she was carrying Guroults child. But on 24 June
1834, in a new letter, she notified Agla Saint-Hilaire: On Friday I gave myself to Mr Aicard.8 Once informed, Guroult turned out to be noble and
4
5
7
8
Johann Jakob Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht. Eine Untersuchung ber die Gynaikokratie der
alten Welt nach ihrer religiosen und rechtlichen Natur (Stuttgart, 1861).
The following is quoted from the presentation Doctrine Fouriristeby Jenny
dHricourt in 1860: 11 A mother is the guardian of her children: they belong
to her alone; the fathers rights to them are limited to what the mother grants
him. Jenny P. dHricourt, La femme affranchie, rponse MM. Michelet, Proudhon, E. de
Girardin, A. Comte et aux autres novateurs modernes. 2 vols (Brussels, 1860), p. 54.
Letter from Pauline Roland to Agla Saint-Hilaire, 23-24 August 1832, Bibliothque
de lArsenal, Fonds saint-simonien, 7777, quoted in Edith Thomas, Pauline Roland:
Socialisme et fminisme au xixe sicle (Paris, 1956), p. 47.
Ibid., pp. 64-65.
Ibid., p. 68. Jean-Franois Aicard, another Saint-Simonian.
266
deeply religious.9 As for the child that Pauline carried, He senses what she
has always felt, that she alone was this childs entire family. He would therefore love [the child] but would not feel any entitlement to [the child].10
Jean-Franois Roland was officially registered on 13 January 1835. The witnesses were: Jean Aicard and Achille Leroux (the younger brother of Pierre
Leroux). Three other children were born to Pauline and Aicard: Marie
Roland (died in infancy), Mose Roland, and Irma Roland.
Never, neither before nor after they separated, or even when Pauline was
imprisoned for her role in the Union des Associations ouvrires [Union of
workers associations] or deported to Algeria for supporting the insurrections against the coup by Louis-Napolon Bonaparte, did she imagine entrusting her lover with parental responsibility.
Another Saint-Simonian, Claire Dmar, condemned both matriarchy and
patriarchy with equal vigour. At the same time, she strongly advocated,
with a virulence ahead of her day, sexual liberation, together with custody
of children exercised not by their father or their mother but by the collective: Loyalty nearly always derives from the fear or inability to do better
or otherwise. [] Proclaiming the law of inconsistency will lead women to be
emancipated; but that is the only way.11
Therefore:
No more paternity, which was always questionable and impossible to prove.
No more ownership, no more inheritance []
No more maternity, no more law of lineage []
You want to liberate women! Very well, from within the natural
mother, carry the newborn to the nurturing mother, the functional wet nurse.12
Whether by virtue of marriage laws that subjected wives and children entirely to male domination combined with the prohibition of divorce
in effect from 1816 to 1884, or in fact for other fairly personal reasons it
remains very likely that some women, regardless of whether they are influenced by Saint-Simonianism, around the same time of their own accord
exercised conduct similar to that of Pauline Roland. In very rare cases, they
have explained the reasons for their decision in writing. Far rarer still are
those whose writings have been retained and are available for study.
9
10
11
12
Ibid., p. 70. Religious, because Saint-Simonianism claimed to be a religion.

Ibid., p. 70.
Claire Dmar, Ma loi davenir. Ouvrage posthume, publi par Suzanne au bureau de la
Tribune des Femmes. (Paris, 1834), p. 49.
Ibid., pp. 58-59.
|26 7
The Universal Dower of Emile de Girardin

On 13 May 1881, Elise Reclus wrote Bachofen, reproaching him for not
even mentioning the brilliant works on matriarchy by Mr Emile de Girardin.
He appears to be the one to have caused a stir by raising the question.
Perhaps you were unaware, but now you know.13
No proper biography exists of Emile de Girardin (1806-1881). The character
is too complex, too contradictory, or so it would appear. Baroque. The story
that remains about Emile de Girardin is that of a child born out of wedlock, rejected by his mother, the exceptional and insolent social climber,
the progenitor of the modern press,14 the husband of Delphine Gay (18041855, a French belle-lettrist), their ties with the greatest romantic writers, by
whom he published so many works as continued series in his journals, the
wealthy socialite, in constant pursuit of women and scandals
From 1850, however, the prince-president challenged one democratic freedom after another. Girardin published a pamphlet,15 in which he harshly
condemned the new electoral law, fiercely opposed it, and was said to have
become a socialist.
The day after the coup, Emile de Girardin filed an appeal that established
him as the precursor in all accounts of the general strike: Close the workshops, shut the courts, halt the stock exchange, abandon the theatres, but
open all prisons, where political prisoners languish. All civil servants with
any self-respect will walk off the job [].16
In 1851, when presidential elections were still expected to take place
the next year, a long polemic pitched him against Geniller,17 as well as
against the majority of the republican-socialist Montagnards hoping for a
united candidature. Below are some examples of the arguments raised by
Girardinto support a workers candidature:
13
14
15
16
17
Quoted in the preface to Johann Jakob Bachofen, Le Droit maternel. Recherche sur la
gyncocratie de lantiquit dans sa nature religieuse et juridique. Translated from German,
with a preface by Etienne Barilier (Lausanne, 1996), p. xxx. The French translation
of Droit maternel ends with this sentence a bit like an addition: This world to
which some French writers recommend restoring the principle of Isis, as a unique
remedy, as well as the natural truth of maternal rights (pp. 1197-1198). In a note,
Michelet is also quoted, which is very inappropriate, and Emile de Girardin, author
of La Libert dans le mariage par lgalit des enfants devant leur mre.
Maurice Reclus, mile de Girardin. Le crateur de la presse moderne (Paris, 1934).
Emile de Girardin, 1850, La question du moment. La rpublique est-elle au-dessus du suffrage universel? (Paris, 1850).
Quoted in Reclus, mile de Girardin, pp. 183-184.
Guillaume Geniller (1789-1864), a revolutionary communist activist. Polemic published inEmile de Girardin, La Rvolution lgale par la prsidence dun ouvrier. Solution
dmocratique de 1852, par Emile de Girardin Reprsentant du peuple (Articles extraits du
Bien-Etre universel), (Paris, 1851), pp. 11-23.
268
Society is a pyramid, with property at the peak and work at the

base. The pyramid is to be restored to its foundations.18
Yes, I would elect the worker, as regular election of the worker, taken from the field or the workshop, [] this would be the
consummate peaceful revolution, thiswould be:
Abolishing military conscription.
[]
The free commune.
Closer family ties.
Closer ties [] reveals too little, since when a mother is separated from her children because of work, that forces her to abandon them to survive, does the family indeed exist?
My answer: NO!19
Closer family ties This enigmatic formulation embodies the matriarchy that Girardin took on as his favourite cause. He started from Brussels,
where, naturally, he was forced into exile.
In 1852, La Politique universelle, dcrets de lavenir was published.20 Volume vi
was Le Douaire universel and carried the subtitle: Les enfants sont gaux
devant la mre [Children are equal before the mother]. Girardin presents
a generalization of the free union marriage endures only for those who
want it to, only as a religious oath with no legal value combined with the
commitment by the man, preceding any sexual relations, to provide financial support to his partner and any possible progeny of his. A slightly revised version of the same thesis appears, with substantial additions we
will see how in La Libert dans le mariage par lgalit des enfants devant leur
mre, which Girardin published in 1854.21 He refers in this work to the preface to the book Les Btards clbres,22 which he had inspired A. Charguraud
to write. He presented it again in 1872, during a polemic with Alexandre
Dumas (fils), who had recently (by provocation) encouraged the husbands of
adulterous women, lacking the option of divorce, to assassinatethem! This
appears in LHomme et la femme Lhomme suzerain, la femme vassale. Lettre M.
A. Dumas (fils):
In an open marriage, adultery, this crime that society has invented and does not exist in nature, ceases to exaggerate the pe18 Girardin, La Rvolution lgale, p. 9.
19
Ibid., pp. 22-23.
20
Emile de Girardin, La Politique universelle, dcrets de lavenir (Brussels etc., 1852).
21
Emile de Girardin, La Libert dans le mariage par lgalit des enfants devant leur mre
(Paris, 1854).
22
A. Charguraud, Les Btards clbres. Including a preface letter, by Mr mile
de Girardin (Paris, 1859), pp. 327-334. The list begins with Hercules, Ishmael,
Jephthah and concludes with Emile de Girardin!
|26 9
nal nomenclature [].23 In what capacity and by virtue of which

law does the State marry people either for eternity or temporarily? Why does the State interfere in this? What authority is
claimed here? []24
In an open marriage, conjugal feudalism forfeits its rights,
while humanity recovers its own. The wife ceases to be a vassal,
the husband stops being the suzerain. He lacks the authority to
pardon her, he has no right to kill her. She belongs to herself, as
do the children she brings into the world at her peril [].25
What distinguishes Girardin from Engels, who in 1884 published The Origin
of the Family, Private Property and the State,26 is not the vision of the ideal future
world based on the matriarchy;27 rather, it is not having imagined the primitive era, in which communism and matriarchy were believed to have been
closely linked.
Finally, in the nineteenth century, and more and more as the century progressed, the main question that informed discussions about family within
the republican, feminist, and socialist movements did not concern the matriarchy but rather restoring the right to divorce. Girardin was a strong advocate of this cause, and, remarkably, the person who achieved this, Alfred
Naquet, was one of his friends and produced a plan for a matriarchal society
associated with socialism or communism.
A State Matriarchy: Alfred Naquet

Alfred Naquet was born in Carpentras in October 1834. Encouraged by his
father, he became imbued with the ideals of the Republic and freedom
of thought. A brilliant student, he became a professor at the Faculty of
Medicine in 1863. This was one aspect of his nature, as he authored several
scientific publications.
The other aspect was his passion for politics, which led him to undertake
a variety of generally extremist commitments. In 1867, he was among the
23
24
25
26
27
Emile de Girardin, LHomme et la femme Lhomme suzerain, la femme vassale. Lettre M.

A. Dumas fils. 2nd ed. (Paris, 1872), pp. 28-29.
Ibid., p. 25.
Ibid., p. 26.
Friedrich Engels, Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats
(Hottingen-Zurich, 1884). French edition: Lorigine de la famille, de la proprit prive et
de ltat. French translation by H. Rav, (Paris, 1893).
The universal dower is the equality of the children before the mother; it is the
end of the old world and the beginning of the new one; it means no longer assessing people based on their forebears but based exclusively on their works; it means
replacing hereditary titles with personal achievement, privilege by birth with the
universality of election, aristocracy with democracy, and the universal republic
with the secular monarchy. Girardin, La Politique universelle, p. 318.
27 0
organizers of the Peace Congress in Geneva. At this occasion, he lashed out

against the Empire. Upon returning to France, he was accused of conspiracy
for having belonged to a small Blanquist group (the Revolutionary commune of French workers) and of having inflammatory texts printed, written by Delescluze, Versigny, and Elyse Reclus, calling for a revolutionary
demonstration. His lawyer, Crmieux, deeply detested by the regime at the
time, was unable to avert him being sentenced to fifteen months in prison,
fined 500 francs, and disenfranchised for five years.
This period of imposed rest give him time to write several scientific articles and Religion Proprit Famille,28 published at the beginning of 1869.
This work got him a new, four-month prison sentence, a 500-franc fine, and
permanent deprivation of his civil rights for insulting public moral decency
and contesting the rights of the family and the principle of ownership.
The author of Religion Proprit Famille related his ideas to the tradition
of the great romantic socialist philosophers. Dealing at length with what
he wrote about religion is pointless, as two lines from his conclusion summarize it sufficiently: So, religions no longer have any ground for opposing
progress [...] they have only to disappear.29
As far as property was concerned, Naquet frequently contradicted
Proudhon. Like the Saint-Simonians, he did not condemn goods obtained
through work but rejected the inheritance principle:
We need to find a way to make inheritance impossible without
even harming the owners; we need a solution that will automatically eliminate inheritance, a way in which the laws against
testamentary freedom even become defunct; by virtue of which,
equality from the outset will be achieved by the simple interaction of individual forces. We will find this solution by addressing the institutions of marriage and family.30
Vehemently opposed to the indissolubility of marriage, he was quick to emphasize that he believed it was just as absurd to replace it with divorce. Like
Emile de Girardin, whom he did not yet quote, Naquet advocated suppressing marriage and instating a matriarchy. Subsistence for women and their
children would not be guaranteed by a dower but thanks to assistance from
the state:
28
29
30
In this historical study, Mr Paul Abram deals at length with the book by Mr Alfred
Naquet, Religion, Proprit, Famille and was wise to do so. This book, which was published in 1869, remains most enlightening in several respects. It has been, in my
view, in a moral sense comparable to the programme of Belleville for the political
order. Preface by Lon Blum to Paul Abram: Lvolution du mariage (Paris, 1908), p.
xi.
Alfred Naquet, Religion-Proprit-Famille (Paris, 1869), p. 118.
Ibid., pp. 189-190.
|271
In the future, the family will not revolve around the father but
around the mother, only the mother will pass her name on to
the children, and she alone will have certain limited rights to
them during their childhood. [...] For each child she has, and
until that child attains a specific age, she will receive an annual allowance from society, calculated to enable her to live
comfortably.31
In 1871, Naquet was elected deputy in his Department of Vaucluse. He represented the far left and had to respond to challenges addressed to him as
the author of Religion Proprit Famille. His first justification appeared in
the preface of La Rpublique radicale Dmocratie du Midi, of Avignon, on 7 July
1871: I affirm that [...] I consider the ideas I have expressed, especially in
this third section (the one about the family), to be incompatible with the
morals of our time, although if it were up to me alone, to decree their immediate application, I would be more inclined to let my hand wither, before
I would sign such a decree.32
While awaiting the radiant future, in which free love and the matriarchy
would prevail, Naquet rallied to support restoring divorce. From 1876, when
he submitted his first bill, until 1884, when his third bill, which was very
watered down, was ultimately adopted, Naquet invested considerable energies in the House and then in the Senate, in the press, at meetings. These
efforts made him renowned as the Man of divorce. In so doing, he increasingly came to reject the ideals he had previously supported:
At this time, driven by a zeal I find commendable for its generosity [], I was imbued with communist ideas and ways.
Since then, I have become firmly convinced that [] if, by
chance, the collectivist and communist ideas [] were embraced in a country, this would suppress all civilization, all progress, and all freedom. [] The best evidence, moreover, that I
have abandoned these doctrines is that I support divorce, which
I did not at that time. [...]
Today, by contrast, I am a liberal, an individualist; I am entirely
opposed to the collectivist solution and, therefore, I aim to retain the institution of marriage; I seek to strengthen and con31
32
Ibid. p. 299-300. Still, he envisaged tolerating the most surprising behaviour:

Moreover, if there is a system of absolute freedom, no inclination will be
suppressed. If a man has a highly sophisticated sense of family, nothing should
prevent him from remaining with his children and with the woman he had them
with, the only requirement is that he continue to be loved by her. We claim that
this is rarely the case, but that is simply a matter of personal appreciation that in
no way reduces the rights of the individual. Ibid., p. 305.
Quoted in the preface to another of Naquets publications, La Rpublique radicale
(Paris, 1873), pp. 4-5.
27 2
solidate it, and my sense is that divorce, far from weakening it,
will serve to consolidate and reinforce it.33
After his victory, Naquet may have believed that he faced one of the most
brilliant political careers ever. Not so: he became General Boulangers righthand man, next, he was affected by the Panama Canal affair, and so his career ended! That interlude behind him, he rekindled his interest in political
philosophy and re-examined how marriage, matriarchy, and communism
related to one another.
In fact, he wrote in 1900, in his preface to the book by J.-C. Spence, LAurore
de la civilisation: Only recently did I begin to support collectivism; still, I
have been a socialist all my life.34 Again, in the same year: Yes! My former
partner in crime, my old Reclus! Let us work on improving education, and
let us work especially on scientific progress. That is what will make collectivism necessary tomorrow and may also make anarchism possible in the
centuries ahead.35 Collectivism tomorrow, perhaps anarchy in the centuries
ahead, at that time, however, Naquet continued to believe that laws were
beneficial. Vers lunion libre, which he published in 1908, reflected this conviction: In our individualist and capitalist society [] women who are mothers
still need to be supported by men, as do children. [] Matriarchy is inadmissible here; patriarchy prevails.36 In communist society, care for children
and the elderly will be entrusted to society, and, as Emile de Girardin wanted, as Mr Paul Abram is now suggesting, the mother will pass her name on
to the children, since it is certain only who the mother is. Surnames, which
are now patronymic, will become matronymic.37
Girardin, Naquet, and some others believed that matriarchy was necessary to achieve sexual liberation, while protecting women from the dangers
of their unfortunate propensity toward motherhood. Logically, therefore, in
1900, Alfred Naquet rejoined and sponsored the Ligue de la Rgnration
humaine, a neo-Malthusian organization that Paul Robin had established
four years earlier.38
33
34
35
36
37
38
Speech at the Senate, 1 June 1884. Journal officiel de la Rpublique franaise. Dbats parlementaires. Snat (1880), p. 1018-1019.
J.-C. Spence, Laurore de la civilisation; ou, LAngleterre au xxe sicle. Translated from
English by Alfred Naquet and Georges Moss (Paris, 1900), p. iii.
Alfred Naquet, Temps futurs. Socialisme anarchie (Paris, 1900), p. 316.
Alfred Naquet, Vers lunion libre (Paris, 1908), p. 253.
Ibid., p. 48.
It is even less surprising that from Religion, Proprit, Famille onward, Naquet turned
out to be a convinced Malthusian. The fourth section of his study, which was
about Mariage et famille [marriage and family], carried the title: Le mariage et
le principe de population [Marriage and the populationprinciple], and the third
chapter of this sectionwas:Le remde lexcs de population est dans labolition
du mariage [The solution to surplus population is to abolish marriage], Naquet,
Religion-Proprit-Famille, p. 312.
|273
Paul Robin, Free Motherhood

Paul Robin (1837-1912), founder
of the first French neo-Malthusian organization: the Ligue de
la Rgnration humaine, was
a teacher before dedicating his
energies mainly to the revolutionary cause. He joined the
International in 1866, was active
in Belgium, then, with Bakunin,
in Switzerland, where he joined
the Alliance de la Dmocratie sociale. In 1871, he fled to London
and joined the Council of the
International (from which he
was expelled the following
year, together with the other
Bakuninists, after supporting a
motion, with minority backing,
in favour of work by women).
Paul Robin, ca 1906. IISH BG A11/760.
That was when he discovered that
the Malthusian theories were already profoundly transformed by
radical Anglo-Saxon thinkers, such as Francis Place, Robert Owen, Richard
Carlile, Georges Drysdale, and Charles Bradlaugh...
Robin then tried to convince his revolutionary friends that the population issue was important. To this end he attended the libertarian communist congress at Saint-Imier in 1877 and appealed to the socialist congress
in Marseille (1879). He encountered only indifference and hostility. Invited
by the republicans, by then the majority in the French government, to participate in their educational renewal project, he was for some years forced
to refrain from publicizing his revolutionary and especially his neo-Malthusian convictions. He was appointed inspector of primary education in
Blois, then, additionally, in 1880, director of the first coeducational boarding
school: the orphanage at Cempuis in lOise. At Cempuis, Paul Robin endeavoured to devise principles for education and lifestyle in accordance with his
libertarian ideals. Dismay resounded throughout the conservative press,
and he was dismissed in 1894. This dismissal enabled him to become fully
engaged in neo-Malthusian propaganda. From February 1895, he published
a small educational journal: LEducation intgrale, openly expressing his eugenic and neo-Malthusian interests. He published several propaganda tracts
as well,including:
274
Women, much-loved sisters!

If you believe that your health, your material state, or the circumstances do not enable you, at present, or no longer enable
you to bring a child into the world under the right conditions,
to provide a child with the type of care and proper education
that such a child needs, you have the right and the duty to forego motherhood. []
This depends on you, you are in absolute control of your fates.
Neither you nor your fellow sufferers should ignore that science
has liberated you from the horrible inevitability of becoming mothers
against your will.39
In 1896, he founded the Ligue de la Rgnration humaine, of which the
Objectives included: Disseminating the exact notions of physiological
and social science enabling parents to appreciate the cases, in which they
need to consider carefully how many children they will have, and guaranteeing, in this context, their freedom, and most of all that of the woman.40
In 1901, mentioning in the Ligues journal Rgnration the future of contraceptive methods, he stated: The perfect method, which has yet to be found
and will be the salvation of humanity, must meet the following conditions:
1st depend exclusively on the woman ()41
The texts on propaganda posters that the neo-Malthusians affixed in public places included:
Assez de chair plaisir !
de chair travail !
de chair canon !
Femmes, faisons
la grve des mres !42
39
40
41
42
Printed in Rgnration. Organe de la Ligue de la Rgnration humaine (1900) 1, p. 7.

Robin in Rgnration (1896), Programme issue, p. 4.
Robin in Rgnration (1901), no 4, p. 3.
No more flesh for pleasure!
No more flesh for work!
No more cannon fodder!
Women, let us stage
the strike of mothers!
This slogan is captured by the dedicated songwriter Gaston Monthus in one of his
most renowned songs. See: Chansons historiques de France 148: La grve des Mres
1905, available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51kXfTY7p3M; last accessed
10 December 2013. Robin also considered himself to be a songwriter: here is a
quadrain from one of his works:
Refuse to be a mother
From disease or poverty
Or for a reason... that remains a mystery?
Act freely.
|275
Is the right to refuse to be a mother truly compatible with the matriarchy?

Yes, if we bear in mind that the woman has the right to decide, on her own,
family composition, descendants of mankind. On this subject, Robin nonetheless found that a woman might care to live as a couple and be a mother.
Then, if after one or several experiences, the young woman finds a companion with whom [] she thinks she will be able to spend a long, happy
life [] she can enter a permanent union with him, if he is willing, without
concern for futile legal sanctions, and indulges in the incomparable joy of
having children [], and that these children will have only her surname.43
To conclude this tradition that evolved from assimilating socialism to
sexual liberation and the matriarchy, I would like to quote without further
ado, the particularly revealing title of a pamphlet by Frdric Stackelberg:
La femme et la rvolution Egalit des sexes et union libre aujourdhui, communisme,
matriarcat, amour libre demain. Avec une lettre-prface dAlfred Naquet.44
The different socialist schools at this time, Marxist or otherwise, no longer list among their priorities suppression of inheritance, collectivization of
means of production and exchange, abolition of salaried staff, sexual liberation or instatement of the matriarchy. Briefly surfing the Internet, however,
will reveal that curious and also numerous small factions persist that embrace matriarchy, which some continue to associate with socialism.
43
44
Paul Robin, Libre amour, libre maternit (Paris, 1900), p. 5.

Frdric Stackelberg, La femme et la rvolution Egalit des sexes et union libre
aujourdhui, communisme, matriarcat, amour libre demain. Including a preface letter by
Alfred Naquet (Paris, 1908).
II.11 Neo-Malthusians
A Photograph
Jenneke Quast
In November 2011 the iish received a picture of a group of people sitting in a

conference room. On the back of the badly damaged photograph is written:
Congrs no-malthusien de La Haye 15 X 1911. It was donated by Claude
Villon, a French actress whose real name was Lucette Humbert. She was the
daughter of the French anarchists, pacifists, and neo-Malthusians Eugne
and Jeanne Humbert, whose papers are kept in the Institute.1 At first I recog1
Eugne Humbert (1870-1944) and Jeanne Humbert-Rigaudin (1890-1986). Their

papers were committed to the care of the Institute by Jeannes biographer and the
historian of French neo-Malthusianism, Francis Ronsin. Asked about his motives
for donating this collection to the Institute, Professor Ronsin told me: LInstitut
a appris que javais ces archives. Jaap est venu Paris pour me convaincre de
vous les confier et pour ngocier les conditions du dpt (catalogue, exposition...).
Le contenu de vos collections et de vos recherches garantissait que vous serez
conscient de leur valeur. The archival description of the collection, which includes
an extensive introduction to the work and lives of the Humberts by Professor
Ronsin, hints at a further motive for sending the collection to the iish rather than
a French repository: Jeanne Humbert avait rgulirement voqu devant moi le
sort futur de ses archives. On lavait contacte, dici et de l, pour lui demander un
legs. Untel lui avait conseill de les verser la Bibliothque nationale, et Devalds
[a French anarchist who went into exile in England], en Angleterre, o on vole
q u as t ne o-malth u s i ans
|277
Neo-Malthusian Conference, The Hague, 28-29 July 1910. Notice the modern lamp
hanging from the ceiling. IISH Collection, BG H12/260.
nized only Marie Rutgers-Hoitsema, president of the Dutch Neo-Malthusian

League (nmb) and Martina Kramers, board member of that organization. The
nmb did organize a neo-Malthusian conference in The Hague, but that meeting took place in 1910, not 1911.2
The People at the Conference

We also have a report of the Hague conference, written by Jan Rutgers, at
the time the secretary and driving force of the nmb.3 Besides listing the conference participants and reporting on the discussions, he also gives a de-
moins quen France. This is available at: http://search.socialhistory.org/Record/

ARCH00598/ArchiveAppendices; last accessed on 26 November 2013.
In 1911 the international neo-Malthusianism conference was held in Dresden,
from 24-27 September, on the occasion of the Internationale Hygiene-Ausstellung
(International Hygiene Exhibition).
[Jan Rutgers], Beknopt overzicht van de 3de Internationale Nieuw-Malthusiaanse Konferentie,
gehouden in den Haag op 28 en 29 Juli 1910, onder ere-voorzitterschap van Mr. S. van Houten,
p. 4. The iish also holds Jan Rutgerss papers and the nmb archive.
27 8
tailed description of the conference room4, which he characterizes as spacious, light and modern:
The conference participants were sitting at small tables. Only
the honorary president, Mr. S. Van Houten, the general president, Dr Alice Drysdale-Vickery, and the executive committee
of our League, the organizers [of the conference], were sitting
at the green table. [...] Fresh flowers adorned the tables, a floral tribute paid by one of our female members, which gave the
room a pleasant and festive appearance.5(Rutgers continues his
description:) On all sides coloured charts were hanging from
the walls making visible at a glance population developments
in each country, particularly birth and death rates, drawn and
prepared by the engineer Dr. C.V. Drysdale.5
In our photo sheets of paper with dark shapes can be seen hanging from a
wall, and, although we cannot see the colours, Rutgers description confirms
that our photo is a snapshot of the Hague conference. Eugne Humbert
(the date on the back of the photo is in his handwriting), must have been
mistaken.
With the help of Rutgers conference report, it should be possible to identify other people in the conference room. Rutgers green table must be
the long table in the background. At one end is Marie Rutgers-Hoitsema. She
was a socialist, feminist, and president of the Dutch Nieuw-Malthusiaansche
Bond from 1899 to 1912.6 She was also the second wife of Jan Rutgers. The
man in the middle is the liberal politician Samuel van Houten, who is best
known for the legislation he initiated to prohibit factory work for children under twelve; he also started the discussion on contraception in the
Netherlands. He had been an honorary president of the nmb since its foundation in 1881.7
One of the two ladies with hats on must be Dr. Alice Drysdale-Vickery,
one of the first women doctors in England and a pioneering birth-control
advocate, co-founder of the Malthusian League in England in 1877, and the
president of the Fdration Universelle de la Rgnration Humaine. With
the help of pictures from the Rosika Schwimmer collection at the New York
Public Library (nypl),8 the square jawed woman in the large hat at the end
4
5
6
7
8
In Caf Hollandais, no. 29, Groenmarkt, The Hague.

My translation. [Rutgers], Beknopt overzicht, p. 2. iish, nmb archive. The full text can
be viewed at: http://www.iisg.nl/exhibitions/neomalthusianism/nmb13-1910-cr.php;
last accessed 2 May 2014.
Marie Rutgers-Hoitsema (1847-1934).
Samuel van Houten (1837-1930).
Rosika Schwimmer (1877-1948) was born in Hungary, and was a feminist,
suffragette, and pacifist.
|279
of the long table can be identified as Alice Drysdale.9 The woman with the
round face sitting between her and Mr Van Houten is probably Mrs F. De
Beer-Meyers, vice-president of the nmb between 1905 and 1919.
As Rutgers wrote in his report, the people in the foreground are sitting
at tables with flower vases. The woman at the right holding a pen and looking into the camera is the socialist, feminist, and linguistic genius Martina
Kramers. She translated the conference documents, took minutes and acted
as the conference interpreter. She also mastered Esperanto.10 With the help
of the nypl photos the serious looking woman at the left can be identified
as Bessie Drysdale (1871-1950), Alices daughter-in-law.11 Apart from Bessie
Drysdale and Martina Kramers, we cannot definitively identify the people
at the small tables, but using the collections of the iish and publications on
the Internet, we can make some educated guesses.
From Rutgers report we know who attended the conference.12 He mentions G. Hardy, whose real name was Gabriel Giroud, the son-in-law of Paul
Robin and a militant French neo-Malthusian; Eugne Humbert; Professor
Forel from Switzerland; Aletta Jacobs, the Dutch feminist and suffragette
who was the first woman doctor in the Netherlands; Hlne Stcker, a
feminist, pacifist, and founding member of the German organization Bund
fr Mutterschutz und Sexualreform; the German feminist and suffragette
Marie Stritt, from Dresden, Henriette Frth from Frankfurt; Professor Knut
Wicksell from Lund; and Dr. Anton Nystrm from Stockholm; the Spanish
anarchist doctor and neo-Malthusian Luis Bulffi; Sarolta (or Charlotte)
Steinberger, the first female physician to graduate from a Hungarian university; the educational reformer, feminist, and peace activist Vilma
Glcklich, the first woman in Hungary to receive a degree from the Faculty
of Philosophy Budapest State University; several Belgian neo-Malthusians,
9
10
11
12
Dr Alice Drysdale-Vickery (1844-1929), widow of Charles Robert Drysdale (18291907), feminist and co-founder of the Malthusian League in England in 1877. She
was also the president of the Fdration Universelle de la Rgnration Humaine.
Charles Robert was a brother of George R. Drysdale (1825-1904), the author of the
often reprinted The Elements of Social Science; or, Physical, sexual and natural religion.
An exposition of the true cause and only cure of the three primary social evils: poverty,
prostitution, and celibacy (1854).
Martina Kramers (1863-1934) was an nmb board member from 1899 to 1913.
Bessie Drysdale (1871-1950).
Among those who wished to come but could not make it were neo-Malthusian
pioneers Paul Robin and the Dutch trade unionist B. Heldt, the co-founder, with
Aletta Jacobss husband Carel Victor Gerritsen, of the nmb. Others expressed their
adherence, including the French feminist and birth control advocate Nelly Roussel,
Rosika Schwimmer, and two British eugenicists named Dr C.W. Saleeby and Arthur
P. Busch. The late Dr Charles R. Drysdale, the first president of the Fdration
Universelle de la Rgnration Humaine, was commemorated, as was Dr. Mensinga
of Flensburg, the gynecologist and inventor of the pessarium occlusivum (the
pessary also known as the Dutch cap), who had died that year. The Belgian neoMalthusian pioneer Fernand Mascaux could not attend because he was in the
prison of Nivelles doing time for spreading birth control propaganda.
280
including Emiel Leemans, bookseller in Mechelen, the anarchist Raphal

Fraigneux; and Emile Chapelier, an Esperantist who founded an anarchist
commune near Brussels in 1905.13
A likely candidate for the white-haired gentleman sitting at Kramerss
table is August Forel, a Swiss neurologist and entomologist who published
on ants, prostitution, sexual ethics, Malthusianism, and eugenics.14 He was
also a pacifist, an Esperantist, a fighter against alcoholism, and an adherent
of the Bahai faith. He worked for social reforms to prevent mental illness,
syphilis, and alcoholism. He actively participated in the discussions, especially about medical issues, Thomas Malthuss population theory, and a recently published work by K. Kautsky, Vermehrung und Entwicklung.15
The woman turning towards the camera is probably Henriette Frth,
a German feminist, socialist politician, social worker, writer, housewife,
and the mother of eight children. She was involved in the Jewish womens
movement and in both the liberal and the socialist womens movements,
which was unusual. She was also actively involved in maternity and childrens welfare, the fight against venereal diseases, and, like Forel, a member
of the German Bund fr Mutterschutz, an organization for the promotion of
maternity welfare.16
The gentleman turning around at the moment the picture was taken
could be Knut Wicksell, a well-known Swedish economist. In 1922 Wicksell
and Anton Nystrm, a doctor, helped found the Swedish neo-Malthusian
Society.17
Unfortunately we cannot definitively establish who the man at the rostrum is. Like Luis Bulffi and Emile Chapelier, he sports a moustache and
goatee, but so did countless other men in that period. It could also be Mr
Leemans, Dr Nystrm, or Dr Van Epen, a Dutch physician who lectured on
tuberculosis and neo-Malthusianism.
Neo-Malthusianism: Another Social Reform Movement

The people in the photo had come to The Hague to discuss contraception
because they were convinced that limiting births was a remedy for many if
not all evils of society: poverty, human misery, womens health problems,
sexual frustration, prostitution, overpopulation, infant mortality. Contrary
to Thomas Malthus, they considered contraception a feasible and acceptable
means to curb population growth. Besides neo-Malthusianism, they were
13
14
15
16
17
We dont have his papers but we do have those of Eugne Gaspard Marin, who had
joined Chapeliers commune. On the Waterfront, no. 13 (2006), p. 4-5.
August Forel (1848-1931). The iish has dozens of his publications, including his
memoirs, which contain a few portraits.
Karl Kautsky, Vermehrung und Entwicklung in Natur und Gesellschaft (Stuttgart, 1910).
Henriette Frth (1861-1938). Her papers are kept in the iish.
Knut Wicksell (1851-1926).
|28 1
engaged in a variety of other partly overlapping social movements: feminism (all women at the conference); labour reform (Van Houten), pacifism
(Humbert, Forel); the Esperanto movement (Chapelier, Kramers); the fight
against poverty (Frth); sexual reform (Rutgers, Forel); prostitution reform
(Forel); eugenics (Robin, Humbert, Forel, Rutgers); temperance (Forel),18
free-thinking (Van Houten, Wicksell, Chapelier), education reform (Robin,
Glcklich); and even spelling reform (Rutgers).19 Not surprisingly most conference participants left traces in the iish collections.
Apart from a shared commitment to neo-Malthusianism and the fight
against ignorance and prejudice, this group of people was far from homogeneous in their politics, with Van Houten at the right end of the political
spectrum and Chapelier at the left. They also disagreed over other issues,
had different reasons to promote neo-Malthusianism and different agendas
as well. Rutgerss eugenic views, for example, differed from those of someone like Forel.20 Henriette Frth, to give another example, warned against
going too far with neo-Malthusianism, comparing France unfavourably with
Germany.21 Eugne Humbert would probably disagree.
In spite of these differences, the atmosphere during the conference seems
to have been pleasant enough. Emile Chapelier, who published his own
report of the conference, recalls that despite initial misgivings, the discussions were respectful and that it had been a pleasure to exchange ideas with
an intellectual like Forel, with whom he thoroughly disagreed.22
The Conference
What was the conference like? A hundred years ago the conference layout, organization, and programme were surprisingly similar to those of
present-day small scale international meetings such as, say, an ialhi23 conference: a room with bookstalls displaying books, pamphlets, and flyers;
reports on the situation in each country; lectures on a special theme; discussions; financial matters;24 and even an excursion on the last conference
18
On the practical information page of the conference programme the addresses of

an alcohol-free hotel (Htel-Restaurant De Dageraad) and a vegetarian hotel and
restaurant (Pomona) are given.
19
In his report Rutgers wrote vertrouwelike and historiese in line with R.A.
Kollewijns Dutch spelling reform proposals.
20
H.Q. Rling, De tragedie van het geslachtsleven : Dr. Rutgers (1850-1924) en de NieuwMalthusiaansche Bond (Amsterdam, 1987), pp. 254-255.
21 [Rutgers], Beknopt overzicht, p. 17.
22
Emile Chapelier, La procration consciente: dbats du Congrs International: tenu La Haye
les 28 et 29 juillet 1910 (Bruxelles, 1910), p. 10. Chapelier also observed that women
were in the majority and commanded admiration for the straightforwardness and
depth of their discourse when they took the floor.
23
The International Association of Labour History Institutions.
24
At this conference a fighting fund was established for hiring lawyers and to pay
fines.
282
Neo-Malthusian Conference excursion, Kagermeer, Saturday 30 July, 1910.

Schwimmer-Lloyd collection, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New
York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
day. Demonstrations of contraceptives, however, are not usually part of

non-medical international conferences, but at this meeting, at the end of
a private session, Swedish Dr Nystrm, with good humour, according to
Rutgers, showed various neo-Malthusian appliances commenting on their
respective merits, limits, and risks.
The French and Dutch neo-Malthusian protagonists Humbert and Dr
Rutgers are absent from our conference photo. The nypl however also has
a photo of the conference excursion, a boat trip on Saturday on a lake not
far from The Hague. The conference participants are pictured on a boat.
The nypl caption mentions Bessie Drysdale, Martina Kramers, and Hlne
Stcker, but sitting in the middle under a large hat is, unmistakably, Alice
Drysdale, and next to her are Marie and Jan Rutgers. Behind Dr Rutgers is
Eugne Humbert. Jan Rutgers is smiling broadly, probably happy that the
conference was over and all had gone well.25
25
The Schwimmer-Lloyd collection, New York Public Library, available at: http://
digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?1536883; last accessed 2 may 2014. The nypl
also has a much better copy of our conference photo. This photo is undamaged,
and shows some more charts and an unknown woman, but the only information
about the photo they have is: Birth Control Congress, Holland, 1910. Available at:
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?1536884; last accessed 2 May 2014.
II.12 Secret Suitcases

Dutch Communist
Party Papers*
Margreet Schrevel
Every Dutch male present at the meeting was named either Joop or Jaap,
which is just about the same. The atmosphere was tense, as there was a
great deal at stake in this encounter with the mysterious Russian guest.
Jaap Kloosterman had been invited as a representative of an internationally influential institution in order to corroborate the request of the
Dutch communists. What was going on here?
When the archives of the Communist International were opened in Moscow
in 1991, the administrators of the Dutch Communist Party (cpn) records sat
on the edge of their chairs. There were many Dutch party documents from
the prewar period on the shelves in Moscow. A special Stichting (foundation) to administer the party archives had been established in 1990, when
the cpn disbanded. The Foundations membership consisted of an equal
number of former party officials and leftist historians.1 Its contacts with
the International Institute of Social History were already close, whereas
relations with the Russian Center for the Conservation and Research of
*
This contribution is exclusively based on the memories of the author, who

arranged the archives of the cpn on behalf of the Stichting tot Beheer van de
Archieven van de cpn from 1992 to 1993. The paragraphs on the Memorial go
back on a research article by Susan Legne and Margreet Schrevel, De cpn en het
communistische verzet in Zesde Jaarboek van het Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie
(Amsterdam 1995) pp. 239-253, in particular pp. 243-246.
E.g. Joop IJisberg, Jan-Jaap Flinterman, Barbara Henkes, Susan Legne, Joop
Morrin, Jaap Wolff.
sch r e v e l s e c re t s u i tc as e s
|28 5
Documents from Contemporary History (rchidni) were much looser. The

rchidni2 housed the Comintern records and the archive of the prewar cpnleader David Wijnkoop. On a fine October day in 1992, Mr Kyrill Anderson,
the keeper of the Russian records, came to visit the dreary former party
premises on the Hoogte Kadijk in Amsterdam to hear the wishes of the
Foundation. On this special occasion, the Foundation had delegated its senior party officials, adroit in negotiating with the Soviet brothers.
After some introductory remarks, Joop IJisberg, chairman of the
Foundation, quickly came to the point. Twenty years of party archives
were stored in Moscow, because from 1919 until 1943 the cpn had sent
reports on all its meetings and activities to the Comintern. These archival
materials were unique, as their Dutch equivalents had all deliberately been
burned in a stove as soon as the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in May
1940. The Foundation, the one and only legitimate heir to the cpn, now
insisted on taking possession of its prewar archive. Alas, Mr Anderson did
not agree with this. In flawless English he pointed out that documents,
once dispatched, become the property of the destination, and the original
sender loses all claim to them. To this he added the argument that the
Netherlands had always been a tiny nation and the cpn was never more
than an insignificant entity within the mighty Comintern. Likewise the
Foundation had no rights to the archives. After these devastating words,
Joop Morrin, the partys former Asia specialist, took the floor. In a moment
he threw the anti-imperialist and anti-colonial principles of his political
fathers overboard. He argued that the cpn and what was now left of it did
have the right to speak up, because the Netherlands were once, precisely
during the Comintern years, a vast and very important colonial nation with
an influential communist party. Jaap Wolff, once the personal secretary
of party leader Paul de Groot (who was never in love with the Russians),
mocked that Holland may be small, but Russia is the largest dreadfully
bureaucratic country in the world. Thereupon several national virtues
and vices were discussed and a promotional gift was presented which,
according to Russian traditions, Anderson left unwrapped. Jaap Kloosterman
hardly made any significant contribution to the discussion, as he was
immersed in some other urgent matter and stayed in the adjacent room
most of the time to make important phone calls. Later that year the cpn
archive in Moscow was microfilmed on behalf of the Foundation.3
2
3
Erstwhile Institute of Marxism-Leninism, nowadays Russian State Archives for

Social and Political History; www.rgaspi.ru
Microfilms now at the iish, as is the archive of the cpn. In 1996, the International
Committee for the Computerization of the Comintern Archives was established.
It ventured to digitize one million pages of the most significant documents in
Moscow as well as the finding aids. Since 2004, these documents are available
through a database. www.comintern-online.com
286
cpn Archives
Whereas most of the prewar archive is in Moscow, the postwar history of
the party is documented in The Hague in the archives of the Dutch Central
Intelligence Agency bvd. Incidentally the first intelligence agency in the
Netherlands was created in the same year as the Comintern (1919). In these
bvd archives too, many cpn documents come directly from the party office
itself, as the ever present spies in the party truthfully sent all reports and
minutes of important board meetings to The Hague. It is no longer contested that the cpn always had a many moles in all its parts. The German
intelligence office sd too had very successfully disseminated its agents in
the party. Many of these were communist exiles in the interwar period who
received aid and shelter from their Dutch comrades. When the war began,
the Sicherheitsdienst in Berlin already had a card system with 800 names
and addresses of Dutch communists.4 Later on they were easily arrested at
their home addresses. The Dutch cia usually bugged the party leader even
in his bedroom5 and thus built an impressive collection of primary sources
on Dutch communism. Sadly enough, the archives of the bvd are virtually
impenetrable. The lucky historian who is able to storm the fortress only
gains access to a minor part of the collection and cannot see all of it.
For all that, the cpn itself would beat all intelligence agencies and
Moscovian archives when inaccessibility, mystification, and alienation of
documents are at stake. It was common practice for party cadres to hide
suitcases filled with confidential documents in their attic or cellar and regularly move them from one house to another so as not to be discovered by
the enemy. The enemy always lurked outside and, in an even more menacing manner, inside the party. In the Cold War period, when the cpn led a
quasi-underground life and was torn by inner conflicts, the number of secret suitcases must have been at its peak. The party leadership had given
guidelines that the formation of any kind of archive or written accounts
should be avoided. As the cp parliamentarian leader Marcus Bakker put it:
We were an anti-paper party.6 Nevertheless, it was felt necessary to put
certain matters on record, as only papers could provide convincing evidence
in case of conflicts or cleansing procedures that might be needed in the future. The party had an intelligence agency of its own, the Kadercommissie
(Cadre Committee) which investigated and recorded the background of
hundreds of cadres. A very small percentage of these files has been saved
4
5
6
A copy of the files concerning Dutch communists in the archive of the

Sicherheitspolizei und Sicherheitsdienst Berlin 1941 is kept at niod, Amsterdam.
As assessed by Igor Cornelissen in his biography of the cpn leader Paul de Groot,
Staatsvijand no 1 (Amsterdam, 1996).
M. Schrevel, Inventaris van het archief van de Communistische Partij van Nederland (cpn)
1940-1991. Annex archief Marcus Bakker (Amsterdam, 1994), Introduction.
|28 7
as proof of their existence. Every cadre of consequence had his own hiding
place for the files under his jurisdiction.
In 1992, one of those suitcases was delivered under cover of night to the
former party premises, and was found next morning by the archivist. It was
accompanied by two old desk drawers. From these odd packages emerged a
mass of intriguing documents from the period 1940-1946.7 To this very day,
it has not been clarified where this asset to the party archive actually came
from. The size of it was enormous. At one go, the archival section on the
war period measured two metres, whereas the majority of the papers from
the 1950s and 1960s has not been preserved. It is a testimony to the historical awareness of the resistance fighters who felt the need to collect these illegal papers in the face of a deadly enemy.
Memorial
A specific part of this nocturnal accession requires more attention, as it describes the ways communists dealt with such documents. This is the collection named Gedenkboek Communistisch Verzet (Memorial Book of Communist
Resistance), a memorial that in fact never saw the light. As of 1 September
1945, the communist daily De Waarheid (The Truth) repeatedly called for
documentation and personal papers on all comrades who have sacrificed
their strength and life during the struggle against the German occupier.
More than 900 relatives of deceased communists, mostly widows, submitted
photos, farewell letters written by their husbands on the eve of execution,
letters from concentration camps, memoirs, and reconstructions of the activities of the deceased. Biographical data were noted on forms, as was information on the date of arrest and their activities on behalf of the party
before the war. The Memorial Department, as it was called, had collected
936 files that contained very interesting documents and knowledge about
party members in wartime.8
The forms yielded a great deal of hitherto unknown data on the construction of the party during the occupation. For instance, the sad total sum of
Dutch communists who died under Nazi terror could now be fixed at an
approximate 1000. Usually the loss had been estimated at thousands or even
tens of thousands. The records testify that six percent of these victims was
female. The activities of the female members were mostly concerned with
distribution of illegal newspapers. The forms confirmed the image of the
cpn as a party of schooled manual workers. But among the dead there were
also 20 bakers, 17 artists, one acrobat, one Italian chimney sweep, and one
police officer. Producing and distributing illegal newspapers was in most
cases ground for arrest, but armed resistance or sabotage was mentioned
7
8
Susan Legne, Margreet Schrevel, De cpn en het communistische verzet, in Zesde

Jaarboek van het Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (Zutphen, 1995) pp. 239-253.
cpn archive, iish, inventory nos. 131-207.
288
123 times. Eleven per cent of the victims was of Jewish descent. These people were killed because they were communists, not because they were Jews;
91 percent was seized by the Germans according to a determined plan,
mapped out after 22 June 1941. By 1943, almost all experienced elderly party cadres had been killed or detained in concentration camps, and underground activities had to be carried out by novices. Apart from the forms,
the Memorial collection included some heart-breaking personal letters and
many descriptions of specific group activities and local initiatives.
The papers reveal that editors once worked on the documents, preparing
them for the printing office. There is even a letter stating that the Memorial
is ready to go to the publishers in January 1946. But in the end this did not
happen. If required, former party officials declare that they do not remember anything about the project, nor are there any written traces about the
end of the project in the archive. It is only possible to guess the reasons.
Lack of funds or scarcity of pulp are unlikely, as the party was in its heyday
and enjoyed much goodwill from the public, precisely because of its recent
actions against the Germans. An educated (admittedly cynical) guess would
be that the Memorial would result in the upgrading to hero status of nearly
1000 dead communists, who would then become more popular than the survivors who were presently in power. De mortibus nil nisi bonum, of the dead
nothing but good is to be said, a fine expression, provided some good words
are also said of the living. Another guess would be that the events and facts
as sketched in the Memorial no longer fit the canonical version of wartime
history as prescribed by the party leadership. For instance, there was no
mention of the name of Paul de Groot in the memoirs on the grand general
strike against the Nazis organized by the underground cpn in February 1941.
The contributors to the Memorial could not possibly foresee that the postwar party leader Paul de Groot would pose as the initiator of this illustrious
February Strike.9 Moreover, a considerable number of the stories in the draft
of the Memorial hinted at painful matters such as treason and guilt of fellow party members.
The contributors were from the grass-root levels and had noted down
their experiences and observations, creating a history of communist resistance that did not match the official version. And the official version too was
bound to change many times, as in inner party circles the war started as
soon as the World War was finished. Various heroes of resistance were referred to the garbage heaps of history whenever the leadership felt the need
to do so. Written, or even worse, published traces of them would complicate
such procedures. This is the most plausible reason why the book never appeared and the draft and source materials for it were hidden.
Jan Willem Stutje, De man die de weg wees. Leven en werk van Paul de Groot 1899-1986
(Amsterdam, 2000), passim.
|28 9
Even in the 1980s, when a young generation of historians sympathizing

with the cpn prepared scholarly publications on the party in wartime,10
they were not told about the hidden materials. For these historians, this
was unfortunate, but even more embarrassing is the fact that the surviving relatives, who sent in their dearest private letters and photos in 1945,
never saw them again. Not only were they put aside, but the party failed
to provide any explanation, or return them to their original owners. In the
1990s, when the location of this collection was revealed to the public, some
relatives checked with the archivist, including a woman in her fifties who
had never seen a portrait of her father before. This Memorial book section in
the cpn archive is both an important historical source and a burden to an
archivists conscience, simply because it should not be there.
This conclusion is valid for other types of documents in the archive as
well. A small number of confidential papers, or rather pieces of paper containing confidential information, has been handed down. On the one hand,
they contain information on individuals that might shock or grieve their
kin. On the other, these same documents provide clear insight on the mores
and internal communication in the cpn. These mores have no equivalent in
any other Dutch political party. Party members were liable to inform their
superiors on matters that people would normally reserve for God, their vicar, or confessor. For instance, if a communist couple wanted a divorce, they
would propose this to a leading committee that would determine whether
a divorce would benefit the party. One of these aspiring divorcees described
in a letter the poor sexual performance of her husband, who was a wellknown party cadre. This same awkward candour about sexual performance
can be found in the published memoirs of some (ex-)communists.11 It is indeed a remarkable counterpoint to the usual communist secretiveness on
other matters.
Another troublesome category in the archive are the files that were made
up by the internal secret service of the party. A few of these have been preserved inadvertently.12 The obscure mechanisms of exclusion, tattling, and
guilt by association practiced in the cpn during the Cold War are here revealed in strident tones. Quoted from the solid memory of the archivist: I
saw comrade X in the red light district, exposing herself as a whore. I was
told that comrade Y had an abortion. Comrade Z told us that he spent a
vacation in Belgium, but I had a look at the mileage indicator of his car and
it was huge. He probably drove to the forbidden country Yugoslavia.
10
11
12
E.g. Hansje Galesloot, Susan Legne, Partij in het verzet. De cpn in de Tweede
Wereldoorlog (Amsterdam, 1986); W.F.S. Pelt, Vrede door revolutie. De cpn tijdens het
Molotov-Ribbentrop pact 1939-1941 (Den Haag, 1990).
Dutifully recorded in Margreet Schrevel, Gerrit Voerman (eds), De communistische
erfenis. Bibliografie en bronnen betreffende de cpn (Amsterdam, 1997).
cpn archive, iish, inventory nrs 708-754.
290
Sorting out the confidential documents, 1992. Left: Joop IJisberg, right: Margreet
Schrevel. Photograph by Susan Legne.
Both categories of files need to be cherished and well-kept, as they are

highly informative about the partys history and culture. All the same, they
can inflict serious harm to individuals. In 1992, on a day full of amazement,
laughter, and horror, a small delegation of the Foundation and the archivist
read every inch of these papers (photo). A small percentage of these files
was put aside to remain inaccessible until 2012.
An impressive amount of archives in the realm of Dutch communism is
now housed in the Institute. Additions keep coming in as party officials die
and covert suitcases filled with documents are found in their home content.13 There are some restrictions in the access to these archives, but these
can be overcome. The time has come for a completely new and innovative history of the Dutch communist movement. An unconventional, lucid
thinker with a penchant for mystification and secretiveness would be the
desired author. His endeavour would undoubtedly disclose many remarkable parallels and common ground among communist organizations and secret societies. Secret Suitcases may be a suitable title for such a book.
13
For example, the archives of Joop Wolff, Jaap Wolff, Daan Goulooze at the iish.
II.13 Long Live the Library!

The Book Collections of
the iish, in Particular
the knaw Library*
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk
Introduction
In the early 2000s I worked at the iish as a phd student, writing a dissertation on early modern womens work. I felt I was in the right place at this
institute: the Research Department focused on family strategies and increasingly on global labour history. The academic atmosphere and debates were
lively and colleagues were friendly. The best thing was that the iish was
not simply an institute of researchers. There were also many capable people
working on the development and preservation of collections and developing a digital infrastructure. In the past I had worked closely with some of
them on a few business history projects, but in a context of inventorying
the available archival material of the firm in question, rather than as a frequent user of the core iish archives.1
*
1
The author would like to thank Wiljan van den Akker, Lex Heerma van Voss, Frans
van der Kolff, Jan Lucassen and Jenneke Quast for their useful suggestions.
For instance, the preliminary inventory work by Bouwe Hijma in the Philips
archives for the history of the Philips Retirement Fund. Elise van Nederveen
Meerkerk and Jan Peet, Een peertje voor de dorst. Geschiedenis van het Philips
Pensioenfonds (Amsterdam, 2002).
v a n n e d e r v e e n m e e r ke r k long li v e the li b rary
|29 3
As a phd researcher working with primary data on early modern local

labour markets from many regional archives, I did not consider myself
an important consumer of the iish collections. This self-image changed
drastically, however, when in the fall of 2003 the evaluation board visited
the Institute. This external committee wanted to talk to several staff
members, and I was granted the dubious honor of being selected by the iish
directorate to be one of the interviewees. To prepare for this, Henk Wals
gave me a short briefing. Remember, he emphatically told me, if the
committee wants to know how your research relates to the iish collections,
do not forget to mention your use of the extensive library!
This was actually the first time I realized I was indeed a frequent user
of the institutes collections. Over the past year and a half, I had primarily
visited local archives all over the Netherlands, but had I visited many libraries outside the iish? Of course, there had been an occasional loan from a
university library of some obscure book on women textile workers in prehistoric times.2 But the majority of my then still incomplete bibliography was indeed derived from the iish library collection. From then on, I felt
even more at home than before. No longer did I have to feel ashamed that
my research did not exactly overlap with the iish collections, I was in fact a
wholesale user of the Institutes inventory!
As a tribute to this important part of the iish collection, I would like to
devote the following pages to the peculiar history and contents of what
is probably the largest sub-collection of the iish library: the library of the
Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (knaw), which was given to the Institute
in 2005.
Background of the Transfer

Since its establishment in 1808, the Royal Institute (later Royal Academy for
Arts and Sciences knaw) already owned a respectable library. Not only did
King Louis Napoleon contribute a number of duplicates from the Bibliothque
Nationale in Paris, but also many members, associates, and correspondents
bestowed (part of) their book collections to the Academys library. David
Jacob van Lennep, a classicist who worked as the Institutes librarian from
1817 to 1851, played an important role in further building the collection.3
When Van Lennep died, the secretary of the Academy took over his job. In
1858, a new catalogue of the librarys collection appeared and some important literary collections, for instance those of Willem Bilderdijk, were collected in the final decades of the century. However, in the course of the
twentieth century, the library turned from a library of books to one of
2
3
E. Wayland Barber, Womens work: the first 20,000 years: women, cloth, and society in early
times (New York, 1995).
http://socialhistory.org/nl/collecties/gidsen/akedemiebibliotheek-geschiedenis; last
294
The Interior of the knaw Library (Trippenhuis, Amsterdam).

Collection KNAW. Photograph by Gert Jan van Rooij.
journals.4 This implied that the former interest in the librarys book collection faded. Therefore, large parts of the collection were outsourced to other
Dutch institutes. In 1938, for instance, the collection of western manuscripts
containing manuscripts by the seventeenth-century literary scientist
Constantijn Huygens (1596-1687) and his son Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695)
were given in permanent loan to the Royal Library in The Hague. Other
parts of the collection (eastern manuscripts) were lent to the University of
Leiden and the collection of coins went to the Koninklijk Penningkabinet, now
for as long as it will still exist the Money Museum in Utrecht.5
The Academy Library thus outsourced important parts of its collections,
making it perhaps an even more haphazard assemblage than before. Still, in
the 1990s, interest in the library was revived. A restoration department was
installed, and parts of the collection were used for exhibitions. Also, efforts
4
5
Lectures on the library of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences,
On the Waterfront. Newsletter of the Friends of the IISH, 11 (2005), pp. 9-15.
http://socialhistory.org/nl/collecties/gidsen/akademiebibliotheek-geschiedenis; last
|29 5
were made to reorganize the catalogue of the librarys collection and to perform research on specific subsets.6
Despite this revival of interest, the collection became too large for the
Academy to house within its walls in the late twentieth century. The Royal
Academy decided to find accommodation for its library in the newly established Netherlands Institute for Information Services (niwi). This was a
merger of six different institutes that were supposed to focus on the provision of (especially digital) infrastructure for the arts and sciences in the
Netherlands. In practice, however, it was not a very coherent umbrella for
its many different activities, some more successful than others. In 2005
Wiljan van den Akker, then the director of the knaw-institutes, decided to
dissolve the niwi, and to continue some of its activities in a different form.
But of course, there was still the valuable large collection of books, journals,
pamphlets, and other curiosities. Selling parts of the collection would have
been difficult, especially what to do with the rest of the material.
In one of his conversations with Jaap Kloosterman, the director of the
International Institute of Social History at the time, Wiljan van den Akker
mentioned his dilemma with the Academy library. Fortunately, Jaap
Kloosterman as always had a pragmatic attitude and offered to house
the entire collection at the iish. While the collection appeared to be somewhat scattered, Kloosterman saw its value quite clearly. In Van den Akkers
words, he was not one of those posh directors who says: Well, Im sorry,
this doesnt fit my collection, but instead he was pragmatic and helpful.
Perhaps, Van den Akker speculates, this was also owing to both mens coinciding interests.7 Kloosterman probably saw this acquisition indeed as
complementary to the iish collection. It was a typical scholarly library with
different cultural and scientific specializations than the social and economic collections the iish and Economic Historical Library housed until
then. It constituted an extension of the larger Enlightenment project, just
as was the case with the emancipation of the labouring classes.8 Or, in the
words of Jan Lucassen, the French Encyclopedists, Smith, Darwin, Stuart
Mill e tutti quanti cannot be considered separate from Marx, Engels, Bakunin
and pals.9
This is how the iish acquired the largest library collection at once in
its history thus far. The Academy library added a sub-collection of about
200,000 volumes, which in large part covers the physical and biological sciences. The book collection comprises around 60,000 documents, and there
6
7
8
Lectures on the library, p. 10.

Interview with Wiljan van den Akker, 13 July 2013. Van den Akker is a professor in
modern Dutch literature at Utrecht University.
As was for instance the idea behind the Exhibition Catalogue published on the
occasion of the 75 year existence of the iish. Jaap Kloosterman and Jan Lucassen,
Rebels with a cause. Five centuries of social history collectied by the International Institute of
Social History (iish) (Amsterdam, 2010).
Personal e-mail from Jan Lucassen, Monday 21 October 2013.
296
are about 2,000 drawings, plates, and maps. Furthermore the Academy library contains almost 3,000 journal series of various scientific societies and
about 5,000 pamphlets.10 While perhaps not at the core of the Institutes collection profile, the directorate still believed this was a valuable collection to
acquire. First, because the Academy library represented a unique historical
collection, which was in fact endangered.11 Some of the books in the library
are the only copy available in the Netherlands, and sometimes even very
rare in the world. Also, the librarys contents were, surprisingly close to
the areas of interest of iish and neha.12 Not only indirectly, since many of
the works represent a collection of contemporary works of propositional
knowledge la Joel Mokyr.13
What is more, apart from the majority of books on physics and biology, there were also many examples of historical accounts of the fifteenth
through nineteenth centuries that may be very suitable for social and economic historical analysis. For instance, the collection contains many manuscripts and documents of the Directorate of the Mediterranean trade, established in 1625 to maintain relationships with the Ottomans, Venetians,
and other notable powers in the Mediterranean. Another example is a fairly
unique copy of the work of an English shipbuilder, William Sutherland:
Prices of Labour in Ship-Building, a two-volume manuscript which records elaborate calculations of costs of labour in this particular industry.14 Moreover,
from the more recent books in the Academy Library, the iish made a selection of secondary literature, including many unpublished phd theses, which
were able to nicely complement the more recent collection of the library.15
So, there is also a more direct link to the use made of the library by other
historians as well as to the research performed at the institute. One particular suggestion for current research, especially in the context of global labour history, are the many travel descriptions of scientists in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. They discovered a new world, just as traditional
labour historians have now come to uncover new regions of the world by
increasingly studying their labour histories, including the very first colonial
encounters. In the context of the regional desks that have been extended by
the Institute over the past few years, ranging from Southeast Asia to Latin
America, it is all the more valuable to reflect this in its collections. Let us
now turn to one of the volumes in the book collection, the Historie Naturael,
10
11
12
13
14
15
Source: http://socialhistory.org/nl/collecties/gidsen/akedemiebibliotheekgeschiedenis; last accessed 24 April 2014.

As the reader may know, this was one of the founding principles of the
International Institute of Social History in 1935.
Lectures on the library, p. 10.
Joel Mokyr, The Industrial Revolution and the Economic History of Technology:
Lessons from the British Experience, 1760-1850, Quarterly Review of Economics and
Finance, 41 (2001), pp. 295-311.
Lectures on the library, pp. 11-15, some other notable examples are mentioned.
Personal e-mail from Jan Lucassen, Monday 21 October 2013.
|29 7
or a translation from Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Salamanca 1588).

The fact that this work was almost immediately translated from Spanish to
Dutch in itself shows the growing interest of ordinary people in the then
rapidly globalizing world at an early stage.
The Historie Naturael by Jos de Acosta

One of the very old books in the collection of the Royal Academy is (a translation of) the Natural History of the West-Indies by the Spanish Jesuit Jos
de Acosta.16 Its author, Jos de Acosta, was born in 1540, as one of nine children of a rich entrepreneur from the prosperous Castilian merchant town
of Medina del Campo. According to his own testimony, Jos ran away from
home a few months before his twelfth birthday in 1552, and entered the
newly established Jesuit Society in Salamanca. The reason for joining the
congregation was probably from a genuine religious vocation, as he saw
the great charity, kindness, humility, and fervor that existed in it.17 Jos
also expressed the wish to travel to the Indies, although spreading the
word of God among Africans was also on his wish list.
Indeed, his wish would be fulfilled, although he had to wait 20 years, in
which he travelled a great deal throughout Europe. In 1572 dAcosta finally
sailed to Latin America, where he would remain for 15 years. He visited regions that today include Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Mexico. On his journeys he
noted his observations of natural phenomena, many of them related to the
geophysical sciences. Not only did he comment on the skies, climate, winds,
volcanic activity, earthquakes, and a variety of new minerals, plants, and
animals, but he also wrote extensively on the social structure and habits of
the inhabitants of the region. When he returned to Spain in 1587, Acosta
started writing the Historia, which is about his observations of America. He
wrote another, controversial book in which he strongly criticized the way
the Spaniards treated the indigenous population.18
The Historie Naturael was a pioneering study in the sense that it constituted
the first detailed European description of the geography and culture of Latin
America. In the first half of his book, Acosta described the natural world of
the Americas, including many of its physiological and biological characteristics. He argued that the Americas formed an integral part of the universe,
and that they were formed of the same four physical elements (earth, wa16
17
18
Jos de Acosta, Historie Naturael ende Morael van de Westersche Indien: Waer inne
ghehandelt wordt van de merchelijckste dinghen des hemels, elementen, metalen, planten ende
ghedierten van dien: als oock de manieren, ceremonien, wetten, regeeringen ende oorloghen
der Indianen, Translated from Spanish by Jan Huyghen van Linschoten (Enkhuizen,
1598). Call no.: knaw AB E 4913 s.
As quoted by his biographer, Claudio M. Burgaleta, in Jos de Acosta, s.j. (1540-1600):
His Life and Thought (Chicago, 1999), p. 9.
Augustin Udias and W. Stauder, Jesuit geophysical observatories, eos Trans. Am.
Geophys. Union, 72 (1991) pp. 185-187.
298
Title page of the Historie Naturael in the IISH collection, KNAW AB E 4913.
Photograph by the author.
ter, air, fire) and the same natural orders (mineral, vegetal, animal) as the
other continents a belief that apparently not many of his contemporaries
shared. In the second half of the book, he described the human inhabitants
of the New World. Although he certainly did not describe the indigenous
peoples as equal to Europeans, he did acknowledge that they were intelligent, spiritual, physical, feeling, and rational creatures. Also, he stressed the
accomplishments of the inhabitants of the New World, their culture, and
the fact that they had their own history, which was generally orally transmitted. In fact, as Butzer has argued, Acosta was the first European to explicitly recognize that New World phenomena existed in their own right.19
He also fervently countered the common opinion that the Indians descended from Jewish lineage [...], because they were fearful, pusillanimous, of
plentiful ceremony, sensible, and mendacious.20 As explanation, he stated
19
20
Karl W. Butzer, From Columbus to Acosta: Science, Geography, and the New
World, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 82:3 (1992), pp. 543-565, 557.
Dat dIndianen vant Joodsche geslachte afcomen, houdt de gemeyne Man
voor een seker teycken, omdat de selve vreesachtich, cleynmoedich, van veel
ceremonien, sinnich ende leugenachtich zijn. Acosta, Historie Naturael, Cap. 23, fol.
48-48v.
|29 9
that the many peoples of the

Indies were too diverse to have
descended from a single tribe.
What is of course rather
striking, is that this work was
translated from Spanish into
Dutch in 1598, in the midst of
the war between the Spanish
Kingdom and the provinces of the
Netherlands trying to fight for
their independence. How can we
explain this phenomenon?
For one thing, the Spanish
Kingdom, although facing difficulties, was still one of the
worlds major powers at the end
of the sixteenth century. In the
Northern Netherlands relatively
few people spoke Spanish, certainly compared to the Southern
Jan Huygen van Linschoten (ca. 1563-1611).
Netherlands, which remained
Collection Maritiem Museum Rotterdam.
in Spanish possession, although
there are indications that many
important Dutch authors at the
time at least mastered some of the language. For instance, important litterateurs such as Coornhert, Hooft, and Cats were probably able to read some
of the major Spanish literature of their time.21 Translating it, however, was
quite a different matter.
Most probably the genuine interest of Acostas translator, Jan Huygen van
Linschoten, played a decisive role in the creation of the Historie Naturael. Van
Linschoten was a Dutch merchant and explorer, who served the Portuguese
for many years, and as secretary to the bishop of Goa. He travelled to the
East Indies only returning to the Netherlands in 1592. He devoted four
years of his life to writing his Itinerario. Voyage ofte schipvaert, naer Oost ofte
Portugaels Indien inhoudende een corte beschryvinghe der selver landen ende zeecusten (1596). This work, in which he apparently relied heavily on earlier
Portuguese accounts of the natural and social descriptions of Portuguese
India, became well-known and was used frequently by later voc sailors
who sailed to the East Indies. According to Kern and Terpstra, Linschoten
was captivated by Acostas eloquent descriptions of the West Indies, and
he felt obliged to translate them into Dutch as a counterpart to his own
descriptions of the East Indies. Linschoten, who in his Itinerario had also
21
G.S. Overdiep, Geschiedenis van de letterkunde der Nederlanden. Deel 3 (Antwerpen/

Brussel/s-Hertogenbosch, [1944]), pp. 60-62.
300
made some remarks on the West Indies, stated that in no way could these
compare to Acostas descriptions, which were in all of the writings of the
authors intention in case more highly taken, more gracefully described,
and more perspicaciously elaborated than my own exercise and humble
mind encompassed, or ever could encompass.22
Chance and the Wider Meaning of the Historie Naturael as Part of

the iish-Collection
As we have seen above, much of the history of the Historie Naturael as well
as its acquisition by the iish were accidental. If it hadnt been for the particular interest of Jan Huygen van Linschoten, the book may not have been
translated into Dutch in the first place. While we do not know exactly how
the manuscript became part of the knaw Library, we may safely assume
that it was part of one of the inventories that were bequeathed to this collection over the past 200 years. And, finally, if it hadnt been for the particular circumstances in which the directors of the knaw and the iish happened to talk about this library collection in the mid-2000s, it may not even
have been saved for posterity.
On the other hand, this particular item is not unique in the Netherlands.
According to antiqbook.com, it is available in at least one Dutch antique
shop, although it costs almost 3,000 euros. Also, Huygen van Linschotens
translation is available in various Dutch libraries, such as the Royal Library
in The Hague and libraries of the University of Amsterdam and of Utrecht
University. The Historie Naturael may not be the most pressing example of
the need to preserve a rather haphazard but historical collection of books
and other manuscripts (known as the knaw Library). Still, the manuscript
is valuable enough, and other pieces in the large collection are indeed more
exceptional and rare.
The history of the knaw Library shows that history and its artefacts are
far from always coherent and logical. They are to a certain extent based
on chance. And although it may not be the prevailing attitude today, it is
entirely legitimate also to acquire archival material and books in this way,
out of a genuine interest and love for the historically contingent. Just to
avoid the chance that some very valuable material may get lost forever.
Moreover, the chances are great that parts of these seemingly coincidental
acquisitions may in the end perfectly fit and complement existing
collections. The same may be argued for (parts of) other collections that
22
[...] in alle stucken des schrijvers voornemen in dien hoogher ghenomen,

cierlijcker vervaet, ende scherpsinnigher uytghevoert te zijn, dan mijn oeffeninghe
ende gheringh verstandt bedroech, ofte noch soude bedraghen. Introduction to
the second edition of Jan Huygen Linschotens Itinerario (first edition 1596), edited
by H. Kern and H. Terpstra, (Den Haag, 1955), p. xxxvi. http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/
lins001itin01_01/lins001itin01_01_0006.php; last accessed 24 April 2014.
|301
are currently under threat, or will be in the near future, not necessarily
far from home.23 As was recently argued, library collections can be highly
informative, not only by studying their contents, but also by studying their
histories.24 As we have seen above, the knaw Library can also be considered
an autobiography of a culture,25 and it is thus advisable to keep it as a
separate collection instead of blending it with other parts of the iish
collection.
23
24
25
Until recently, for instance, the unique kit-Library collections were severely threatened. Remarkably, the Alexandrina Library in Egypt decided to rescue two-thirds (c.
700,000 items) of the collection of the Royal Institute for the Tropics (kit). See e.g.
Veel boeken Instituut Tropen gered, nrc Handelsblad (1 November 2013), p. 16.
Jaap Kloosterman, Unwritten autobiography: Labor history libraries before World
War I, in Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen (eds), Working on Labor: Essays in
honor of Jan Lucassen (Leiden, 2012), pp. 395-416.
As quoted in Kloosterman, Unwritten autobiography, p. 395.
II.14 The iish as a

Trailblazer in
Technology in
the 1990s
Jaap Kloostermans
Transformative
Breakthroughs
Henk Wals
Appointing Jaap Kloosterman deputy director of Collections in 1985 may

have been one of the most fruitful decisions ever by Eric Fischer (the iish director since 1984).1 Although not previously the most progressive institution
among archive and library services, the iish was rapidly transformed into
an early adopter of new technology, with exceptionally original ideas about
how best to apply it. Many of these ideas were inspirational insights of Jaap
Kloosterman, who in turn became the director in 1993. As a consequence,
in the 1990s the iish established a technological edge, which was a driving
force behind these golden years at the Institute.
Computers
Eric Fischer, formerly a navigating officer on seafaring vessels, was not initially convinced of the merits of computers in historical research and was
highly sceptical of the incipient alpha informatics. Still he was sufficiently
1
International Institute of Social History, Annual Report 1985, p. 23. In November 1985
Jaap Kloosterman was initially appointed as a temporary replacement for acting
librarian Dr Fritjof Tichelman, who was incapacitated by a serious car accident.
w a l s the i i s h as a trai lb laze r
|303
open-minded to allow Kloosterman and others to explore what information

technology could offer the Institute.
In 1985 the iish therefore purchased three Oc text processors for the secretariat.2 This was the first experience that the Institute acquired with computers. Fischer chose the Oc brand, because he wanted this investment in
excess of 80,000 guilders to benefit Dutch corporate industry.
The reorganization that the director carried out at the time was supervised by an external commission of librarians and archivists who stressed
with some input from Jaap Kloosterman that an automated catalogue was
indispensable for the new organization.3 The Ministry of Education and
Science allocated 700,000 guilders toward purchasing a computer system.
The knaw and the iish then added 150,000 guilders each, yielding a onemillion guilder budget for purchasing and retrospectively introducing the
card catalogues.4 During the years that followed, an additional 1,500,000
guilders was allocated toward retro-introduction and equipment via what
was known as the Ministrys Intentional Equipment Scheme.5
Not everybody at the iish welcomed this trend. The cataloguing department presented a petition carrying a great many signatures from those who
opposed automation. They feared occupational erosion. Some also believed
that computers emitted radiation and were medically harmful. Once the
computers were operational, however, very few signatories wanted to restore the card catalogue.
The instigator, Jaap Kloosterman, did not have the mindset of a traditional
archivist or librarian. Though familiar with the standard library and archive
rules, he based his decisions primarily on how researchers operated in practice. This was why the iish opted to ensure access to all types of material
present at the Institute via a single system. Kloosterman believed that researchers were interested primarily in finding information. Whether such
information was contained in an archive, book, newspaper, photograph, or
poster, was of secondary importance to users. The iish thus became one of
the few institutes in the world where just about the entire archive is accessible, also to visitors, through one central catalogue.6 Of course the system
needed to be equipped to handle this, and Geac, a company of Canadian
origin, was commissioned for this task.
Following the text processors for the secretariat, the iish purchased the
first personal computer in 1986. An iish delegation under the aegis of Jaap
Kloosterman visited several computer companies to this end. The portable
ibm selected was the size of a sewing machine and was equipped with a mi-
2
3
4
5
6
International Institute of Social History, Annual Report 1985, p. 15.

Ibid.
International Institute of Social History, Annual Report 1987, p. 18; International
Institute of Social History, Annual Report 1988, p. 18.
3 0 4
niscule amber screen. The number of computers at the iish subsequently

increased rapidly.
One way of curtailing costs was to purchase the computers in parts and
assemble sections of them at the Institute. That Kloosterman was personally
involved here highlights the pioneering stage of these efforts at the iish.
The deputy director of Collections learned rudimentary programming in
Basic and even designed a course on how to use personal computers, starting with an explanation about the binary system, which Kloosterman regarded as indispensable knowledge for understanding computers. This outlook was very characteristic of his mindset: to have an informed opinion
about something, Kloosterman was convinced one had to know everything
there was to know about it.
In his own pursuit of new knowledge, Jaap Kloosterman even attended
one of the few courses in his career around this time: a three-day training about the RBase 5000 database system. The insight he acquired in the
mechanism of relational databases benefited him in his subsequent career. Kloosterman was also interested in digital humanities or alpha informatics, as it was known at the time. In late 1987, for example, he attended
the founding meeting of the Vereniging voor Geschiedenis en Informatica
[Association for history and informatics] as an interested observer. This interest as well as that of research director Jan Lucassen paved the way for
what was to become an important pillar for iish research: databases.
In the late 1980s Kloosterman started talks with the Leiden-based
Nederlands Historisch Data Archief (nhda), which was interested in acceding to the knaw and possibly becoming part of the iish. Kloosterman regarded collecting, analysing and providing access to social history data as a
new responsibility for the iish. The expertise of the nhda could facilitate
this. In 1994 the nhda did indeed join the knaw, following mediation by the
iish, but it became part of the Nederlands Instituut voor Wetenschappelijke
Informatievoorziening (niwi) rather than the iish.7 The outcome was different with respect to the Historische Steekproef Nederland (hsn) [Historical
sample of the Netherlands], with which talks were in progress around that
time as well. The HSN did ultimately enter the iish and to this day figures
prominently in the research infrastructure for scholarship in Dutch social
and economic history.
The foresight of Jaap Kloosterman in this field greatly benefited the
Institute. In 2002 the hsn acquired a grant exceeding 3 million euros from
the nwo large investments programme, while the fnv approved 800,000 euros toward building a database of Dutch trade unions. Building databases increasingly became a methodological foundation for research at the iish. In
the years that followed, several data hubs were set up for the Global Labour
History research programme.
|305
In the second half of the 1980s substantial progress was made on retrospective introduction of the card catalogue in the library system. Most of
the work was outsourced. The conversion took place at a mind-boggling
pace. Within two years the titles of all printed materials were available.8
In 1989 the next stage began, in which the descriptions of the visual material were entered and descriptions generated of material that had yet to be
catalogued. This required compiling a new thesaurus, based on the options
a relational database features. Most images lack a title, complicating provision of access.9 The image project comprised various stages: first the photographs, then the posters, and subsequently the prints. The revolutionary
feature was that a digitized version was generated for each image or group
of images, which could then be retrieved on the computer in the reading
room (and later via internet). The project was funded by the Ministry of
Education and Science and was completed as planned in 1996.10
Director & www

In 1993 Eric Fischer left the iish to head up the Verbond van Verzekeraars
[league of insurers]. Jaap Kloosterman was appointed to succeed him.
Around this time while visiting the nhda, he discovered a new phenomenon: the World Wide Web. nhda director Peter Doorn presented his latest gimmick: a Mosaic browser for displaying digital documents on servers
all over the world. Kloosterman understood the potential immediately. By
December 1995, the iish catalogue became accessible online.11 The iish also
expressed an interest in an instrument that other archives confronted only
years later: the born-digital archive. A pilot project was launched to obtain
digital materials about the events in the former Yugoslavia.12
In that same year, an evaluation commission chaired by the Utrecht professor later an iish staff member Jan Luiten van Zanden observed that
the iish should aim to retain the technological edge achieved.13 This was
precisely the intention of Jaap Kloosterman: the effect of new computer and communications technology is comparable to the invention of the
printing press. Both generating and distributing knowledge and sharing
views and providing stimuli have overcome boundaries of distance, time,
and scope that prevailed for centuries, he wrote in the 1996 annual report.14
In keeping with this trend, the iish became one of the first institutions in
8
9
10
11
12
13
14

Jenneke Quast, Een nieuwe onderwerpsontsluiting, in Eric Fischer, Jaap
Kloosterman, Henk Wals (eds), Vele Gezichten. Achter de schermen van het IISG
(Amsterdam, 1991), pp. 65-70, 69.
Ibid., p. 13.
Ibid., p. 11.
3 0 6
continental Europe that year to join the Research Library Group (rlg). The
consortium consisting primarily of American universities maintained a
joint catalogue comprising over seventy million records. Adding the iish
catalogue to this database considerably enhanced the discoverability of the
Institutes collection.15 In 2006 the rlg merged with the oclc, which led the
iish records to be included in WorldCat.
While the iish website served primarily to give the general public access
to the catalogue, in 1996 additional items were posted on the site, such as
information about the European Social Science History Conference, the
Labour and Business History section of the www Virtual Library, and the
first virtual iish exhibition, The Chairman Smiles.16 Visits to the iish website
soared, from 20,000 unique visitors in 1996, to 150,000 in 1997, 250,000 in
1998, 457,000 in 1999, 762,000 in 2000, reaching 1.3 million in 2001.17 The
peak was in 2006, when the website drew over 4 million visitors. Visits declined after that, possibly because of the abundance of fascinating websites
by then.18
Jaap Kloosterman was the very first to understand the fundamental
change that the Internet brought about for the Institute:
Clearly, we have to reconsider what we are doing, and how we
are doing it. The new environment should have an impact not
just on the way archives are indexed or publications presented,
but on our perspectives on the users we serve. Traditionally, the
better part of our patrons consisted of several thousand WestEuropean academics. No longer. The Institutes Webservers
received close to half a million visitors, many of them from
countries and segments of society that we have never reached
before,
so he explained in the 1999 annual report.19
Like many libraries and archives, the iish had a considerable backlog in
cataloguing. Although the reorganization and automation of the 1980s led
to an impressive increase in productivity, substantial sections of the collection remained inaccessible to users. In 1994 the backlog in cataloguing books and periodical had indeed been reduced by sixty percent, but
the large collections successfully acquired meant that there was still some
catching up to do.20 Following an investigation of alternative methods for
15
16
17
18
19
20
Ibid., p. 12.
Ibid., p. 48.
Institute of Social History, Annual Report 1996, p. 43; International Institute of Social
History, Annual Report 1998, p. 11; International Institute of Social History, Annual
|307
providing access, Jaap Kloosterman approved an unorthodox solution, involving bulk access to relatively cohesive sections.21 His rationale was that
providing general access was preferable to none at all. While this course of
action appalled some conventionally-trained librarians and archivists, many
researchers were delighted. In some cases this procedure even yielded items
that would have been overlooked by using individual access methods. Other
heritage institutions have adopted similar methods.
Researchers often work differently than library experts think they do.
Based on a user survey conducted in 1995, for example, Jaap Kloosterman
determined that the overwhelming majority of researchers found what
they needed through searches by title, subtitle, or author fields in the automated iish catalogue. Use of the substantive classification system was minimal. Substantive cataloguing was done by academic staff of the Collection
Development and was therefore costly. As a result of these findings, the iish
stopped classifying printed material in 1996. This revolutionary decision
met with resistance in traditional library circles. The board of the Stichting
IISG had reservations as well. As expected, however, new publications remained perfectly retrievable. And, as had been the case with bulk access,
other libraries eventually followed the example of the iish.
The iish was also at the vanguard in coping with another traditional library problem. Perhaps more than do many other libraries the iish works
with collections especially newspapers in poor condition. Restorative efforts would be doomed, reasoned Jaap Kloosterman. From the early 1980s,
the iish therefore invested most of its conservation budget in microfiche
recordings, with a view to securing the content of the material in danger
of disintegrating. In 1999 Kloosterman observed with satisfaction that our
longstanding policy to focus on microfilming rather than restoration is increasingly being accepted [by the outside world] as the most feasible way of
tackling the problem.22
Golden Years
The 1990s were golden years at the iish. Its technological edge gradually
waned in the new millennium. The Institute remained a trailblazer in library and archive technology and in research databases, but many of the
novelties that Jaap Kloosterman had introduced had become commonplace
in the 2000s. In university settings and at other knaw institutes digital humanities was truly getting off the ground. Interesting advances included
text mining and crowd sourcing. In addition, techniques and methods were
developed that would have been of interest to the iish but were not adopted
21
22
Report 1999, p. 20; International Institute of Social History, Annual Report 2000, p. 22;
Institute of Social History, Annual Report 1997, p. 45.
3 0 8
there. Heritage studies made a quantum leap as well, and libraries and archives started to digitize their holdings. Sources increasingly became available online, while the iish except for the visual materials was not quick
to digitize its collections.
What led to the loss of the leading edge? The lead undoubtedly had an
inhibiting effect. Early on, the iish devised a highly functional, popular
website that grew to massive proportions within a few years, comprising
hundreds of pages. Still, this website was built in flat html, based on the
technological insights of the 1990s. When content management systems became the vogue in the decade that followed, the enormous conversion operation was long delayed.
Perhaps an unnoticed complacency set in as well. In the 1990s and early
2000s the iish was widely acclaimed and consulted. The iish administration
advised about merges in the Dutch archive system. Even those in charge of
the National Library of the Netherlands spent an afternoon at the iish to
learn how the iish achieved such feats. So much acknowledgement may
instil the sense that outside surroundings have little left to offer and may
cause an organization to lose its creative drive.
More objective factors are identifiable as well. One concerns the serious
financial predicament of the iish in the first decade of the 21st century. This
was when public funding for scholarship was reduced. The knaw had to
pass these budget cuts on to the institutes. In research, this was largely offset by raising project grants from research institutes and contract funding.
The collections were an entirely different matter. In addition, the lump sum
ceased to be adjusted for inflation in the 1980s. In 2002 Jaap Kloosterman
calculated that the real fixed income of the iish had been reduced by virtually half by all the assorted spending cuts over the past decade.23 In addition
to its diminished financial leverage for innovation, the iish had to reorganize twice in this period and was forced to make staff members redundant.
Such measures can paralyze an organization for some time.
In 2004, Jaap Kloosterman, the main driver of the iish as an innovative organization, suffered a heart attack. He recovered rapidly but had to consider
his health more than he had in the past. In 2007 he resigned from his position as director to dedicate his efforts entirely to historical research. In the
course that the iish pursued under the aegis of his successor, technological
advances and digital humanities became secondary.
23
III
THE IISH AND
EASTERN EUROPE
III.1 Publications of Posrednik

and Svobodnoe Slovo
Publishing Houses in
iishs Russian Collections
Els Wagenaar
Preliminary
In 2010 Jaap Kloosterman took the initiative to start the Memory Project.
Most of the collaborators in the Collection Development Department were
due to retire soon, often after decades of work at the iish, and much of the
knowledge about the collections would probably get lost when they retired.
The goal of the Memory Project was to give them the opportunity to record
in articles or web presentations information about (parts of) the collections
that was stored in their memory, but for various reasons could not be incorporated in the standard catalogues or archival descriptions. This contribution is one of the results of this project.
The most important part of the Russian collections are the archives of
nineteenth-century thinkers and political activists, often formed during
their exile outside Russia, beginning with the archives of the revolutionary
populists of the 1870s (Alexander Herzen, Petr Lavrov, Valerian Smirnov).
A second category was the archives of world-famous anarchists such as
Michail Bakunin, Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, and Senya Flechine.
Then there is a third group of materials that concern social democracy:
in addition to Pavel Axelrods vast collection of personal papers, there
are smaller collections of Georgij Plechanov and Aleksandr Potresov, who
w a g e n a a r p o sr e d ni k and s v ob odnoe s lov o
|31 1
Nikolay Petrovich Bogdanov-Bielsky, Sunday Reading in a Village School (painting, circa

1899) IISH BG A44/144.
together with Vladimir Lenin, Vera Zasulich, and Julius Martov strove
to introduce social democracy in Russia. The archive of the SocialistRevolutionary Party, psr, by far the largest and most illustrious organization
archive in the Russian collection, reached the iish in 1938. Since the early
1990s, the iish has worked closely with Russian grass-roots initiatives to
collect archives and gather documentation. The Institute has obtained
copies of the Memorial and Vozvrashchenie archives, comprising thousands
of files filled with memoirs, surveys, literary statements, and biographical
data about victims of Stalinist terror. Finally, the archive of the Alexander
Herzen Foundation (a Dutch initiative from the 1970s to publish the
writings of Russian dissidents in the West) contains a wealth of data from
and about the samizdat and correspondence with Russian authors.
In addition to archives, iishs Russian collections are a real treasure trove
of publications of the social movement itself, books, periodicals, and leaflets. Among the specialized libraries and subject-based collections, there is
the Lavrov-Goc library (this was the psr party library and contains approximately 10,000 titles, including Marxs Russian books with his personal remarks), the library of the Bund (the Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeiterbund in
Lite Polyn un Rusland, a collection comprising 20,000 leaflets and pamphlets), the library of Boris Sapir (1902-1989), a Russian social democrat, who
led a turbulent life of exile and emigration, became the head of the iish
Eastern Europe desk in 1936, and remained affiliated with the Institute for
3 12
many years after the Second World War. His library comprises hundreds of
titles on socialist history, humanities, and the arts), and the late twentieth
century mnob collection, containing newspapers, newsletters, and bulletins
from movements ranging from leftist extremists to the ultra right wing, the
womens and environmental movements and the like, from the Gorbachev
era to the present.
Also worth mentioning is the large collection of original posters in constructivist and social-realist styles from the countries of the former Soviet
Union, and the Russian Childrens Books collection from the 1920s and
1930s, often illustrated by famous avant-garde artists.
Shortly before the start of the Memory Project the iish received a very interesting addition to its Russian collections: a collection of brochures, published around 1900 by the Russian idealistic publishing houses Posrednik
(The Mediator) and Svobodnoe Slovo (The Free Word). This collection made
a fine addition to the publications of these publishing houses already at the
iish, and so formed a good opportunity to examine them more closely and
to document this material as a whole.1
Posrednik Publishing House

Following the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the number of village schools
and libraries increased significantly, and there was much interest in
vneskolnoe obrazovanie (after school education), but there was hardly any
reading matter available in the villages. The few farmers that were able
to read had to content themselves with hagiographies, published by the
Orthodox Church, or lubki: cheap, popular prints reviled by those in intellectual circles. A functioning network of publishing houses and printing companies was also lacking. Posrednik publishing house, founded by
Leo Tolstoy and his ideological ally Vladimir Chertkov in 1884, committed
1
Though not precisely documented, it is likely that many of Posredniks and

Svobodnoe Slovos publications in iishs collection originate from the uk (Zhook)
collection acquired in 1949 (Vasily Pavlovi uk (1876-1949) http://www.iisg.nl/
archives/en/files/z/10773375.php). Regarding this collection, the 1949 annual report
notes the following: Undoubtedly, the most important event in the life of the
Russian Cabinet during the course of the last year has been the purchase of a
small Russian library from Mrs. Zhook from London, which she and her deceased
husband W. P. Zhook who at the beginning of this century published under
the aliases Baturinsky and Baranov, and was author of amongst other works A.I.
Herzen, his friends and acquaintances (1904, Russ.) established partly in Russia,
but especially abroad. The acquisition of this library represents a special enrichment for the cabinet. [...] the Zhook collection comprises some 270 brochures,
primarily foreign publications about the various ideologies within the Russian
revolutionary and opposition movement. [...] and the especially numerous group of
works by the Tolstoyans (circa 100 works), which represent a marvellous addition
to the cabinets Tolstoy collection.
|31 3
itself to fill this gap by distributing simple, informative booklets

written in plain language, with
a morally uplifting message.
Tolstoy wrote numerous educational stories for the publishing
house, and even though their
moral tenor was limited mostly
to innocent matters such as a
the non-violent pursuit of good,
being content with a simple life,
and the promotion of community spirit, his stories were nevertheless often rejected by the
censors, though he himself was
left alone.
In 1885, Pavel Biryukov became
a co-publisher for Posrednik.
He worked very closely with
Tolstoy in the succeeding years
and became his biographer.
Another long-time contributor to
Posrednik was Nikolai Rubakin.
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828-1910) and Vladimir
He wrote a large number of edGrigoryevich Chertkov (1854-1936). Photo:
ucational booklets, published
1905/1906 (On back of photo stamp Christchurch/
manuals for the establishment
Hants). iish BG A13/963.
and management of village libraries, and developed into a renowned bibliographer. He maintained close contacts with revolutionaries from various tendencies at the
time, though he took an independent position towards them. He saw more
in enlightenment and education than in violent action.
He was a contributor to Posrednik from its beginning, but also published for the marxist journal Novoe Slovo and wrote, under the alias Sergei
Mikhaylovich Nekrasov, illegal pamphlets which were released by the psr
and the rsdrp. In Sredi knig, his manual for establishing and organising such
educational libraries, he wrote: The book is one of the most powerful instruments in civilizing and educating the people, in schools and elsewhere,
in the struggle for truth and justice.2 Unlike Tolstoy, he greatly valued combating ignorance and superstition by promoting exact knowledge about natural sciences, for example.3 His more revolutionary minded contemporaries,
2
3
N.A. Rubakin, Sredi knig (Among Books) St-Petersburg, 1906, p. 1. (iish R1/10M).
N.A. Rubakin, Uslovija rasprostranenija estestvenno-naunych znanij v
Rossii. (Doklad, itannyj na II sezde russkich dejatelej po technieskomu i
3 14
like Georgi Plekhanov, one of the founders of Russian social-democracy, and

literary critic Nikolay Mikhaylovsky, didnt think much of Tolstoys stories
nor of publications by Posrednik. They accused them of spreading superstition and encouraging the passive acceptance of fate. The journal Russkaja
Mysl criticized the booklets for focusing on individual virtues: modesty, patience, and eliminating evil within the individual person rather than fighting social ills.
Practical Obstacles: Censorship and Distribution

The government enforced strict supervision over the nature of the peoples
libraries. Literary works approved by the censor for the general reading
public could still be designated
as unauthorized for inclusion
in village libraries, thereby exposing them to a form of double censorship. The Ministry of
Education annually compiled a
comprehensive list of books falling under that category.4 In a
brochure about peoples libraries, S. Stakhanov summarizes a
series of humorous situations, in
which a library manager could
find himself if he followed these
censorship rules: is it permitted
for the library to possess a book
designated as approved last year,
but no longer so this year? May
the library make a collection of
stories available, if one of those
stories has appeared in a separate, unauthorized publication?5
Another problem involved
the distribution of Posredniks
Pavel Ivanovich Biryukov (1860-1931).
releases. Russias vastness comiish BG A48/189.
bined with its poor infrastruc-
4
5
professionalnomu obrazovaniju v Moskve, in: Novoe slovo, 1896, nr. 7, April, p. 86

ev. (iish ZO 22159). See also A.E. Senn, Nicolas Rubakin. A life for books (Newtonville ma,
1977), p.11-12 (iish 133/224).
V.R. Lejkina-Svirskaja, Intelligencija v Rossii vo vtoroj polovine XIX veka (Moscow, 1971), p.
271-272 (iish 36/138).
S. Stachanov, Narodnaja biblioteka-italnja i ee posetiteli (Moscow, 1900), p. 17-20 (iish
R349/30).
Letter from N. Rubakin to P. Axelrod, 3.5.1926. As the founder and director

of the Institut International de Psychologie Bibliologique, Rubakin sent a
letter of appreciation to Pavel Axelrod, who had congratulated him on his
forty years of literary, social and scientific work. Rubakin writes that he
especially appreciates the fact that Axelrod emphasizes his efforts to be a
writer for the labourers and farmers who have so little access to the achievements of social, scientific, and philosophical thinking. How does one ensure
that these achievements become commonplace, especially for the working
class? Rubakins institute aimed to give an exact scientific answer to this
question by means of experimental and other scientific methods. This research is referred to as biblio-psychology. IISH Axelrod Archive, 38.
|31 5
3 16
ture made the distribution of goods problematic, though the publishing

house managed to successfully resolve this issue for its booklets by employing an existing network of ofeni (pedlars). Following the example, and
with the help of the commercial publishing house Sytin, these travelling
merchants proved to be willing to carry Posredniks booklets with them in
their baggage. Posrednik would eventually become one of the most successful publishing houses for this type of reading material, boasting more than
a thousand titles in huge impressions. In rural areas, they presented a welcome counter to the detested lubki pamphlets.
From Posrednik to Svobodnoe Slovo

Posrednik Publishing House would continue to exist into the 1920s.
However, Chertkov and other followers of Tolstoys ideas were forced to
leave Russia by the end of the nineteenth century.6 In the words of editor
Pavel Biryukov: [...] our publications were subjected to such strict censorship that it became utterly impossible to continue our work [...] Everything
that Tolstoy, our most important colleague, wrote was so reviled that the
censors were filled with panic and fear at the mere sight of his name.7 They
were eventually exiled from Russia in 1897, partly because they had helped
a group of Duchobors to establish themselves in Canada with Tolstoys financial support. This religious sect was persecuted in Russia, partly because
they refused to serve in the military because of their non-violence principles.8 Chertkov then founded the publishing house Svobodnoe Slovo in
Some archive material about Tolstoy, Chertkov and the Tolstoyans can be found in
the archives of the War Resisters International (WRI) (http://www.iisg.nl/archives/
en/files/w/10773401.php) (inventory numbers 496 and 497) and the Charles William
Daniels Company (http://www.iisg.nl/archives/en/files/c/10741558.php) (inventory
numbers 111-144).
7
From the introduction of the first edition of Svobodnoe Slovo. Periodieskij sbornik, pod
red. P. I. Birjukova. (Purleigh, Essex, ertkov, 1898-9), nr. 1-2, p. 3 (iish ZO 22285).
8 The iish possesses a small archive on this religious sect (http://www.iisg.nl/archives/
en/files/d/10749160.php). The 1949 annual report of the iish mentions: Separate
mention deserves a small archive, comprising about 250 documents related to
the emigration of Duchobors to Canada. These Duchobors are one of many sects
representing the richness of Russian religious life. They are of importance to social
history on account of their social beliefs: their communism and strongly rejective
attitude towards the state. [...] In 1895, Duchobors conscripted to military service
refused to take arms and every Duchobor burnt his weapons in a solemn show of
resistance. The Russian government responded with persecutions and reprisals.
And hence we arrive at our Russian collection, since the persecutions to which
the Duchobory were subjected, spurred L.N. Tolstoy and his followers to unleash
a protest against the action by the Russian government. This resulted in their
granting authorisation to the Duchobors to emigrate; the money to finance the
emigration could be accumulated, as Tolstoy himself offered the proceeds of his
novel Resurrection. Between 1898 and 1899, 8200 men, women and children,
split up in three groups, voyaged to Canada, after an unsuccessful attempt at
Christchurch, England, with the

intention of publishing Tolstoys
works there, which had been
banned in Russia, and to make
known the facts regarding
Russias political and social reality, which on account of censorship cannot be released in
Russia.9 A journal of the same
name was also released, with
Biryukov as editor.10 The publishing house soon became very
successful. During the period between 1897 and 1900, through
various channels, some 23,777
sheets of print, a weight of
about 15 pood were smuggled
into Russia.11 Biryukov settled in
Geneva, where he founded the
journal Svobodnaja Mysl (Free
Thought),12 which existed until
1901. The journal Svobodnoe Slovo
existed until 1905.13
9
10
11
12
13
|31 7
V. Garshin, Signal. Razskaz. (Moscow, 1910). 32 p.

No. 40. The books cover reads: Authorized for
school libraries, for primary and secondary education, for peoples libraries and reading rooms,
and for public readings. IISH Bro 5596/5.
establishing themselves in Cyprus. In our small archive, we have now found

several letters of correspondence of persons involved in the emigration, including
4 letters by L.N. Tolstoy, copies of letters from and to him, letters by his son S.L.
Tolstoy, and by his followers Chertkhov and Sullerzhickij, amongst others. Several
letters by Duchobors are also included.
Otet knigoizdatelstva Svobodnago Slova V. i A. ertkovych za period 1897-1900 gg.
(Christchurch, A. Tchertkoff, 1901), p. 19 (iish R3/9).
Svobodnoe Slovo, Periodieskij sbornik, pod red. P.I. Birjukova. (Purleigh, 1898-1899, 1-2)
( iish ZO 22285) and Svobodnoe Slovo, Periodieskoe obozrenie, pod red. V. ertkova
(Christchurch, 1901-1905) (iish ZK 22226).
Otet knigoizdatelstva Svobodnago Slova V. i A. ertkovych za period 1897-1900 gg.
(Christchurch, A. Tchertkoff, 1901), p. 15 (iish R3/9). A single sheet (peatnyj list) is
16 to 20 pages, a pood is about 16 kg.
Svobodnaja Mysl. Izd. vejcarskago otdela Svobodnago slova. Eemesjanoe obozrenie.
(eneva, 1899-1901) (iish ZO 22166).
In nr. 16 of 1901 of Svobodnaja Mysl, there is an announcement by Biryukov that the
journal will subsequently be edited by Chertkov, that the independent publication
[Svobodnaja Mysl] will be retired, and that he will remain a Svobodnoe Slovo employee.
In no.17-18 of May 1905, the editors write in the epilogue: With this edition of
Svobodnoe Slovo, we are forced hopefully merely temporarily to cease the
continued publication of this journal, on account of a lack of materials.
III.2 Bakunin and

Bacon Cake
E-editing in
Social History*
Lex Heerma van Voss
Tickets and Digitization

We all know what a ticket is: a small piece of printed paper, proof we are
entitled entrance, or to a good or service. But since when did this become
pervasive? In Britain, the Eighteenth Century saw the widespread use of
tickets. Understandably, the public had to adjust to the idea that a small slip
of paper could represent clothing left at a check-in counter, a pawned object, the right to have a free paupers meal or to leave an institution, wages,
a journey, or access to a game or a meeting. A ticket may even represent a
person, as a visiting card was also called a ticket. The British Museum admitted visitors by ticket from 1759, but because access to anyone willing to
pay an entry fee was more democratic than the Museum wanted to be, a
complicated vetting system determined who could purchase these tickets.
The ticket had really arrived in 1821, when Queen Caroline was refused entrance to the Westminster Cathedral coronation ceremony of George iv, her
estranged husband, on the ground that she could not produce a ticket.
This brief history of the ticket is based on an article by Sarah Lloyd.1 Lloyd
can show how the ticket spread, since she can quote from a large number
*
1
Thanks to Joris van Zundert and the editors for comments on a previous version of
this essay.
Sarah Lloyd, Ticketing the British Eighteenth Century: A thing never heard of
before, Journal of Social History, 46 (2013) 4, pp. 843-871.
h e e r m a v a n v o ss baku ni n and b ac on c ake
|31 9
of eighteenth-century sources, especially newspapers, which she searched

for ticket and other terms like lot, token, or card. This type of research,
where an object is searched through large amounts of source material, has
become feasible only recently, since large digitized sources the historians
form of big data have become available. Digitization has not only changed
the way historians use edited sources, but also the way source editions are
produced. This essay looks at the changes digitization has brought to source
editing, using the iish edition of the Oeuvres compltes of Mikhail Bakunin as
its main example.
Source Publications
Scholarly editing has been part and parcel of the historians craft for a
long time. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, providing
scholarly editions of historical texts was one of the main tasks of historical institutes. It was a logical corollary of collecting important documents
in archives. For most of this period, there was a broad consensus about the
kind of questions that were asked in history, the kind of explanations that
provided the answers to these questions, and the kind of sources that were
relevant to these answers. Typically, these were questions about political,
military, and institutional developments in national history, the answers
were to be found in the thoughts and actions of great men, and the relevant
sources were descriptions of such actions and thoughts in state papers and
the correspondence of the same great men. It was therefore relatively easy
to identify the relevant text or part of text for source publications.
If it was easy to identify the relevant texts once found, it was often very
difficult to find them. Sources were hidden in archives without organization, often dispersed over many collections or not actually available, but
had to be reconstructed from later witnesses of their existence. As some of
the extant sources were forgeries which had been produced in the recent
or more distant past, one of the essential tasks of editing the texts was to
establish which text was what it claimed to be, and which was partial or
complete falsification. The writing could be difficult to read, and the language and context only accessible to specialists and in need of clarification
for less specialist readers. But as this was the stuff history was made of, it
was worthwhile to go to great lengths to collect, select, decipher, transcribe,
annotate, and print these sources, and make editions available to the scholarly world. A published edition substituted a long, expensive and arduous
journey to many archives by a visit to the nearest scholarly library.
Source editions in social history could and did fit this mould. Social history had its own great men, who created institutions, fought social conflicts
and revolutions, competed for power and wrote letters, resolutions, and
manifestos. But social history also gave rise to alternative ways of looking at
sources. It identified other movers in history, In some cases these were abstract powers such as social classes, labour relations, or demographic devel-
3 20
opments; in other cases quite ordinary women and men acting in day-to-day
struggles to better their lives or at least survive. If history moved because of
the shifting balance between abstract social forces, or the outcome of many
individual decisions, very diverse sources might be relevant, and the writings of great men might not be. To give one example: Jan de Vries proposed
that the industrial revolution in North-western Europe was preceded by an
industrious revolution. In the industrious revolution middle and working
class households decided to have more household members work longer
hours, to enable the household to buy more market goods, like tobacco, cotton textiles or coffee. To evaluate this theory, social historians had to determine how many hours working men, women, and children worked, and
how much of these delectable goods they consumed.2
Social history thus led to new types of source publications. Now the letters of paupers to poor relief organizations and of sailors to their wives, autobiographies of working men and women, of slaves and bonded labourers,
collections of probate inventories, or databases of types of labour relations
and life histories became relevant.3 And social historians came to ask different questions of traditional sources. They looked into newspapers, not for
the political news, but for news on strikes and social legislation, and also for
tickets. They might look in the collected writings of a nineteenth-century
revolutionary not only for the precise content or development of his political views, but also for information about the wardrobe of a gentleman.
Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution. Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy,
1650 to Present (Cambridge, 2008); Hans-Joachim Voth, Time and work in eighteenth-century London, The Journal of Economic History, 58 (1998), pp. 29-58; Anne
McCants, Exotic Goods, Popular Consumption, and the Standard of Living.
Thinking about Globalization in the Early Modern World, Journal of World History,
18 (2007), pp. 433-462; Anne McCants, Poor Consumers as Global Consumers. The
Diffusions of Tea and Coffee Drinking in the Eighteenth Century, The Economic
History Review, 61 S (2008), pp. 172-200.
Mary Jo Maynes, Taking the Hard Road: Life Course in French and German Workers
Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialization (Chapel Hill, 1995); K.D.M. Snell, Annals
of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660-1900 (Cambridge, 1985);
http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/boedelbank/index.php ; http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html and http://www.clio-infra.eu/; last accessed 10 November
2013; Lex Heerma van Voss, Ten geleide, in Erik van der Doe, Perry Moree en Dirk
J. Tang (eds), Buitgemaakt en teruggevonden. Nederlandse brieven en scheepspapieren in een
Engels archief [Sailing letters journaal v] (Zutphen, 2013), pp. 9-15.
Bakunin
|321
List of clothes Bakunin handed in when he went to jail; a 19th Century gentlemans wardrobe4
The International Institute of

Social History in Amsterdam
holds both important collections
of sources of the traditional type,
the writings of leading thinkers,
revolutionaries, organizers and
organizations, and of the second
type. Among the first group is an
important collection of the writings of the Russian revolutionary
thinker Mikhail Alexandrovich
List of clothes Bakunin handed in when he went
Bakunin (1814-1876).5 Bakunin
played a major role in the interto jail; a 19th Century gentlemans wardrobe4
national revolutionary movement of the mid-nineteenth century, and in this context wrote extensively. His interventions range from
public ones, through programmes and other documents aimed at discussion within the movement to private letters. Some of these writings were
published by the author, others were available in manuscript form, and yet
others have been lost, but survive in transcription by Max Nettlau. This is
not the place to even summarize the odyssey of his archival heritage.6 In
total, more than 40 archives now hold smaller or larger parts of Bakunins
writings. His oeuvre is a typical candidate for a traditional source edition:
important but dispersed and difficult to interpret, partly because the organizations Bakunin belonged to often shrouded themselves in secrecy.
Max Nettlau and James Guillaume edited six volumes of Bakunins Oeuvres,
published between 1895 and 1913 by the Paris Publishing House Stock. From
1958 a team under Arthur Lehning, of which Jaap Kloosterman was a mainstay, published an eight-volume Archives Bakounine with Brill (1961-1982).
10 Hemden
1 Unterhosen
4 3 Snapftch
2 1 Halstch
1 Strmpfen
2 Westen
1848 Kleiderliste, Original Moscu, RCChIDNI f.192, o.1, d.79. Copy from the Bakunin
CD-Rom.
Available at: http://www.iisg.nl/archives/en/files/b/ARCH00018.php; http://search.
socialhistory.org/Record/ARCH00018/ArchiveCollectionSummary; last accessed 10
November 2013.
On the history of Bakunins papers, see Jaap Kloosterman, Les papiers de Michel
Bakounine Amsterdam, available at: http://socialhistory.org/sites/default/files/
docs/publications/bakarch.pdf; last accessed 1 August 2013.
3 22
This, however, only covered a selection of Bakunins works from the first
half of the 1870s. In 1988 iish management in which Jaap Kloosterman
was the main force positioning iish at the scholarly forefront in profiting
from new digital possibilities decided to try and finish the series. It realized that external financial means to finish it would not be forthcoming if
the project would proceed at the pace of the Archives Bakounine. In July 1990
the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (knaw), of which iish
is an Institute, allocated money to a project which would finish the publication in a limited number of years. In May 1992 Bernedine Bos started a feasibility study, which was finished by the end of that year. She concluded that
it would be possible to publish the complete works of Bakunin, using novel
methods of editing and publication. iish announced publication for 1997.7
cd-rom
What were these novel methods? Archives Bakounine had published in print
selected texts, in some cases only parts of a text. It had published these
texts in their original language, and a French translation if French was not
the original language. The texts were annotated following the established
practices of historical source publications, not only supplying information
on the provenance and history of the document, but also with comments by
the editor, explaining unclear passages, the geographical names and persons
mentioned in the text, and relations to other documents. The new project
decided to publish Bakunins Oeuvres compltes on a cd-rom. It did not make
any selection, but included all extant writings for which Bakunins authorship was at least probable. It published images of the most original version
available, either the manuscript or the first publication. The principle that
these were transcribed in their original language and that a French transla-
The project was conceived under the supervision of Jan Lucassen. It was executed
at iish by Bernedine Bos and Anke van der Moer, with participation by Nikita
Kolpinski and Vladimir Mosolov of the former Institute of Marxism-Leninism in
Moscow. The application and user interface were developed by the Netherlands
Institute for Scientific Information Services (niwi), and production and editorial
support were provided by Edita, the publishing department of the knaw, in the
person of Yola de Lusenet. The publication was announced at: http://socialhistory.
org/en/news/bakunin-collected; last accessed 6 May 2014.
|323
tion was offered for the non-French texts was retained.8 In the new situation
the fact that for every document a French language version was available,
made full text search possible. Digital search possibilities, online or on the
cd-rom itself, were felt to be a good alternative to traditional explanatory
editorial notes, so the cd-rom only contains provenance information on the
documents. Bakunins main correspondents were introduced on the cd-rom
with brief biographical notes. As a full text search in all Bakunins writings
was possible, relations to other documents on the cd-rom could be established by the user, in fact the user could establish many more such relations
than an editor could indicate.
A core aspect of the Oeuvres compltes was that as far as possible an image
was supplied for every transcribed text. This allows users to check the transcription. For printed editions the current practice at iish was to collate a
transcription twice with the original, and a result with the smallest possible
number of transcription errors was a matter of pride among editors. For the
Oeuvres compltes it was decided to dispense with any verification of the first
transcription. Colleagues preparing editions which were to appear in print
experienced this as an insult to their professional standards. On a number
of occasions they would point out transcription or translation errors, and
were dismayed that these finds did not lead to a general round of verification. Although the project had been conceived as a publication on cd-rom,
by, say 1996 the staff of the Bakunin project already thought of it in terms of
the Internet, and assumed that in a future online version of the application
errors would be corrected and alternative readings would be made available.
In hindsight, it is clear that by that time it would have been better to develop the project further as an online application. However, the financial
constraints at the time dictated publication on cd-rom. This happened in
8 The cd-rom contains 368 writings by Bakunin, 1232 letters and 153 various texts
like personal documents, secret codes and notes on Bakunins readings. The
division over the different languages and categories is as follows:
Original language
Writings
Letters
Various
French
246
533
65
Russian
50
592
71
German
47
99
13
Italian
16
7
3
Swedish
4
Polish
2
Serbian
1
Czech
1
1
English
1
1
Total
368
1232
153
3 24
September 2000, but the 16 bit application was soon technically outdated.9
Bakunins Oeuvres Compltes now await a resurrection on the Internet.10
However, looking online for the works of Michael Bakunin reveals a
large number of available texts.11 These are typically transcribed from earlier printed publications by volunteers and in some cases also offer images
of the publications. The two authoritative editions, the Archives Bakounine
and the Oeuvres compltes, cannot be accessed online. Something similar
is true for the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which are abundantly available online, but not in the authoritative version of the MarxEngels-Gesamtausgabe (mega). We do not know how often the paper editions
are consulted. But anyone who has the privilege to grade students papers
knows that there is something like Greshams Law for texts: any version of
a text available on the Internet will be quoted, regardless of how much better an edition may be which is available exclusively on paper. So it is not
difficult to predict that whatever is available online is read and used much
more frequently than the best available scholarly editions.
For this reason alone source editions available online will drive out editions which solely exist on paper. But there are also more substantive reasons to believe that digital editions are the future. For every source edition
the relationship between text and metadata is relevant, and for almost every edition those of the edited text with other texts, with additional information, and if these exist with other versions of the text. These relationships
can all be offered in an online edition. Depending on the use to be made of
the edition, they can be shown or remain hidden.12
Different users have different preferences. One user may simply want to
read the text, another wants to check every editorial decision and so needs
information about them. One reader is interested in different versions of
the text, for another these are just a distraction. A digital edition can display
9 The cd-rom met with positive reviews, but the present writer is not aware that it
gave rise to important new interpretations in the first 10 years of its availability.
Mark Leier, Bakunin: The Creative Passion. A Biography (New York, 2009), p. 335, called
it a wonderful research tool. Reviews in the scholarly press include Bertrand
Taithe in European Review of History, 9 (2002), pp. 115-116 (This is a stupendous
scholarly enterprise and it is a great, albeit low-key, technical success); Rob
Knowles in The Australian Journal of Politics and History (2002), pp. 139-140.
10
At the time of writing, this is anticipated by iish staff for 2014.
11
In August 2013, larger collections include those of at www.marxists.org, the
Anarchy Archives run by Dana Ward (http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_
Archives/bakunin/BakuninCW.html) and the Anarchist Library (http://
theanarchistlibrary.org/authors/Michail_Bakunin.html). The 1895-1913 edition
of the Oeuvres is available from http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Spcial:Recherche/
Bakounine/uvres. All last accessed 1 August 2013.
12
A random example is the Online Froissart http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/
onlinefroissart/index.jsp, which offers transcriptions and for some manuscripts
images of 113 manuscripts of Jean Froissarts Chroniques of the last three quarts of
the 14th century. Last accessed 1 August 2013.
|325
all these variants, and if the variant lends itself to being read as a book, it
can be printed as a print-on-demand publication.
A very fundamental reason to opt for a digital edition is its ability to include images of originals. From the mid-1990s it has been prophesized that
future editions would consist of, or at least contain, scans of the original
witness or witnesses, a transcription and metadata.13 Even a very good transcription may contain reading errors, and a user may want to compare the
transcription against an image even if just to come to the conclusion that a
transcription is indeed correct. And as we noted, an online edition can both
correct errors and offer alternative readings. The availability of images also
makes transcription and the layout of transcriptions easier. Instead of describing peculiarities of the original (such as text placed elsewhere than on
the line) in the transcription, the transcription can now refer to the image.
There is yet another fundamental reason to opt for a digital edition. A
transcription which fully confirms to the source text will hardly ever be
the desired end product of an edition project. Different scholarly disciplines
have different conventions about what should be added to a transcription to
create a useful edition. For example: historians are used to editions in which
abbreviations are expanded and obvious errors are corrected.14 But literary
researchers and linguists may be interested in exactly these errors. To make
texts useful for as many disciplines as possible, transcriptions should be
presented that are faithful to the source in every aspect. The online edition
can then offer other versions, with for instance errors corrected or abbreviations expanded, as need be.
And finally, there is a non-fundamental reason to favour online editions.
Just as in the case of the Bakunin editions, traditional edition projects of
substantial bodies of texts often take a very long time to complete. Outside
funding organizations are often reluctant to fund projects which will run
for decades. Online edition projects make it relatively easy to include the
work of volunteers in adding additional layers of value to the digital edition.
Depending on the readability of the images, it is feasible to put images and
metadata online, and organize transcription as a crowd editing project.15
13
14
15
Edward Vanhoutte, Defining Electronic Editions: A Historical and Functional

Perspective, in Willard McCarty (ed.), Text and Genre in Reconstruction. Effects of
Digitalization on Ideas, Behaviours, Products and Institutions (Cambridge, 2010), pp.
119-144, 132, quoting Susan Hockney, Creating and Using Electronic Editions in
Richard Finneran (ed.), The Literary Text in the Digital Age (Ann Arbor, 1996), pp. 1-22;
Peter L. Shillingsburg, Principles for Electronic Archives, Scholarly Editions, and
Tutorials, in idem, pp. 23-35 and G. Thomas Tanselle, Critical Editions, Hypertexts,
and Genetic Criticism, The Romantic Review, 86 (1995), pp. 581-593.
Regels voor het uitgeven van historische bescheiden samengesteld in opdracht van het bestuur
van het Historisch Genootschap (4e druk, Groningen, 1966), p. 8.
Cf. for instance T. Causer, J. Tonra, and V. Wallace, Transcription Maximized;
Expense Minimized? Crowdsourcing and Editing The Collected Works of Jeremy
Bentham, Literary and Linguistic Computing, 27, no. 2 (March 28, 2012), pp. 119137. doi:10.1093/llc/fqs004; also Ben Brumfield, David Klevan, and Ben Vershbow,
3 26
This brings down costs, and offers a more versatile and more useful product
on line, the functionality and scholarly value of which increases over time.16
Layers
Thus we can expect for the future a model for scholarly editing which can
be conceived as a number of layers. I therefore refer to it as the spekkoek or
spekuk model for editing, after a Dutch-Indonesian layered cake, which gets
its name, literally bacon cake, from its layers that make a transection resemble striped bacon.
13
12
11
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
Comments by users / vre

Rendition in other formats (e.g. database, accounts)
Links between passages in different versions of the original
Previous editions, summaries
Indices (historical or editorial)
Explanatory, contextual annotation
Translation in other language
Critical edition
Transcription(s) adapted to the conventions of one or more disciplines
Transcription which is fully text conform
Notes on material aspects of the original
Metadata
Images of the original(s) (or of several versions of it)
The spekkoek model of editing
Any edition will consist of at least two layers: the images and the metadata.
If we are talking about an edition which consists of a large number of individual texts, such as the Bakunin edition or any collection of letters, it is
easy to think of the metadata as a layer in which each document is identified by its corresponding set of metadata. When we are dealing with a single
document, say a book, it is perhaps less evident to think of the metadata as
a layer, but the principle remains the same, each image in the images layer
having its corresponding set of metadata in the metadata layer. When we
16
Sharing Public History Work Using Crowdsourcing of Both Data and Sources.
Panel presented at the Webwise 2012, Baltimore, February 29, 2012. Available
at: http://www.crowdsourcing.org/video/webwise-2012-session-2---sharing-publichistory-work-crowdsourcing-data-and-sources-/17572; last accessed 6 May 2014.
That enough volunteers can be found for such ventures, is clear from the
Gekaapte brieven project [Captured Letters] Available at: http://www.
gekaaptebrieven.nl/tekst; last accessed 1 August 2013.
|327
Spekkoek. Used by permission.
are dealing with several versions of one text, for instance several versions of
a book (one or more manuscripts, proofs, several published editions), each
version will be represented by a layer of images and a corresponding layer
of metadata. The minimal set of metadata will identify the correct image,
and may have some information about the provenance of the text. For letters we would think of including the addressee and the place and date of
writing. In the case of the letters taken by the British on board prize ships
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ships name, port of departure and destination, and date and place of seizure would be logical additional metadata.17
In those cases where the images are easily readable, these two layers in
themselves already offer a useful product. But we expect from an edition at
least a transcription of the text. This is also what makes source publications
into the text corpora that lend themselves to digital humanities research. As
argued above, this second use of every contemporary source edition means
that this layer should in general be a transcription which follows the text
as closely as possible. One or more separate layers could contain transcriptions which follow the conventions of the relevant disciplines and which
for instance expand abbreviations, silently correct obvious errors, or adjust
punctuation to current usage.
17
Available at: http://www.nationaalarchief.nl/internationaal/project-sailing-letters;

last accessed 10 November 2013.
3 28
Other layers could offer different transcriptions, like a critical edition

which tries to establish the version of the text which best renders the original intention of the author, or which shows the differences between different witnesses. The Bakunin example alerted us to the possibility that we
might need a translation in a common language to facilitate full text search.
A more ordinary reason to want a layer of translation would of course be to
make the texts available in other languages, and hence to a broader public,
scholarly or general.
Another way editors ensure the accessibility of the texts they edit, is by
adding explanatory notes that convey the cultural context of the original
text and thus render the edition more accessible to present-day readers. This
is another layer which enriches the edition. As we noted in discussing the
Bakunin example, some types of notes are less pressing in the digital age,
especially the notes referring to other places in the edition where similar
issues come to the fore.
Another possible enrichment is to offer indices as an alternative or addition to full text search. Indices belong to the traditional aids printed editions offer to find relevant passages in the edition. Is it still worthwhile to
invest the amount of time necessary to make an index when we also have
full text search? To a certain extent digital tools will offer an alternative,
for instance trough Named Entity Recognition. It obviously is worthwhile
to include an index in a digital edition when the edition is based on an earlier printed edition and the index is already available. There is no reason to
withhold a layer from the users that may point them to relevant passages
that otherwise could have escaped them. The same holds true for indices
that may be part of the original source. If part of a source has been published before, or has been summarized in an earlier source publication, the
same reasoning applies: adding these to the online publication offers an additional way to consult it.
Sensitive decisions have to be taken in those cases where a source has already been published in a paper edition, but only partly so. This was the
case in the Bakunin example. As has been done there, it seems logical to
include images of all originals, as these convey additional information and
are part of the backbone of a digital edition. But what about annotation
and indices? The Oeuvres compltes edition left them out. Working from the
spekkoek idea of layers, it would make sense to keep the notes in. It could
be indicated in every single note if need be that these were derived from
the Archives Bakounine edition and that similar notes were not offered for all
texts. It is simply a layer of additional information for a subset of the text,
which the user can turn off or on at wish. However, it seems unlikely that
the same would apply for the indices of the paper edition. This partial layer
still would have value. It might point the user to text that a full text search
will miss if the index term is not a word used in the text. However, a partial
index is confusing, so the choice for the editor seems limited to leaving the
index out, or completing it for the full edition. In the cases suggested here,
|329
it may be that a layer is only available for part of the material or that it offers information which is only useful or easy to understand for expert users.
Luckily the digital format enables us to offer an edition in different way for
different audiences, ranging from a simple reading edition to a very complex layered scholarly tool, and anything in between.
Some of the data that we find in historical sources lend themselves to be
rendered in ways other than text. This is the case with financial records,
which it may be possible to render as text, but also in a more recent accounting format.
Regardless of whether the crowd has had a role in producing the transcription, the online digital environment makes it possible to correct erroneous readings or add alternative readings, as was already envisaged in the
Bakunin project. In a similar way, users can help in annotating the texts,
or by adding comments on interpretation. This can either find its way to
the main online edition, or be shared by researchers in a Virtual Research
Environment.
III.3 The Activities

in Moscow
after 1991
and Memorial
Francesca Gori
The opening of the former Soviet archives, the so-called archival revolution, is one of the primary cultural and political events that followed the
collapse of the ussr in the early 1990s. The opening included materials from
the years from 1917 until the de-Stalinization phase (1956), as well as some
materials related to the subsequent years, which gave scholars the opportunity to examine documents on the history of Russia, the Soviet Communist
Party, and the fates of the Russian and international workers movement.
A new archival law was introduced in the post-Soviet Russia of the early 1990s. The new law reflected the more general review of legislation on
State secrets. It involved reorganization of the archives and the ministerial
bodies that had been assigned to this task. The opening of the Russian archives (law of 7 July 1993 on the Legislative Fundamentals of the Russian
Federation on the archival records of the Federation and on archives in
general1 and Regulation of the archival legacy of the Russian Federation
of March 1994)2 has brought to light extensive documentation that marks
1
2
Vedomosti SND i VS RF, 33 (19.08.1993), p. 1311.

Sobranie aktov Prezidenta i Pravitelstva RF,12 ( 21.03.1994), p. 878; Rossiskaja gazeta, 55
(24.03.1994).
g o r i A cti v i ti e s i n Mos c ow af te r 1 9 9 1
|331
the beginning of a new stage of studies on Soviet history. An intense but,

alas, short historiographic period, considering that many Russian archives
have become much less accessible, especially in recent years. This change
in direction, the first signs of which date back to the years after 1996, when
the Russian Communist party once again scored an unexpected success at
the Duma, was strengthened by Putins rise to power in 2000. These two
events underscored the continuity between the Russia of the new century and its Soviet past, scrupulously protected by archival officials reluctant to disclose to scholars, especially foreign ones, documentation that
has remained secret for decades. Archival law has not been substantially
changed in recent years, but it has been interpreted in an increasingly restrictive manner, and the application of regulations and norms pertaining to the declassification of documents and to the possibility to look
them up has significantly limited the access to the documents themselves.
Archival Revolution
Leading scholars, such as Patricia Kennedy Grimsted and Nikita Petrov,3
have written extensively on the archival revolution, on the results of archival investigations, and on the different periods during which access to
the documents was either open or restricted (by law or by facts).
At that time I was working at the Feltrinelli Foundation, one of the main
institutes for the history of international labour movement. From its outset, the Foundation has been collecting materials on the Russian labour
movement, the revolutionary parties, and on Soviet Russia. The Feltrinelli
Foundation is the holder of one of the most important funds on pre-revolutionary Russia, thanks to a donation made by Franco Venturi the author of Il
populismo russo, a well known work.4
From the beginning, the Foundation has devoted much effort to the studies of Russia and Soviet Union. This resulted in the publication of important works, and in the organization of seminars and specific studies, such as
3
Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Archives of Russia Five Years Later: Purveyors of

Sensation or Shadows cast to the Past?, International Institute of Social History Research
Papers, (Amsterdam, 1997); Nikita Petrov, Desjatiletie archivnych reform v Rossii,
Indeks, 14, (2001); V. Kozlov, O. Lokteva, Arkhivnaia revoliuciia v Rossii (19911996), Svobodnaja mysl, 1, (1997); Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Russian Archives
in Transition: Caught Between Political Crossfire and Economic Crisis, American
Archivist, 56, (Fall 1993); Nikita Ochotin, Svoboda dostupa k informacii i sovremennaia archivnaia situatsiia, Indeks, Dose na tcenzuru (1997); Nikita Petrov, Politika
rukovodstva kgb v otnoshenii arkhivnogo dela byla prestupnoi, Karta, 1 (1993).
Francesca Gori and Antonello Venturi (eds), Utopia e riforma in Russia, 1800-1917: il
fondo russo della Biblioteca Feltrinelli, (Milan, 1997); Emanuela Guercetti and Antonello
Venturi (eds), Tra populismo e bolscevismo: la costruzione di una tradizione rivoluzionaria in urss, 1917-1941: il fondo russo della Biblioteca Feltrinelli, (Milan, 1999); Antonello
Venturi (ed.), Franco Venturi e la Russia, con documenti inediti. Annali della Fondazione
Feltrinelli, xl (Milan, 2006).
3 32
the study on the revolutionary collective mobilization, under the guidance

of Leopold Haimson and Charles Tilly, with the International Institute of
Social History of Amsterdam; the conference devoted to the studies on Lev
Trotsky; and the studies devoted to the collapse of the Soviet empire, with
an analysis of its internal and geostrategic causes.5
In early 1992 Amsterdams International Institute of Social History and
the Feltrinelli Foundation decided to start a joint research project, taking
advantage of the opportunity offered by the archival revolution. Together
with Jaap Kloosterman we decided to visit the archives in Moscow.
The first and most relevant effort carried out by Jaap Kloosterman aimed
to identify the Dutch archives that were stolen and subsequently transferred in Germany by the Nazi occupants during the Second World War. These
archives contained documents on all left and socialistic groups, womens
movements, masonry, and Jewish organizations in the Netherlands. At
the end of war in 1945, special Red Army units found them in the Soviet
zone of Europe. These archives were taken to Moscow and kept secretly in
an Institute created for this purpose and whose existence was made public
in 1991. Jaap Kloosterman retrieved all the archival information needed to
have the archives definitely returned to Amsterdam.
Jaap Kloostermans work concentrated first on the rgava (Rossiiskii
Gosudarstvennyi Voennyi Arkhiv, Russian State Military Archive) one of
the most secret archives sealed off to foreigners.6 At the same time we visited the rtskhidni (Rossiiskii Tsentr Khraneniia i Izucheniia Dokumentov
Noveishei Istorii, Russian Center for Preservation and Study of Records
of Modern History), called rgaspi since 1999 (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi
Arkhiv Sotsialno politicheskoi Istorii, Russian State Archive of Social and
Political History) which holds a unique collection of documents and realia
from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries on the social and political history of Russia, the ussr and many other countries. Among the holdings are
important documents on the history of foreign relations and socialist, communist, democratic, and youth international movements.
Following a number of meetings with Kirill Anderson, director of the archive, Jaap Kloosterman and I were authorized to examine the Cominform
records, which had been inaccessible to scholars until then. We offered our
Leo Haimson and Giulio Sapelli (eds), Strikes, Social Conflict and the First World War.
An International Perspective. Annali della Fondazione Feltrinelli, xxvii (Milan, 1992);
Francesca Gori (ed.), Pensiero e azione politica di Lev Trockij. Atti del convegno internazionale per il 40 anniversario della morte (Firenze, 1992); Marco Buttino (ed.), In a Collapsing
Empire. Underdevelopment, Ethnic Conflicts and Nationalisms in the Soviet Union. Annali
della Fondazione Feltrinelli, xxviii (Milan, 1993).
Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Displaced Cultural Treasures as a Result of World War
II and Restitution Issues: a bibliography of publications. Available at: http://socialhistory.org/en/russia-archives-and-restitution/bibliography. See also http://socialhistory.org/en/projects/russia-archives-and-restitution,http://socialhistory.org/en/news/
archives-back-amsterdam; all last accessed 2 May 2014.
|333
support to find the best solution

to the problems related to the
description and inventory of the
records. In fact, the documentation was stored in a room with
no catalogues and lacking even
a brief description. It was simply
named: fond 575.
Cominform Archives
The sources on the Cominform
fund in the Russian archives are
particularly relevant to reconstruct the origins of the Cold
War.7 Previous knowledge on the
establishment of the Cominform
as a key aspect of the ussr reaction to the Marshall Plan, and
of the consequent division of
Europe since 1947, as far as the
Soviet part is concerned, relied
in fact on the limited published
material available at that time,
on memoirs and on Western archives. Even the official proceedFrontispiece of the proceedings of the first
ings of the three Cominform
Conference of Cominform of 1947. RGASPI f.575,
conferences were known only
op.1, d.1, s.1. Thanks are due to RGASPI.
in the censored version that had
been made public at that time.
The discovery of the complete
protocols of the three conferences has thus represented a very important
step forward in our knowledge, and has allowed us to read the complete
presentations of the Soviet delegates and of the representatives of the other Communist parties. It also showed us which aspects had been kept secret. Even more important was the opening of archival records such as the
Cominform records and other personal papers of Soviet leaders (containing
assorted material such as confidential notes, reviewed texts and various documents, reports of conversations, letters, telegrams, etc.). These materials
allowed us to reconstruct in detail the reasons and dynamics that led to the
establishment of Cominform in September 1947.
7
The main reference for the archival sources published on the Cold War, is the Cold
War International History Project Bulletin, Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars, Washington d.c.
3 34
Revealing Soviet decision processes, this material opens an exceptional

perspective on the relations between Moscow and the other Communist
parties. In particular, it was possible to analyze the connections between the
launch of the American aid plan in Europe and Stalins decision to concentrate the main European Communist parties in a single organization only
four years after the Comintern was dismantled. The organized nature of the
new international body of Communist parties (the scope of which was not
limited to an advisory function) was kept secret by the Soviets until the very
last moment, even from the other delegations, a fact bearing witness to
the mistrust and tensions that characterized their relationships. The documents also highlight the strongly centralized approach of the whole operation, which was conducted under Stalins direct supervision, not just in its
preparatory stage, but throughout the founding conference of Cominform.
The aim was obviously to hinder the formation of a Western bloc by the
mass mobilization of Western Communists and to limit the sovereignty of
Eastern Europes political regimes. The archival evidence also shed light on
the ambiguities and the inconsistencies of the Soviet leadership who had
apparently lacked any accurate and well-defined plan since the start of the
operation.
The documents dated after 1947 are not less relevant. Their examination has allowed a much more circumstantial reconstruction of the reasons
that led to the split between the ussr and Yugoslavia in June 1948. Today
these reasons can be seen in the framework of international politics and the
Soviet decisions aimed at imposing obedience and uniformity within their
sphere of influence. From this perspective, the Cominform clearly appears
as an institution whose functions and objectives represented a source of
tension inside the East European bloc and not just a principle of orderly organization. The archived documents have also shed a new light on the antiTitoist persecutions in Eastern Europe, as well as on the pacifist campaigns
of the Communist parties between the end of the 1940s and the start of the
1950s. Although the Cominform lost most of the primary meaning it seemed
to have at the time of its establishment, the documents on Cominform are
essential to understand the propaganda and the international visions of the
Soviet bloc until Stalins death.8
Giuliano Procacci et al., The Cominform. Minutes of the Three Conferences 1947/1948/1949,
Annali della Fondazione Feltrinelli, xxx (Milan, 1994), and subsequently published
in Russia Soveshchaniia Kominforma 1947, 1948, 1949. Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow,
1998), Ya. Gibiansky, Kak voznik Kominform. Po novym archivnym materialam,
Novaja i noveishaja istoriia, 4 (1993); Ya. Gibiansky, Kominform v dejstvii. 19471948 gg. Po archivnym dokumentam, Novaja i noveishaja istoriia, 1-2 (1996); Silvio
Pons, A challenge let drop: Soviet foreign policy, the Cominform, and the Italian
Communist Party, 1947-8, in F. Gori, S. Pons (eds), The Soviet Union and Europe in the
Cold War, 1943-53 (London, 1996).
|335
Other Archival Institutions

After this important experience, our cooperation extended to other archival institutions. We started a wide-ranging study of the archives. We visited
the garf (Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federtasii, State Archive of the
Russian Federation) guided by a passionate historian like Sergej Mironenko.
Here Jaap started a systematic examination of Bakunins papers and had
them reproduced for the iisg. Bakunin had been the topic of his first research, and his study on this historical figure is still a key reference document
today for all scholars of international anarchism.
The research on Bakunin was carried out mainly in the garf, but also
in the rgaspi, in the Pushkinskii Dom ran in Petersburg, in the rgali
(Rossiiskii Gosudarstevennyi Arkhiv Literatury i Iskusstva, Russian State
Archive of Literature and Art) and in 2000 the International Institute of
Social History edited the Bakunin collected works.9
Stefano Garzonio and I went to the rgani (Rossiiskii Gosudrstvennyi
Arkhiv Noveishei Istorii, Russian State Archive of Contemporary History),
where, thanks to officers and scholars such as N.G. Tomilina and V.Ju.
Afiani, we managed to collect all the papers concerning the Pasternak affair
and the cultural and political relationship between publisher Feltrinelli and
the Italian and Soviet Communist parties, a task performed on behalf of the
Feltrinelli publishing house.
Chronicles
In those same years, together with Jaap Kloosterman, we got in touch with
the Roskomarchiv (Komitet po delam arkhivov pri Pravitelstve Rossiiskoi
Federatsii, State Committee for Archival Affairs of the Russian Federation)10
and during one of the meetings with Tatiana Pavlova and other officers, we
decided to continue a project on the workers movement that had been originally launched by the Maison des sciences de lhomme, under the guidance
of Maurice Aymard.
It so happened that the International Institute of Social History, together
with the Feltrinelli Foundation and the Bibliothque de Documentation
Internationale Contemporaine (bdic), (whose coordinator of the Russian section, Hlne Kaplan, is undoubtedly one of the major experts not just of
Russian archives but of all Eastern Europe) and the Maison des sciences de
lhomme, started to publish the Rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii, 1905- fevral 1917.
9
10
Available at: http://socialhistory.org/en/news/bakunin-collected; last accessed 2 May

2014.
Rosarkhiv, the administrative agency in charge of state archives throughout the
Russian Federation was founded as the State Committee for Archival Affairs of
Russia (Roskomarkhiv) in 1990, on the basis of the Main Archival Administration of
the rsfsr (Glavarkhiv rsfsr).
3 36
Khronika series under the supervision of Irina M. Pushkareva. It is a valuable chronologic account of all the important events regarding the Russian
workers movement from 1895 to 1917. An editorial committee composed of
archivists and scholars of the workers movement was established. The publication aimed at collecting all the documentation on the diverse forms of
protest and struggle and on the workers and party organizations in Russia.
This account is a unique tool that simplifies research work on the workers
movement, in that it broadens the aims of traditional studies on this field
and spreads knowledge of the archives and of the material published at
the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth century. The sources
were found not just in the archives of Moscow and Petersburg, but also in
those of Kazakhstan, Ukraine, the Republic of Belarus, North Caucasus, and
Northern Russia. The Khronika collects documents from 466 funds and 112
archives. This was a very long, complex, but fascinating job that made us
aware of the peripheral network not only of the Russian archives, but also
of the Russian administration.11
The iisg has also collaborated with the Institute of World History ras in
Moscow, run by Aleksander Chubarian. Both institutions worked together, supported the publication of the Social History Yearbook, which was
launched by the iisg and edited by a group of well- known historians and
carried on with the strong engagement of Irina Novichenko. The journal
was first published in 1997.12
Apart from the research work on the archives, I have to mention the social history courses that Jaap organized involving me at the rgaspi Archive,
an enterprise I was invited to participate in. It was a very meaningful experience, as Jaap Kloosterman and I regularly met with students and intellectuals from all over Russia. The courses proved an extremely interesting
activity during which Jaap Kloosterman managed to convey his passion for
research and his competence. Irina Novichenko took part in all the courses
and phases of project planning, and her contribution was essential throughout the years of study on the archive.13
11
Komitet po delam arkhivov pri Pravitelstve Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Gosudarstvennyi

Arkhiv Rossiiskoj Federatsii, Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv
Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk, Institut Rossiiskoi Istorii, Rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii, 1905fevral 1917. Khronika. The publication is split into 4 periods: 1895-1904, 1905-1907,
1908-1913, 1914 February 1917. 10 books in 16 volumes have been published from
1992 to 2008.
12
From 2001 transition to digital format has taken place. See: http://www.icshes.ru/
en1/shy/; last accessed 2 May 2014.
13 While iisg runned a program on Social History, the Feltrinelli Foundation organized two tacis seminars with the Institute of World History on Teaching History
inviting several major experts on the topic. See : Sovremennye metody prepodovaniia
noveishei istorii (Moscow, 1996); Evropeiskij opyt i prepodovanie istorii v postsovetskoi Rossii
(Moscow, 1999).
|337
Memorial, Moscow
Memorial
Our quest, however, could hardly stop at State archives. At the end of the
1980s, the Memorial Association was established to preserve the memory
of the victims of Stalins repression, systematically collecting all the material on the forced labour camps, on repression and dissent.14 One further
aim was to promote the publication of important works based on the material stored by the association as well as those located in the State and kgb
archives.15
An important project to reproduce all these materials was developed as a
result of Jaaps work and the efficient scientific support of Arseniy Roginskii
and Nikita Okhotin. The iisg produced a microfilm of approximately 50,000
files that contain memoirs, letters, and documents on the repressions, with
the dates of arrest, accusation, conviction, and reports of the interrogations.
14
15
Available at: http://www.memo.ru/s/64.html; last accessed 2 May 2014.

Nikita Okhotin, Arsenii Roginskii (eds.), Zvenya. Istoricheskii almanach (Moscow,
1991-1992); Nikita Okhotin, Arsenii Roginskii (eds), Sistema ispravitelno-trudovych
lagerei v sssr, 1923-1960, Dokumenty. Spravohcnik (Moscow, 1998); A. Kokurin, N. Petrov
(eds), gulag (Glavnoe Upravlenie lagerei 1917-1960 (Moscow, 2000); Politbiuro tsk rkp(b)
vkp(b): Katalog, 1930-1939 (Moscow, 2001); Irina Shcherbakova (ed.) Nakazannyj narod:
Repressii protiv sovetskikh nemtzev (Moscow, 1999); Pavel Polian, Ne po svoei vole Istoriia
i geogeafiia prinuditelnykh migracii v sssr (Moscow, 2001).
3 38
The conservation and dissemination of these records is even more important today, as non-governmental organizations (ngos) dealing with politics
and receiving foreign funding (such as Memorial, the organization nominated for the Nobel peace prize) are threatened with closure as a result of a
new law regulating ngos operations. Should this organization be unable to
continue its activities, it would be a serious blow, not only to the memory
and civil rights of Russia, but of the whole world.
The efforts made in those years and especially the effort made by
the International Institute of Social History today have made it possible
to access all these important documents: in fact, they are stored at the
Amsterdam archive, which has become an increasingly important reference
point for scholars all over the world.
This is also the result of the generous and intelligent research work that
Jaap Kloosterman has always carried out throughout his activity as researcher on the sources of the international workers movement.
Italians in su
As a matter of fact, the research on Italians in the Soviet Union carried out
by Elena Dundovich, Emanuela Guercetti, and myself started precisely from
the Memorials archive. Thanks to the archival material found in Moscow
and in other cities of the former Soviet Union, it was possible to reconstruct for the first time, based on documentary evidence, the complex history of Italian migration in Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. Of particular interest were the origins and characteristics of the different migratory
waves, the mechanisms through which Soviet political history in the 1920s
and 1930s was reflected in the microcosm of the Italian communities in the
ussr.
The internment of Italians in Stalins lagers had already been reported in
some memoirs of witnesses and survivors. But the opening of the archives
allowed access to the direct documents and to reconstruct the fate of about
1,000 Italians, both political and non political migrants.
Evidence of the presence of Italians was found in 27 lagers throughout the
immense Russian territory and in 19 border areas or labour camps.
These figures certainly cannot compare with the millions of Soviet victims and with the losses suffered by other foreign communities, but they
are nonetheless significant when compared with the small Italian community in the Soviet Union.
As a result of the archival research, it was possible to split Italian migration to the Soviet Union in three distinct groups. Repression occurred at different times and for different reasons, but the history of these groups is inevitably intertwined. On one side there was traditional migration boasting
ancient roots, as it started at the end of the 1700s, but especially in early
1800. These migrants were persecuted, especially in the 1920s and during
the Second World War: the migrants were divided in separate communities
|339
and concentrated in geographically limited areas, especially in the ports of

the Black Sea and Azov Sea the most important ones being the communities of Kerch and Mariupol. This community in particular was persecuted in
the 1920s and during the Second World War.
Starting from the 1920s, there was a growing wave of political migration,
composed mainly of anti-fascists, who had moved to the Soviet Union to flee
the persecutions and contribute to the achievement of the ideal of a classless society. These political migrants were affected starting from 1935 and
especially in the years of the Great Terror, 1937-1938. There is a third population of migrants that did not represent a special category: single individuals of various ideologies and origins, mainly craftsmen and artists, who simply lived and worked in different cities of the Soviet Union. This category
was persecuted as a result of the xenophobia unleashed during the Second
World War.
To reconstruct the history of Italian migrants in the Soviet Union, their
settlement in Soviet society, and their repression, we consulted the archives
of Moscow and Petersburg and the peripheral archives. The research showed
that most of the documents are stored at the garf of Moscow. The personal files of the people arrested by Moscows main office of the kgb (Komitet
Gosudarstevnnyi bezapasnosti) can be found in this Preliminary investigation records fond 10035 (Fond sledstvennych del). The files of the preliminary
investigations contain all the documents, from the arrest warrants to the
interrogation records that allow us to analyze the repression mechanisms.
The records of the pkk (Politicheskii Krasnii Krest, Political Red Cross) fond
8419 contain the files of the prisoners who had turned to this organization
for help and had then been released through its mediation.
Several documents of the mopr records (Mezhdunarodnaia organizatsiia Pomoshchi bortsam Revoliutsii, International Organization for Aid to
Revolutionary Fighters also known as the International Red Aid) were found
in the rgaspi Archive, where we also worked at the Comintern records, in
particular the documentation on the Italian Communist Party (pci) (fond 513).
Finally, material on the Soviet factories with Italian workers, in particular on the gpz factory, were found at the tsaod (Tsentralnyi Arkhiv
Obshchestvennych Dvizhenii, Central State Archive of Social Movements),
fond 470.16 This research made it possible to reconstruct a chapter, previously
unknown, of the larger history of the repression of foreign communities in
Stalins Russia.17
16
17
Besides Central Archives, an important work was carried out at some peripheral
archives, such as the Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv pri Sovete Ministrov Avtonomnoi
Respubliki Krym (ga pri sm ark) of Simferopol, because a rather large Italian community lived in Kerch and in other cities in Crimea; the State Archive of the Region
of Cheliabinsk (Obedinennii gosudatstevennyi arkhiv Cheliabinskoi oblasti) was
found to be especially meaningful.
Elena Dundovich, Francesca Gori, Emanuela Guercetti (eds), Reflections on the Gulag.
With a Documentary Appendix on the Italian Victims of Repression in the ussr, Annali della
3 40
The activity of the iish and the Feltrinelli Foundation was not limited to the archives. We also worked in the libraries of the former Soviet
Union. With Jaap Kloosterman, we had a number of meetings with Mikhail
Afanasev, director of the gpib (Gosudarstennaia Publichnaia Istoricheskaia,
Biblioteka, State Public Historical Library) that were followed by numerous
acquisition projects and microfilming of the journals of the unofficial press
of the 1990s.18 One acquisition project was carried out to fill gaps in the
Russian sections of the library of both the International Institute of Social
History and Feltrinelli Foundation.
Jaap Kloostermans latest efforts were focused on the important library
gopb, (Gosudarstvennaia Obshchestvenno-Politicheskaia Biblioteka State
Socio-Political Library), the library of the former Institute of Marxism
Leninism, one of the largest libraries of social history worldwide, established by Boris Rjazanov, leading scholar and bibliophile, who had spent his
life collecting bibliographical and historical materials throughout Europe.
Since 1991, the Institute of Marxism Leninism has ceased its activity. The
Archive was deposited at the rgaspi, and for some time the library has been
almost forgotten. The staff was reduced from 200 to 30, and for nearly one
year they did not receive a salary. Thanks to Jaap Kloostermans commitment, the library obtained a financial support during this period. Above all,
Jaap Kloosterman endeavored to protect this library, stating the need to preserve it in its original form, because it was unique; he succeeded in having
the library placed under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Culture of the
Russian Federation.
A recent article in a book in honor of David Rjazanov published recently: Do Rjazanova. Rasmyshleniia o pervich bibliotekach posvjashchennych
rabochei istorii,19 helps us understand Jaap Kloostermans in-depth knowledge of the libraries devoted to social history. Jaap Kloostermans command and thorough understanding of available evidence intertwines with
Rjazanovs own work and with his passionate experience as a scholar and
bibliophile.
Apart from ordinary research activities, all the projects carried out in
the archives, the invaluable cooperation for scientific and dissemination
purposes in Europe and worldwide, I would like to conclude by remembering the visit Jaap and I made to Yasnaia Poliana and the strong emotion
we felt when we visited the home, library, and tomb of Lev Tolstoy. There
we understood the extent of our involvement with the Russian world, its
18
19
Fondazione Feltrinelli, xxx (Milan, 2003).

An interesting exhibition on this topic was prepared at the library and a valuable
catalogue was prepared: Alternativnaja periodicheskaia pechat v istorii rossiiskoi mnogopartijnosti (1987-1996), pod red. L.N. Strukova (Moscow, 2005).
In Irina Novichenko, I. Svetkova (eds), Izvestnyi i neizvestnyi David Rjazanov (1870-1938)
(Moscow, 2011) and updated in the article Unwritten Autobiography. Labor History
Libraries before World ii, in Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen (eds), Working
on Labor: Essays in honor of Jan Lucassen (Leiden, 2012).
|341
culture, the nature of those places, the passion that for so many years had
driven us to seek and spread the historical memory of that country.
III.4 Rescue Efforts in

Post-Soviet Moscow
Nanci Adler
In 1990, on a visit to Veniamin Iofe, chairman of the Leningrad Memorial,

I was shown several suitcases of index cards containing files on victims of
the Soviet terror. These suitcases were stowed under the bed, in a private
apartment, hidden and easily transportable. Likewise, in the Moscow apartment of Nikita Okhotin, thousands of index cards of personal fates of terror victims were being filled in, and hundreds of memoirs were being gathered and carefully, clandestinely stored. Memorial an organization formed
in 1987 to record, preserve, research, and disseminate materials on the
Stalinist past understood the politically proscribed nature of the information they had unearthed. So, too, did Jaap Kloosterman.
In 1992, recognizing the archives value to our understanding of Soviet
repression, and perceiving the risk to a collection of this nature even in
post-Soviet Russia, Jaap set a team in Moscow to the task of microfilming
Memorials (at the time) 30,000 dossiers. This was an unprecedented gesture of support for an organization that has been under fire since its inception.1 Jaap brought these thousands of pages of microfilmed testimonies to
1
For an early history of the organization, see Nanci Adler, Victims of Soviet Terror: The
Story of the Memorial Movement (Westport ct, 1993).
a d l e r R e scu e E f f o r ts i n pos t-Sov i e t Mos c ow
|343
the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Researchers like

me have benefitted immensely from the availability of the material and the
excellent facilities at the iish. The Memorial files, containing hundreds of
memoirs and thousands of questionnaires, formed the basis for both The
Gulag Survivor2 and Keeping Faith with the Party.3 Some excerpts from these archives have been selected below, but first a word on the scope of the terror
will help frame this discussion.
Opening Archives
The post-Soviet opening of the archives re-opened the debate regarding
how many victims were repressed in what period and under which article
of the Soviet Criminal Code. The range of estimates is wide because the
victims include those who were incarcerated in labor camps, starved by
the man-made famine, subjected to de-kulakization, deported, and killed
outright. Additionally, their non-incarcerated family members effectively
lived in prisons without walls. Those born in special settlements (exile)
are not included in the category of victims of political repression, nor are
the citizens who were incarcerated and sent to the Gulag on non-political
articles such as those covered by the 1941 draconian labor laws. According
to Memorial chairman Arsenii Roginskii, a review of the cases in these excluded categories, would no less than double the number of political prisoners calculated in the Gulag statistics.4 The accuracy of figures regarding
arrest, incarceration, and release is further confounded by the fact that the
statistics include re-arrests and moribund victims who were sometimes released only so that their death would take place outside the camp.5 The estimates range from a few million to well over twenty million victims. There is
relative consensus that in the years 1930-56, 17-18 million were sentenced to
detention in prisons, colonies and camps.6 With regard to the number of re-
2
3
4
5
6
Nanci Adler, The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System (New Brunswick, 2002).
Nanci Adler, Keeping Faith with the Party: Communist Believers Return from the Gulag
(Bloomington in, 2012).
See interview in Obeliat Stalina bessmyslenno, 30 Oktiabria, 84, 2008, pp. 4-5.
See Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror
(New Haven ct, 2004), p. 78.
For a review and apt analysis of the various estimates, see Michael Ellman,
Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments, Europe-Asia Studies, 54:7 (2002),
pp. 1151-1172. In 2000, Russian criminologists Vladimir Kudriavtsev and A.I. Trusov
introduced the figure of 6.1 million sentenced on political articles between 1918
and 1958 (V.N. Kudriavtsev, A.I. Trusov, Politicheskaia Iustitsiia v sssr (Moscow, 2000),
pp. 312-318. See also J.A. Getty, G.T. Rittersporn & V.N. Zemskov, Victims of the
Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival
Material, American Historical Review, 4 (1993), pp. 1017-1049; Steven Rosefielde,
Stalinism in Post-Communist Perspective: New Evidence on Killings, Forced
Labour and Economic Growth in the 1930s, Europe-Asia Studies, 48:6 (1996), pp. 959987; Stephen Wheatcroft, The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression
3 44
Memorial archive associates in the apartment of Nikita Okhotin, one of the founders of
Memorial, Moscow, 1990 Photos Rob Knijff.
turnees, there are few calculations.7 However, using a rough approximation

based on release figures in the aftermath of Stalins death and Khrushchevs
Secret Speech, it is my estimate that well over five million victims survived
to return to Soviet society in the 1950s.8 This estimate includes the former
exiles and deportees.
Memorials researchers have participated in the debate on the scope of
the terror, and its collection has contributed to our quantitative and qualitative understanding of Stalinism, because the memoirs it preserves allow
us to investigate hitherto under-researched questions on the camp and returnee experience. These narratives offer insight into a whole host of issues.
There are stories like that of Lev Gavrilov, who survived eighteen years of
and Mass Killings, 1930-45, Europe-Asia Studies, 48:8 (1996), pp. 1319-1353.
In his speech at the opening plenary session of the international conference Itogi
Stalinizma, Oleg Khlevniuk argued that the 20 million arrests frequently quoted
in statistics are just the tip of the iceberg, Moscow, December 5, 2008. Yoram
Gorlizki reported the following rough repression statistics from the sessions on
Politics. The institutions and methods of Stalins dictatorship: 6 million were sentenced on political charges, 1.2 million were executed; 6 million were deported; 5-6
million died in famines; and millions of others were arrested for infractions that
would not have constituted crimes in other countries (Summary report, Moscow,
December 7, 2008).
7
One of the only assessments has been made by Russian historian V.N. Zemskov
in Massovoe osvobozhdenie spetsposelentsev i ssylnykh (1954-1960gg.),
Sotsiologicheskie Issledovaniia, 1 (1991). His focus is on special population groups and
exiles. Some rehabilitation facts can be found in A. Artizov et al., Reabilitatsiia: Kak
eto bylo, mart 1953 fevral 1956 (Moscow, 2000); see also Ellman, Europe-Asia Studies.
8 Adler, Gulag Survivor, pp. 30-34, 168-171.
|345
prisons, camps, and exile. He endured ten prisons, among them Butyrka,
Lubianka, Lefortovo, Magadan, Krasnoiarsk, and ten camps including those
of Kolyma and exile in Norilsk.9 Gavrilov was a staunch Party loyalist, who
called himself a zapasnoi communist (reserve Communist), which is a play on
words with the Russian abbreviation, or acronym z/k, meaning prisoner. In
his memoirs, he describes how he extracted his own gold teeth to contribute to the war effort. When he tried to give them to his interrogators, they
did not want to accept this offer from an enemy of the people. Gavrilov
did not accept the assessment that he was someone who had violated his
right to be a Communist.10 Such narratives offer valuable insight into the
prisoners experiences and in this case, Communisms compelling grasp.
Other gaps in our understanding of the Gulag have also been filled by
these archives. Until the emergence of the Memorial collection, we had
only scattered sources such as Solzhenitsyns Gulag Archipelago11 and Evgeniia
Ginzburgs Within the Whirlwind12 to inform us on the dynamics of such phenomena as, for example, exile under Stalin. The intention of the policy governing the release into exile of political prisoners (who had survived their
ten year terms) seems to have been that no prisoner should ever taste freedom again.13 Accordingly, a February 1948 ukaz (decree) of the Presidium of
the ussr Supreme Soviet ordered political offenders and individuals presenting a danger on account of their anti-Soviet ties [to be] exiled indefinitely when their prison terms were up.14 A March 1948 order of the Ministry
of State Security further specified the remote regions to which these exiles
were to be sent for settlement.15
A typical example of release into exile can be found in the following story from the Memorial files. Grigory Grigorevich Budagov, a railroad engineer, was arrested in 1930 and taken to Moscows Butyrka prison. His journey through the prisons and camps ended when his term was completed
in 1948. He waited three days, then walked sixteen kilometers to the train
station and headed for Novosibirsk. At this destination, he was picked up
by the authorities and taken to prison. He waited four days and then went
on a hunger strike to protest being held illegally. It was finally explained
to the prisoner that they had lost him and were thus obligated to send
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
Lev Gavrilovich Gavrilov, Zolotoi most [Golden Bridge], International Institute of

Social History, Memorial archive, f. 2, op. 1, d. 41, l. 0001 2909 1516.
Gavrilov, Zapasnoi kommunist [Reserve Communist], in Semen Vilenskii, Dodnes
Tiagoteet 2 (Moscow, 2004), pp. 225-234.
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956, Vol. 3 (New York, 1992).
Evgeniia Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, trans. Ian Boland (San Diego, 1982).
John Keep, Last of the Empires: A History of the Soviet Union 1945-1992 (Oxford, 1996), p.
12.
Istochnik 2 (1994): 92-94; rgani (Russian State Archive for Contemporary History). F.
89, op. 18, d. 26, l. 1
Prikaz Ministerstva Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti Soiuza SSR za 1948 god, Ob organizatsii raboty po ssylke, vysylke I ssylke na poselenie, Moscow, 23 March 1948.
3 46
him for consignment. Then he learned that all Article 58ers (counter-revolutionaries) were being sent to remote places in Siberia for permanent
settlement. Dozens of others were in the same situation, all waiting to be
dispatched:
Under convoy two officers took us to the village of Chumakovo
in Novosibirsk province where I was reminded of Uncle Toms
Cabin. It was something like a slave auction. All the big bosses
of the region came I was chosen by the head of the regional
community services, who took me right away, telling me along
the way that he did not have a technical engineer, and if the
chairman of the regional executive committee gives permission,
then he would engage me in this function. After his visit to that
chairman, the head of the regional community services reported the formers answer: Give him the heaviest physical work.
[] I dragged logs for a week.16
The experiences of this disheartened exile were not unlike those of others.
They had to report to the authorities every ten days, and any attempt to
transgress their prescribed borders was considered an escape, punishable
by ten years of incarceration. These and other rich documents from the
Memorial archive address fundamental questions on the broad and deep entrenchment of terror in the Soviet system; they are indispensable for any researcher working on Soviet victimizations. Their accessibility is particularly
important because most of these memoirs have yet to be published.
Saving Archives
Those, like Jaap, who advocated for a safe place for the archive, were prescient. Perhaps unrelated to the states ambiguity with regard to the Stalinist
past, on the eve of the first international conference on Approaches to
Stalinism in Moscow in December of 2008, the Memorial office in St.
Petersburg was raided by masked federal security agents, who proceeded to
confiscate the organizations hard drive and numerous archival dossiers.17
The pretext was the St. Petersburg Memorials alleged association with an
extremist article in the newspaper Novyi Peterburg. Among other transgressions, the authorities carried away Memorials belongings without leaving
16
17
Grigorii Grigorievch Budagov, Zapiski., iish Memorial archive, f. 2, op. 1, d. 30

l. 0001 2909 516.
See Viacheslav Feraposhkin, Obysk v Sankt-Peterburgskom Memoriale, 30
Oktiabria, 90, December 2008; Orlando Figes, The Raid on Memorial, letter to New
York Review of Books, 15 January 2009; Arnout Brouwers, Jozef Stalin was een effectieve manager, de Volkskrant, 11 March 2009.
|347
an inventory. Veniamin Iofe, who stowed that same archive under his bed
eighteen years earlier, would likely not have been surprised by the raid.
Irina Flige, chairman of the St. Petersburg Memorial, has tried to explain
what might have precipitated this event. She asserted that the state glossed
over the state-sponsored crimes of the terror, emphasizing instead its great
accomplishments in modernization and its victory over the Nazis. This
omission in the historical record led Memorial to draft an international appeal in 2008, wherein they lamented that, instead of a serious nationwide
discussion about its Soviet past, the Soviet State patriotic myth with small
changes is reviving. This myth views Russian history as a string of glorious
and heroic achievements.18
The voluminous materials that Memorial holds on the scope and nature of
the terror provide an unwelcome addition to this image. Memorial had reason to believe that the St. Petersburg raid, and similar such actions, are part
of a concerted effort by the authorities to brand Memorial as a dissident/extremist group and marginalize the importance of its revelations.19 If so, this
would represent a politically retrogressive trend; the pursuit and dissemination of information on Soviet repression has not been considered a marginal activity since the Brezhnev era.20 But it may be unofficial policy; some
archival documents on the terror are now less accessible than they were in
the 1990s.21 In January of 2011 the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation
dismissed a law suit filed by Memorial to gain access to documents on the
repression. Many of these materials are subject to a 75-year period of inaccessibility from the day the case closed due to violations of privacy.22
Apparently, an accurate account of the victimizations under seven decades of Soviet rule cannot yet be integrated into Soviet history. Until it can
be, this part of the past will continue to challenge the credibility of Russias
present version of history.23 In the aftermath of the raid, Memorial engaged
18
19
20
21
22
23
National Images of the Past: the twentieth century and the war of memories, an
appeal from the International Memorial Society, March 2008; See also Irina Flige,
Predmetnaia I materialnaia pamiat o Bolshom Terror, draft paper, 2007.
Conversation with Irina Flige and Arsenii Roginskii, Moscow, 7 December 2008.
For a comment on latter-day dissidence, see Serge Schmemann, The Case Against
and for Khodorkovsky, International Herald Tribune, 20 October 2008.
Clifford J. Levy, Purging History of Stalins terror, International Herald Tribune, 27
November 2008. I personally experienced this trend while working in the Party
archive. Documents to which I had had access in 1996 were not available, nor were
Party Control Commission statistics from the Brezhnev era on. The archive staff
themselves did not seem to know the reason. Other researchers working in other
places reported similar problems.
See Nikita Petrovs open appeal, Landmark Decision by the Supreme Court:
Is Access to Documents about Repressions being Closed Down in the Russian
Federation?, 2 February 2011. Available at: http://hro.org/node/10136; last accessed
3 February 2011.
Similarly in Chechnya, a 2009 ally of Russia, the scars of war were being erased as
Grozny had a makeover. The deputy mayor cited a Russian proverb that guided the
3 48
Semn Samuilovich Vilenskii, founder of Vozvrashchenie, Chukavino, 1998.

Photo Nanci Adler.
in a protracted legal battle and ultimately accomplished the return of their

collection, but they were very fortunate on the day of that raid to have had
Jaaps foresight. The iish holds a number of complete Memorial fonds on
microfilm, but as the Russian collection grew, the filming did not keep pace.
There are still several thousands of pages of new documents gathered by the
organization that merit preservation outside of Russia. Notwithstanding the
fact that the iish Memorial archive is incomplete, it is still the largest foreign repository of Memorial documents.
Early on in the cooperation with Memorial, in 1992, the iish hosted
a Memorial exhibition on Anti-Semitism at the End of the Soviet Era.
Jaap endorsed the project and Huub Sanders worked together with Boris
Belenkin and others from Memorial. Huub no doubt will long remember
our nail-biting eve of the opening, when nothing had yet been mounted on
the swastika-formed panels in the exhibition area of the iish. After working
deep into the night, the exhibition turned out to be quite a success. It, too,
has been preserved, on microfilm at the idc (Publishers) in Leiden.
In the mid-nineties, I found myself at the restaurant Manolo on the
Warmoesstraat with Jaap, Semn Vilenskii, a Kolyma survivor and chairman of the organization Vozvrashchenie, Zaiara Veselaia (whose father, a faprocess, The one who recalls the past will lose an eye, in C.J. Chivers, The New
Chechnya reconstructs its Past, International Herald Tribune, 20 October 2008.
|349
mous writer, had been executed

in 1937) and others. Vilenskii
had been arrested as a student
in 1948, and was charged with
anti-Soviet agitation and terrorist intentions. He was sent
to the harshest of prisons and
camps and eventually freed in
1955. He started gathering manuscripts of camp memoirs already in the sixties at considerable risk. Had he been found to
possess even one manuscript,
he would have lost his residence permit in Moscow, and
perhaps much more.24 His brave
efforts attested to his will to
honor those who had perished
and represent surviving victims.
Vilenskii has been active
on several fronts. Today, he
is the only member of the
Presidential
Rehabilitation
Commission who had been a
Stalin-era prisoner. He is inArchive of Vozvrashchenie, apartment of Semn
censed about the fact that there
Vilenskii, Moscow, 2005. Photo Rob Knijff.
had never been a moral condemnation of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union. In
2003, he asserted that Russia would benefit from a Nuremberg Trial without blood.25 Those found guilty in these crimes against humanity could
receive the maximum penalty, and then be pardoned. At the time of this
writing, Vilenskii, now age 85 and one of the few in the dwindling ranks of
survivors of the Stalinist era, continued his call for the state to recognize
and repent.26 His unpublished manuscripts and many of the books from his
publishing house offer sometimes harrowing testimony on the nature of the
Soviet terror.
Jaap had invited this delegation to Amsterdam to discuss preserving
the vast collection of Gulag survivor memoirs that Vozvrashchenie hosts in
the cramped apartment of its chairman in Moscow. Several of these man-
24
25
26
For more on Vilenskiis biography, see Gulag Survivor, pp. 125-134, and Semn
Vilenskii, Any Questions?, Gulag Studies, 2-3 (2009-2010), pp. 95-106.
Semn Samuilovich Vilenskii, interview, Moscow, 18 November 2003.
Ibid., interview, Moscow, 30 October 2011.
3 50
Foreign Agent [Loves] USA, graffiti on Memorial headquarters, Moscow, 2013. Photo
Nanci Adler.
uscripts have been published, but countless others are in danger of deteriorating, and the organization may not survive beyond the lifetime of its
founder. Once again recognizing the historic and scholarly value of this collection, Jaap arranged for its microfilming and accessibility to iish visitors
and researchers.
Threats
The importance of having a safe copy of collections like those of Memorial
and Vozvrashchenie should not be underestimated. In early 2013, Memorial
was raided again, this time by lawyers, accountants, television crews and
tax inspectors. Two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the work
of historians and civil society actors who challenge the official narrative of
present or past events has become more marginalized, and in some cases
even dangerous. Representatives of Memorial and other human rights organizations have been not only physically, but also legally harassed. Even if
they triumph in their day in court, it is seldom publicized.27 Memorial has
been accused of political activities and targeted for official harassment for
not having duly declared themselves foreign agents, in keeping with a
new law. They share this dubious status with a number of other ngos, including the Levada Center, a highly respected independent polling agency.
27
On the legal battle of researchers arrested for working in the archives, see Catriona
Bass, Controlling History, Transitions Online, 6 December 2011.
|351
I was witness to the intimidating raid at Memorial on March 21 of 2013,

where a state delegation barged into their headquarters in the early morning with a television crew (with which they denied having any connection).
I had not felt concern for Memorial about their contact with me, a foreigner, since the eighties. At the moment, it appears that such state-sponsored
measures could potentially limit the functioning of Memorial, although its
chairman, Arsenii Roginskii, is not deeply concerned.28 What is certain is
that, as a human rights watchdog that represents many who were forced
into signing false confessions and subsequently executed, they will not bow
to state pressure to admit to being a foreign agent. These attempts to suppress civil society hark back to Soviet propaganda images of capitalist encirclement, with internal enemies aided and abetted by foreign enemies.
Memorial has faced numerous obstacles in its 25-year existence, but the
current official limitation may be one of their greatest challenges yet. We
can be very grateful for Jaaps efforts at supporting Memorial, Vozrvrashchenie
and similar initiatives, because even as we await the unfolding of this current siege with baited breath, we can rest assured that many of the victims
stories already have a safe haven in Amsterdam.
28
Arsenii Roginskii, interview with author, Amsterdam, 6 November 2013.
III.5 Archival Revolution

and Intellectual
Access in Russia
ArcheoBiblioBase in
Moscow and Amsterdam
Patricia Kennedy Grimsted
Increased directory-level intellectual access to now revolutionized Russian

archives has come to the Internet in Moscow with a newly signed (2013)
Agreement between the International Institute of Social History (iish) and
the Russian Presidential Academy for the National Economy and Public
Administration (ranepa; or in Russian rankhigs).1 As the prime comprehensive archival directory and reference bibliography, abb grew out of the
bilingual database that during the 1990s produced Russian and English
printed directories of Russian archives, in close collaboration with the
Federal Archival Agency of Russia (Rosarkhiv).2 After publication of the ex1
See the announcement at <http://www.iisg.nl/abb/>. See also P.K. Grimsted, A

New Home for ArcheoBiblioBase? The Premier English-Language Directory and
Reference Bibliography for Russian Archives and Manuscript Repositories, aaass
NewsNet (May 2010), pp. 15-18, and my subsequent reports, ArcheoBiblioBase
Archives in Russia Update 2011, International Newsletter of Communist Studies,
17 (2011), no. 24, pp. 21-27; and Archival Transition in Russia and the Legacy of
Displaced European Archives, Solanus, N.S., 22 (2011), pp. 185-200.
Arkhivy Rossii: Moskva-Sankt-Peterburg: Spravochnik-obozrenie i bibliograficheskii ukazatel,
Introduction by V.P. Kozlov; P.K. Grimsted, L.V. Repulo, and I.V. Tunkina (comps);
M.D. Afanasev, P.K. Grimsted, V.P. Kozlov, and V.S. Sobolev (eds) (Moscow:
g ri ms t ed A r ch i v a l R e v o l u ti o n a nd Inte lle c tu al Ac c e s s
|353
panded English edition of Archives in Russia in 2000, however, Rosarkhiv declined further collaboration in the expansion of the bilingual Internet version iish was proposing. Jaap Kloosterman, as iish director was not prepared
to let ArcheoBiblioBase (abb) expire. Already since 1997 iish hosted and developed an English Internet version of abb on the Institute website (http://
www.iisg.nl/abb/), which now covers close to 600 Russian archives and manuscript repositories with links to their reference facilities. Following the
Dutch-Russian 2013 cooperative Agreement, ranepa launched an abb mirror
website in February 2014 at http://abb.ranepa.ru/, while planning continues
for further updating and eventual revival of a bilingual version.
When the Bolshevik October Revolution overthrew the Russian Empire in
1917, it was followed by an archival revolution that led to the most centralized state archival system the world had ever known. As a would-be totalitarian state, the Soviet Union had every reason to control all of the archives
of the nation. Control of the historical records of society was a means to
control that society and what was to be revealed about its history, with the
aim of molding its future. During the postwar Soviet decades the state archival administration developed a central catalogue of fonds in state repositories, which could have been the infrastructure at the heart of a centralized
reference system, but it was not for public consumption. The concept of
public intellectual access to archives was virtually unknown in the Soviet
Union by the end of 1991.3
If only archival restrictions were the most glaring insufficiency of our archival service, replied Academician Dmitrii Likhachev, one of the most revered scholars of Russian culture, when asked in September 1989 to respond
to foreign criticism that many Soviet archives remained closed. It is insufficient to decide from on high merely to declassify archives. We still need to
tell the whole world exactly what is held in them, to publish inventories and
catalogues of previously secret documents.4 A perceptive article by the former head of the Lenin Library Manuscript Department, Sara Zhitomirskaia,
entitled Files Not Only Classified Secret, carried a similar message in that
initial period of glasnost: our whole archival system was oriented toward the
utmost restriction on information.5 Today as part of the post-Soviet archival
4
5
Arkheograficheskii tsentr, 1997); Archives of Russia: A Directory and Bibliographic

Guide to Holdings in Moscow and St.Petersburg, English edition edited by P.K. Grimsted;
Introduction by V.P. Kozlov; P.K. Grimsted, L.V. Repulo, and I.V. Tunkina (comps);
M.D. Afanasev, V.P. Kozlov, and V.S. Sobolev (eds), 2 vols. (Armonk ny/London,
2000).
P.K. Grimsted, Intellectual Access and Descriptive Standards in Post-Soviet Archives: What
is to be Done? (Princeton, March 1992), Preface, and 1. The Legacy of Ideological
Control, pp. [1]-23.
Evgenii Kuzmin, Blizorukost S akademikom D.S. Likhachevym beseduet
correspondent LG, Literaturnaia gazeta, no. 38 (20 Nov. 1989), p. 5.
S.V. Zhitomirskaia, Delo ne tolko v sekretnosti, Literaturnaia gazeta, no. 29 (19
3 54
ICA Congress in Washington dc, 1976. Patricia Grimsted presents the supplement
Russian Archival Directory and idc microfiche catalogue to Soviet Glavarkhiv director
F.I. Dolgikh (left), with idc editor Jan Juffermans (center). Archivist of the United States
J.B. Rhoads (right) looks on. Collection of the author.
revolution, many federal archives under Rosarkhiv are providing Internet access to their portion of the updated Central Catalogue of Fonds, and some
even to the finding aids, or inventories (opisi) for each fond.
A quarter century earlier, in 1972, the hitherto most extensive interagency archival directory describing a total of seventy-four archives and manuscript repositories in Moscow and Leningrad with an annotated bibliography
of their finding aids could only be published abroad.6 My private presentation in Moscow of a hand-bound copy to the Chief of the Main Archival
July 1989), p. 3; see also the P.K. Grimsted response, Propisi pro opisi, Literaturnaia
gazeta, no. 33 (16 August 1989), p. 5, and comments by V.P. Kozlov and N.N.
Bolkhovitinov; and later by V.V. Tsaplin, in Kruglyi stol zhurnala, Sovetskie arkhivy,
1990, no. 1, p. 12; quoted in Grimsted, Intellectual Access, Preface. Zhitomirskaia
translated my essay, but it was never published in Russian.
P.K. Grimsted, Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the USSR: Moscow and Leningrad
(Princeton nj, 1972). I could not acknowledge Zhitomirskaias brave assistance with
my directory.
|355
Administration under the Council of Ministers of the ussr (Glavarkhiv) was

the only official recognition in the Soviet Union. A year later, a review appeared in the Soviet historical journal Voprosy istorii. However, the concluding recommendation of the two leading Soviet archivists that a parallel
Russian-language directory be published in the ussr had been stricken by
the editors.7 When I met the authors in the late 1980s, they showed me their
original conclusion. That volume already introduced the concept of combining directory-level descriptions of repositories and an annotated bibliography of finding aids. Soon after publication, the Dutch-Swiss publisher InterDocumentation Company (idc) reproduced under my editorship all of the
finding aids in correlated microfiche editions together with a bibliographic
supplement.8 Those publications were particularly helpful for foreign researchers in the ussr, who had to request specific archives in advance of
arrival in the country; even the few who made it to the isolated foreigners
reading rooms were never given access to reference facilities. Many of the
guides and other finding aids published in the Soviet period were issued in
only minute pressruns, and were restricted for internal service-use only.
Starting already in 1986, I represented the American Association for the
Advancement of Slavic Studies on the Soviet-American Archival Commission
that the International Research & Exchanges Board (irex) had organized to
include the heads of archives on both sides of the Atlantic. We met in alternate years in the Soviet Union and the United States, with one of our major
goals to promote access to archives and their reference facilities for foreign
researchers in all fields.9 When in the spring of 1988, I was verifying data for
my Handbook for Archival Research in the ussr, as a member of the Commission,
I had official entre to Glavarkhiv with minimal cooperation, but real collaboration with Russian archivists proved difficult, if not impossible.10 That
Handbook was outdated by the time it appeared in 1989. As late as the winter of 1991, Glavarkhiv rejected an irex proposal for a computerized collaborative updated edition, officially proposed within the framework of the
Bi-National Commission, along with the offer of computer equipment and
training.11
7
8
10
11
K.I. Rudelson and N.V. Brzhostovskaia in Voprosy istorii, 1973, no. 10.
P.K. Grimsted, Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the ussr: Moscow and Leningrad.
Supplement 1: Bibliographical Addenda (Leiden, 1976); together with Archives and
Manuscript Collections in the ussr: Finding Aids on Microfiche. Series 1: Moscow and
Leningrad (Zug, 1976); updated electronic version: (Leiden, idc website, 2001).
See my first two reports: New us-ussr Archival Commission, aaass Newsletter
27, no. 3 (May 1987), p 6, 9-10; and u.s.-ussr Archival Commission Update, aaass
Newsletter 28, no. 5 (November 1988), pp. 13-14.
Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, A Handbook for Archival Research in the ussr (Washington
dc, 1989).
The Commission owed much to irex Deputy Director Wesley A Fisher, who served
as Secretary. My project benefited from generous support and encouragement
3 56
abb
Specially developed for the Russian project, ArcheoBiblioBase as a computerized database was born in 1990 at Harvard University, although the collection of data started much earlier.12 Developed amidst the euphoria of glasnost
and perestroika, even before the collapse of the ussr in December 1991, in
conception and content abb grew out of my directories of Soviet archives
starting in the mid-1960s and the contacts developed in that process.13
In contrast to earlier Soviet days, when archivists could never invite me
home, by 1990 in Moscow already the period of glasnost I became friends
with a new generation of historian-archivists bent on archival reform. A
group I came to know had just made an historic visit to the Netherlands
on their maiden voyage abroad. There they got a first glimpse of Western
archives, as guests of the Royal Association of Archivists in the Netherlands.
From this group, Vladimir Kozlov became director of what was then the former Central Party Archive, today the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political
History (rgaspi).14 Sergei Mironenko took over what became the State
Archive of the Russian Federation (ga rf), combining the former Central
State Archives of the October Revolution and Socialist Development of both
the ussr and the rsfsr. Vitalii Afiani was then assigned to the deputy post
in what had been the Politburo Archive, now rgani, and today he heads the
archival system of the Academy of Sciences. Toasts to mir i druzhba continued in Russian kitchens with a new sense of irony as well as euphoria,
as they joined the revolutionary western partnerships, cooperative foreign
publication projects such as the vast Hoover Project for microfilms of
Communist Party records or the Annals of Communism series undertaken by Yale University Press, which in 2013 culminated in the Stalin Digital
Archive.15
12
13
14
15
from irex since its 1968 foundation, and starting in the early 1970s was funded by
a series of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (neh) with
matching funds from several other sources.
The Macintosh database in acius 4th Dimension for abb was initially developed
by programmers at Harvard, from my office at the Ukrainian Research Institute,
where I had been a Research Associate since its beginning in 1974, as well as an
Associate of the Russian Research Center, now the Davis Center for Russian and
Eurasian Studies. Renewed funding for my Soviet archival directory project came
from neh.
See bibliography of P.K. Grimsted writings on Russian archives at the
ArcheoBiblioBase website.
See V.P. Kozlovs privately published memoirs, Bog sokhranial arkhivy Rossii
(Cheliabinsk, 2009).
See <http://www.eastview.com/Files/EVStalinDigitalArchive.pdf>.
|357
irex
Fortunately, given the Glavarkhiv rejection of joint efforts in my archival
directory project, irex had also arranged for my participation in the official
us-Soviet exchange program of the American Council of Learned Societies
(acls) with the Academy of Sciences of the ussr. Vladimir Kozlov, fresh from
his trip to the Netherlands, was then Scientific Secretary of the Division of
History, and his boss, Academician and Professor G.N. Sevastianov, was
also President of the newly organized Society of Archivists of the ussr.
Following the Glavarkhiv rejection of the proposed computerized directory,
the Academy initiative and enthusiastic reception in Moscow led to a formal agreement between irex and the Academy Division of History. Moscowbased operations for abb, with computers furnished by irex, started in the
spring of 1991. Initially we were housed in the State Public Historical Library
(gpib), thanks to encouragement of gpib director Mikhail D. Afanasev, who
remains to this day a strong abb advisor. The opening of Soviet archives was
accompanied by expanded public reference facilities and hence intellectual
access.16 ArcheoBiblioBase became the computerized reference system that
could keep track of all the changes of names and directors, together with
reference publications, leading researchers to wider access to the record of
the Soviet and Russian imperial past.
As I recall, it was the early 1990s when I first became associated with Jaap
Kloosterman, who was already spending considerable time in Moscow, trying to assure the preservation of important library collections whose survival might be endangered as a result of the new revolution. One of my own
archival revelations was of special interest for Jaap and iish. News about the
secret repositories of trophy art in 1990 led to front-page headline news
in the West in 1991, followed by revelations about an estimated twelve million trophy books transferred to the ussr after the Second World War.17
Already in early 1990 came the revelations about the captured German archives still held in the hitherto top-secret Special (Osobyi) Archive.18 Later
that year in another Moscow archive, I discovered a file with Soviet security chief Lavrentii Berias personal orders for seizure in May 1945 of French
intelligence and national security archives from a remote Gestapo/Abwehr
counter-intelligence center in a Czech village. My Russian archival friends
16
17
18
See my series of articles in the American Archivist (1989-1993), and a 1990 iccees
Harrogate presentation in Solanus, 5 (1991), pp. 177-198. Some of the text below
is drawn from my 2000 Bad Godesberg conference presentation Archives in
the Former Soviet Union Ten Years After: Between Law and Politics; OR, Still
Caught between Political Crossfire and Economic Crisis, in Stefan Creuzberger,
Rainer Lindner (eds), Russische Archive und Geschichtswissenschaft: RechtsgrundlagenArbeitsbedingungen- Forschungsperspektiven (Frankfurt am Main, 2003), pp. 51-80.
See P.K. Grimsted, Tracing Trophy Books in Russia, Solanus, 19 (2005), pp. 131-145.
Ella Maksimova, Piat dnei v Osobom arkhive, Izvestiia, nos. 49-53 (18-22 February
1990), based on interviews with tsgoa sssr director Anatolii Prokopenko.
3 58
did not believe my story, nor could French archival colleagues in Paris confirm. I turned to a Russian investigatory journalist friend, Evgenii Kuzmin,
who had done such fine detective work about the millions of trophy books
left to rot in the abandoned church outside of Moscow.19 Only a year later,
in October 1991, after suppression of the August coup, could he publish his
interview with me in Literaturnaia gazeta, revealing what turned out to be
seven linear kilometers of French records in Moscow.20 A week later, Osobyi
Archive director Anatolii Prokopenko confirmed the findings of the wellknown archival spy Grimsted in an interview entitled Archives of French
Spies Concealed on Leningrad Highway. He admitted the existence as well
of captured archives from almost every country in Europe.21
Soviet trophy archives were of particular interest to Jaap Kloosterman
because it turned out among them were many long-lost iish holdings seized
by the Nazis from the iish Paris Branch headed by the Menshevik exile
Boris Nikolaevsky, whose legendary name is today honored in memorial
seminar rooms in both Moscow and Amsterdam. My first iish seminar in
Amsterdam about the captured archives in Moscow also featured leaders of
the Dutch Womens Archive, who were in tears of joy when they learned
that the Special Archive also held many of their long-lost archival treasures
seized during German occupation.22
Meanwhile, from its gpib base, ArcheoBiblioBase had already produced
brief directory data for the 1991 irex Orientation for the final group of outgoing scholars under Soviet exchange agreements. But abb could not continue to expand to its optimal goals without endorsement of the new official
Committee for Archival Affairs of the Russian Federation (Roskomarkhiv),
then headed by Rudolf G. Pikhoia, replacing the Soviet-era Glavarkhiv.23
19
20
21
22
23
Evgenii Kuzmin, Taina tserkvi v Uzkom, Literaturnaia gazeta, no. 38 (5365) (18
September 1990), p. 10; English edn.: The Mystery of the Church in Uzkoe, Literary
Gazette International, 1990, no. 16 (October, no. 2), p. 20.
Evgenii Kuzmin, Vyvezti unichtozhit spriatat L. Beriia: Sudby
trofeinykh arkhivov (interview with Patricia K. Grimsted), Literaturnaia gazeta, no.
39 (5365) (2 October 1991), p. 13. Kuzmin later headed the Library Department of
the Ministry of Culture, and considerably assisted ArcheoBiblioBase.
Ella Maksimova, Arkhivy Frantsuzskoi razvedki skryvali na Leningradskom shosse
(interview with Anatolii Prokopenko), Izvestiia, no. 240 (9 October 1991).
See P.K. Grimsted, Displaced Archives and Restitution Problems on the Eastern
Front from World War II and its Aftermath, Contemporary European History 6, no.1
(1997), pp. 27-74, updated from Janus (1996) and iisg Research Paper, no. 18 (1995).
See the bibliography of P.K. Grimsted publications on displaced archives and
restitution issues at: <http://socialhistory.org/en/russia-archives-and-restitution/
bibliography>. Electronic texts of many of the P.K. Grimsted publications listed are
available at this website or through hot links.
November 1991-December 1992: Roskomarkhiv [Komitet po delam arkhivov pri
Pravitelstve rf]; December 1992 July 1996: State Archival Service of Russia-Rosarkhiv
[Gosudarstvennaia arkhivnaia sluzhba Rossii]; July 1996-March 2004, Federal Archival
Service of Russia [Federalnaia arkhivnaia sluzhba Rossii]; since March 2004: Federal
Archival Agency of Russia [Federalnoe arkhivnoe agentstvo Rossii].
|359
irex was able to arrange a new agreement for abb with Roskomarkhiv,
signed symbolically at the opening of the sensational exhibition of
Revelations from Russian Archives at the Library of Congress in June 1992,
during the presidential summit in Washington dc.24
In mid-1992, Vladimir Kozlov became Pikhoias deputy and assumed the
Rosarkhiv editorial role for abb. Our subsidiary agreement continued with
the State Public Historical Library (gpib), but the following year we moved
to larger facilities within the Rosarkhiv complex at Bolshaia Pirogovskaia.
Our principal Russian coordinator was Lada V. Repulo, a talented graduate
student and docent at the Historico-Archival Institute (iai), which by then
had formed the basis for the newly established Russian State University for
the Humanities (rggu).25 St. Petersburg coverage was handled by the Branch
Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (pfa ran), headed by Vladimir
Sobolev, with deputy director Irina Tunkina as our coordinator, while the St.
Petersburg Mayors Office circulated our abb questionnaire.
By summer 1992 we produced an enlarged English-language, Archives
in Russia 1992. A Brief Directory, for irex out-going exchange scholars.26 irex
wisely decided on an easily updated loose-leaf format. The day after our text
was sent to irex in the States, we learned that new directors were appointed for six renamed federal archives; fortunately we were already in e-mail
contact with the Washington office and could send the updated data before
they had printed copies. Even before the ink was dry, another institution
had changed its name, often not knowing how soon its new street address
would be official, or when new street signs or a new plaque for its building
would appear. Still more replacement pages were ready for the special abb
directory edition we presented at the Congress of the International Council
on Archives (ica) in Montreal in September 1992. irex provided travel funds
for Pikhoia and Kozlov, their first participation in an ica world congress, at
a moment when Russian archives were in center stage. I served as their escort and makeshift interpreter. To be sure Jaap Kloosterman was on hand in
Montreal as well.
With most European archival leaders present, Russias trophy archives
and restitution issues were of overriding concern. Our latest abb edition already had an updated entry for the Special Archive (tsgoa sssr), by
24
25
26
See the catalogues: Revelations from the Russian Archives: An Exhibit at the Library of
Congress, June 17-July 16, 1992 (Washington dc, 1992); and Revelations from the Russian
Archives: A Checklist (Washington dc, 1992).
irex funding was augmented by the National Endowment for the Humanities
(neh) and the Smith-Richardson Foundation, among others, and later the Soros
Foundation and iish.
Archives in Russia. 1992: A Brief Directory, Part 1: Moscow and St. Petersburg, 2nd
preliminary English version, P.K. Grimsted, L.V. Repulo, I.V. Tunkina, and V.G.
Zabavskii (comps); M.D. Afanasev, P.K. Grimsted, V.P. Kozlov, and V.S. Sobolev (eds);
Preface by P.K. Grimsted; Forward by V.P. Kozlov (Princeton, September 1992).
3 60
Presentation of an early ABB directory to Rosarkhiv Chairman R.G. Pikhoia (center),

1992. Left to right: M.D. Afanasev, V.P. Kozlov, P.K. Grimsted, R.G. Pikhoia, Rosakhiv assistant, and V.D. Simakov, head of Rosarkhiv Reference Service. Collection of the author.
then euphemistically renamed the Centre for Preservation of HistoricoDocumentary Collections (tskhidk), including reference to the published list of fonds in the German Division hot off the press in Germany.27
Indicative of commercial interests in those early years, one enterprising
microform vendor proposed microfilming all the fonds in tskhidk, offering
me generous compensation as consultant. But given Russian recalcitrance in
restitution, Pikhoia preferred dealing with the rival firm Chadwick-Healey
and the delegation from the Hoover Institution, who were promoting many
perks for his support of the Hoover Project of microfilming Soviet-period
cp records and their finding aids (opisi). Meanwhile a special ica session
discussed European plans for digitization of the newly opened Comintern
Archive.
Reflecting Rosarkhiv mood in Montreal, Kozlov entitled his Foreword for
our ica edition of Archives in Russia Invitation for Collaboration. I quote the
27
Kai von Jena and Wilhelm Lenz, Die deutschen Bestnde im Sonderarchiv in
Moskau, Der Archivar, 45 (1992, Heft 3), pp. 457-467.
|36 1
opening indicative of the welcome abb and I had found in Moscow reformist archival circles:
Patricia Kennedy Grimsted and her writings about archives
in Russia and the former ussr have, for a long time, been lessons for Russian archivists. For many years she was actually
the only binding link between Russian archivists and their
foreign colleagues, between Russian archives and their foreign users. She has made a serious contribution to the process of mutual professional enrichment and informational
exchange. The critical spirit of her writings on a number of issues regarding the archives of the former ussr was understood
to a limited extent by some Russian archivists. But for wellknown political reasons, Grimsteds critical views could not
be discussed openly and taken into appropriate consideration.
Now the situation has changed. Very symbolically the directory we are presently offering is, first of all, a real confirmation of
this change, and secondly, it is produced as a result of real collaboration between the former severe critic and those to whom
for many years her critical words were addressed.28
Expounding on the new order for opening Russian archives, Kozlov suggested the main distinguishing feature of the new archival-information
sphere should be the principle of openness and general accessibility to all.
After discussing legal and organizational aspects, he turned to the information or reference aspect and plans for development of an archival information system on three levels. In his words, ArcheoBiblioBase represented,
the most general directory covering the entire range of Russian
archives regardless of their controlling agency[...] The present
directory, or rather its initial part dealing with archives in
Moscow and St. Petersburg, we view as the first and very important most general level of information about Russian archives as
a whole.29
Our Russian colleagues, and especially Kozlov, were equally preoccupied
with Russian archival materials abroad archival Rossica, as known in
Moscow. Emigr archives were long taboo in Soviet days, while they were
the major archival sources available to Western scholars. In the early 1990s
there was explosive interest and many new links to the Russian emigration,
and active attempts to retrieve related archives. iish holdings were of particular importance as the largest collections of Russian revolutionary-related
28
29
Kozlov, Invitation for Collaboration, Archives in Russia, 1992, p. i.

Ibid., p. vi.
3 62
archives in Europe. My own wide knowledge and experience in the field of

migr archival Rossica were of particular importance for Kozlov. His willingness to work with me on abb was undoubtedly encouraged by my willingness to speak out and report on foreign archival Rossica. That was how
it happened that Jaap and I had several private meetings with Kozlov, and
then found ourselves together on the Presidium for the large conference
Kozlov organized in December 1993 to launch the official Russian government Rossica program.30
Kozlovs preoccupation with archival Rossica abroad and how to retrieve it led to his rapprochement with the Foreign Ministry archivist and
Rosarkhivs official policy of demanding Rossica in return from countries that were rushing in to claim their captured or trophy archives
in Moscow. Following the resolutions of the ica 1994 citra conference in
Thessalonica, devoted as it was to dispersed and displaced archives, in
which Jaap and I also participated, the concept trophy archives was officially outlawed by ica, as was barter with archival materials. But that
did not change the Rosarkhiv policy. Despite Rosarkhiv attempts, the
Netherlands was not required to furnish additional Rossica in exchange
for return of its captured archives from Moscow. However, among the
iish holdings, Kozlov labelled Rossica many papers the Nazis had seized
among iish Paris holdings, including the Boris Nikolaevsky papers, and he
refused to return them to Amsterdam. That whole story has been dealt with
elsewhere, but still not resolved.31 Fortunately, the problem did not affect
abb progress in Moscow.
Internet
From the beginning, Kozlov always insisted that planned abb output should
first appear in Russian, and by 1993, our new resourceful Russian programmer, Iurii Liamin, had completed a Cyrillic utility with automatic transliteration for parallel Russian data files. The WorldWideWeb was still in its
infancy when the Eurasia Foundation supported a crucial workshop in the
30
31
The conference proceedings, V.P. Kozlov (ed.), Problemy zarubezhnoi arkhivnoi

Rossiki: Sbornik statei (Moscow, Russkii mir, 1997), included my opening article,
Arkhivnaia Rossika/Sovetika: K opredeleniiu tipologii russkogo arkhivnogo
naslediia za rubezhom, pp. 7-43, and Jaaps contribution, Rossika zarubezhom:
Arkhivy Mezhdunarodnogo instituta sotsialnoi istorii, pp. 121-123. Variant versions
of my paper appeared in Trudy Istoriko-arkhivnogo instituta, 33 (Moscow, 1996), pp.
262-286, and in Otechestvennye arkhivy, 1993, no. 1, pp. 20-53. An extended English
version appeared as: Archival Rossica/Sovetica Abroad Provenance or Pertinence,
Bibliographic and Descriptive Needs, Cahiers du Monde Russe et Sovietique, 34, no. 3
(1993), pp. 431-480.
See the report of Eric Ketelaar, The Return of Dutch Archives from Moscow, in
P.K. Grimsted, F.J. Hoogewoud, and Eric Ketelaar (eds), Returned from Russia: Nazi
Archival Plunder in Western Europe and Recent Restitution Issues (Institute of Art and Law
[uk], 2007), especially pp. 246-247.
|36 3
abb Work Station at the Historical Library (gpib), 1993. Left to right: abb programmer
Iurii Liamin, Lada Repulo, Patricia Grimsted, and Vladimir Zabavskii. Collection of the
author.
United States for our abb programmers and coordinators from Russia and
Ukraine to become acquainted with American Internet developments. That
visit also resulted in our first abb Internet outlet in gopher format on the
website of Yale University, launched in 1995.
A year later at the ica Congress in Beijing in 1996, with added support
from the Soros Foundation and iish, Kozlov (by then head of Rosarkhiv)
and I presented a mock-up of the 1,000-page Russian edition of Arkhivy Rossii.
That comprehensive directory of over 260 archival repositories in Moscow
and St. Petersburg with close to 3,000 bibliographic entries for reference literature, produced with automatic typesetting-ready output from
ArcheoBiblioBase was published in Moscow in 1997.32 Presenting data
about archival materials under all agencies from the still secretive Archive
of the President of the Russian Federation (ap rf) to film studios and factory
museums it provided basic reference for those using traditional state and
cpsu records, medieval manuscripts, and personal papers. The new directory also identified manuscript maps, folk songs, motion pictures, genealogical data, and architectural drawings, to name only a few among the specialized sources covered. Notes about access and working conditions in each
repository augmented researcher orientation, with annotated bibliographic
32
Arkhivy Rossii: Moskva-Sankt-Peterburg (Moscow, 1997).
3 64
entries cross-referenced to microform editions. A correlation index linked

present repositories with all of their previous names and acronyms. The appearance of this volume published first in Russia itself under Rosarkhiv
sponsorship was an indication of the revolutionary development of reference information about Russian archives.
Symbolically a formal presentation ceremony for our 1997 Arkhivy Rossii
was held in the crowded auditorium of the former Central Party Archive
(now rgaspi), hosted by our Russian co-editor, Vladimir Kozlov. Historical
Library (gpib) director and co-editor Mikhail Afanasev introduced a projected online demonstration of our newly launched website with abbreviated Russian-language listings on the public-access server at his library.33
Jaap Kloosterman demonstrated his new abb English-language webpage on
the iish website.34 The ceremony was attended by directors of major federal and municipal archives, as well as representatives of key federal agency archives, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (mid), the Ministry
of Defense (Minoborony), the Federal Security Service (fsb), and even the
Foreign Intelligence Service (svr). Major libraries and museums were represented, as were the Archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ran)
in Moscow and St. Petersburg, all of whose holdings were listed. The fsb
Archival Administration director, who had earlier met with me personally
to verify and approve our coverage of the fsb Archive, poured me a glass of
champagne at the reception that followed with a toast to the first coverage of his agency archive in print!35
The success of the Moscow presentation, however, masked lingering serious problems, calling into question the extent to which Russian infrastructure was ready to sustain a revolutionized archival information system, to
say nothing of readiness for tolerance of my critical approach to Russian
archival affairs. The archival revolution turned out to have been abortive
and the ingrown Soviet context proved difficult to overcome. My expanded
introduction was rejected by Kozlov as too subjective for our scientific
directory. After being banned in Moscow, Kloosterman quickly published
it in Amsterdam as an expanded monograph, doing much of the editing
himself.36
33
The gpib website and free public assistance was established during 1996 under
sponsorship of irex with usia funding.
34
See P.K. Grimsted, Russian Archival Directory Published in Moscow and Launched
on the Internet, in irex International Alumni Forum, 1 (1997, no. 2), pp. 14-16.
35 The fsb agreed to be included only after I presented them a copy of Steven A.
Grants Scholars Guide to Washington dc, for Russian, Central Eurasian, and Baltic Studies,
3rd edn revised by William E. Pomeranz (Washington dc, 1994), with printed
coverage of cia resources!
36
P.K. Grimsted, Archives of Russia Five Years After: Purveyors of Sensations or
Shadows Cast out to the Past (Amsterdam, 1997, IISG Research Paper,
no. 26, at: http://socialhistory.org/en/publications/archives-russia-fiveyears-after; revised edn: Archives of Russia Seven Years After (Washington
|36 5
Access
Thanks to our printed abb directory, was there really more widespread public access to a reformed archival information system for Russian archives?
In many ways, I regret having to answer negatively, even more so because
I personally shared the euphoria of fall 1991 and 1992 with my Russian archival colleagues and the satisfaction of completing that 1997 volume with
them. At most, it was only in limited circles.
First was the problem of publicity and lack of serious peer reviews,
although our directory rated more than many. A front-page notice appeared in Izvestiia, followed by a write-up in the Rosarkhiv archival journal,
Otechestvennye arkhivy, and at the end of the year in Knizhnoe obozrenie, by a
specialist at Moscow State University (mgu).37 However, the only serious review appeared in Poland, as far as we know.38 Neither Rosarkhiv nor the
publisher had any mechanism for publicity or distribution of review copies.
Second, more basically, we were a foreign-funded operation, not a basic component in the Rosarkhiv federal budget; our staff were not on the
Rosarkhiv payroll. What is striking is that, with few exceptions, every major
guide, shortlist of fonds, and more detailed finding aid for Russian archives
issued since 1991 has depended on foreign subsidy for publication, and in
many cases on a further foreign subsidy for preparation of the text or microform. However, for ArcheoBiblioBase, actually produced collaboratively in
Russia, there was no Rosarkhiv infrastructure to take over and assure continuity of our revolutionary information system. After our 1995 experimental Internet outlet at Yale University, Kozlov had insisted we could not continue English Internet coverage without a Russian equivalent. After launch
of our Russian Internet coverage on the Historical Library (gpib) server,
Rosarkhiv promised upkeep of abb, but never followed through. We and our
foreign sponsors had hoped that ArcheoBiblioBase would open a new era
of intellectual access within Russia. But was abb really a high priority for
Rosarkhiv? And if so, were they prepared to assist in keeping that opening
current? They were willing to house the abb workstation with our special
staff, as long as we had outside funding to cover costs, but there was even
discussion that we should pay rent and electricity costs.
Third, and in some ways even more important, distribution of our directory within Russia was extremely limited. Even for such a well-subsidized
37
38
dc, Cold War International History Project, 1998, Working Paper,

no. 20, parts 1 and 2; at: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/
archives-russia-seven-years-after-purveyors-sensations-or-shadows-cast-to-the-past.
Izvestiia, 12 April 1997, p. 1; T.I. Bondareva, Prezentatsiia spravochnika Arkhivy
Rossii, in Otechestvennye arkhivy, 1997, no. 3, pp. 120-121. See also Dmitrii Volodikhin,
Slovo o rossiiskikh arkhivakh, in Knizhnoe obozrenie, 1997, no. 52, p. 6.
Ewa Rosowska, in Archeion, 98 (1997), pp. 222-223. See also the Ukrainian review
of the 1992 edition by Liubov Dubrovina and Konstantin Novokhatskyi in Arkhivy
Ukrainy (1993) no. 1-3, pp. 106-108.
3 66
reference publication produced in Moscow, there was no viable distribution

system. Indeed, the most serious complaint was how those who knew about
it could get copies.39 During 1996, the Open Society Institute osi (Soros
Foundation) provided a grant to double the pressrun, with a generous quota
to be distributed free to Russian libraries. However, promised free copies
were not even delivered to all the repositories covered, let alone to regional
archives and libraries outside of Moscow. Besides, copies were not readily
available for purchase in convenient bookstores.
With few exceptions, copies could be purchased (Soviet style) only within the Rosarkhiv complex involved. The French cultural attach came in
person on his lunch hour to purchase four copies; although I personally
arranged a pass for him for the Rosarkhiv compound, he couldnt get the
books out, because the publishing office had not issued the requisite pass. A
colleague from the u.s. Holocaust Memorial Museum succeeded in purchasing three copies, but a Sheremetevo customs agent confiscated two of them,
claiming he was trying to export an unauthorized reference book.
Later we received a supplemental grant from osi to buy up the remaining
pressrun for distribution, but by that time, no one had made the necessary
legal arrangements before the grant expired. When iish then arranged for
another Russian publisher to buy the remaining pressrun, no one could find
the printer or figure out what happened to any remaining books. It turned
out that our enterprising publisher closed down and disappeared abroad before paying the printer or filing for bankruptcy.
Understandably, even today the most serious complaint about our Russian
edition is that copies are available only in a few libraries and archival reading-rooms, even in Moscow and St. Petersburg, let alone throughout the
Russian Federation. Later one of my assistants found a stash of at least 250
copies that were supposed to be delivered to the participating repositories.
Rosarkhiv reportedly sent one hundred copies to Petersburg for contributing repositories, but on last count, only about ten per cent reached their
intended destination. Neither the director of the National Library (rnb) in
St. Petersburg, nor the director of the Russian Book Chamber (Knizhnaia
palata) in Moscow, had seen the directory before I personally presented
them copies a year and a half after publication. (Legally both should have received immediate depository copies.) By 2000 a considerably expanded and
updated English edition was available, but Russian libraries still needed the
Russian version, even if outdated, and they could not afford the high-priced
foreign English one, even as supplement.
Political problems? Legal problems? Economic problems? Russian problems? Unfortunately, such problems were all too frequent in the post-Soviet
era, and all too symptomatic. In the late 1990s they did not result from political censorship, as was the case with my first directory of Moscow and
39
In answer to distribution complaints, Otechestvennye arkhivy (1998) no. 3, p. 126,

printed the publishers coordinates.
|36 7
Leningrad archives a quarter century ago, although occasionally, alas, that

did still play a role. More likely, socio-economic problems may well have
played a part: from inadequacies of book distribution and the lack of infrastructure for public reference access in post-1991 Russia, to the persistence
of Soviet-era mind sets. Even if archivists wanted to promote profitable
marketing, they lacked experience in implementation. And at the same
time, they were not anxious for free distribution, when there might have
been money to be made in sales. Besides, some compilers were disappointed
that they received no royalties, despite their having been better compensated for their work than their Rosarkhiv counterparts.
Even more serious problems arose when news spread that the English
edition would be published in the States. Rosarkhiv was challenged by a
scandalous political attack from a prominent Moscow academic leader. In
a letter to a high official in the Presidential Administration, he complained
bitterly about the foreign copyright and publication of Russian archival information in the United States. The letter suggested we were selling off
the national patrimony, similar to the complaints heard earlier in connection with the Hoover Chadwick-Healey microfilming project.40 Further the
letter expressed alarm that archival information might be freely available
on the Internet, which may well have dampened Kozlovs appetite for our
Internet plans.
Simultaneously, in the fall of 1997 I was subjected to a customs inspection at Sheremetevo unlike any I had ever experienced in Soviet days. My
departure was delayed for twenty-four hours, so that customs officers could
try to charge me $250 for a computer inspection they were unable to carry
out. Indeed, when I returned with an American Embassy escort the next
day to claim my computer, the customs agent in charge was not available,
and an assistant informed me they had dropped the charge because they
had been unable to open my Macintosh!41 That was 1997. Fortunately, even
threats to the Russian editor, harassment of the chief compiler, and initial
prohibition of her travel to the United States for a conference presentation
and editorial work on the English edition did not prevent publication.42
What was all this about? Business? Politics? A revived security crackdown
on foreigners? Concern about open Russian archival information abroad? Or
fear of our Internet plans? The fsb had blessed the project (at least verbally and by their participation in the Russian volume) and complained when
their free copy was delayed! We could only speculate that behind the attack
40
Just before our publication, Pikhoia had been forced to resign, and the Hoover
Project essentially curtailed, having earlier aroused similar criticism from the same
Russian nationalist source.
41 The us Embassy discovered a secret regulation had been issued regarding
computer searches, but it was rarely enforced for departing foreigners. klm agents
kindly let me use my ticket to Amsterdam from the day before.
42
Sharpe did acknowledge copyright of the earlier Russian edition by Rosarkhiv.
3 68
there was some institutional rivalry or perhaps personal vendetta involved

in which our Russian colleagues were involved. Since the high-level complaints about our plans for the English-language publication came from the
Russian State University for the Humanities (rggu), we suspected ill feelings
there, where our chief editor and chief compiler were both on the teaching staff. Both experienced other critical incidents from that source. We had
turned down an rggu publication proposal for both the Russian and English
editions, which would have required a much larger subsidy and additional
editorial control, and chose a smaller firm within Rosarkhiv.
The 2000 two-volume English-language edition, published by M.E. Sharpe
in New York, was enlarged by one-third, including an additional 40 repositories and over 500 more reference aids. Not reading English, Kozlov could
not edit the English text nor control all of my editorial decisions, yet he was
displeased that Sharpe put my name on the cover as English editor. Despite
abb automatic typeset output and irex subsidy, it was a very expensive volume for Sharpe to produce. But Kozlov was even more displeased that the
u.s. publisher refused to give him all the free copies he requested for gifts to
foreign archivists, to whom Sharpe would have hoped to sell copies.
We did present a review copy to the International Council on Archives.
ica colleagues told me they had yet to see the same type of coordinated archival directory and bibliographic reference coverage in any other nationallevel archival directory. The volume received a special commendation from
the Society of American Archivists. One British reviewer wrote, no country
in the world now has such a comprehensive and professional study of the
holdings and finding aids of its central repositories.43 In November 2002 the
American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies awarded me
their Lifetime Distinguished Contribution to Slavic Studies Award.44
Further Russian criticism arose ironically because the foreign-published
English edition had expanded beyond the 1997 Russian edition without a
Russian equivalent, while few in Russia had received the Russian edition.
Rosarkhiv did not attend the Moscow presentation for the English edition
at the American Centre at the All-Russian Library for Foreign Literature
(vgbil) in the fall of 2000. The fsb requested an extra copy of the Russian
edition, but alas, we had no more to offer. At that point, the Ministry of
Culture was anxious to take over Rosarkhiv (hitherto an independent federal service).45 When I was invited to the Ministry of Culture to present a
copy of the English edition to the senior deputy minister, he asked me what
43
44
45
Janet Hartley in Slavonic and East European Review, 79 (2001) no. 3, p. 524. See also
Ingo Kolasa in Zeitschrift fr Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie, 47 (2000) H. 5, pp. 512516. Choice chose it one of the top 100 reference books of the year.
See http://socialhistory.org/en/news/patricia-grimsted-honoured. I was particularly
gratified that Jaap Kloosterman came all the way to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for
the ceremony.
Rosarkhiv came under the Ministry as a subordinate Agency in 2004.
|36 9
it would cost to produce a similarly expanded Russian version. I hardly had

a ready answer. I feared it was not only a question of cost; well-qualified
staff and computer infrastructure would have been required, and by then
our chief compiler had already moved on. I could only suggest that a digital
version would be much cheaper to produce, since we already had most of
the Russian data files, which could easily be brought up to date.
By 2000 printed archival directories of the size and scope of abb became
outdated too soon and were too rapidly overtaken on the information highways of cyberspace. What abb really needed was the bilingual Internet database Jaap Kloosterman was proposing to Rosarkhiv, and which Rosarkhiv
was rejecting. The Ukrainian archival administration (Derzhkomarkhiv) had
earlier followed that example with our Ukrainian abb data files, left over
from my 1988 published Ukrainian directory. Since the 1990s they boast of
a comprehensive bilingual website.46 Rosarkhiv was not prepared for that,
while there was still fear of the Internet. Neither the Ministry of Culture nor
Rosarkhiv were quite ready for the digital age at that point. Rosarkhiv was
still declining use of our sophisticated database (at that point still for standalone computers), and refusing the iish offer of updating to a bilingual
Internet one. We can only speculate whether this was a carry-over of latent
Soviet attitudes, opposed to the free circulation of Russian archival information abroad, still fearing the Internet, or merely the Russian economic and
socio-ideological reality at the start of the new century.
With the English publication finished, Rosarkhiv hired our chief Russian
compiler Lada Repulo to head their foreign office, but soon she moved on to
a more upward mobile career in the commercial sector. Although she would
have been well qualified to coordinate an expanded Russian edition and prospective digital update, Rosarkhiv was not prepared for that. Unfortunately,
the Russian archival world today cannot compete in the labour market
place, despite urgent needs to safeguard the national archival heritage.
Talented archivists are too often lured away by more interesting careers
with better compensation. When we had foreign grants to develop abb in
the 1990s, we were able to compensate staff somewhat above the Rosarkhiv
level. Today such funding is no longer available for abb, and the Russian
government prefers to curtail direct foreign involvement.
Following our Russian presentation in 1997 in Moscow Jaap Kloosterman
expanded our English-language coverage on the iish website, which he
largely implemented himself. It was soon relayed by a number of other
servers. During the following few years, funding was sought to extend the
Internet coverage, and the Soros Foundation was prepared to respond. Jaap
46
P.K. Grimsted, Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the ussr: Ukraine, and Moldavia
(Princeton, 1988). See also Grimsted, Biblioteka-Arkhiv: Shliakh do intehruvannia
(Avtomatyzovannyi dostup do arkhivno informatsi dlia Rosi), Ukrainy ta inshykh
nezalezhnykh derzhav kolyshnoho Soiuzu, Bibliotechnyi visnyk (Kyiv), 1994, no.5-6,
pp.26-29.
370
and I pleaded with Rosarkhiv to continue collaboration and expand our bilingual database, which he proposed could be transformed to an Internet
system that would put Rosarkhiv far ahead in the international archival
reference world for the twenty-first century. But again, Rosarkhiv refused;
close collaboration such as we had enjoyed in the 1990s was no longer the
order of the day.
The Soros Foundation, which had done so much to expand Russian archival reference publications, including abb, was offering support and a subsidy for the official Russian archival website Arkhivy Rossii, launched in
the spring of 2001. They offered Rosarkhiv funding for an English version
as well, but Rosarkhiv preferred to use available funds to retranslate the by
then expanded English abb data files back into Russian. Presumably with
remaining Soros funds, a Russian-language html version of selected abb
data files became part of the new Rosarkhiv official website. Initially the
website offering covered only the fourteen Rosarkhiv-administered federal
archives; they even retained our abb bibliographic numbers for reference
publications listed, but rarely did they update the files with newer issues.
Rosarkhiv leadership again rejected the iish offer to develop a bilingual
web-based Content Management System that could make more extensive archival directory information available on the Internet.
As the Internet gained more favour, some Russian archival leaders considered making the abb database a commercial operation, as had been done
with the subscription-based digital version of the Comintern Archive and
now the Stalin Digital Archive. I was approached by several commercial vendors in Russia and abroad. But fortunately for researchers, the principle of
free public information won out, as was necessitated by the requirements
of our abb funding sources, including the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the Soros Foundation.
Then unfortunately in November 2003, the Soros Foundation was thrown
out of Moscow. By that time, even the collaboration that had produced our
published directories and nascent Internet websites became more suspect,
produced as they were with a foreign director and support from abroad.47 By
2004 Rosarkhiv was under control of the Ministry of Culture, but the political orientation of the Ministry had changed dramatically. There were no further suggestions of federal subsidy for an updated Russian printed edition,
or an Internet equivalent to the cms English abb being developed by iish in
Amsterdam. Finally, by 2005, we were asked to vacate our work area in the
Rosarkhiv building.
47
Soros offices shut down in Moscow, 7 November 2003 the bbc gave frontpage coverage when At least 30 men stormed the offices and seized computers
and documents in the raid of the Open Society Institute in Moscow, founded by
George Soros at news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/Europe/3251281.stm. The osi, established
in Moscow in 1995, was responsible for funding extensive archival reference
publications, among its other activities.
|371
A New Database for abb at iish, Amsterdam. Left to right: Natalia Maslova, Gordan
Cupac (iish programmer), Marien van der Heijden, and Patricia Grimsted. Collection of
the author.
Not withstanding the Russian refusal of collaboration on a bilingual basis during the early years of the new century, thanks to Jaap Kloosterman,
the English-language abb website continued to develop and operate out of
Amsterdam with a workstation within a Rosarkhiv compound until 2005,
and continuing cooperation from gpib. By mid-decade, Jaap found funding
and a talented programmer, Gordan Cupac, in Amsterdam to develop the
sophisticated web-based Content Management System that now supports
abb. Our extensive English-language abb database was launched on the iish
website, with iish still subsidizing upkeep in Moscow by abb coordinator
Natalia Maslova. Under Jaaps guidance, iish did much in those years to encourage preservation of the archives and libraries in Russia, while also keeping reference access to the archives of the would-be workers state on the
international platform of the WorldWideWeb.
Quite ironically, the Amsterdam abb website is still more extensive and
often more up-to-date than the Russian-language coverage on the official
Rosarkhiv website. Some of that Rosarkhiv Russian-language directory coverage still remains a retranslation from our 2000 English-language data files.
A few other archives outside of the federal system also benefit from our abb
directory: for example, one major archive under the Russian Academy of
Sciences even displayed a scanned image of the abb 1997 printed Russian
coverage of their repository on their own website. That ironic situation,
although a compliment to abb, does not quite seem appropriate for the
Russian Federation in the twenty-first century.
3 7 2
Although Rosarkhiv has yet to provide comprehensive directory coverage of Russian archives on their website, they have made notable reference developments over the past two decades to open intellectual access to
the fourteen federal archives under their immediate control. For example,
Putevoditeli po arkhivam Rossii (Guide to Archives of Russia) a database
now on the Rosarkhiv Internet portal has brought together digitized data
from many recent guides to numerous federal and regional state archives,
albeit thanks to initial American government funding from the Department
of Education through a grant to the University of Kansas. Unfortunately the
American developers were not aware of abb, and did not link their helpful database to abb with its basic directory, bibliographic, and contact data
that might give users a better orientation. Besides, so far that database still
does not even cover all of the federal and regional state archives, let alone
the hundreds of repositories covered in abb under agencies other than
Rosarkhiv.48
The Rosarkhiv website also now displays a database of its Central
Catalogue of Fonds, listing record groups held in federal and state archives.
Today some federal and local state archives display on their own websites
their own registers of fonds, and some even the internal finding aids (opisi)
listing files within individual fonds. Indeed, it is a real achievement of the
archival revolution to find such facilities on the Internet and have access
on line to the many of the opisi that foreigners were never permitted to examine in reading rooms. But how can researchers, and especially foreigners, know what opisi they might need for what fonds, if they cannot start
with basic directory and bibliographic-level coverage of all archives and determine the current names and addresses of the archives most relevant for
their research?
Recent Developments
When in 2010 with Kozlov retired and a new Rosarkhiv head, we had hopes
and even strong encouragement from friends at court that Rosarkhiv might
again welcome abb back as an integral part of its expanded Internet portal.
But in the course of negotiations, it became apparent, that was only wishful
thinking. abb and its foreign developers were still foreign appendages to
the Russian archival scene, and Kozlovs Invitation for Collaboration had
been withdrawn. Rosarkhiv seemed to have turned its back on his 1992 vision of ArcheoBiblioBase as the first and very important most general level
of information about Russian archives as a whole.
Whereas forty years ago, my directory of Soviet archives in Moscow and
Leningrad could only be published in English abroad, twenty years ago we
were able to launch a collaborative bilingual directory in Russia itself, albeit
with generous foreign subsidy. But today, Western foundations, such as the
48
See the current version at: http://guides.rusarchives.ru/search/help/about.html.
|373
osi, that had done so much to support archival reference publications in

Russia, including abb, are no longer welcome in the country. Yet Russia today is the only former Soviet republic that does not have any basic archival
information in English on its website.
Our three-year Agreement with ranepa was signed in 2013 designated
as the special year of Russian-Dutch Friendship. A new iish director was
prepared to carry forward the tradition Jaap so masterfully started, the year
of his formal retirement. The ranepa Center for Russian Studies took over
the upkeep of ArcheoBiblioBase in Russia, for which they hired Moscow
abb Coordinator Natalia Maslova. Yet it soon became apparent that the task
was too much for Natasha alone, while additional help is yet to be found.
ranepa also appointed me an Honorary Fellow and Visiting Professor of the
Center for Russian Studies, although I am really beyond retirement age. As
this article goes to press, the ranepa mirror website is on-line, thanks to a
new it specialist in the Center in coordination with our iish programmer.
But much updating work lies ahead, for which more assistance is needed.
Quite coincidentally, the Dean of the ranepa History Faculty and co-director of the Center for Russian Studies is none other than Professor Rudolf
Pikhoia, whom I earlier knew as the first Chief Archivist of Russia and head
of the official Russian state archival agency now Rosarkhiv. Two decades
earlier he had signed a collaborative agreement for abb with irex, carried
forward by his then deputy Vladimir Kozlov. That was at the start of the
archival bonanza, the gold rush when a host of projects were underway
with the newly opened Russian archives. Extensive foreign funding was
then available, supporting not only publication of revelations, but also the
intellectual access needed to reveal even more, with abb at center stage.
Today in the early twenty-first century, however, ranepa is not oriented for
archival training and has scant budget to support research or adequate library resources, while Pikhoia lamented that he has no students who could
assist with abb.
We must be very grateful to ranepa for welcoming ArcheoBiblioBase
back to Moscow, but recently they have suggested that their hosting of abb
can be only temporary. Even now with the launch of the ranepa mirror
website, it has become apparent that more Russian academic and library
reference assistance is needed for data upkeep. With the move to Moscow,
ranepa is now forming an international board of advisors, who it is to be
hoped will help assure the survival of abb and the eventual revival of the
earlier abb bilingual system. Even as this essay goes to print, we are gratified to learn that another Moscow university more actively involved with
archives is expressing interest in possible assistance with abb. Ideally abb
project participation could contribute to archival training for students
in many fields of research who might benefit from learning more about
the organization and riches of archival holdings throughout the Russian
Federation and the potential of information technology that could make
them even more intellectually accessible.
374
Cheers to Jaap
Kloosterman with a
bottle of Putinka vodka.
Collection of the author.
In considering a more permanent home for abb in Moscow, many

Russian archivists and reference specialists appear unanimous in advocating the desirability and utility of updating our 1997 Russian publication of
Arkhivy Rossii, which could be achieved by reviving and modernizing the abb
Russian data files (last updated in 2000) in an updated bilingual Internet facility. Such development will require additional Russian staff and programming resources and cooperation from the many archival repositories covered. Yet if abb could be expanded on a bilingual basis, to be sure, it could
provide intellectual access for many more researchers in all disciplines
to the comprehensive abb directory coverage of the riches of close to 600
Russian archives now available in the abb English-language database. Let us
remain optimistic that ArcheoBiblioBase, having benefitted so much from
the iish development of an Internet computer infrastructure, can continue
in an expanded Russian environment to provide updated general informa-
|375
tion about the entire range of Russian archives regardless of their controlling agency.49
The dramatic Russian archival revolution of the post-Soviet era has produced new impetus for reference and documentary publications as well as
historical, economic, social and cultural analysis never dreamed possible in
Soviet days. The declassification of archives and production of reference materials over the past quarter century has been truly impressive. But without
continuing directory-level intellectual access, access to all the newly available archival resources, including increasing digitized collections on the
Internet, will remain less than optimal. We must encourage Russian archivists committed to safeguarding and researchers committed to using those
resources in Russia to plead for better public support for the archives, with
further declassification and subsidy of improved, more user friendly information systems. Only then will researchers at home and abroad know more
about the primary sources relating to Russias troubled past and multifaceted culture as prologue to what we hope will be a more open society of the
future.
49
As quoted above from Kozlov, Invitation for Collaboration.
III.6 Sources for Writing

the History of Russia
and the Soviet Union
National and Transnational
Perspectives
Gijs Kessler
For the historical profession the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 opened
up what can perhaps best be described as a historiographic frontier.
Practically overnight sources became available to write and rewrite the history of a major empire: kilometers of archives to be dealt with by a historical discipline which was ill-equipped to take on this gargantuan task.
To start with, previously existing secrecy rules and access restrictions prevented historians from having a clear understanding of the bureaucratic
procedures, information flows, and administrative practices that had produced the mountains of paper now suddenly accessible to researchers after
the Archival Revolution of the early 1990s.1 In some cases detailed inventories and finding aids provided well-marked access routes, but large swathes
of archival material, particularly for the lower ranks in the state bureaucracy, and for decades such as the 1930s, when there was a great deal of flux,
were ordered and described in a much cruder and untraceable way.2
For a first stock-taking of the impact of the archival revolution, cf. Andrea Graziosi,
The New Soviet Archival Sources. Hypotheses for a critical assessment, Cahiers du
Monde russe, 40:1-2 (January-June 1999), pp. 13-64.
Based on personal experience in archival research in the mid- and late 1990s for my
k es sl e r S o u r ce s f o r W r i ti ng the Hi s tory of Ru s s i a
|377
What complicated exploration of these archives was that the crisis of the
Russian state in the early post-Soviet years severely disrupted adequate financing of science and research. This had a doubly negative effect because
on the one hand it sent salaries plummeting and forced scholars to take extra jobs to make ends meet, while at the same time it dissuaded the younger
generation from entering academic careers after finishing university. Thus,
at a time when major work needed to be done in exploring and coming to
terms with the archival legacy of the Soviet state, the number of historians
ready to take on the job did not increase, indeed probably even declined.
Lack of adequate financing also undermined the functioning of the archival system as such, forcing it to struggle to maintain existing facilities and
conservation standards and throwing up major obstacles to the application
of information technology, the modernization of finding aids, and the digitization of archival holdings. For several years an English-language online
inventory of archives and libraries, the ArcheoBiblioBase, maintained by the
International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, offered the only generally accessible and by far the most comprehensive body of information on
Russian archives and their holdings.3
In light of the difficulties outlined in the paragraphs above, the work that
has been done over the last twenty years in charting, exploring, and using
the newly opened archives is all the more impressive. Russian and foreign
scholars alike have thrown themselves at the opportunity to fill in blank areas, verify established notions, test existing hypotheses, and extract a significant body of new knowledge on a wide variety of topics relating to Russias
recent and less recent past.
Important instruments in this process were source publications, which
became a flourishing genre during the 1990s and remain so now. As a rule,
these source publications had a thematic focus, rather than publishing particular types of documents, or documents from particular holdings. Many
of them served as preludes to monographs on the subject concerned, or
were indeed the by-products of research for such monographic studies, but
a great many also served the primary goal of offering an overview and coming to grips with the variety of material available in the archives.4 Apart
3
4
dissertation on labour migration during the collectivization of the 1930s. Cf. Gijs
Kessler, The Peasant and the Town. Rural-Urban Migration in the Soviet Union,
1929-40 (phd thesis, European University Institute, 2001).
ArcheoBiblioBase, available at: http://www.iisg.nl/abb/; last accessed 24 November
2013.
It would be impossible to even try and present an overview of the main source publications, particularly if one includes publications from the regions as well, but an
important example which served as a source of inspiration to many others was the
series Dokumenty sovetskoi istorii, which took off in 1995 with O.V. Khlevniuk,
et al. (eds), Stalinskoe Politbyuro v 30-e gody. Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 1995) and
subsequently went on to publish ten more volumes with rosspen publishing house
in Moscow.
3 7 8
from producing systematic knowledge about the types of sources available

in the archives, source publications also played an important role in providing access to important documents to researchers, based in the regions at
a time when funding constraints effectively made travel to Moscow or St.
Petersburg for extended periods of archival research impossible. Conversely,
the same was true for regional source publications, which allowed researchers based in the center to contrast materials available in the region with
the national picture. Indeed, pending the digitization of the vast holdings of
Russias archives, source publications will continue to fulfil this role, even if
funding for research trips has now become more widely available.
Materials & Statistics

In terms of the insights derived from the newly available archival materials, the greatest progress has been made on a number of issues which, due
to secrecy rules, had hitherto largely been shrouded in mystery. First, this
concerns the history of the repression and terror inflicted on the population by the Soviet regime. The mechanisms behind the Great Terror of 19361938 have been largely unravelled, the functioning and magnitude of the
Gulag system of forced labour charted, and the scope, intention, and effects
of the dekulakization and deportations of the collectivization drive examined and assessed.5 In conjunction with the impressive body of personal testimonies of the terror brought together by organizations such as Memorial
and the Association Vozvrashchenie (Return), this has resulted in a much
richer understanding of this tragic episode in Russias twentieth century
history, taking in the perspectives of both perpetrators and victims.6
5
The foremost specialist on the terror and the Gulag is Oleg Khlevniuk, cf. O.V.
Khlevniuk, The history of the Gulag : from collectivization to the great terror (New
Haven, ct, 2004); idem, Khoziain. Stalin i utverzhdenie stalinskoi diktatury (Moscow,
2010). Crucial work on collectivisation has been done by the school of peasant
studies founded by the late Victor Petrovich Danilov, notably the multi-volume,
integral publication of secret police reports on the village: A. Berelovich and V.P.
Danilov (eds), Sovetskaia derevnia glazami vchk-ogpu. Dokumenty i materialy v 4 tomakh
(Moscow, 1998-), but also by Andrea Graziosi, Sheila Fitzpatrick and others, cf.
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalins Peasants. Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after
Collectivization (New York, 1994); Andrea Graziosi, The Great Soviet Peasant War.
Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1917-33, Harvard Papers in Ukrainian Studies (Cambridge, ma,
1996); Dann R. Penner, Stalin and the Italianka of 1932-1933 in the Don region,
Cahiers du Monde russe, 39(1-2) (January-June 1998), pp. 27-68. On the Stalinist deportations, cf. Pavel Polian, Against their will: the history and geography of forced migrations
in the ussr (Budapest, 2004).
Archival, library, and museum holdings of Memorial available at: http://www.
memo.ru/s/70.html; last accessed 24 November 2013; Historical-literary association
Vozvrashchenie available at: http://www.vozvraschenie-m.ru/; last accessed at 24
November 2013. The archives of Vozvrashchenie are in part available to researchers on microfilm at the International Institute of Social History, and are currently
being integrally digitized by iish. Available at: http://search.socialhistory.org/
|379
A second topic which has attracted the undivided attention of researchers

is the inner functioning of the higher echelons of Soviet power. An important source for this have been the frequent letters Soviet leaders exchanged
until all their residences, cabinets, and working quarters were finally
hooked up to the telephone system. Large parts of this correspondence have
now been published, including the crucial correspondence between Stalin
and his closest aide Molotov.7 In combination with other sources, they have
provided the basis for a significant increase in our understanding of the personal interaction and politics at the heart of Stalinist and Soviet rule, first
for the pre-war period and gradually for more recent decades as well.8
Significantly less headway has been made in appropriating what turned
out to be another treasure trove in the archives the vast amounts of elaborate and extremely detailed statistical data. The Soviet statistical organs
kept minute records of virtually all the social, economic, political, cultural,
and other phenomena which were considered relevant for policy making,
implementation, planning, and monitoring. In many cases, though, the documentation on these datasets, specifying how they were compiled and how
they should be read and interpreted, is not stored alongside the data, and
this has caused researchers to be wary in using these sources.
This reluctance is partly owing to long-standing suspicions about the reliability of Soviet statistics per se, which are generally assumed to have been
routinely manipulated and falsified, and to bear little or no relation to the
actual state of affairs. Although several such cases of deliberate falsification
have indeed been documented, this bad reputation of Soviet statistics would
appear, as a whole, to be undeserved. As Stephen Wheatcroft and R.W.
Davies, among the foremost experts on Soviet statistics, have pointed out,
politically inspired distortions and falsifications concerned only published
statistics, which are few in their own right, but even fewer compared to the
masses of data stored in the archives.9 A good example is the 1939 population census. Only a very small part of the census results were published at
Record/ARCH01985/Description; last accessed 24 November 2013.

L. Kosheleva, et al., Pisma I. V. Stalina V. M. Molotovu, 1925-1936 gg. (Moscow, 1995); A.V.
Kvashonkin (ed.), Bolshevistskoe rukovodstvo. Perepiska. 1912-1927, Dokumenty sovetskoi
istorii (Moscow, 1996); A.V. Kvashonkin et al. (eds), Sovetskoe rukovodstvo. Perepiska
1928-1941, Dokumenty sovetskoi istorii (Moscow, 1999); O.V. Khlevniuk et al. (eds),
Stalin i Kaganovich. Perepiska. 1931-1936 gg. (Moscow, 2001).
O.V. Khlevniuk, Politbiuro. Mekhanizmy politicheskoi vlasti v 1930-e gody (Moscow, 1996);
Yoram Gorlizki and O.V. Khlevniuk, Cold peace: Stalin and the Soviet ruling circle, 19451953 (Oxford/New York, 2004); O.V. Khlevniuk, Regionalnaia politika N.S. Khrushcheva:
tsk kpss i mestnye partiinye komitety, 1953-1964 gg. (Moscow, 2009).
Stephen G. Wheatcroft and R.W. Davies, The crooked mirror of Soviet economic statistics, in R.W. Davies, M. Harrison, S.G. Wheatcroft (eds), The Economic
Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913-1945 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 24-37; Stephen G.
Wheatcroft, The Great Leap Upwards: Anthropometric Data and Indicators of
Crises and Secular Change in Soviet Welfare Levels, 1880-1960, Slavic Review, 58(1)
(Spring, 1999), pp. 27-28.
3 80
the time, and the published data were indeed manipulated to obscure the
location of the labour camps and army units.10 However, the original, uncorrected data are available in the archives at several levels of aggregation, and
ready to be used in research.11
Soviet statistics were not primarily gathered and compiled for propaganda
purposes, but to supply policy-making bodies with as accurate information
as possible on the processes they were expected to steer and direct. But did
they? One of the accusations often levelled at Soviet statistics is that they
were produced by a system with a built-in incentive to inflate figures reported upwards in order to boast better performance and avoid sanctions for not
meeting the plan. Although this was a tendency which obviously existed, it
is important to realize, however, that the scope of distortion was also limited by the fact that the authorities were perfectly aware of this problem and
operated an intricate number of checks and balances to reduce the problem and secure as accurate a flow of information as possible. Recent archival-based research by Mark Harrison has demonstrated the eventual scope
of such falsification from below to have been quite limited in practice.12
There is therefore no intrinsic need to be more distrustful of Soviet statistics than of statistics procured from any archive anywhere else in the world,
provided universally accepted standards of source critique are applied when
using them.
Changing Attitudes
The example of statistical data is illustrative of a gradual change in the attitudes how scholars have approached the archives since their opening up
in the early 1990s. Initially, the tendency was to focus on the revelations the
archives had to offer, but gradually research questions and hypotheses again
came to the fore in archival work, which by the end of the decade started
to result in a steady trickle of monographs on an ever-widening range of
subjects. Twenty years after the archival revolution, the historiography of
Russia and the Soviet Union differs in no fundamental respect from that of
other countries historians regularly turn to archival data when required to
find answers to their research questions.
Research questions have, however, been dominated almost exclusively by
a national perspective in the sense that the history of the country is essentially approached as a case in itself, rather than a case within a wider, com-
10
11
12
Iu.A. Poliakov (ed.), Vsesoiuznaia perepis naseleniia 1939 goda: Osnovnye itogi (Moscow,
1992), pp. 4-10.
Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki (rgae), f. 1562 (Tsentralnoe statistischeskoe upravlenie sssr), op. 336, part 1 (Biuro vsesoiuznoi perepisi naseleniia
1926, 1939 g.).
Mark Harrison, Forging Success: Soviet Managers and Accounting Fraud, 1943 to
1962, Journal of Comparative Economics, 39:1 (2011), pp. 43-64.
|38 1
parative framework. This national focus needs to be understood against the

background of the general lack of knowledge concerning some of the most
elementary aspects of the countrys history, and in particular its modern
history, but has been further enhanced by two other factors.
In the first place, the breakdown of Marxist-Leninist analytical approaches
and their large interpretative schemes has caused scholars in the former
Soviet Union to prefer solid empirical research over wider perspectives and
theory-building. Indeed, this concentration on sources and good craftsmanship is key to understanding the remarkable progress made in the exploration of the Soviet archives described in the paragraphs above. But it has
also resulted in a tendency to over-concentrate on sources at the expense of
published materials and insights derived from other studies and contexts, at
the risk of identifying as peculiar for the Russian case what is in fact part of
more widely established patterns.
A second circumstance which has likely worked to strengthen the national focus in the new historiography of Russia and the Soviet Union is that
the foreign scholars who, in contrast to Soviet days, now also had the opportunity to work in the archives, have tended to come from a background
of area studies, with research agendas geared to aspects specific to their regions of specialization rather than to more general patterns.
As a consequence, the renaissance of Russian history as an archive-based
discipline over the last 20 years has worked relatively little to the benefit
of the rapidly expanding field of global and world history. This is a pity, because the Russian case has much to offer in this respect. Indeed, as someone
working on Russia at a research institute specialized in global and comparative history, I have had no lack of expressions of interest over the years
from colleagues, both at my institute and from its wider network, who were
keen on entering Russia into the equation and asked me for data or for possible contacts in the Russian academic community. Unfortunately, all too often I had little to help them with.
Global Comparisons
The significance of the Russian case in global comparisons has several dimensions. The first dimension is Russias particular social, economic, and
political development relative to other parts of Europe, as well as many other parts of the world. Its autocracy, the reintroduction of serfdom, and its
subsequent late abolition, its high land to labour ratios, and of course its
twentieth-century experience of non-capitalist development all make it attractive for comparative purposes. It may be noted that this appeal of Russia
as a contrasting case can, somewhat paradoxically, strengthen perspectives which focus on the particular rather than the universal in explaining
Russias development.
A second reason why global historians are interested in Russia, although
related to the first, is that it is a country that is perceived as essentially part
3 82
of Europe, but exhibits a noticeably different development pattern from the

rest of the continent. This makes it an interesting case in-between for debates on the differential development of Asia and Europe. Russia emerges as
not just one instance of comparison, but as a crucial instance of comparison.
Similarly, but again slightly different, Russia is an interesting case for
scholars of economic development because it is one of the few, if not the
only example of a country which, in the course of the twentieth century
changed its peer group in terms of gdp per capita, coming close to the
group of nations constituting the developed world, while leaving behind the
countries it was at similar levels of development with at the start of the century, such as Argentina and Brazil.13
Finally, and it is here that Russian history has most to offer to global history, even if this is not at all widely recognized: Russia offers superb data,
both in their own right and even more so in terms of the countrys degree
of economic development, which means it offers a unique chance to study
in detail developments for which in similar cases no data are usually available. This may sound surprising because of the general suspicion towards
Soviet statistics described above, but it is in fact a logical corollary to that
single outstanding feature of Russias development the strong presence
and role of the state and its bureaucracy. Often regarded as an obstacle to
development, Russias solid bureaucratic traditions also produced superb
record-keeping and statistics.
Bringing part of this wealth of statistical material to the wider scholarly
community is the central ambition of a Russian-Dutch project started in
2010 by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Studies in History, Economy and
Society (Moscow), the New Economic School (Moscow) and the International
Institute of Social History (Amsterdam).14 The project aims to build an
Electronic Repository for Russian Historical Statistics (errhs), which will
make available online, free of charge, a data set of key indicators for measuring the social and economic development of Russia from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries.15
Two characteristics of the data set are crucial to the mission of the project. To start with, the Electronic Repository for Russian Historical Statistics
will offer data which are internationally comparable, expressed in accepted
units of measurement, and tagged with the use of internationally accepted
13
14
15
This is the central thrust of Robert Allens assessment of the achievements of

Stalinist industrialization, cf. Robert C. Allen, Farm to Factory. A reinterpretation of the
Soviet Industrial Revolution (Princeton, nj and Oxford, 2003).
The long-standing co-operation of the International Institute of Social History with
Russian archives and scholarly institutions builds on a foundation laid in the early
1990s by the then director Jaap Kloosterman, who in a very early stage recognized
the opportunities offered by Russias opening-up.
The project was financed by the Dynasty Foundation, Moscow. Cf. Available at:
http://www.icshes.ru/en1/projects/repository/index.php; last accessed 3 October
2013.
|38 3
standards of classification, such as nace16 (Statistical classification of economic activities in the European Community) and hisco17 (Historical international standard classification of occupations), because this will allow
researchers without a background in Russian history to draw direct comparisons with their own data. This opens the way to historians and non-historians alike to benefit from the data, including economists and other social
scientists keen on adding a historical dimension to their analysis.
Second, the Electronic Repository for Russian Historical Statistics offers regional-level data rather than national aggregates for each of the 89 provinces of the modern-day Russian Federation. The background to this choice for
regional data is twofold. A first consideration is that in global history the preferred unit of comparison is the region rather than the country, particularly
where large territorial entities like India, Russia, and China are concerned.
Kenneth Pomeranzs famous study of the causes of the Great Divergence,
the differential development of Europe and Asia since 1500, is based on such
a regional perspective, comparing particular regions of China to others in
Europe, for the simple reason that a comparison on the aggregate level
would largely amount to comparing apples and oranges.18 Indeed, the diversity within such large territorial formations might mean that comparison at
the aggregate level becomes pointless, whereas comparing specific regions,
similar in make-up but differing in other crucial respects, can offer highly
fruitful avenues of research. What is more, such transnational comparisons
and perspectives are more apt when studying processes and developments
not necessarily related to the national context and/or legislation, which is
the case for many aspects of social and economic development.
Even in studies focusing on Russia alone, a regional perspective has much
to offer, given the size of the country and its spread over varied climate and
cultural zones. At the aggregate level this diversity is obscured, but given
the lack of readily available data, all too often research projects simply cannot afford to address the regional variety within the aggregate figures. One
of the best examples of how a lack of attention to regional variation has
tended to distort analysis is the debate about agrarian overpopulation in
the late nineteenth century Russian countryside and its impact on agricultural productivity. It was long believed, following Gerschenkrons classical
argument, that overpopulation resulted in a fragmentation of landholdings
and a constant downward pressure on levels of productivity and rural living standards, but on closer scrutiny this pattern was typical only for the
16
17
18
nace is the acronym for Nomenclature statistique des activites economiques dans
la Communaut Europeenne.
Available at: http://socialhistory.org/nl/projects/hisco-history-work; last accessed 3
October 2013.
Kenneth Pomeranz, The great divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the modern
world economy (Princeton nj, 2000), p. 10.
3 84
agricultural heartland in the Central Black Earth district, whereas in other

regions of Russia very different dynamics were at play.19
Basic Indicators
By making available a grid of basic indicators of social and economic development at the level of individual regions, the aim of the Electronic Repository
for Russian Historical Statistics is to lower the threshold for addressing regional variation in research projects. Projects can rely on the Repository for
the more basic data and supplement this with targeted data mining for the
specific parameters they need to investigate. Also, the basic grid of indicators
available in the repository can offer an effective way of selecting regions with
a specific profile for interregional comparisons. Whether from a national or
a transnational perspective, regional data can be instrumental in obtaining
better answers to more precisely formulated questions.
The data set in the repository consists of five historical cross sections
pegged to the availability of more or less comprehensive population data
from censuses or taxpayers registers at roughly 50-year intervals: 1795, 1858,
1897, 1959, 2002. For each of these five benchmark years of data, the data
gathering program consists of the same uniform grid along five main lines:
Category
Population
Labour
Land
Capital
Output
19
Indicator
size
age/sex
urban/rural
literacy and/or higher education
religion
estate
fertility
mortality
nuptiality
profession
labour relation
employment by sector
source of income
type
ownership
prices
rents
capital assets by branch
investments
interest
arable agriculture by main crops
animal husbandry
industry by branch
services by branch
Peter Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy 1850-1917 (London, 1986), pp. 74, 128-139; Teodor
Shanin, Russia as a Developing Society (London, 1985), p. 143.
|38 5
Of course not all of these data are available for all benchmark years and for
all regions. Some of the indicators are simply not applicable to some of the
cross sections, such as the estate for the twentieth century. Others might in
theory be applicable but in practice non-existent or impossible to come by,
such as the investments and interest rates for earlier benchmark years. But
on the whole the grid of indicators aims to maximize the potential availability of data for all five cross sections and all regions, ensuring maximum
comparability over time and extent.
Data are procured from published and unpublished sources available in
libraries and archives. The sole limitations are that the data set should be
available in Moscow or St. Petersburg repositories and should cover at least
the majority, and preferably all of Russias regions. The reasons for these
limitations are mostly pragmatic and serve to keep the project manageable,
as well as to ensure data for different regions have been gathered as much
as possible according to the same program, and, consequently, contain the
same biases, which is crucial for ensuring comparability.
Data for the benchmark years 1795, 1858, and 1959 have been procured
exclusively, or almost exclusively from archives, for lack of published data,
whereas for 1897 and 2002 publications are the main source. The data set is
accompanied by extensive documentation in both English and Russian, and
contains full information on the sources used, the corrections, standardizations, and extrapolations applied, and an assessment of the possible biases
the data may contain. The full data set and documentation is made available
online at the dedicated web address: www.histstat.ru in 2014.
Returning to the ongoing process of (re)writing the history of Russia and
the Soviet Union which started just over twenty years ago, as the Soviet
state collapsed and its archival holdings were opened up to the public it is
to be expected that the use of Russian data in international comparative research will also contribute to our understanding of the history of an important country in its own right. Especially on crucial aspects where not much
more than the barest of outlines is currently known. For optimal results in
comparative global history, national and transnational perspectives ought
to supplement each other.
III.7 The Making of

Collective Memory
The Politics of Archive in
the Soviet Azerbaijan
Touraj Atabaki and
Solmaz Rustamova-Towhidi
Setting the East Ablaze

On 28 April 1920, less than three years after the Bolshevik takeover in St
Petersburg, the 11th Red Army entered Baku and raised the red flag over a
city known for a century as the Russian gate to the East. For the Bolsheviks,
Baku was not just another city inherited from the fallen Tsarist Empire
but was a bastion from where the revolution would set the East ablaze.
The fallen empires immediate neighbours, Iran and the Ottoman Empire,
were entangled in the political turmoil of change and revolution, and from
Southeast Asia the echoes resounded of the anti-British Indian nationalist uprising. For the Bolsheviks, expanding the revolution to the West
and to East Asia became essential to safeguard the revolution at home.
In September 1920, it was with this mission in mind that the Communist
International (Comintern) called for the First Congress of the People of the
East to be held in Baku. In his opening address, Zinoviev, the Chairman of
the Executive Committee of the Comintern appealed to the hundreds of delegates, the majority of them Muslims from Asia and Africa, as well as to the
people from the Tsarist Empires colonies in Central Asia and the Caucasus,
to join the Russian revolution and wage a jihad against British imperialism.
a t a b a ki a n d r u sta m o v a to w hi d i c olle c ti v e Me mory
|38 7
Congress of the People of the East, Baku, September 1920. Baku, 1920. Collection IISH.
The course of this entire Congress has been well documented in written proceedings. However, the existence of a documentary film recording both the
congress proceedings and the scenes from beyond the confines of the congress has been overlooked. The film covers the journey by the Cominterns
leaders from Moscow to Baku, the sabotage launched by the counterrevolutionaries to halt the missions travel, celebrations in the streets of
Baku, featuring the delegates diverse and colourful cultures, the presence
of women, veiled as well as unveiled, among the delegates, and even the
individual initiative to support unveiling women.
In 1990, while at the archive of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Baku,
conducting our joint research project on the history of the Comintern, we
found a reference dated 1920 to a documentary film on the Congress proceedings. Our further enquiries led to the Azerbaijan State Archive of Film
and Photo. We were astonished to discover film reels from this recording
there. We screened the film in Baku first and were then granted permission
to make a copy of the film for the International Institute of Social History
(iish). This marked the start of a partnership between the iish and a research and archival institution in the former Soviet South. In Amsterdam,
such an association not only became part of the iish collecting profile but
was also strongly encouraged by Jaap Kloosterman, then the director of the
institute. Although Jaap had been committed to extending the research and
collecting activities of the Institute to include West Asia, Iran, and Turkey
since the 1980s, this film of the Baku Congress of the People of the East led
3 88
the Soviet South to be added to the list of areas receiving institutional support from Jaap during the years that followed.
In December 1920, three months after the First Congress of the People of
the East, all documents of the congress were deposited at the newly founded
Central State Archive. Nariman Narimanov, the chairman of the newly established supreme state body (the Revolutionary Committee of Azerbaijan)
ratified a decree proclaiming the establishment of the Central State
Archive under the administration of the National Education Commissariat.
According to the new decree, the Central State Archive was responsible
for collecting and preserving all documents originating from all government departments and public organizations that existed in the past in the
territory of Azerbaijan. The new decree also called on all citizens of the
Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic to urgently return all documents of a
variety of state and public enterprises still in their possession to the Central
State Archive. Furthermore, state and public organizations had no right to
destroy any file, correspondence or a separate document without the written permission of the Central State Archive. The State Publishing House
was instructed to provide three copies of all locally published printed materials, as well as all publications received from Soviet Russia (books, brochures, magazines, journals, newspapers, leaflets, posters, orders etc.) to the
Central State Archive. The Central State Archive of the Azerbaijan Soviet
Socialist Republic, the first in the Soviet South thus came into being in
January 1921.1
First Caucasus Archive

Baku was the first city in the Soviet Caucasus to be selected as the venue
for an institutionalized archive for a variety of reasons. First, Baku was the
main Bolshevik bastion in the South and contained few traces of other leftist movements, such as the Mensheviks or Social Revolutionaries, who were
chiefly based in Tbilisi. Second, under the former regime, Baku was the cradle of one of the most radical labour movements, chiefly associated with
the Baku oil industry. Third, Baku was the main city along the south-western frontier of the Soviet Union and had a Muslim majority. If integrated
within the new Soviet lifestyle, this community could not only serve as a
role model for other Muslims subjects of the Tsarist Empire but might also
refashion the Soviet image among the people of West Asia, namely the populations in Iran, Turkey, and the Arabian Peninsula. For the next two decades, during the interwar period, Baku remained the chief centre for the
Soviet and Comintern-coordinated activities in the Soviet South and beyond.
As a result, today duplicates from a large part of the Comintern archive are
1
Azrevkom (Azerbaycan Inqilab Komitesinin) Dekretleri. 1920-1021. Senedler Toplusu (The

Decrees of Azrevkom (Azerbaijan Revolution Committee) 1920-1921. Collection of
Documents (Baku, 1988), p. 405.
|38 9
present at other affiliated Soviet institutes in different state archives of the

Republic of Azerbaijan.2
The Central State Archive initially collected documents of the former
Tsarist Empire administrations, as well as the records of the first national
government of Azerbaijan (the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic that governed the country for two years (1918-1920) prior to the Soviet regime) and
the archive of the communist movement in the Caucasus. In 1921, however, to establish legitimacy in order to retain political power, the Azerbaijan
Communist Party decided to preserve the records of its past by organizing
a separate archive. A new institute called the Azistpart (Archive of the Party
History) was founded with the chief purposes of collecting documents on
the history of workers and communist movements in the Caucasus and
West Asia and organizing research projects associated with the documents
collected. The Azerbaijan Communist Party appealed to all party members
to contribute old newspapers, books and brochures, historical documents,
leaflets, minutes of meetings, reports, memoirs, and any materials that
would illustrate the partys past. Veteran party members were asked to
write their recollections about their revolutionary activities and biographical information about revolutionary figures who had perished for submission to the archive. A special instruction to the Society of the Veteran
Bolsheviks encouraged them to participate in the campaign enriching the
partys archive. To extend its activities, the Azistpart established auxiliary
branches in the Baku oil fields, as well as in other factories and offices of
state enterprises throughout the country. The Azistpart was the cornerstone
of the institute that became known as the Marxist-Leninist Institute in the
following years.
By 1930 the scope of the archival operations in Baku expanded. A new
Central Archive Office was established and was authorized not only to process accessions to, classify and preserve the archival documents to them,
but also to encourage scholars and other interested individuals to use them
in research to support political, economic, and cultural developments.3
Subsequently, new institutes were founded and assigned the mission of collecting the recorded documents of the regions past in different formats.
The Central State Archive of the October Revolution (1930) and the Central
State Archive of History (1930) were the first of these new institutions. In
For studies on the Comintern in the Caucasus and neighbouring countries see:
Solmaz Rustamova-Towhidi, Kominternin arg Siyasati va Iran, 1919-1943 (Baku, 2001);
Touraj Atabaki, The Comintern, the Soviet Union and the Labour Militancy in
Interwar Iran, in Stephanie Cronin (ed.), Iranian-Russian Encounters. Empires and
Revolutions since 1800 (London, 2012), pp. 298-323. Touraj Atabaki, Incommodious
Hosts, Invidious Guests. The Life and Times of Iranian Revolutionaries in the Soviet
Union: (1921-1939), in Stephanie Cronin, Reformers and Revolutionaries in Modern Iran:
New Perspectives on the Iranian Left (London, 2004), pp. 147-165.
Azerbaycan Respublikas Dvl t Arxivl ri (Republic of Azerbaijan State Archives) (Baku,
2003), pp. 7-11.
e
3 90
Workers who participated in the 1905 Revolution. Baku, 1925. Collection IISH.
the years that followed the state opened additional archival institutions: the
Archive of Film and Photo (1943), the Archive of Literature and Art (1966),
the Sound Recording Archive (1968), and the Archive of Science, Technical
and Medical Documents (1969).
After the fall of the Soviet Union and with the emergence of the new sovereign states, the constructing of a shared memory and writing national history evolved into a persuasive political project in each republic. The main
role of national history in this project was to refashion a significant and unbroken link with each nations real or imagined past and present. This new
mission restored the initial purpose of the institution of national archives,
though within the new nation-state context.4 In the Republic of Azerbaijan,
the Central Archive Office was renamed the National Archive and was entrusted with recovering and recording the countrys past and the national
perception of the countrys sovereignty.5
Today, six state archives operate in the Republic of Azerbaijan. These are
the National Archive, the Archive of Political Documents, formerly known
as the Archive of the Marxist-Leninist Institute, the State Archive of History,
the State Archive of Film and Photo, the State Archive of Sound Documents,
The same consideration led to the establishment of the new national museums in
the former Soviet Republics, which have replaced the celebrated Museums of the
October Revolution that existed in each republic during the Soviet era.
Azerbaycan Respublikas Dvl t Arxivl ri, p. 9.
e
|39 1
and the State Archive of Literature and Art. The aim of this essay is to explore the past and present of two of these state archives, which for the past
twenty years have worked closely with the International Institute of Social
History: the State Archive of History and the Archive of the Marxist-Leninist
Institute (now the Archive of Political Documents).
The State Archive of the History of the Republic of Azerbaijan

To distinguish the pre-Soviet history of the Caucasus from that of the Soviet
period, in 1930 the Central Archive opened a new archive dedicated to collecting documents on social and political history of the Caucasus from the
ancient time until the Bolshevik takeover in 1920.6 The lions share of the
documents in this archive, however, is from the nineteenth century, when
after two consecutive armistices with Iran (Persia) in 1813 and 1828, the expanding Tsarist Empire extended its frontiers in the Southern Caucasus and
reached the present border with Iran.
Following the annexation of the Southern Caucasus to the empire, exploration of natural resources became the top priority of Russian colonial rule.
Nineteenth-century Russias heavily state-oriented industrialization policy
paved the way for massive expansion of domestic industries, development
of large-scale mining projects, and a dazzling extension of railway networks
into the southern regions of the Tsarist Empire.7 Construction of roads
and railways, such as the Trans-Caspian network, connecting the Caucasus
to Central Asia, and notably the free extraction of the oil deposits in the
Apsheron peninsula on the Caspian coast in 1872, increased labour migration and resulted in still greater population displacements, as well as the
expansion of ancient cities and development of new composite industrial
districts.8
Thanks to the rapidly growing oil industry in the Caucasus, the region
soon progressed to supplying 95 % of Russias consumer oil, as the holder
of the second-largest oil deposits globally, after the United States. Together
with the British, French, and German companies operating in the region,
the Russian state was to benefit from underground natural resources in a
territory where on the eve of its occupation and annexation to the empire,
7
8
Of the 756 funds and 244,367 files in this archive, a considerable share concerns
the history of political, economic, and cultural life during the Tsarist Empire
colonial period (1805-1920).
M.E. Fakus, The Industrialisation of Russia. 1700-1914 (London, 1972), pp. 44-46; pp.
64-66.
In the city of Baku, for example, the population grew as a result of the oil boom
from 13,000 in 1859 to 112,000 in 1879 and to 300,000 in 1917, while the workforce
in the oil fields increased from 1800 in 1872 to 30,000 in 1907. Bakunun Tarixine dair
Senedler, 1810-1917 (Documents on the History of Baku, 1810-1917) (Baku, 1978), p. 13,
pp. 29-30.
3 92
Working at the oil field of Baku. Baku, 1931. Collection IISH.
no one could envisage that within a few decades it would turn into the empires cornucopia.
At such an accelerated pace of economic growth, not only the labour-intensive industries did face serious labour scarcities, but the growing agricultural lands and industries, such as tea plantations, were affected by the
same labour shortage. Consequently, local inhabitants were joined by hundreds of thousands of Iranian, Russians, Armenians, and Daghistanis who
migrated to oilfields, mining areas, and other industrial or agricultural sectors. Studying the living and working conditions among these labour migrants adds new chapters to nineteenth-century global labour history and
enhances our understanding of the Tsarist Empires colonial practice.9
The Archive of History holds a wide range of documents of particular importance for studying the social history of the oil industry in this region.
These documents cover oil extraction and processing, transportation and
transmission, construction of oil pipelines and oil refineries, working and
living conditions, the struggle by workers for better living and working conditions, as well as records from labour organizations. The Archive of History
also holds noteworthy records of migrant workers in the Baku oil industry.
The well-recorded documents in this archive on the ethnic, gender, and age
9
Touraj Atabaki, Disgruntled Guests: Iranian Subaltern on the Margins of the

Tsarist Empire, International Review of Social History, 48:3 (2003), pp. 401-426.
|39 3
breakdown of migrant workers, their working and living conditions, family

composition, leisure, and sanitary and nutritional practices are indisputably
unique.
Aside from industrial and labour history, the documents in this archive
are immensely important for studying other social and political movements
during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Examples include numerous references reflecting the revolutionary movements in the Southern
Caucasus refashioned following the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), the
Russian Revolution of 1905, the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906, and
the Young Turks Revolution of 1908. The archive of the widespread regional
conflicts, deriving chiefly from ethnic clashes between the Armenian and
the Muslim communities in 1905 and 1906, is also at the State Archive of
History.
The final note on the importance of this archive concerns the First World
War period, when the Caucasus gradually became the battleground of the
great powers aiming to capture the Baku oilfields. The conversion of the war
industries from coal to oil in the first year of the war revealed the strategic
importance of this commodity and consequently led the major protagonists
in the First World War to extend the battle frontiers to the oilfields in West
Asia and the Caucasus. While documentation of the campaigns and confrontations in the Caucasus during the war of the powers involved may be
found in Moscow, London or Istanbul, the State Archive of History in Baku
holds exclusive sources revealing how the prevailing international conflicts
shaped the social lives of ordinary locals during this extraordinary period.
The Archive of Political Documents of the Republic of Azerbaijan

(Former Archive of the Marxist-Leninist Institute)
The Archive of Political Documents was founded in 1921, as mentioned earlier, when the Azerbaijan Communist Party decided the year after it was established to organize its own archive by founding the Azistpart. Although
the large collections in this archive relate to the history of the Soviet Union
in general and the history of the Soviet power in the Caucasus, including
Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia (1920-1991) in particular, thefirst part of
the documents kept in this archive nevertheless deals with the 1845-1920
period and comprises reports from the Baku province, the Caucasus general-governorship, and non-classified documents from social movements,
including the labour movement in the Baku oil industry, the 1898-1907 social-democratic movement in the Caucasus, and the Russian Revolution of
1905. The documents from this period comprise collections on the supreme
legislative representative bodies of the Russian State Dumas (1906-1917) and
on the activities of its members from the South Caucasus.
Records from the political parties in the Caucasus, from before the
Soviet regime and implementation of one-party rule, figure among other
important collections in this archive. The archive of the local nationalist
3 94
parties the Musavat, Ittihad, and Hummat, as well as the Baku branch of
the Russian Social Democrat Workers Party (Mensheviks), the local party
organizations of Socialist-Revolutionaries (sr), the Armenian nationalist
Dashnaksutyun party, and the Social Democratic Hunchakian Party, the
Jewish Social Democrat Party Poale Zion, the Jewish Bund, the Cadets, the
Anarchist parties, and the Social-Democrat Party of Iran, are all collected at
this State Archive. An additional collection of documents relating to the social history of the Russian Revolutions of February and October 1917 is here
as well.
During its early years of operation, in addition to tracing and documenting the past of the Bolsheviks and non-Bolsheviks in the Caucasus, the task
of the Azistpart included collecting documents on local opposition to the
Soviet power, primarily the nationalist movement in Azerbaijan, Armenia,
and Georgia in the period 1918-1920. The Azistpart preserved all documents
deriving from the Government of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, as
well as the stenographic records of its Parliament (1918-1920) and the archives of its ministries. This collection contained correspondence between
the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic and the neighbouring countries Iran,
Turkey, Georgia, and Armenia, as well as accounts of the involvement of the
Azerbaijani Delegation in the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.
Pursuant to the Comintern assignment guideline, the Azistpart also collected the records of major labour and anti-colonial movements in West
Asia and neighbouring countries. In addition, the Azistpart complemented
the archive of the First Congress of the People of the East. The First World
War and the ensuing developments had sweeping consequences for both
Iran and Turkey. In both countries the nationalist movement intended to
establish a modern central state on the remains of the Ottoman Empire
in Turkey and in opposition to the resilient provincial movements in
Iran, where the Socialist Republic of Iran was proclaimed (1920-1921). The
Azistpart collected documents related to these movements and episodes, as
well as the records of the Communist Parties in both countries.
In 1928 the Azistpart was renamed the Institute of the Study of Class
Struggle of the Azerbaijan Communist Party and a year later was again renamed, becoming the Azerbaijan Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the
Central Committee of the Azerbaijan Communist Party. Additional name
changes during the years that followed included the Marx-Engels-Lenin
Institute and the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin Institute. In 1956, the institute became the Azerbaijan branch of the Marxism-Leninism Institute under the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, retaining this designation until the
fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the MarxismLeninism Institute ceased to operate independently and became the
Azerbaijan Republic State Archive of Political Parties and Social Movements,
affiliated with the Central Archive Office. This reorganizing and renaming of the institute continued. By 2009 it was called the Archive of Political
|39 5
Documents and reported to the

office of the President of the
Republic of Azerbaijan.
The numerous basic funds in
this Archive, as mentioned earlier, include documents reflecting the history of the Communist
Party of Azerbaijan and affiliated
communist organizations such
as the Komsomol from its establishment in 1920, until it was disbanded in September 1991. Over
the seventy-year history of the
Communist Party, certain periods
and episodes have greatly impacted society in the region. Among
them was the campaign against
opposition to Soviet power and
the early stages of purging the
party (1921-1929), the collectivization of agriculture (1928-1940),
the anti-religion campaign of late
1920s, and finally the Stalinist repressions of 1937-1938, to which
the majority of employees of this
Eyyub Atamoqlanov, a Stakhanovist worker.
archive fell victim.
Baku, 1941. Collection IISH.
The Communist Party Archive
(later the Archive of the MarxistLeninist Institute) differed from
the other archives in the firm ideological commitment of the institute to
Marxism-Leninism. The documents collected served to construct a collective
memory of the Communist Party. Constructing such collective memory was
inevitably associated with selective amnesia. Both the constituent memories
and the selective amnesia in writing the history of the Communist Party
were intended to refashion legitimacy for the ruling party. Obviously, those
employed at all levels of the archive, from archivists to the management
staff, underwent several different screenings before joining the archive.
In the early days of the Archive, the employees were chiefly Russians.
By 1922, however, through inviting instructors from the Red Professors
Association in Moscow, the Communist Party launched a new campaign to
replace some Russian employees with local Azerbaijani communists. This
shift in recruitment policy was very limited but nevertheless gave locals
access to certain documents, which were classified as a top-secret, restricted collection. Among these documents were records of the local opposition to Bolshevik rule, including the records of the Azerbaijan Democratic
3 96
Republic. In the 1920s and 30s many employees of the archive perished, all
charged with foreign espionage and criminal associations with the nationalist, national communist, or Trotskyist network, in addition to
consulting these archives.10
Currently, the Archive of Political Documents with its large library of
reference books and periodicals and an archive of 4,979 funds comprising
over 1,215,000 files is considered to be the largest archive in the Republic
of Azerbaijan. Its extended library holds not only all major books and periodicals published under the Soviet regime in the Caucasus but all those
throughout the Soviet Union as well.
Postscript
The twentieth century has gone down in history as the century of the rise
and fall of Soviet communism. For many historians, studying the social and
political history of seventy years of Soviet government resembles a voyage
to a mysterious island that few explorers have visited. Among the many reasons for such hesitation, there is undoubtedly the question of the existence
and availability of archival sources. How much of the Soviet social and political past has been recorded, and how much is accessible? While in 1991 no
straightforward answer was available to any of these questions, now, more
than twenty years since the fall of the Soviet Union, there is at least an explicit answer to the first question. The Soviet Union kept records of virtually
every trace of its practices, which is exceptional, even compared to many
countries that cherish their past and claim to record it in a continuous register. Historians note with astonishment that in the Soviet era, every act of
state and society in the union was documented, down to registering the details of the very dark practices of Stalinist purges. This procedure often puzzles Soviet historians and analysts. Disregarding whether such documentations was accessible during the Soviet period, the question remains: what
led the Soviet authorities to archive their past so consistently?
The fall of the Soviet Union seriously interfered with this practice. Not all
who inherited the fallen empire, especially those privileged to be associated
with the new ruling elites, were happy to confront their immediate past.
After the early years of the post-Soviet era, when in some former Soviet
republics historians were granted partial access to the Soviet archives, by
early 2000 access to some archives was once again restricted, but a covert
10
Among those employed at the archive who were executed as victims of the purge
was Ahmad Ahmadov, a young Azerbaijani Bolshevik and early Communist Party
celebrity, who was arrested and executed in 1928. The purges of 1937-38 claimed
the lives of many other archive staff, including the archives directors and a
group of established Marxist historians: Mahmoud Agayev, B.N. Tixomirov,Ismail
Eminbayli,Rahim Hasanov, Ruhollah Akhundov, Vali Khuluflu, Biukaga
Talibli,Hussein Mamadov, Baba Asgarov, and many others. See: Zia Bunyadov,
Kirmizi Terror (Red Terror) (Baku, 1993), pp. 80-87, 101-114, 128-136.
|39 7
Workers of a workshop associated to the Baku oil industry. Baku, 1924. Collection IISH.
new campaign was launched to refashion public memory. In constructing

this new national memory, a measure of selective amnesia was inevitable.
Accordingly, the disappearance of documents from collections of certain national archives throughout the former Soviet, where the old index is still
present, is no longer an exceptional occurrence.
The International Institute of Social History was one of the few international research and archival institutions that eagerly committed to work on
the Soviet archives with the objective of making them accessible to historians globally. Jaap Kloostermans visit to Moscow in 1991 and subsequent
partnership with the archive of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism and later
the Memorial Archive was the first initiative by the Institute. In the following years, while conducting joint research projects exchanging archives
with different archives and research institutes continued in Moscow, the
International Institute of Social History extended its cooperative strategy to
the former Soviet republics, especially those in the Caucasus and Central
Asia.
In the Caucasus, joint projects with the archives in Georgia and
Azerbaijan were a priority for the Institute. These archives were valuable
not only for their important collections from the Soviet periphery but also
for their assets including duplicates of some Soviet collections held centrally
in Moscow. Working with these archives became possible thanks to various
proposals for joint research projects, such as the Labour Migration in the
3 98
Caucuses, Everyday Stalinism in the Caucasus, the Comintern and the East,
the Fall of the Soviet Union Remembered (an oral history project conducted
in Azerbaijan, examining how the fall of the Soviet Union was remembered
ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union by elites and non-elites
alike). In 2003, following a proposal submitted by the International Institute
of Social History to the Ministry of National Security of the Republic of
Azerbaijan, a joint conference was organized in Baku on the Stalinist repressions of the 1937-1938. The immediate outcome of such a unique initiative of
cooperating with a security institute in one of the former Soviet republics
was that the partial restriction on access was lifted for the Soviet Peoples
Commissariat for Internal Affairs nkvd archive. Utilizing the nkvd collections significantly broadened our understanding of everyday repression in
the 1930s.
The mutual cooperation between the International Institute of Social
History and the archives in Georgia and Azerbaijan has been conducive to
organizing several joint research projects, exchanging archives, and initiating international conferences.11 Social history of labour in the Caucasus and
everyday Stalinism in the Caucasus were the themes of these conferences
held in Baku, Tehran, Istanbul, and Tbilisi. The partnerships between Baku
and Amsterdam have enabled scholars from both places to access their mutual archives and to host joint research projects that have extended their
research beyond national frontiers.
11
A few of the publications that resulted from this partnership are: Touraj
Atabaki, Svetlana Ravandi-Fadai and Solmaz Rustamova-Towhidi, Fallen for Their
Faith: From Comrades to Enemies of the People. The Iranian Revolutionaries in the Land
of the Soviets (Forthcoming); Solmaz Rustamova-Towhidi, Baku: March 1918 (Baku,
2009); Touraj Atabaki (ed.), The State and the Subaltern. Society and Politics in Turkey
and Iran (London, 2007); Touraj Atabaki, The Comintern, the Soviet Union and
the Labour Militancy in Interwar Iran, in Cronin, Iranian-Russian Encounters;
Touraj Atabaki, Incommodious Hosts, Invidious Guests. The life and Times of
Iranian Revolutionaries in the Soviet Union (1921-1939), in Cronin, Reformers and
Revolutionaries in Modern Iran; Solmaz Rustamova-Towhidi, The First Congress of
the Peoples of the East: Aims, Tasks and Results, in Mikhail Narinsky and Jrgen
Rojahn (eds), Centre and Periphery. The History of the Comintern in the Light of New
Documents (Amsterdam, 1996).
IV
THE IISH
goes global
IV.1 The Long Journey of

the dhkp Archive
From the Turkish
Prisons to the iish
Zlfikar zdoan
Over the past quarter century, the Institute has evolved into the largest and
most successful institution collecting materials on modern Turkish history
outside Turkey. How this came about is a fascinating story, of which only
the highlights may be described here. Still, the achievement is important
for understanding one of the most important acquisitions from recent
years, as will be discussed below in more detail.
Before 1987, Turkey was nowhere to be found in the annual reports of
the Institute. Nevertheless, the Institute had reached an agreement the previous year with the Turkish political refugee Orhan Silier (born in 1946 in
Malatya and fled following the military coup of 1980) to purchase his collection on Turkish social and labour movements since World War II and to
undertake all kinds of research and collection projects. As the working relationship became increasingly tense, Silier resigned in 1989. His collection
remained at the IISH, as did his assistant Mehmet Bilgen.
From 1990 to 1999, Erik-Jan Zrcher, a specialist in late Ottoman political and social history, was responsible for the Turkish collections and for
scholarly research in this field.1 He worked closely with assistants in Turkey
1
He returned from 2008 to 2012, succeeding Jaap Kloosterman as director.
zd o a n L o n g J o u r ne y of the DH KP Arc hi v e
|401
and with Herman van Renselaar, who was posted at the Dutch embassy in
Ankara. At the iish, besides Mehmet Bilgen, Erhan Tuskan had by then been
recruited to perform archival inventories. In April 1996 I started working at
the Institute as well. Within a few years, in addition to research and acquisitions, cataloguing got under way.2
Meanwhile, Zrcher continued to be assigned additional duties at Leiden
University, leading him to resign from the iish in 1999.3 I subsequently became responsible for the Turkish acquisitions. The collections had by then
expanded considerably, both the ones consisting of books and periodicals,
and the archives and audiovisual materials. Jewels in the crown included
the Kemal Slker papers, the archives of the Communist Party of Turkey
(tkp) and of one of its leaders Hikmet Kivilcimli, and the archives of the
htib, an important organization of Turkish migrant workers in Europe, including the Netherlands.
Turkish Collection
The Turkish collection presently comprises 25,000 books and brochures,
4,000 titles of periodicals, a great many audiovisual materials, including 2,000 posters, plus 40 collections of archives and documentation. The
Kurdish collection comprises 3,000 books and brochures, 500 titles of periodicals, a few collections of archives and documentation, a great many posters, photographs, videos, cds featuring battle songs, audiotapes, and textile
items.4
Over the past fifteen years, I have acquired quite a few archival collections, as well as printed matter. The most important one among them in
my view is that of Dev-Sol/dhkp/c (the Revolutionary Left / Revolutionary
Peoples Liberation Front). This collection consists of 7 metres of arranged
materials and about 5 metres of materials that have yet to be arranged,
including many library materials, such as books, brochures, hundreds of
pamphlets, and audiovisual materials, such as posters, video cassettes, photographs, and objects, such as chains, necklaces, and textiles.5 Below I describe how complicated acquiring this material turned out to be.
2
3
For details, see the annual bulletin zler Traces, published by the Institute from
1992 to 1997 in English.
From January 1994 he held an iish-sponsored part-time chair in modern history
of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey at the University of Amsterdam and was
appointed full professor of Turkish Studies at Leiden University in 1997 and
associate dean of the Arts Faculty there in 1999.
For additional information, see the iish Annual Reports, the English-language
brochure Turkeys Red Flank (Amsterdam, 2007), and especially the annual newsletter Sosyal Tarih (Social History), published in Turkish 2001-2009 (illustrated and
published in colour from 2005 onward).
As stressed in Turkeys Red Flank (2007), a considerable number of iish collections
not classified as Turkish archives nevertheless contains important material on
40 2
The Revolutionary Peoples Liberation Party/Front - dhkp/c (previously

Dev-Sol, an abbreviation of the Revolutionary Left in Turkish) is a typical
Marxist-Leninist organization, known mainly for attacks on right-wing politicians, generals, and businesspeople.6 As a result, dozens of dhkp/c militants now languish in solitary confinement in Turkish prisons.
Since this group was founded in the 1970s, I have been watching it with
immense interest, as a left-wing journalist. Nearly all leftist groups have
disappeared since the fall of the Soviet Union. Not this group: it is still active and remains fully committed to its anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist
struggle. I no longer identify with the ideology of this group, because I long
ago abandoned the Marxism-Leninism that dominated my youth. Still, I admire the dhkp/c militants for their innocent idealism and their courageous
struggle against a heavily militarized state such as Turkey.
In Turkey the dhkp/c finds most of its following among the younger
generations, publishes in journals, and organizes activities on social causes. In European countries, such as the Netherlands, it also has adherents
and maintains a few offices. Years ago, I called the Information desk for
Freedom of this group in Amsterdam, on a side street off Ceintuurbaan. I
wanted to find out whether they would be willing to send their periodicals
and other publications to the iish. After ringing a few times, I still had no
response. I wondered whether they had taken me seriously. Then I stopped
by their office to meet them and explain my intentions. I received a warm
welcome and gradually earned their trust.
Prisons
During that first visit, I noticed extremely interesting materials on the large
table in the centre of the room: journals, satirical newspapers, brochures,
drawings, poems, and, surprisingly, miscellaneous items, such as chains,
small figures, and the like, all handmade. I could not believe my eyes! How
was this possible? Who had made this? Where did it all come from? What
was this material doing here in Amsterdam, at this office, lying on this
table?
A female comrade explained that these items came from their comrades
languishing in Turkish prisons. Her answer made me still more curious, and
I thought it would be wonderful, if this material were transferred to the
iish. I could not help asking: What do you plan to do with all this? She
replied: We intend to digitize the material. I told her that this would need
to happen quickly, since the police might raid the premises at any time. She
agreed with me and added that far more material was present in an adja-
Turkey and Turkish guest workers in Europe.

For background information on the general political history of Turkey, see Erik-Jan
Zurcher, Turkey: A modern history (London, 2004) and the sources listed there.
|403
Handwritten calendar made by prisoner: Resist isolation.

IISH Archive DHKP-C nr. 166 2005.
cent storage area. She opened it to show me, revealing a magnificent selection, all neatly inventoried and recorded on lists.
While doing this, she told me about the prisoners who had made these
items.
They include dozens of dhkp/c militants in various prisons
throughout Turkey. The regulations of the Ministry of Justice stipulate that prisoners in solitary confinement may spend only ten
hours a week together; the rest of the time they are in deep solitude in their cells. But the regulations are not properly applied by
the prison administrators, as social contact hours for the prisoners are reduced or cancelled altogether for no reason at all.
Revolts among prisoners are commonplace, both because of this situation
and to enforce other rights. The revolt in 2000 was the most massive: hundreds of political prisoners in 20 prisons simultaneously demanded better
and more humane conditions. Dozens staged hunger strikes that lasted very
long indeed. Many nearly starved to death, and some even perished from exhaustion. Daily news about the prisoners on hunger strikes drew a lot of at-
40 4
tention in Turkey and abroad. A special police force was ordered by the government to intervene. This action was given the ironic code name Return
to life! Still, 32 prisoners did not return there but were killed at random
by the police, while 200 prisoners were injured. The others were sent into
solitary confinement in F-type prisons, which are prisons built according to
eu standards.
What can you do, when you are stuck in a tiny cell measuring only a few
square yards? Reading and writing, nothing else. They also had a limited
allotment of books (they were allowed to receive no more than 10 at once)
and therefore had a lot of time on their hands. So they wrote articles and
poems, made drawings and satirical papers, and devised objects, most with
some political connotation.
Political prisoners have a tremendous need to speak out. To avoid a complete loss of morale inside your cell, you need to stay busy to keep your
spirits up. Writing, drawing, and creating objects were the only options.
Of course this requires materials, such as paper, various pens, and fabric.
These were supplied by comrades outside, who snuck them in through various channels. And the output needed to be smuggled back out, which was
how all these materials ended up on that table in Amsterdam. Outside it
was obviously not safe either, as the police relentlessly hunted down the
remaining dhkp/c members. So they decided to smuggle the materials to
Brussels, where the information desk of the organization is based. The ultimate destination along this one-way journey of the material turned out
to be a side street off Ceintuurbaan in Amsterdam, followed by a semi-legal
office in Amsterdam North.
The woman who told me all about this ran the information desk. I stayed
in touch with her for quite a while afterwards, until she was arrested in
Brussels. Her alias was Nermin (only much later, when she trusted me, did
I learn her real name). She was a very tough woman, maintained a strict
regimen, was not very streetwise but was highly disciplined and politically
completely devoted to her party. Whenever we met, she would spend half
an hour venting propaganda about how bad and unfair capitalism was,
and how the Turkish state was oppressing her comrades. I listened attentively to her speech, as if I did not already know that. I never told her that
I used to be a member of the Workers Party of Turkey (tp) and then joined
the Communist Party of Turkey (tkp), and that I had studied Marxism in
Moscow.7
Over time, I convinced her that the material was no longer safe at the
office, and that transferring it to the iish would be wiser. She was worried
that this would mean giving it up permanently. I explained that granting it
as a standing loan was an option. The date that the archive would be opened
to the public was determined after lengthy negotiations. Understandably,
the dhkp/c was reluctant to open the material to the public quickly. Jaap
7
After studying law in Istanbul, I studied Marxist philosophy in Moscow.
|405
Kloosterman allowed the importance of preserving it to prevail; he understood the issues this organization faced. Following extensive deliberations,
the archive is now available for consultation, subject to consent from the
dhkp/c. For security reasons, no deadline has been set (yet) for when the
archive needs to be opened. At first, two authorized persons were supposed
to sign, but this arrangement soon proved insufficient for them. So another
person joined them and then still another. We raised no objection to this
circuitous procedure, because we realized beforehand how difficult working
with such a group would be, and our main concern was to get the material
to safety quickly.
At my request the archive department gave this archive priority, and it
has been arranged very nicely. Mehmet Bilgen was responsible for this project.8 I was elated about this outcome. Transportation of the material was
arranged by iish staff member Ed Kool. We had announced in our bulletin
published in Turkish, Sosyal Tarih (Social History), that the dhkp/c archive had
been entrusted to the iish. Sosyal Tarih had a circulation of 1,500 and was
sent mainly to addresses in Turkey, such as universities, libraries, human
rights institutions, and the like. Months later, I received a letter from a prisoner in solitary confinement in Turkey. The following is an excerpt from
this letter:
Dear Zlfikar zdoan, When I received your magazine (Sosyal
Tarih) through the ventilation duct of my cell, I was amazed.
I had never imagined that the materials we made would ever
be collected by an international institution such as yours. It
brought tears of joy to my eyes. Thank you so much for your
efforts to preserve our materials. Your magazine has travelled
a long way, passing through the ventilation ducts in all cells.
Everyone is now aware of the destiny of the material that he or
she made. I have been incarcerated for 8 years and have been
charged with being a member of tkp/ml (Communist Party of
Turkey /Marxist-Leninist). In Europe you must find it impossible
to understand how anybody can spend 8 years in solitary without having been convicted. The legal proceedings will certainly
take a very long time, and I do not know when I might be released. If I am ever released, though, I would like your institute
to preserve the materials I have gathered. R. Aydn, Tekirda
F-Type Prison. 9
I sent him a reply, but our contact ended there, with no information at all
from his end. My hunch is that he never received my last letter from the
8
9
Available at: http://www.iisg.nl/archives/en/files/d/ARCH03029full.php#toc; last

Sosyal Tarih, 2008, pg. 33-34.
40 6
prison administration. I was aware that incoming and outgoing post for the
prisoners was heavily censored and for that reason was very cautious in my
wording to avoid getting him in any trouble. Perhaps the administration
simply objected to prisoners maintaining foreign correspondence. I do not
expect I will ever know what really happened. I later published one of his
letters anonymously in Sosyal Tarih, 2008.
Recently
One day I received a call from a comrade at the Information desk for
Freedom. The man sounded rather tense. He reported: The police raided
our offices. We rescued our archive materials by sneaking them out the back
door and loading them into a minivan. Comrade Nermin said that you could
help us store the materials. Can you do that? Of course I agreed immediately, and we brought the archive materials over here together. Thinking
back, I still wonder, what would have happened, if we had been unable to
rescue that material?
The story of the dhkp/c archive still haunts me. I still think about this
group, because the militant members remain in solitary confinement and
continue to produce materials that reach Amsterdam via various channels. After comrade Nermin left the Netherlands, however, I had a hard
time staying in contact with the people who took over. The people who replaced Nermin were inexperienced and did not understand what our work
was about. Communication was strained between us. I urgently requested
an appointment with the new leader A. to discuss everything clearly in private. A. took over following the death in the Netherlands of Dursun Karata,
who was the founder and leader of the movement. After a few unsuccessful attempts, I finally managed to schedule an appointment with him for
February 2013. I planned to tell him how important it was to provide regular
accruals to the archive, and that designating a comrade to act as a permanent liaison was essential. I also hoped to make firm commitments about
the audiovisual materials.
But then fate intervened. On 1 February 2013 in Ankara there was a suicide attack on the u.s. Embassy. One policeman was killed, and a journalist
was injured. According to the Turkish media, the leader of dhkp/c ordered
the attack. That was A., who was living in the Netherlands. That news was
immediately broadcast by the Dutch media, and A. had to go into hiding for
his own protection. Our appointment never took place.
Working closely with Jaap, I have brought in far more archive collections
over the years, and each collection has a story behind it. After ten years of
intensive joint efforts, we have, if I may say so, assembled a lovely Turkish
and Kurdish collection for the iish. When I joined the iish in 1996, I had
only a very general awareness of social history. After three years as an assistant at both the archive department and the Turkey department, I replaced
|407
Erik-Jan Zrcher as the person in charge of the Turkish and Kurdish collections from. Since no special training was available for this area of expertise,
I had to learn what I needed to know on the job. Jaap has provided me with
wonderful guidance.
IV.2 The Egyptian and

Sudanese Communist
Collections
Roel Meijer
Introduction
This contribution is based on my experience as an archivist and collector
of documents of the Middle Eastern communist and left-wing movements.
I became attached to the iish after I had written my phd in 1995. My doctoral thesis focused on the liberal and left-wing movements in the period
1945-1958,1 and I was very glad to become part of the iish as it allowed me
to continue to pursue my interests. I did not realize that we had already acquired our biggest addition even before my appointment. The Henri Curiel
archives, or the Groupe de Rome (Rome Group in the iish archives),2 had already been acquired through my Egyptian connection Rifat al-Said in 1994.
Henri Curiel, born 1914, had been one of the most fascinating and controversial figures in the communist movement in the Middle East. He was assassinated in 1978.3
1
2
3
My doctoral thesis was later published as The Quest for Modernity: Secular Liberal and
Left-Wing Political Thought in Egypt, 1945-1958 (London, 2002).
The Egyptian Communists in Exile (Rome Group) Collection, http://search.
socialhistory.org/Record/ARCH01722/Description; last accessed 2 June 2014.
Gilles Perrault, Un Homme Part: Qui tait Henri Curiel? (Paris, 1984).
mei j er E g y p ti a n a n d Su d a n e s e C ommu ni st C olle cti ons
|409
Communism in the Middle East

The history of the communist movement in the Arab world is quite astonishing. Every country had its own trajectory. There are general characteristics, however. In all the Arab countries the movement was closely related
to the nationalist struggle for independence in its more radical phase from
the 1930s to the 1950s. In Algeria it was related to the emergence of Masali
Hajj, who as founder of the ltoile nord-Africaine in 1927,4 was later attracted to communism but then found a more nationalist Algerian form of
resistance against the French attempt to include Algeria in France. Another
common feature is the large number of minorities that were represented in
the Communist movement.5 The Iraqi Communist Party was led by Shiites,
and had a large Kurdish following.6 Jews were also represented in many of
these parties. The first communist party of Egypt in the 1920s, for instance,
was founded by the Joseph Rosenthal.7 The prominent role played by minorities highlights the contradictions within the movements. On the one
hand they tended to try to intensify the nationalist movements and demand
social reforms necessary to build a more inclusive and democratic nationstates by mobilizing the peasantry and the workers in independent trade
unions; on the other hand they were often highly cosmopolitan, intellectual, and geared to international developments. As a result they remained in
most cases elitist and marginal in numbers. Although the ideological influence on the nationalist movement was immense, forcing even the Islamist
movement to emphasize social justice in their work, their direct political
influence on events was limited. Only in two cases is it possible to speak of
mass movements: the Sudan and Iraq. In all other countries the movement
produced astonishing intellectuals but was subordinated to the Arab socialist movements as Nasserism, the fln in Algeria,8 Neo-Destour in Tunisia,9
and the Bath in Syria and Iraq (after 1966).10 The re-emergence of the left in
its many forms in the past 20 years, and its influence on the Arab uprisings,
marks a wholly new phase in its development.
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Benjamin Stora, Messali Hajj, 1898-1974 (Paris,2004 [1982]).

Taline Ter Minassian, Colporteurs du Komintern: LUnion Sovitique et les Minorits au
Moyen-Orient (Paris, 1997).
Batatu, Hanna, The Old Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of
Iraqs Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of its Communists, Bathists and Free officers
(Princeton, 1978).
Tareq Y. Ismael & Rifaat El-Said, The Communist Movement in Egypt, 1920-1988 (New
York, 1990), p. 13.
Emmanuel Sivan, Communisme et Nationalisme en Algrie, 1920-1962 (Paris, 1990).
Kenneth J. Perkins, A History of Modern Tunisia (Cambridge, 2004).
Tareq Y. Ismael, The Rise and Fall of the Communist Party in Iraq (Cambridge, 2008).
410
Egyptian Communist Movement

The Egyptian communist movement illustrates the brilliance of the
Communist movement in the Middle East and its weaknesses par excellence. Nowhere else was the discrepancy between its intellectual influence
and political impact greater. As in the 1920s, it was established by Jews. This
time they were young Jews who graduated from the French lyces under
the monarchy (1923-1952), when a large foreign and half-Egyptianized community of several hundred thousand lived mainly in Cairo and Alexandria.
In this cosmopolitan milieu, Italians, Greeks, French, Brits, and Lebanese
mixed freely, speaking several languages, and feeling at home as much in
Alexandria, Beirut, Marseille, Paris, or London. Henri Curiels father was a
banker and their villa was located on Zamalek, the island on the Nile in
Cairo, where the rich foreigners lived and on which the Jezira Sporting Club
(restricted to foreigners) was also situated. Curiel himself never spoke colloquial Egyptian well, making up for his lack of linguistic skills with his dedication to the cause.
The Rome group epitomizes the response of those members of this community that realized their days in Egypt were numbered, but who loved
Egypt and wanted to stay. The only way to achieve this was to become communist and take part in the nationalist struggle for independence, trying
to give it a more international and social dimension. They appealed to the
social consciousness and the dire poverty among workers and peasants and
especially the extreme differences between rich and poor. At the end of the
1930s they founded the first communist groups, first among the foreigners, with the purpose to recruit Egyptians and then establish an indigenous
communist movement.11 This project was a success, but unfortunately several others had the same idea, so the movement was born divided as Rifat
Said, who later became their historian, wrote.12 Counting a few hundred
members, divided among several small groups and splinters that constantly
split and split again, they were able to give the nationalist movement as a
whole a much greater social dimension, calling for land reform, nationalization of industry, establishing independent trade union movements, etc. In
contrast to the movements in Iraq and Syria, the Egyptian movement was
much more independent from the Comintern. This had an effect on their
ideas and tactics. Reading their works after so many years, I was struck
by the mildness of their reform plans; they were more influenced by Lon
Blum and the Popular Front in France than by Lenin and war communism.
When I was in Cairo in the 1980s, first working on my ma thesis on Egyptian
historiography and later on my phd on secular movements, I met the last
members of this group. Ahmad Sadiq Sad even translated my ma thesis into
11
12
Selma Botman, The Rise of Egyptian Communism, 1939-70 (New York, 1988).
Rifat al-Said, Tarikh Munazzamat al-Yasariyya al-Misriyya, 1940-1950 (History of
Egyptian Left-Wing Movements, 1940-1950) (Cairo, 1976).
|41 1
Henri Curiel. IISH BG A64/846.
Arabic. I also had my first taste of Egyptian infighting. When Mubarak succeeded the assassinated Sadat in 1981, Egypt went through a liberal period
in which there was an upsurge in interest by Egyptians in their own history.
Vehement debates took place between intellectuals about where and how
things had gone wrong in the past. One of the controversies concerned the
communist movement and especially the role of the Jews in the movement.
This aspect of the communist movement became even more problematic
when the Islamist movement expanded in the 1970s and 1980s. The Jewish
presence impaired the authentic (nationalist) character of the communists, who were tarnished with the foreign, or even worse, Zionist brush.
The Soviet recognition of Israel in 1948 affected the movement even in the
1980s. In search of authenticity (asala) and the masses, some left-wing intellectuals went over to the Islamist movement, entertaining the romantic
idea that Egypt had to find its roots again if it wanted to become strong. In
this climate of re-evaluation of the past, Curiel was singled out as the evil
genius who had prevented a fusion of social reform with an Islamic identity,
thwarting the true revolution from coming about and allowing the military
to take over in 1952.
The collection of the Group de Rome consists mostly of the documents of
the group after they were exiled, first to Rome and later to Paris. The most
412
amazing aspect of the documents is that they supported their comrades in

Nasserist jails despite the fact they had not only been banished from Egypt,
but also purged from the Egyptian Communist movement. The last survivors of the group, Joyce Blau, Joseph Hazan and his wife, visited the iish in
1996 to answer our questions about the numerous noms de plumes they used
in their correspondence with specific Egyptian Communists they had supported in the 1950s, after they were exiled. We spent a few memorable days
with them during which they explained the bewildering list of names and
the people who used them. It was then that the uniqueness of this small
group, which combined a communist dedication with a comradely liveliness
and a deep love for the Egyptians, dawned on us. In exile in Paris the group
continued its political activity, becoming involved in the Algerian independence struggle, founding the Institut Kurde in Paris, producing one of the
best Sudan specialists, and becoming active in the Palestinian cause, probably the main reason for the assassination of Curiel in 1978.
Although the collection is remarkable for the internal workings of the
Group de Rome, I was disappointed with the limited number of Egyptian
documents from this period. Most of the documents are minutes, correspondence, and clippings, and reports on the situation in Egypt, etc. We
made a very detailed index of the documents, a project performed by my
later wife, Marianne Wigboldus. At the time she was a student of political
science, who as a student intern, spent months sorting out the documents
and drawing up the inventory together with Jaap Haag.
The main purpose of making such a detailed inventory was out of respect
for the Rome Group and their remarkable history, but we also spent so
much time on it because we believed it would attract other collections of
the communist movement to the iish. Unfortunately this was a mistake. For
me it was the beginning of my long process of initiation into the vagaries
of the collector. This profession shows similarities to a tourist trying to buy
pharaonic kitsch at the Cairene bazaar Khan al-Khalili: the more interest
you show, the higher the Egyptian seller will raise the price for the artifact
you fancy. The longer you explain that the iish in principle does not pay
for a collection and that its worth can only be expressed in historical value,
the more the owner believes he is sitting on a treasure expressed in dollars.
That someone would travel so far to obtain documents and would work in
the interest of the holder him/herself was inconceivable to many of the people I met in Egypt. Even the standard argument that these documents would
be lying next to the Marx archives, as if they are lying in a cemetery of the
communists, seldom made a dent.
Another problem was that we had become associated with one particular group of communists and therefore became suspect in the eyes of all
the other groups who still remembered the slightest theoretical controversy
from more than 50 years ago. That the iish also collected Israeli documentation didnt help either. It was imperialism all over again. The Groupe de
Rome collection kept on pursuing us, and friends would every now and then
|41 3
send me Arabic newspapers clippings, or pass on rumors about the iish and
its plot to squirrel away crucial documents of the communist movement.
Only after years of persistent trips to Egypt I was able to obtain the originals of another remarkable movement: the Workers Vanguard. In contrast
to Curiels group, in the 1940s it decided to limit the number of intellectuals
and concentrate its recruitment among workers. Although the number of
documents was very small, they are worth their weight in gold, metaphorically speaking. Among them are the last collection of original pamphlets
the Workers Vanguard had issued during the student-workers movement in
1945-1946. I remember having to travel to a depressing high rise building in
a Paris banlieu to receive them personally from one of its leaders, Abu Sayf
Yusuf, an incredibly dedicated and kind man, whom I enjoyed visiting when
I was in Cairo. I made a highly detailed inventory of the collection, describing each pamphlet separately.13
Over the next years every now and then we obtained other collections of
the Egyptian communists, mainly from outside Egypt. For instance, we obtained documents on Michel Kamel, who was a well-known Egyptian intellectual of the 1960s and 1970s and lived in Paris. His collection also contains
documents related to the unification of the Egyptian communist party in
1973.14 We also obtained the collections of letters and documents of one of
the remarkable Egyptian intellectuals Ahmad Abdalla, who became famous
as a student leader in 1973 in the resistance against president Sadat. The
documents are mostly concerned with his activities in Great Britain from
1980-1983.15 The archives of the Egyptian left also include the very interesting collection of Bertus Hendriks, one of the most well-known Dutch Middle
East journalists, who started out writing a phd on the Egyptian Tajammu
Party, which he never finished because of his passion for following the latest political developments. Having finally given up on this project, he donated his remarkable collection of pamphlets, booklets, and programs of the
main leftist party from the end of the 1970s to the beginning of the 1990s
to the iish.16 Rifat al-Said later stored with the iish minutes of the trials
against communists in Egypt between 1951 and 1958.17 In between, we received a collection of the Egyptian Communist Party containing inner documents, among them minutes of secret meetings of the Central Committee,
in the period between 1980 and 1995. We received this collection through
13
14
15
16
17
Talia al-Ummal Collection, http://search.socialhistory.org/Record/ARCH02315/

Description; last accessed 2 June 2014.
Michel Kamel Papers, http://search.socialhistory.org/Record/ARCH02449/
ArchiveContentList; last accessed 2 June 2014.
Ahmed Abdalla Collection, http://search.socialhistory.org/Record/ARCH01991/
Hizb al-Tajammu Collection, http://search.socialhistory.org/Record/ARCH01997/
Trials of Egyptian Communists Collection, http://search.socialhistory.org/Record/
ARCH02693/Description; last accessed 2 June 2014.
414
an Egyptian who held these shadow archievs of the illegal Egyptian

Communist Party in Minsk.18 Ahmed Abdalla, the Egyptian student leader of
the 1970s, donated his collection to us.19 Finally, through Rifat al-Said, we
obtained a small but unique collection of personal papers of one of the first
Egyptian libertarian-leftist thinkers, Isam al-Din Hifni Nasif (1899-1969).20 All
in all, we did not do so badly. The Egyptian leftist/communist collections at
the iish start from the beginning of the twentieth century until I left the
iish. Anyone who is doing research on the Egyptian left will have to come
to the iish if he wants to do in-depth research. As we also bought all the relevant Arabic secondary books on the communist movement and the history
of Egypt, the researcher will also have all the reference works at hand.
Sudanese Communist Party

In a sense the Sudanese collections are even more remarkable.21 Our success with the Communist Party of Sudan is largely based on one person:
Mohammed AbdalHamid, who I met by chance. The Sudanese Communist
movement was established by Curiel in Cairo after World War ii. It would
later grow into one of the major communist parties of the Middle East, acquiring a very strong presence in the trade union movement.
My first contact with the Sudanese was made through Rif at al-Said, who
introduced me to al-Tigani al-Tayyib in Heliopolis. In his 70s, he was a remarkable person, and as the other communists of his generation, always
kind and gracious. The collection we talked about was divided in two parts.
One part was a shadow collection of documents of the cps in Moscow. The
other part was in London, but when I went to London it proved difficult
to find out what had happened to the collection. After two other visits to
the annual meeting in London, where I met all the members of the cps in
Europe, I still did not obtain a single document. Obviously they did not trust
us for one reason or another.
It was only after we took up contact with Mohammed AbdalHamid in
1997, who was a Sudanese refugee from Yemen and was himself a member
of the cps, that a green light was given: we could pick it up. As always the
pick-up was in itself an extraordinary experience. I hired a van because I
was told it was a large archive, and drove to the outskirts of London, where
we were met by an extremely nice Sudanese surgeon who spoke impeccable
English and was glad to hand over the moldy documents that had been in
18
19
20
21
Communist Party of Egypt Collection, http://search.socialhistory.org/Record/

ARCH02027/ArchiveContentAndStructure; last accessed 2 June 2014.
Ahmed Abdalla Collection, http://www.iisg.nl/archives/en/files/a/ARCH01991.php;
last accessed 2 June 2014.
Isam al-Din Hifni Nasif Collection, http://search.socialhistory.org/Record/
ARCH02044/ArchiveContentAndStructure; last accessed 2 June 2014.
Hizb al-Shuyui al-Sudani Collection, http://www.iisg.nl/archives/en/files/h/
ARCH01998.php; last accessed 2 June 2014.
|41 5
his garden shed for the past five years. He could not understand why the
party had taken so long to donate the collection and preserve it in a professional archive. He explained to us that it was neither money nor neglect of
the real value of the documents, but simply a different way of looking at
documents that explains why it took so long for the cps to donate them to
the iish.
Once in Amsterdam the collection proved to be extremely interesting.
Mohammad, who made the inventory, was amazed to find documentation
on the so-called failed communist coup dtat in 1971, minutes giving in detail the reasons for the party line he himself had had to follow when he had
been student. In short, the whole inventory took much longer than planned
because Mohammad read most of the documentation from cover to cover.
In the end several other parts were added to the collection,22 but the hope
we would receive the main chunk of archives in the Comintern archives in
Moscow was never fulfilled. The Sudanese archives would also attract some
attention from researchers on the Sudan, as they were the only collections
available for research. Also, the widow of the leader of the cps, Abd al-Khaliq Mahjub, who was hanged 1971 by the Sudanese regime, visited the iish
several times and was impressed with the Institute.
As so often happens, one case led us to another. A friend was working on
a phd on Mahmud Taha, the founder and leader of the Republican Brothers,
who was hanged when he was 88 by president Numeiri in 1985. Over the
years we acquired most of the booklets written by the Republican Brothers.
Several visits by the daughter helped to expand the collection. Another collection belonged to the National Democratic Alliance,23 the coalition of forces against the government of the National Islamic Front when it took power
in the Sudan in 1989, with the help of the army.
Books
In the entire period I was at the iish, we collected an impressive number of
Arabic books on the communist movement in the Middle East and on Arabic
history. Since the main interest in the communist movement was beginning
to ebb, a last attempt to collect pamphlets and digital information of more
modern movements such as the Kifaya movement against the re-election of
Mubarak in 2004 proved to be a failure. As always, it was extremely difficult
to find people who were willing to collect material systematically for a long
period on a regular basis. In the end this was unfortunate, because the iish
missed documents from the Arab Spring, as one of the persons I contacted
was at the forefront of the revolt in Egypt.
22
23
Hizb al-Shuyui al-Sudani, Egypt Branch Collection, http://search.socialhistory.org/

Record/ARCH02688/ArchiveContentAndStructure; last accessed 2 June 2014.
http://www.iisg.nl/archives/en/files/n/ARCH02670.php; last accessed 2 June 2014.
416
Over the past few years I focused more on social movements, including
the Islamist movement. I never tried to collect any documents, because
our earlier communist concentration prohibited any suggestion of preserving material of the Muslim Brotherhood. But purchasing Arab books
and booklets with documents is often sufficient to get a collection started.
During a trip to Jordan in 2006, I purchased almost all the books available
on the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, and on a trip to Lebanon in 2009, I
acquired the complete works (from the 1950s until his death a few years
later of Fathi Yakan (d. 2009), the most important leader of the Lebanese
Muslim Brotherhood over the past 40 years. I also went to Great Britain to
collect Salafi literature that had been translated form Arabic to English. This
was an amazing trip that took me to mosques and a religious bookshop in
Manchester, Birmingham, and London, where I encountered a new world of
religious activity. Although the trip proved fruitful, the material was a bit
too outlandish for the iish, so it became a secular archive. I left the iish in
2008 to work at Clingendael.
Conclusion
I believe the iish has done an excellent job in collecting documents and secondary literature on the Middle East with the limited means at its disposal
(I had only a small budget for travel and acquiring books). I am especially
grateful to Jaap Kloosterman for giving me the opportunity to work in this
way, which I believe proved very efficient. When I was in the Middle East,
I was able to contact people and purchase the necessary books, maintaining and updating the Middle East collection on specific topics, and allowing enough room to acquire larger collections of documents when necessary. Though low key and not very ambitious, it was a good way to function.
Working at the iish was always a pleasure; one of the few places where people understood that patience is an art and success is not instantaneous.
IV.3 Collecting under

Uncertainty
The Creation of the Chinese
Peoples Movement Archive
Tony Saich
Walking across Tiananmen Square in the Center of Beijing nowadays, one

sees visitors who have come to wonder at the splendors of the Forbidden
City, visit the Mao Zedong Mausoleum, fly kites, and revel in the demonstrations of state power that surround the Square. The track marks of the tanks
and the pock-marked bullet holes on the Monument to the Peoples Heroes,
where the last students huddled, have long been cleaned up. The only sign
that a tension still lurks beneath these visions of tranquility, is the extensive presence of plainclothes security agents trained to watch for any indication of unrest or demonstration. It is hard to remember that in the Spring
of 1989, the Square had been filled with tens of thousands of student-led
demonstrators who demanded a more democratic and transparent political
system that was less riddled with official profiteering. The presence of massive numbers of protestors occupying the symbolic center of the Chinese
revolution was an affront to many of the older generation of revolutionaries, including the paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping. Thus, in the night of
3-4 June, they sent in the soldiers of the Peoples Liberation Army (pla) to
clear the Square and reclaim the heart of the revolution for the Chinese
Communist Party (ccp). Once again Mao Zedongs portrait is able to gaze out
unimpeded across to his body lying in the Mausoleum without the Goddess
sa i ch co l l e c ti ng u nd e r u nc e rtai nty
|41 9
of Democracy blocking his view. The Goddess of Democracy was the students last throw of the dice, erected by the students, dressed in her white
robes of plaster and styrofoam, holding the torch of freedom under the old
mans nose as if taunting him to respond.
Almost twenty-five years on, are the demonstrations still relevant
and what value does a collection of materials sitting in an archive on
Cruquiusweg have? Collecting in a time of uncertainty always carries the
danger that what looks important at the time might seem irrelevant later
or that the wrong kinds of materials have been collected. However, much
as the leadership of the ccp has tried to banish the events from historical
memory, its historical legacy remains and, while reassessment seems far
away, it could still form part of a reconciliation between state and society.
The spontaneous demonstrations were unprecedented in the history of the
Peoples Republic of China (prc). They revealed a high level of dissatisfaction with the reform program that had been initiated in the late-1970s and
exposed deep divisions within the leadership about the future trajectory
of the revolution. Below, we recap briefly the events before turning to the
question of the collection itself.
Creating a Peoples Movement

The spark that lit the fire of protest was the death of the pro-reform former
General Secretary of the ccp, Hu Yaobang. In 1987, Hu had been dismissed
from his post following a prior round of student demonstrations. Hu died
on 15 April and on 17 April, some 6,000 students marched to Tiananmen to
lay wreaths in his honor, followed by some 50,000 students converging there
on 22 April to mark his funeral and demanding to see the then Premier, Li
Peng. The frustrations among key sectors of the urban population meant
that the student actions quickly found widespread support. The industrial
working-class felt that its privileged position was under threat from marketbased reforms; intellectuals and the students were frustrated by insufficient
political reform, and all were affected by inflation. The reform momentum
was stalling.
Official ccp response was to use tough rhetoric but to be careful in suppressing the rising discontent. This was expressed best in the Peoples Daily
editorial of 26 April that denounced the demonstrations as a planned
conspiracy and turmoil.1 Yet, the party leadership knew that using violence to suppress peaceful students who were singing the Internationale
and professing their faith in the country was not yet viable. The same day
the Beijing Students Autonomous Federation was formally established, the
first such organization in the history of the prc. The founding represented
a fundamental challenge to traditional party dominance of social organiza1 Bixu qizhi xianmingde fandui dongluan (It is Necessary to take a Clear-Cut Stand
Against Turmoil) in Renmin ribao (Peoples Daily), 26 April 1989.
420
tions, a challenge that was increased by the founding of the Beijing Workers
Autonomous Federation in mid-May. The idea that students and workers
could form horizontal linkages of their own that cut across traditional vertical hierarchies was anathema to orthodox party leaders.
The denunciation of official corruption gave the movement the flavor
of a moral crusade that drew many Beijing residents to its support. The
launch of a hunger strike on 13 May heightened further this moral image.
However, as the movement grew and different groups began to emerge, it
became clear that the student leaders had little capacity to control or direct
the movement and there was no effective mechanism for negotiation with
the ccp. This situation was made even worse by the incoherent and divisive
response of the party leaders themselves. The response to the movement
exposed deep divisions within the party elite, divisions that had to be resolved before the student-led movement could be dealt with. The General
Secretary, Zhao Ziyang, was seen as more sympathetic to a peaceful resolution to the demonstrations and had strived to moderate the harsh rhetoric. However, he was marginalized and martial law was invoked on 20 May.
From that day, Zhao remained under house arrest until his death in 2005
and his smuggled out memoirs portrayed the violent suppression as a serious mistake for which the party should apologize.2 By contrast, his more
orthodox opponents saw the establishment of autonomous organizations as
a fundamental challenge to party rule and were unwilling to accept any political agenda that was not set by the party itself. This shut out any potential
for compromise and the result was the tragic clearing of the Square during
the night of 3-4 June.
Subsequently, the partys response has been three-fold. First, control the
message. Initially, the party-controlled media was saturated with its side of
the story about the rebellion and how it had been put-down by the heroic
soldiers of the pla to safeguard the interests of the Chinese state and society. Outside of Beijing, this propaganda seemed to have an effect. In a world
without internet and social media, citizens had little access to alternative information. In 1991, I remember vividly visiting relatives in a medium-sized
town in Central China and being taken aback by their view of events. They
were considered to be the citys liberals, yet in a discussion over dinner
they mentioned the turmoil in Beijing and its suppression. The choice of
words surprised me as no ordinary citizen in Beijing used this phrase but
referred simply 4 June or the Beijing massacre. When I asked them
how they knew it was turmoil and a counter-revolutionary incident, they
simply replied that it was true because they had seen it on Central Chinese
Television news!
Second, its the economy stupid! After three-years, Deng Xiaoping was
able to win the economic policy debate and launch a new round of econom2
For the English language version see Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier
Zhao Ziyang (New York, 2009), edited by Adi Ignatius.
|421
ic growth to satisfy citizens material desires and provide bountiful access to

resources for the party elite. This led to growth rates of over 10 percent per
annum and was used as a justification for the crackdown claiming that it
had provided the stability for the subsequent economic boom.
Third, promote collective amnesia. After spinning the story and launching a consumer boom, the party set about erasing the events from history.
Mention of the demonstrations disappeared from official media and any
mention or discussion was forbidden in the retelling of official ccp and prc
history. Many of the younger generation in China have not heard of the
movement and would have little interest in it if they had. China has moved
on as one of the Chinese participants often says to me. One friend of mine
who teaches in Beijing and is a prominent researcher on another taboo topic, the Cultural Revolution, says that he would never discuss either event
with his son as he was growing up because it might create confusion and
get him into trouble at school, should he make an unguarded comment.
Archiving a Peoples Movement

However, history is a living entity, it changes over time and is subject to
rewriting and reinterpretation as new winners and losers appear in the
political process. Memories, perhaps buried deep or tucked away for a future day of retribution, still exist among some in China, especially for those
who lost children during the night of 3-4 June or whose careers were destroyed because of their support for the demonstrations. Despite the ban
on discussion and no acknowledged documentary collections in existence
in Mainland China, stories still circulate and underground collections of materials do exist waiting to be retrieved at a future date. Presumably there is
also a treasure trove of materials with the public and state security bureaus.
For a society that is denied access to its own history, a collection such as
that at the International Institute for Social History (iish) has an important
role to play to safeguard and preserve the hidden histories of protest and
resistance.
Like many a good project, the collection at the iish began by chance
and in an ad hoc way. Professor Frank Pieke is to be credited with pulling
the random acquisition into a coherent project and ultimately the collection that now exists. Frank and myself had both been in Beijing for different research purposes during the movement but both of us recognized that
what was taking place was of historical significance and worthy of documentation. Frank was in Beijing for eight months before, during, and after
the movement, to conduct research for his phd thesis at the University of
California, Berkeley. Unexpectedly, he found himself as a witness to the
dramatic events unfolding in the Square and around Beijing. This completely changed his research focus and resulted in his thesis and an English
422
Language publication, The Ordinary and the Extraordinary.3 For myself, I arrived after the movement had begun on a trip for the Institute to discuss
our collaborations with the Translation Bureau for the Collected Works of
Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin of the Central Committee. And to conduct
research at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought of
the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. At the time, the Director of the
Institute, Professor Su Shaozhi, was a well-respected critic of policy and became a strong supporter of the student-led movement. This support led to
his exile from China shortly after 4 June, when he left on a flight to Finland
on a list of Dutch students returning home (another story that remains to
be told).
Both Frank and I decided to collect materials as best we could with no
real plan about what to do with them. We collected materials from multiple
sides of the unfolding drama, including whatever pamphlets we could from
the students and the official responses of the party and government. I was
fortunate that Chinese friends gave me many materials, including photos of
the aftermath of the entry of the troops in the West side of the city and photos of most, if not all, of the posters that were put up at Peking University
at the democracy triangle. This became a key spot for discussion and dissemination of information. The modes of communication immediately revealed two different worlds that had emerged as a part of the reform. The
partys propagandistic response showed how out of touch it was with the
world that its policies was creating. It mobilized traditional media, a topdown approach and the use of archaic rhetoric to attack the students. While
loudspeakers around the Square blasted out traditional propaganda messages, the students on the Square formed horizontal linkages that cut across
the traditional hierarchical forms of communication. They also made use of
new technology: the fax machine! At their headquarters on the Square they
received faxed information from their supporters around the city as well
as faxes from overseas that feed back information on what was happening
and what was being said about the movement. The information was then
sent across the city through their networks, often using the private Flying
Tigers Motor Brigade. These networks also enabled them to keep abreast
of troop movements once martial law was declared. The bbc correspondent, James Miles, became a local hero as they replayed his Chinese language
reporting. One way to get access to the inner sanctum on the Square, as
the students began to adopt the same hierarchical organization as that they
Frank Pieke, The Ordinary and the Extraordinary: An Anthropological Study of Chinese
Reform and the 1989 Peoples Movement (London and New York, 1996). Under the
pseudonym of Frank Niming he also published Op het scherp van de snede: achtergronden en ontwikkeling van de volksbeweging in China, Beijing voorjaar 1989 (On the knifes
edge: backgrounds and development of the peoples movement in China, Beijing
Spring 1989) (Kampen, 1990).
|423
were struggling against, was to claim to be a friend of Mai Jiesi (his Chinese
name) and invisible doors would open.
On returning to the Netherlands and having managed to get a significant
amount of original materials back, we had to decide whether the plan to
set up an archive could be realized. There was also the realization that we
were not the only people who had thought about this idea, although we
were the only ones in the Netherlands. Having worked for some time at the
iish on the Sneevliet Archive, I was aware that this kind of material was the
lifeblood of such an institution. As a result, with the support of Eric Fischer,
then the Director of the iish, funding was granted from the Dutch Ministry
of Education and Science (hw/oiub 836.720, 22 August 1989). This funding
launched a collaboration between the iish and the Sinological Institute,
Leiden University for the project to build the archive for the Chinese
Peoples Movement, Spring 1989. The project was led by Frank Pieke and
the concrete work of building the archive was planned and executed under
his guidance. Fons Lamboo was employed to help with the compiling and
cataloging.
The first task was how to systematize the eclectic collection that had been
brought together through the grab whatever you can approach of Pieke and
Saich in Beijing and the donations of friends and colleagues. By this time,
other collections were being set up such as that at the British library, primarily based on the personal collection of Robin Munro. It was clear that
not everything could be collected, nor did it make sense for everything to be
collected. This applied especially to the readily available newspaper reporting and television footage. Pieke decided to concentrate on the materials
that had become available in the Netherlands and other European countries
and then to use these as a basis for exchange with materials collected elsewhere. For example, an active exchange was set up with Ms. Nancy Hearst,
the Librarian of the Fairbank Center Library, Harvard University. Given that
we had both been based in Beijing, the geographic focus was there. This was
justifiable as the movement began and ended there and it was the spiritual
home. It should be remembered, however, that significant movements developed in many other cities such as Shanghai, Nanjing and Changsha. By
contrast, we know relatively less about events in these other cities.4
Three types of material were collected, with the emphasis placed on categories one and two. These were: a) pamphlets, wall-posters, unofficial publications and slogans written by participants; b) photographic and audio materials; and c) diaries and media coverage. Some 1,000 pieces were collected
in total and are inventoried in the following three publications:
A good initial attempt at providing information on the movement in these other

cities is contained in Jonathan Unger (ed.), The Pro-Democracy Protests in China. Reports
from the Provinces (Armonk ny, 1991).
424
Inventory of the Collection Chinese Peoples Movement

1) Volume I: Documents. Amsterdam: Stichting Beheer, iisg, Working
Paper No. 14, 1990, Frank Pieke and Fons Lamboo
2) Volume II: Audiovisual Materials, Objects and Newspapers. Amsterdam
Stichting Beheer, iisg, Working Paper No. 16, Frank Pieke and Fons Lamboo
3) Volume III: Further Documents. Amsterdam: Stichting Beheer, iisg,
Working Paper No. 29. Frank Pieke with Agnes Ee Hong Khoo and Hudi
Tashin.
Volume I was published on microfiche by the Inter Documentation
Company Ltd, Leiden (1994). Subsequently, an updated inventory was published in 2002 by Catelijne Cortlever, List of Accrual of the Collection of the
Chinese Peoples Movement, Spring 1989, 1974-1993, and is available online
at http://www.iisg.nl/collections/tiananmen.
The materials collected led to a number of early publications to try to
make sense of the movement including Piekes own phd thesis and subsequent English language publication, an early impression of the movement
published in Dutch and a subsequent English language publication edited
by Tony Saich that tried to provide a broader perspective on the movement
and the tradition of student protest in China.5
There followed in quick order, memoirs by some of the participants,
documentary collections and analytic accounts by a range of academics and
journalists all trying to make sense of the movement.6 Such a plethora of
publications, including copies of many original documents both in original
Chinese and in English and German translation might led one to question
whether the existence of such an archive still has value.
Vincent Mentzel, Tony Saich, Frnk van der Linden e.a., Hemelse Vrede. De Lente
van Peking (Amsterdam, 1989) and Tony Saich (ed.), The Chinese Peoples Movement.
Perspectives on Spring 1989 (Armonk ny, 1990).
The first two memoirs were Li Lu, Moving the Mountain: My Life in China from the
Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen Square (Basingstoke and New York, 1990) and Shen
Tong, Almost a Revolution: The Story of a Chinese Students Journey from Boyhood to
Leadership in Tiananmen Square (Ann Arbor, 1991). Chai Ling, who was named as the
General Commander on the Square, contributed her memoir much later in 2011,
A Heart for Freedom: The Remarkable Journey of a Young Dissident, Her Daring Escape, and
Her Quest to Free Chinas Daughters (Illinois, 2011). The most useful documentary collections in English are Han Minzhu (ed.), Cries for Democracy: Writings and Speeches
from the Chinese Democracy Movement (Princeton, 1990); Suzanne Ogden (ed.), Chinas
Search for Democracy: The Student and Mass Movement of 1989 (Armonk ny, 1992); and
Michel Oksenberg, Lawrence R. Sullivan and Marc Lambert (eds.), Beijing Spring 1989:
Confrontation and Conflict: the Basic Documents (Armonk ny, 1990). Two of the more
interesting journalistic accounts are: Phillip J. Cunningham, Tiananmen Moon: Inside
the Chinese Student Uprising of 1989 (Lanham md, 2009) and James Miles, The Legacy of
Tiananmen: China in Disarray (Ann Arbor, 1997). There is also the remarkable documentary made by the Long Bow Group, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, 1995.
|425
This is a fair question but I think there are four strong reasons that justify
the existence of the archive. First, having so many original materials kept
in one place in a well ordered archive makes it easy for future researchers
to conduct their work. Including, we hope, those from China. Second, the
holding of original documents or authentic copies is more reliable than
what is printed in books. It allows verification of the printed word where
there may be selection bias or possibly even the editing of documents to
support a particular perspective. Third, as history rolls along research questions and perspectives change. What interested one generation of researchers might not be of interest to subsequent generations and new questions
and perspectives might be explored. Having an archive of original materials held in one place and easily accessible means that the needs of future
researchers can also be served. Last, and certainly not least, the archive
stands as a monument to the heroic but doomed efforts of a young generation of students to open the path to a more democratic and open China. The
archive remains in Amsterdam for the day when Chinese researchers and
citizens are able to look freely at their own history, review historical documents and make their own judgment on what happened and why.
Jaap Kloosterman on the Chinese Wall, with Ineke Mertens and Jrgen Rojahn, 1992.
Photograph by the author.
IV.4 From Dhaka with Love

The Nepal Nag Papers and
the Sino-Soviet Split*
Willem van Schendel
In 1958 Nepal Nag, a prominent communist in East Pakistan, fell ill. When
it turned out that he had tuberculosis, his comrades arranged for him to
go to a sanatorium in the Soviet Union.1 There he learned about Soviet life
and he killed time by studying Russian and reading books in English.2 He
returned to Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan (today: Bangladesh) but the
*
I would like to thank Meghna Guhathakurta and Marcel van der Linden for help
in finding source material for this chapter, and Kathinka Sinha Kerkhoff for useful
comments.
Nibedita Nag, Mone Pore unpublished memoirs (Nepal Nag Papers), pp. 103-110;
Ronesh Dasgupto, Biplobi Shathi Nepal Nag, in Nibedita Nag (ed.), Nepal Nag
Smriti Charona (Kolkata, 1996), pp. 20-29, 28. The Communist Party was banned in
Pakistan and Nepal Nag was living an underground life, so travelling on a Pakistani
passport was out of the question; friends in Delhi approached Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru who helped him, his wife and their two children get Indian
passports. Nibedita Nag, Amader Jibon, in Nibedita Nag (ed.), Nepal Nag (Kolkata,
1996), p. 116.
Letter from Nepal Nag in Vasilevskoe to his wife Nibedita Nag, 15 February 1959
(Nepal Nag Papers, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam). He also
describes life in the sanatorium and the enormous popularity of Hindi film stars
such as Raj Kapoor. See also Nibedita Nag, Amader Jibon, p. 116.
v a n sch e n d e l f rom d h aka wi th lov e
|427
next year he was back in Moscow

to represent Pakistan at a crucial
conference of communist parties
in that place.3 During this conference he kept a diary and he sent
letters home to his wife (See photo
on this page).4 These documents
are of historical interest for three
reasons. They throw light on this
conference, on the development
of communist thinking in East
Pakistan, and on the antecedents
of the collapse of Pakistan.
The Moscow Conference

The Moscow Conference of Re
pres
entatives of Communist and
Workers Parties in November
1960 has been described as probably the most important gathering of its kind in the entire history of Communism.5 It was a
rare gathering of stellar lights on
Nepal and Nibedita Nag with their children in
the communist firmament. Parties
1960. IISH BG B27/440.
from 81 countries as varied as
China, Sudan, Brazil, Romania,
Mexico, and Canada had sent
delegations.6 Their most vocal leaders addressed the meeting: Ho Chi Minh
(Vietnam), Enver Hoxha (Albania), Maurice Thorez (France), Dolores Ibrruri
(Spain), and Deng Xiaoping (China).7
3
4
5
6
Moni Singh, Jibon-Shongram (Dhaka, 1983-1992), 2 vols., II, p. 67; Nibedita Nag,
Amader Jibon, pp. 118-119.
She donated these to the International Institute of Social History (iish),
Amsterdam, in 2000 and 2001. Nepal Nag was born in 1909 and died in 1978.
Donald S. Zagoria, The Sino-Soviet Conflict, 1956-1961 (Princeton nj, 1962), p. 343.
According to one source, Africa sent 4 delegations, the Americas 24, Asia 20,
Europe 28 and Oceania 2. Three delegations were not identified. Documenten van de
conferentie van vertegenwoordigers der communistische en arbeiderspartijen uit 81 landen
been te Moskou, november 1960 (Amsterdam, 1960), p. 4. MacFarquhar states that
the world communist movement consisted of 87 parties at the time. Roderick
MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, Vol. 2, The Great Leap Forward, 19581960 (Oxford, 1983), p. 285.
Nepal Nags Moscow Diary (Nepal Nag Papers); William E. Griffith, The November
1960 Moscow Meeting: A Preliminary Reconstruction, The China Quarterly, 11 (1962),
pp. 38-57.
428
By 1960 relations amongst communist parties worldwide were deteriorating

as a result of increasing tension between the Soviet Union and the Peoples
Republic of China. This tension, expressed in ideological terms, had its roots
in rivalry over the leadership of world communism.8 The first cracks of the
Sino-Soviet split had become visible to all in 1957, and the 1960 conference
was an attempt to re-establish unity under democratic centralist Soviet
leadership. This failed, as the meeting turned into an open confrontation;
parties from all over the world were forced to take sides, and several challenged Soviet authority to lay down universal communist policy.9 Soon afterwards the split became public. In the ensuing Cold War in the Communist
World, the Chinese referred to the Soviets as revisionists and social imperialists, while the Soviets spoke of the Chinese as left-wing adventurists
and splittists.10 Communist parties all over the world chose to follow either
Moscow or Beijing, or they broke into pro-Soviet and pro-China factions.11
The Moscow conference was a turning point, and it has received much
scholarly attention. It would seem, however, that historians of world
communism have based themselves on a set of specific sources that may
have restricted their understanding of the impact of the conference. Their
accounts rely heavily on Russian and Chinese sources, augmented by
material from France, Belgium, Poland, Italy, Great Britain, and Germany.12
As a result, the focus is on the leitmotif of the conference, the Sino-Soviet
conflict, and on European and Chinese views of it. Nepal Nags diary
provides an indication that delegates from dozens of other countries at
the conference may have produced source material that can nuance and
modify these views (see some delegates on the photo next page). He made
notes of the speeches of many delegations that do not figure in published
analyses. Among the more extensive notes are those on Iraq, Guatemala,
South Africa, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Morocco but we read about
the views from Guadeloupe, Cyprus, and San Marino as well. These voices
may not have carried much weight in the power struggle at the top of the
communist food chain but they do provide insights in a range of different
The main ideological disagreements were over the evaluation of the role of Joseph
Stalin, peaceful coexistence, the peaceful transition to socialism, and war and
imperialism.
9 Zagoria, The Sino-Soviet Conflict, pp. 343-369; MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural
Revolution, pp. 255-292.
10
Lorenz M. Lthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton nj
and Oxford, 2008), see especially pp. 157-193.
11
For views on the 1960 conference from East Pakistan/Bangladesh, see Khoka Ray,
Shongramer Tin Doshok (Dhaka, Bortoman Shomoy, n.d), p. 129; Badruddin Umar, The
Emergence of Bangladesh (Oxford, 2004-2006), 2 vols., II, pp. 74-84.
12
For example, Zagoria, The Sino-Soviet Conflict; Griffith, The November 1960 Moscow
Meeting; MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution; and Lthi, The Sino-Soviet
Split.
|429
Nepal Nag (second from right) with other delegates at the Moscow Conference, 1960.
IISH BG A57/875.
perspectives on it. Nepal Nags observations show that collecting and using
such material may enrich historical accounts of the dynamics of world
communism at the time.
Communist Thought in East Pakistan

The 1960 Conference reverberated in the subsequent histories of communist movements around the world. Its effects differed considerably, depending on local circumstances. The information that Nepal Nag brought back
to his party meshed with thoughts and discussions among his comrades in
East Pakistan. Their interpretation of the split within the global communist
community was predicated on their partys history.
The history of communism in East Pakistan had an unusual beginning.
During the colonial period communist activists had been at the forefront
of numerous social movements in this region. East Pakistan was then
eastern Bengal and part of British India; naturally, communists there had
operated under the umbrella of the Communist Party of India and its
various front organizations. Decolonization in 1947 led to the break-up of
British India and the creation of the new states of Pakistan (consisting of
43 0
two distant wings) and India. The Communist Party of India was one of
many organizations that were now in a quandary: should it also split in two:
a Pakistani and an Indian party? It decided to remain united, but soon it
was clear that animosity between the newly independent states made this
difficult. In 1948 a conference was held in Calcutta (now: Kolkata) in India to
decide how to proceed. Out of a total of some 900 delegates, 130 came from
Pakistan. A Pakistan Committee was formed within the Communist Party
of India to coordinate activities in Pakistan (today, this is usually regarded
as the beginning of the Pakistan Communist Party). The vast majority of
Pakistani communists lived in East Pakistan, and at the Kolkata conference
Pakistans two wings were very unequally represented. There were 125
delegates from (nearby) East Pakistan and only 5 from West Pakistan (today:
Pakistan). Nepal Nag was one of the leaders from East Pakistan.13
After the Kolkata conference, the members of the Pakistan Committee
could never meet, so the East Pakistan group went ahead and formed
the East Pakistan Communist Party later in 1948.14 Nepal Nag was a
central figure, and he soon became vice-president of the newly founded
East Pakistan Trade Union Federation as well.15 A period of frequent
reorganization of trade union federations followed, but there was little
proper trade union work going on.16 Party membership dwindled.17 Even
so, Nepal Nag emerged as the most influential communist leader among
the working class, and took part in organizing several strikes.18 Soon the
Pakistan government cracked down on the communists and most leaders
were jailed. Nepal Nag escaped imprisonment, went underground and
became the party secretary and main organizer.19 Despite the fact that the
13
Among the others were Moni Singh and Khoka Ray, whose memoirs this chapter
refers to. See Singh, Jibon-Shongram, I, p. 89; Umar, The Emergence of Bangladesh, I, p.
42.
14
Up to 1957 there were no contacts between the communist parties of East and West
Pakistan and it was not until 1967 that a coordinating committee was formed to
exchange experiences. Yet, formally, a Pakistan Communist Party had been created
at the 1948 Kolkata conference; the East Pakistan Communist Party waited until
1968 to declare itself a completely separate organisation. Umar, The Emergence of
Bangladesh, I, pp. 46-50 and II, pp. 130-131.
15 Umar, The Emergence of Bangladesh, I, p. 52.
16
Ibidem, I, p. 54.
17
Shotyendronath (Gokul) Chokroborti, Amader Nepalda, in Nibedita Nag, Nepal
Nag, pp. 37-47, 45.
18 Umar, The Emergence of Bangladesh, I, p. 67.
19
By this time, in order not to stand out in Muslim-majority East Pakistan, he had
shed his Hindu dress and customs, looked and behaved like a Muslim, and called
himself Rohman Saheb. His wife Nibedita adopted the name Rizia Begum.
Nibedita Nag, Mone Pore, p. 83. In these unpublished memoirs she gives detailed
descriptions of the everyday realities of life in the underground with two young
children. See also Chokroborti, Amader Nepalda, p. 45; Kolpotoru Sengupto,
Nepal Nagke Kemon Dekhechi, in: Nibedita Nag, Nepal Nag, p. 67; Nibedita Nag,
Amader Jibon, p. 101.
|431
East Pakistan Communist Party was banned, its leaders tried to keep in
touch with the outside world: Even though we were under a suppressive,
reactionary government, we, leaders of the underground East Pakistan
Communist Party, constantly stayed informed about the decisions of the
international communist movement and we were keen to learn from them.
The party was always loyal to proletarian internationalism.20
But ill feeling about proletarian internationalism was soon felt within
the East Pakistan Communist Party. Eleven out of thirteen leaders followed
the Moscow line, and Nepal Nag was among them.21 The schism between
Beijing and Moscow gradually tore the East Pakistan party apart, and,
despite strenuous attempts to maintain unity, it split in two in 1966.22 The
resulting pro-Moscow and pro-Beijing parties were sharply divided over
policy matters, both locally and internationally; over time they would
give birth to numerous successor parties. Read in this light, the Nepal Nag
papers are of historical interest because they mark a moment of suspense at
the beginning of the splintering of communist thought and organization in
East Pakistan.
The Collapse of Pakistan

The ideological quarrel among East Pakistans communists led to organizational fragmentation but, remarkably, not to political marginalization. In
the late 1960s the role of various Marxist-inspired parties actually increased
amidst general disillusionment about the Pakistan government.23 Now the
East Pakistan Communist Party was the most vocal pro-Moscow group and
the National Awami Party the largest pro-Beijing group.24 Their policy decisions notably to boycott the first national assembly elections in 1970 had
a major influence on the events that led to the collapse of Pakistan.
As we have seen, the Sino-Soviet rift became complete in 1966, halfway
through the Cold War. For the next 20 years it reverberated not only in local
arenas such as East Pakistan, but also, crucially, in international relations.
The two levels were closely connected, and this became evident when the
movement for more regional autonomy in East Pakistan led to a political
20 Ray, Shongramer Tin Doshok, p. 129.

21
Two members of the Central Committee demurred: Mohammad Toaha and
Shukhendu Dastidar. Another leader, Abdul Huq, joined them. According to Umar,
both factions prepared position papers for the 1960 conference and Nag first went
to Beijing and then to Moscow to present them. Other sources omit the Beijing
trip. Umar, The Emergence of Bangladesh, II, pp. 81-82.
22 Singh, Jibon-Shongram, II, pp. 86-89; Umar, The Emergence of Bangladesh, II, pp. 124-133.
23
For a brief introduction, see Willem van Schendel, A History of Bangladesh
(Cambridge, 2009), pp. 120-130.
24
The National Awami Party (nap, led by Maulana Bhashani) should not be confused
with the non-Marxist Awami League (led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman), which would
rule the country after the Bangladesh Liberation War.
43 2
confrontation with Pakistans military government. When this government

decided to quell the movement, it ignited a war that would result in the creation of Bangladesh by late 1971. This defeat was deeply humiliating for the
Pakistan leaders who were forced to retreat to West Pakistan, the wing that
would henceforth continue as Pakistan. But what made their humiliation
infinitely more mortifying was that final defeat was largely at the hands of
India. This country declared war after Pakistan had attacked Indian installations in frustration over Indias support for East Pakistan/Bangladesh freedom fighters.
In the South Asian political arena of the 1960s and 1970s, the Sino-Soviet
split was vitally important. In this region the Cold War was not merely a
stand-off between the capitalist bloc and the communist bloc, but also an
intense rivalry between the Soviet Union and China, rooted in the enmity
that had first become public after the Moscow conference of 1960. During
the Bangladesh Liberation War these rivalries led to surprising alliances.25
The superpowers lined up as follows: the United States and China supported
Pakistan, while India and the Soviet Union supported the rebels.26 It was
us/Chinese backing that emboldened Pakistan to attack India in the
expectation that the us Navy would come to the rescue and that the Chinese
would amass troops at their border with India so as to force Indian troops
away from East Pakistan.27 None of this happened, and East Pakistan broke
away to become Bangladesh. For obvious reasons the new Bangladeshi
state elite deeply resented Chinas role during the war. It makes sense to
remember, however, that it was Chinas defiance of Soviet hegemony a
decade earlier that had opened a window of opportunity. The Sino-Soviet
split reshuffled the international power equation, allowing Bangladesh to
emerge. The information that Nepal Nag had brought back to Dhaka from
Moscow in 1960 foreshadowed a transformation in global power relations
that zeroed in on Dhaka in 1971.
25
26
27
Van Schendel, A History of Bangladesh, pp. 161-171.

The alliance between India and the Soviet Union was based on their close
relationship since Indias independence. By contrast, the alliance between
Pakistan, China and the United States was of very recent origin. The Bangladesh
war occurred just as the u.s. and China were suddenly drawing closer by means
of a series of initiatives known as the ping-pong diplomacy. Pakistan was an
essential go-between in this endeavour because it was one of very few states with
good relations with both these countries. The movement for self-determination
in East Pakistan fell victim to superpower realpolitik: support for it could not
be permitted to upset this larger scenario, which is why both the U.S. and China
backed Pakistan during the war.
For example, A.A.K. Niazi, The Betrayal of East Pakistan (Dhaka, 1999), p. 180.
|433
The View from Dhaka

The significance of the Nepal Nag papers is that they provide unusual
insights into the dynamics of world communism in the 1960s and 1970s.
The view from Dhaka allows us to link different scales of historical change,
from the global to the regional to the local. The interaction among these
scales in the political arena of East Pakistan Nepal Nags home turf
shows the necessity of considering local and global change together. It may
be true that when the Sino-Soviet elephants fought, the grass got trampled;
but there was more to it than the two elephants that have so fascinated
historians. Studying the fight from the perspective of the grass reveals how
the crisis in world communism played out in many local arenas around the
world.
IV.5 The Role of Archives

and Archivists in
the Contemporary
Age in Ensuring the
Transmission of
Collective Memory
Stefano Bellucci
Defining Archives
Archives are generally understood as institutional settings characterized
by two principal features: first, they are repositories where documents are
preserved, transmitted, and organized; second, they are spaces for the constructing, preserving, transmitting, and organizing knowledge. Archives are
a conduit to the past, allowing researchers to prove historical facts or even
to claim certain rights.
The job of an archivist requires both specific knowledge and a large degree of practical skill. A flexible intellectual approach is intrinsic to the
work. An archivist needs to master and interact with multifaceted and
multidisciplinary knowledge. At the same time, archivists need to consider changes in society, politics, culture, and technology. Such developments
may, in fact, have a cumulative effect on an archive collection, as well as on
its organization, formation, preservation, and utilization, and may affect the
direction originally envisaged at its inception. The world changes, as does
the style of writing history, together with the topics and focus of historical
research, as well as the public that accesses archives.
To enhance understanding about potential developments in our perceptions
of how archives should be defined, and the ways they continue to impact con-
b el l u c c i Th e R o l e o f A r ch i v e s i n th e Conte mporary Age
|435
temporary society, a congress was convened in Florence in February 2007, entitled Is the Mobile Phone an Archive? Archivists, it experts, historians, and philosophers participated. They concluded that mobile phones were indisputably
far more than oral communication devices. Their widespread use as a typing
interface for writing and as a camera for taking photographs and videos clearly confirms the veracity of that conclusion. Mobile phones have thus become
a repository for images, sounds, and texts. Conceivably, these representations (or annotations of life1) may one day substitute their equivalent paperbased documents, such as, for example, paper prints of photographs.
Given the existing definitions of archive, asserting that a mobile phone
is an archive may seem controversial. Lexical definitions of archives in dictionaries and specialized publications do not reflect such a broad scope.
Meanings and usages of words change over time, however, and a more expansive definition of archives, encompassing technological developments
that do not transform the core purpose of an archive, may surface in future
dictionaries. At the end of the twentieth century, Aleida Assmann wrote:
the digital age will probably give rise to new forms of archival activity and
will archive the very notion of archive.2 Googling the term archive will
retrieve thousands of definitions and utilizations of the term: from title of
reviews to online papers; from individual blogs to company websites that
offer online cataloguing services; from data repositories on biographies to
collections of sports items, news, music, texts, poems, etc. These varied
uses of the word archive coexist with the definitions used by specialists.
Accurately defining what an archive is therefore involves some degree of
approximation.
In this paper, the following definitions of archive have been applied.
1. Materials created or received by a person, family, or organization, public
or private, in the conduct of their affairs and preserved because of the
enduring value contained in the information they contain or as evidence
of the functions and responsibilities of their creator, especially those materials maintained using the principles of provenance, original order, and
collective control; permanent records.
2. The division within an organization responsible for maintaining the organizations records of enduring value.
3. An organization that collects the records of individuals, families, or other
organizations; a collecting archive.
4. The professional discipline of administering such collections and
organizations.
5. The building (or portion thereof) housing archival collections.
6. A published collection of scholarly papers, especially as a periodical.3
See: M. Ferraris, Dove sei? Ontologia del telefonino (Milan, 2005).

A. Assmann, Erinnerungsrume. Formen and Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedchtnisses,
(Munich, 1999), p. 23.
3 Cf. Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology, The Society of American Archivists:
1
2
43 6
Other specialized definitions of archive are available, for example, that

of the International Council of Archives,4 but they more or less reflected the
generally accepted scope of the term. The old, classical definition in the entry by Franois Vincent Toussaint in the Encyclopdie in 1751 reads as follows:
Denotes old deeds or charters stating the rights, claims, privileges and prerogatives of a household, city, or kingdom. May also refer to the place where
these deeds or charters are kept.5
Comparing the definition used in this paper with the one that prevailed in
the 1700s reveals in what measure the conception of archives has expanded
over the past few centuries. The Encyclopdie of course mentions only paper
archives and specifically addresses documents concerning the rights, claims,
privileges, and prerogatives that vouchsafe an ancient lineage connected to
noble households, cities, and kingdoms. The definition in this article, on the
other hand, provides for paper-based documents as well as a wide-range of
different data formats, such as photographs, audio-visual records, digital files,
etc. The term collection appears in this definition of an archive as well.
Collections are contained within an archive and may be classified thematically or chronologically, from oldest to most recent. In addition, in all modern archives and archive collections the items are potentially or theoretically
equal in importance in both quantitative and qualitative respects. Still, every
collector selects what to preserve, depending on his or her collection profile.
While broadening the scope of the term archive seems inevitable for
many reasons in the digital age and is indeed necessary to ensure that an archivists mission remains relevant, some have cautioned about the risks inherent in accepting an overly broad interpretation that might dilute or even
strip the term of its meaning. As noted by Pierre Nora, over the past two or
three decades, the term archive has undergone a widening in scope, the
limits of which have become lost in incertitude; this has allowed for insidious doubt to slip in and has caused some turbulence around archive activities, the archivist profession, and the way in which be practised.6
http://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/a/archives; last accessed 27 July 2013.
See for example: P. Walne and K.G. Saur (eds), Dictionary of the Archival Terminology.
English and French with Equivalents in Dutch, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish
(International Council on Archives, Munich-New York-Paris, 1988), p. 22.
5 archives, s. f. (Hist. mod.) se dit danciens titres ou chartres qui contiennent
les droits, prtensions, privilges & prrogatives dune maison, dune ville, dun
royaume. Il se dit aussi du lieu ou lon garde ces titres ou chartres. Ce mot vient du
Latin, arca, coffre, ou du Grec , dont Suidas se sert pour signifier la mme
chose: on trouve dans quelques auteurs Latins archarium. On dit les archives dun
collge, dun monastre. Les archives des Romains taient conserves dans le temple
de Saturne, & celles de France le sont dans la chambre des comptes. Dans le Code
on trouve quarchivum puolicum vel armarium toit le lieu ubi acta & libri exponebantur.
Cod. de fid. instrum. auth. ad hoec XXX. quest. j. (H). See: D. Diderot and J. le Rond
dAlambert (eds), Encyclopdie ou Dictionnaire raisonn des sciences, des arts et des mtiers,
etc. (Paris, 1751), Vol. 1, p. 619.
6
Cfr. P. Nora, Missions et enjeux des archives dans les socit contemporaines, in
4
|437
Also of interest is that the definition of archive is associated with the

idea of a societal memory. Although these terms are closely connected,
labelling them as synonyms would be misleading. As noted by Krzysztof
Pomian, archives are not in themselves memory: rather, they are a repository containing a virtual or indirect memory. This means that they have
to be read, understood, contextualized, de-codified, interpreted, etc. in order to acquire a meaning equivalent to direct memory.7
Disproving the Stereotype?

Archives have traditionally been concealed from full public view. In the
twentieth century, in Europe, a new trend got under way, in which archives
became more visible and accessible to the outside world. Nonetheless,
paper-based collections inevitably need to be handled with care, as printed
materials deteriorate over time. Striking the right balance between access
and conservation requires careful judgment. Some argue that overemphasizing conservation, combined with increasing use of sophisticated technological systems, might once again render archives inaccessible, with the undesired consequence of their disappearing from public view again. For this
reason, Michel de Certeau has observed that historiography attributes to
the present the privilege of resuming the past as knowledge, and thus becomes a deadly exercise, and a struggle against death.8 This otherworldly,
almost poetic description of historiography as a lethal archival art resonates
with the treatment of archives in literature. Kafka and Saramago, for example, depict archives as obscure labyrinths of darkness, where life mixes with
death, and truth mixes with bureaucracy. Cinema has also conveyed similarly suggestive images of archives.9 Archives sing of the past; withdrawn
from what is directly visible, they inspire distance, silence, mystery, and
darkness.
In Italian academic circles, a researcher who spends a lot of time inside
an archive is often described as an archive rat. Dutch also has the equivalent term: archiefrat. Archives can be seen as cold and spectral prisons []
they are inaccessible and mysterious repositories, dusty and sickly, which
[compel] [] historians to physical sacrifice.10 Those who frequent archives
express a variety of different emotions, describing archives as places where
peoples histories may be disentangled; where difficult events may be deciphered; where a researcher may reconstruct historical courses of events;
7
8
9
10
Comma, 2/3, 2003, p. 47.

See the book: K. Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities (Cambridge, 1991).
Cfr. M. de Certeau, Lcriture de lhistoire (Paris, 1975), p. 6.
See: S. Vitali, Memorie, genealogie, identit, in M. Giuva, S. Vitali, I. Rosiello (eds),
Il potere agli archivi (Milan, 2007).
M. Moretti, Archivi e storia nellEuropa del xix secolo. Un discorso introduttivo,
in I. Cotta, R. Manno Tolu, Archivi e storia nellEuropa del xix secolo. Alle radici dellidentit culturale europea (Rome, 2006), Vol. I, p. 9.
43 8
where the past is revived. Archives are therefore repositories of memory

that interest historians, social scientists, novelists, and everyday citizens.
Digital archives, with their immediate and non-material nature, also
inspire emotions associated with an ethereal or fantastic imagination. For
example, web archives allow the public immediate access to music, images,
documents, etc. from the past, thereby giving the impression that people
can relive a virtual history from the comfort of their own homes. While
easily-available material abounds, a lot of this digital material vanishes into
oblivion. Hackers and viruses may also attack and permanently destroy a
digital document. The non-material state of digital documentation therefore does not entirely safeguard it from the conservation and protection
problems that affect paper-based archives. The fear of the digital traces of a
person, an institution, or a social organization being lost forever is depicted
in the motion picture directed by Irwin Winkler The Net, released in 1995.
The protagonist is a hacker hunter, who faces a group of people that manages to delete all traces of her life on the internet. She therefore stops existing
online, and her life becomes a Kafkaesque nightmare of lost identity.
An archive (whether paper or digital), however, is not only a world that
stimulates the imagination of users and the public at large. As Jacques
Derrida has explained, it is a problematic core that also encourages psychoanalytical reflections and interpretations.11 Instead of indulging in fear
and fantasy, the archive user must overcome his or her instincts and be enthralled by the archive itself. As stated by Annette Wieviorka, one must not
treat an archive and its collections and documents as relics of the past.
Otherwise, he who interacts with it may find himself under the illusion
that he can solve the mystery of the real presence of a past that is no more.
[celui qui la touche peut avoir lillusion daccder au mystre de la presence
relle dun pass qui nest plus].12 An archive does not possess the truth but
is a place where many truths can be found. A French historian wrote: the
reality of the archive becomes not only a trace, but also an organization of
people in reality, and the archive always has an infinite number of relationships with reality.13 Archives share this character with libraries. Archives
and libraries share the privilege of conserving Toute la mmoire du monde. This
was the title of Alain Resnais documentary on the National Library in Paris
released in 1956; and Memory of the World is unescos ambitious programme
to protect world heritage, including digital heritage.
The International Institute of Social History (iish) has been collecting material on social history and the labour movement since 1935. The Sub-Sahara
Africa Desk, established in 2011, is performing several archival projects in
Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Sudan, Senegal, Zambia etc. The Desk is dedicated mainly to historical research on labour and social movements in Africa.
11
12
13
See: J. Derrida, Mal darchives, une impression freudienne (Paris, 1996).

Cf. A. Wieviorka, Entre transparence et oubli, Le dbat, 115, 2011, p. 141.
A. Farge, Le got de larchive (Paris, 1989), p. 31.
|439
Collecting on these subjects and these countries refutes the stereotype of

archives as obscure places, for the simple reason that the digitalization project illuminates their contents and significance. Thanks to the work of the
iish and similar entities, material from these at times inaccessible archives
is easy to retrieve online and thus encourages access by the younger generation. Historians can extract important data from these archives, such as
numbers and data relevant to underpinning their research on labour and
economic history. In Senegal, for example, the Africa Desk has two projects digitalizing the archives pertaining to the railway workers. This will
give historians easy access to information on employment types, ages, and
numbers of railway workers, duration of employment in structuring railway
works, etc. Such information and data are not yet available online. This digitalization process is therefore essential, as otherwise these archives risk being relegated to dark, spectral places with no oxygen of diffusion.
The Memory of Digital Data

Digital data have no intrinsic memory. Based on this hypothesis, the
International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam has considered ways
to keep and ensure access to digital data or digital memory for both
researchers today and future generations. Digital memory is fragile. More
than paper documents, digital data can be at risk of transmutation from archive to amnesia.14
Clearly, not all digitally-generated information is worth conserving. The
selection process is therefore key, as it is with more historically traditional
archives as well. Selection has always played an important part in political
or cultural projects concerning the transmission of historical memory. But
while with paper-based documents, the choice conservation vs. obliteration of which ones to preserve takes place at a later phase in the production, with digitally-born material this is not possible. Specialized literature
on the subject has clarified the characteristics of the digital environment.
To guarantee long-term preservation of digital files, as well as their access,
readability, and intelligibility, the transmission needs to be projected from
the moment the actual document is created. Furthermore, the course of the
digital document needs to be followed. As observed by Stefano Vitali, the
life of a digitally-born document is not static but in fact evolves continuously.15 Raising funds for the preservation of digitally-born material which can
be far more costly than archiving paper-based material is the real test for
the future success of archives.
14
15
See: S. Vitali, Una memoria fragile: il web e la sua conservazione, in D. Ragazzini

(ed.), La storiografia digitale. Le fonti dello storico nellera del computer (Milan, 2004), pp.
208-223.
S. Vitali, Passato digitale. Le fonti dello storico nellera del computer (Milan, 2004), p. 143.
440
With regard to digital documentation, the verb to preserve and the

noun preservation are used differently than when applicable to paperbased documents. With paper documents, when the material is preserved
often in the sense that its physical quality is assured its content is safeguarded as well, i.e. content is intrinsic to its material conservation. This
does not hold true for digitally-born material. Lacking a physical state, a digital archive is therefore not the material object that needs to be preserved
but rather the capacity to reproduce that specific piece of digital material.
Digital material is moreover generally characterized by its expansion,
multiplication, redundancy, fragmentation, etc. In archival studies, this is
called noise. What is necessary is a more active preservation process as
opposed to the more passive one typical of paper-based material. Because
of the rapid obsolescence of hardware and software, data need to be migrated from one support system to another and at the same time to be transformed into new memorization formats, while preserving the metadata
concerning the provenance, transformation, and context within which the
data are migrated. Such metadata allow the digitally-born material to retain
its integrity and above all its authenticity. Some experts claim that originality and authenticity do not apply in the digital environment, because the
digital environment is by definition fluid. For this reason we find only copies (albeit authenticated ones) rather than original documents. This is a subject of debate among the international community of archivists and may result in a totally new approach to archiving methodology and new doctrinal
assumptions that will inform how digital aspects impact archive collection.
This may lead archivists to learn a new language acquire new know-how, in
their quest to remain pivotal in the fascinating debate concerning the documentary memory of our times.
The question of who should deal with digital memory to be transmitted to posterity, and where this memory ought to be kept figures in this
debate. Paper-based archives need physical space, with suitable climate conditions and proper shelving; digital archives, by their very nature, do not.
However, digital archives need specific high-tech machinery to function
properly.
There are now various hypotheses about the storage of digital archives.
Many questions remain open: which institutional or non-institutional setting is better suited for long-term preservation of digitally-born archives?
State institutions or private ones? Should this material be preserved alongside pre-existing paper-based archives? Should new structures be created?
Should a new structure be made available for producers of digital material?
This idea is called Archive Service Centres,16 which could be created by any
institution wishing to become a focus point that preserves and makes
available its own documentation or documentation from elsewhere. This
16
For a definition of asc, see: http://www.library.pitt.edu/libraries/archives/archives.

html; accessed 29 July 2013.
|441
debate is ongoing and will remain so for the foreseeable future, in part because a solution adapts to technological advances over time, and in part because of a general lack of international financial resources.
Conclusions
Over the past few decades, at least in Europe, states, in all their various
manifestations, have significantly cut back on the support that they used
to give archives to ensure the transmission of memory. It is all the more
critical that archivists those who have safeguarded our historical patrimony from time immemorial refute all stereotypical assumptions that they
have become anachronisms in society. Only by remaining abreast of the
developments in the digital revolution will archivists remain preeminent
in preserving archives and continue to provide guidance in setting archive
policy. Contemporary historians should see themselves as allies in this
mission and not as extraneous to it. The real cooperation between archivists
and historians at the IISH, for example, has manifested in the far-reaching
and world-renowned paper and digital archive collection at the Institute.
Enforcing any separation between historians and archivists would be detrimental to their overall objectives.
Archivists should be closely involved in the selection and transmission
of online and digital archives. In contemporary times, historically interesting material may be obtained from high-level and low-level digital sources.
Personal blogs, for example, arguably reveal as much about contemporary
societys realities as do speeches by politicians. In this brave new world a
specialized force of archive collectors should be formed to act as a filter or
conduit for the mass of digital material available. They are the best-placed
professionals to discern which criteria should be applied, envision the overall picture, and adapt to accommodate the proliferation of modern digital
applications. In short, archives and archivists in the contemporary age
must remain fundamental in ensuring the transmission of memory.
IV.6 Gunnar Mendoza

A Life to Share
Rossana Barragn Romano
I just consider myself a worker, who does his best at the job that life and
vocation have assigned to me. (Gunnar Mendoza, 1985)1
Between 1952 and 1962, Gunnar Mendoza Loza (1914-1994) organized and
systematized two of the most important archival collections in Bolivia, entitled Mine Workers and Mine Resources. The research was made easier
by the search of names, places, topics and years for these collections. A comprehensive new system of cross-references, for an important period spanning almost 300 years (from 1542 to 1825), became available in the National
Archive of Bolivia before the computer age.
Free and short translation of: Yo no me creo otra cosa que un trabajador que trata
de hacer tan concienzudamente como puede la obra que la vida y la vocacin le
han impuesto y no hago ninguna diferencia entre el trabajador manual y el de la
cultura (Gunnar Mendoza, 1985, El Diablo sabes ms por Diablo que por viejo,
in Obras Completas, Vol. V, p. 24). Our main source for this article is the eight-volume
work of Gunnar Mendoza Loza, Obras Completas, published in Sucre, 2005-2006 by
the Fundacin Cultural del Banco Central de Bolivia and the Archivo and Biblioteca
Nacionales de Bolivia. Thanks are due to Judith Tern, from the National Archive
in Sucre for the photographs of Gunnar Mendozas card catalogue and to Alfredo
Ballerstaedt of the Archivo and Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia.
b a r r a g a n g u n n a r m e ndoza: a li f e to s h are
|443
Photograph left: The card system of Gunnar Mendoza. Photograph right: The records
on Mine Workers and Mines Resources of Gunnar Mendoza. Photographs taken in the
National Archive of Bolivia by Jess Mendoza, Sucre, August 2012.
The archival work consisted of a basic card catalogue,2 comprising a set of

four long boxes and arranged chronologically. Another set of card catalogue
boxes was alphabetized by topic, geographic location, and finally by name.
In all these cards, only some contained the complete description to avoid
redundancy of information. Over 3,000 detailed entries were made available
to the researchers thanks to the multiple access points established for every
document.3
Several extraordinary facts merit mention. The first concerns the creation
of those collections: highlighting the workers and their history of work,
working conditions, processes, and daily life was highly exceptional at that
period and for a National Archive. Gunnar Mendoza stated that the workers
were Indians and as such were the main actors in the social history of the
mines in the Andean world.4 Second, the cross-referencing system that is
now widespread and easy to manage thanks to computers was far from ob2
Basic description cards measured between 15 and 20 cm and contained the following information: 1. Date, 2. Place, 3. Provenance and Form, 4. Title or Content, 5.
Number of pages, 6. Place in the Archives, 7. Number and Code.
Mendoza, Prefacio a la Gua de Fuentes Virreinales en Hispanoamrica. Gua de
fuentes inditas en el Archivo Nacional de Bolivia para el estudio de la administracin virreinal en el Distrito de la Audiencia de Charas, 1537-1700. Explicaciones
sobre las documentaciones comprendidas en la Gua (1980), in Mendoza, Obras
Completas, Vol. III, pp. 272-273. He wrote that the indexes, presented in general as
some final accessory facilitated retrieving and finding key information (Ibid. p.
235).
los indios son obviamente los protagonistas humanos mximos en estos
recursos documentales sobre la historia social de la minera andina (Mendoza,
1986, Recursos Documentales inditos en el Archivo Nacional de Bolivia en el
rea andina del Distrito de la Audiencia de Charcas, 1548-1826, in Mendoza, Obras
Completas, Vol. III, p. 287).
444
Gunnar Mendoza in his office in the old building of the National Archive of Bolivia, 1993.
vious in those times. Third, a small team of people without a formal training for work in archives and libraries implemented this sophisticated professional system. They were trained and led by Gunnar Mendoza. Fourth,
the cards were generated on old blank papers recovered from the documents, because insufficient funds were available to purchase new cards.
Gunnar Mendoza is the author of more than 14 volumes of Descriptive
Guides of Different Funds and Collections, comprising more than 7,000 pages and providing over 56,452 points of access.5 He has also edited several
historical manuscripts from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century
and has written a number of books and essays.6
To produce these works, he devoted his life to the National Archive and
Library. As a self-taught researcher who set high standards, he understood
how crucial making the documents accessible was. He stated that the archives were not cemeteries of documents but service centres, and that such
Luis Oporto, Gunnar Mendoza and la construccin de la Archivstica Boliviana (La Paz,
2004), p. 27. Mendoza stated: A guide of archival documents is in fact a computer
to identify, and find documents (Una gua de documentos de archivo es de hecho
una computadora para identificar y localizar documentos). Mendoza, Prefacio
a la Gua de fuentes virreinales en Hispanoamrica (1977), in Mendoza, Obras
Completas, Vol. III, p. 234.
See Gunnar Mendoza, Obras completas I-VIII.
|445
activity is possible when an archive is ordered, described and accessible.7

Archival descriptions, library tasks, and research converged in his daily life
and in training others.
A Life of Work in a Permanent Economic Crisis

Gunnar Mendoza was largely a self-made man or, more precisely, was
trained by his father, Jaime Mendoza, who, like his own son, had an exceptional course of life. He studied medicine and wrote a thesis about tuberculosis. He was employed as a physician at the Patio Mining Enterprise
Consolidated and Incorporated in the tin mines of Unca and Llallagua in
Bolivia.8 He lived there some years and married a mestiza from a lower social
class. His experience in the mines with his wife born in these circles was
crucial. In 1911 he published the novel En las tierras del Potos. The poet Rubn
Daro called him the Bolivian Gorky, as he was strongly influenced by
this Russian writer. As Gorky, Jaime Mendoza was a voice that depicted the
bottom strata of society. The novel roughly describes his own life course:
a student who went to work at the mines, attracted by the rich ores, but
discovered the lives of the poorly paid workers, who often perished through
accidents and diseases.9
Gunnar Mendoza was born in the Unca-Potos mines in 1911. Some years
later, his father Jaime Mendoza left the mines, and he continued to work
as a doctor. He was later appointed director of the psychiatric hospital and
chancellor of the University in Sucre. He wrote several articles about medicine, but the poetry and novels he wrote mattered throughout his life. His
son Gunnar Mendoza mentioned in an interview that he was involved in
books and the writing process since he was 12 years old, because he was a
typist for his father.10 Initially a law student, he abandoned this programme,
because he felt a stronger affinity with humanities. In 1938, at 27, he began to write for the Journal of the University. In 1944 he was appointed director of the Bolivian Archive when this institution was still being formed.
10
Los archivos no deben ser cementerios de documentos sino centros de servicio

colectivoUn archivo es en la medida en que est ordenado y descrito (1967).
Mendoza, Problemas de ordenacin archivstica, in Mendoza, Obras Completas, Vol.
III, p. 9.
William Lofstrom, Gunnar Mendoza: Ensayo Biogrfico, in Mendoza, Obras
Completas, Vol. I. See also, Ren Arze and Josep Barnadas, Gunnar, un maestro, in
Martha U. de Aguirre et al., Estudios Bolivianos en homenaje a Gunnar Mendoza L. (La Paz,
1978); and Oporto, Gunnar Mendoza.
For a brief biography of Jaime Mendoza see: http://www.biografiasyvidas.com/
biografia/m/mendoza_jaime.htm and http://www.mcnbiografias.com/app-bio/do/
show?key=mendoza-jaime; last accessed 14 November 2013.
Mendoza, Entre Archivos y Bibliotecas. Correo-Suplemento de los Tiempos,
Cochabamba 28 de Noviembre (1985), in Mendoza, Obras Completas, Vol. V, p. 373.
446
Although it was a national institution, the budget and salaries of those

working there (no more than 15 at the beginning) were unbelievably low.
Important archival descriptions were initiated the year he was appointed. In 1946 he started describing the collection Resources for the study of
Mines and in 1949 the collection Mine Workers.11 In 1952, the year of the
National Revolution, he started another large collection entitled Land and
Indians, another monument for the study of communities, land processes,
and land reforms.
His archival and library work was exceptionally vast: he and his team described Bolivian newspapers since 1823, journals and reviews since 1826,
sources on numismatics between 1574 and 1814, documents on blacks and
slaves, and sources on rebellions and revolts
In 1954-1955 the American historian Lewis Hanke graduated from Harvard
University, visited the Bolivian Archive and established a lifelong bond with
Gunnar Mendoza.12 Hanke was the director of the Hispanic Foundation
at the Library of Congress until 1951 and director of the Latin American
Institute at Texas University in Austin. He became one of the best-known
Latin America specialists in the United States.
In 1954 Gunnar Mendoza edited the first of several primary sources on the
history of Potosi, by P.V. Caete.13 This important eighteenth-century manuscript was at the New York Public Library. Some years later, in 1958-1959,
Gunnar Mendoza went to the United States, where he obtained formal diplomas in archival and library studies. During these years he started extended projects that led him to be recognized among Latin American archivists
and in colonial history circles.14
11
12
13
14
See Curriculum Vitae in Arze and Barnadas, Gunnar, un maestro.

For a brief biography of Lewis Hanke see: http://memory.loc.gov/hlas/hanke.html;
last accessed 14 November 2013 and his Obituary, Lewis Ulysses Hanke, The Hispanic
American Historical Review, 73:4 (Nov. 1993), pp. 663-665.
Pedro Vicente Caete, Historia fsica y poltica de Potos. The manuscript was in
the New York Public Library (lxiv).
There is not a single book of Mendoza in the Library of the IISh. This can be
explained because the focus in the past years was the study of the industrial
working class (19th and 20th. centuries). The indigenous workers of the mines
in the XVII-XVIII century were then outside of that focus. Other explanation lies
in the fact that the flow of books and ideas are in general from the north to the
south rather than the other way around. Last but not least there is the question
of language and frequently there are spaces that coexist and sometimes did not
interact, even in this global world. In the Library of the CEDLA there are two books
published by Lewis Hanke and Gunnar Mendoza together. Lewis Hanke was clearly
much more read than Gunnar Mendoza in the English world. Hanke published
a book in the Hague with Nijhoff: The imperial city of Potos; an unwritten chapter in
the history of Spanish America. (The Hague, 1956). In the books published by Slicher
van Bath we did not find a bibliographical reference of Mendoza or Hanke: Spaans
Amerika omstreeks 1600 (Utrecht, 1979); Indianen en Spanjaarden een.. ontmoeting tussen
twee werelden, Latijns Amerika 1500-1900 (Amsterdam, 1989); De bezinning op het verleden
in Latijns Amerika, 1493-1820 (Groningen, 1998).
|447
One of their most important activities was editing and publishing another
eighteenth-century manuscript on the history of Potos which took Gunnar
Mendoza and Lewis Hanke nearly a decade to complete.15 In 1959 Mendoza
edited a third manuscript, Relacin general de la Villa Imperial de Potos de Luis
Capoche, which became a classic on the early history of the Potosi mines.
Mendoza was assigned several tasks related to the archives almost immediately. In 1959 he produced an evaluation about the Bolivian collections at
the Library of Congress and made suggestions for their development. Two
years later he wrote a booklet about problems with ordering and describing archival documents in Latin America and a guide about Latin American
Archives. He was also invited that year as co-organizer of the Primer
Seminario Interamericano sobre Archivos in Washington. Last but not least, in
1965, he published Archival Underdevelopment in Latin America, in which
he outlined the main problems and presented possible solutions for over 28
Latin American archival institutions.16
In the 1970s and 1980s he participated in several seminars on archive subjects and led meetings on the organization of archives in Bolivia to prepare
new legislation on archives.
The Protagonists of Mendozas History: The Mines, a Soldier of the

Guerrillas, and a Naturalist and Painter of Local Customs
The mines were immensely significant for Mendoza. His mother and he
were both born in the mining towns and his father wrote about life in these
particular surroundings. He was aware of their importance in the Spanish
colonial period and in Bolivian history.
Life is a Lamp of Oil, Glass and Fire17: Arzans History of Potos (1676-1736).18
The History of Potosi by Arzans Orsa and Vela was somewhat mythical.
The manuscript was in part known and in part unknown. Descriptions of
sections of his writings had existed since the eighteenth century, but noSee: Lewis Hanke, Bartolom Arzns de Orsa y Velas History of Potos (Providence RI,
1965). There were two manuscripts: at Brown University in Providence and in the
Biblioteca del Palacio in Madrid.
16 Mendoza, Obras Completas, Vol. III, p. 59.
17
La misma vida es una lmpara de aceite, vidrio y fuego: vidrio que con un soplo
se hace, fuego que con un soplo se apaga. Glassblowing life with just a breath, the
same breath that can extinguish fire and life.
18
Lewis Hanke, El otro tresoro de las Indias. Bartolom de Arzns de Orsa and Vela
y su Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potos. aih. actas (II), 1965. Centro Virtual
Cervantes, available at: http://cvc.cervantes.es/literatura/aih/pdf/02/aih_02_1_006.
pdf; last accessed 1 July 2013; John L. Phelan, The History of Potos of Bartolom
Arzns de Orsa y Vela. Review of Bartolom Arzns de Orsa and Velas History of
Potos by Lewis Hanke and Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potos by Bartolom Arzns
de Orsa and Vela by Lewis Hanke and Gunnar Mendoza (eds), The Hispanic American
Historical Review, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Nov. 1967), pp. 532-536.
15
448
body was familiar with the complete manuscript. Since the early twentieth
century, several people had tried to publish these writings, including Juan
Pern from Argentina (who noticed the manuscript in Madrid) and the tin
production magnate Mauricio Hochschild at Harvard University, as well as
the Institute of Hispanic Culture in Spain.19
Arzans History was written between 1705 and 1736 and comprises nearly one million words.20 The first section of the manuscript of Madrid had
539 fols, the second section 152; the manuscript at Brown University has
543 fols. In 1967, John L. Phelan reviewed the manuscript. He wrote that the
book was as rich as a mine for social historians today, featuring great detail
on wealth and poverty, avarice and generosity, religiosity and deep hatred,
intense cruelty, and intrigue.21
Hanke and Mendoza stated in the preface to the History that the book covered an exhaustive range of topics: the mining process, cultural traditions
and festivities, religious practices, economic issues, and experience with
and attitudes toward Indians.22 One of the most impressive descriptions relates to the origin of products sold in Potosi:
Granada Priego and Jaen with taffeta and all kinds of silk and
textiles; Toledo with stockings and swords; Segovia with rough
cloths and slices; Valencia and Murcia with satins and silks;
Crdoba with silks, cloaks and other textiles; Madrid with fans,
cases and a thousand toys and knick knacks; Seville with stockings, cloaks and all kinds of textiles; Vizcaya with iron; Portugal
with fine yarns and other textiles; France with all the fabrics,
gold, silver, serge, beaver hats and all kinds of linens; Flanders
with tapestries, mirrors, laminates, beautiful secretaries, cambrics, lace, and types of haberdashery impossible to express;
Holland with strips of cloth and fabrics; Germany with swords
and all kinds of steel and shawls; Genoa with paper; Calabria
and la Apulia with silks; Naples with stockings and textiles;
Florence with rough cloths and satins; Tuscany with rich embroidered cloths and admirably crafted fabrics ; Rome with
relevant paintings and engravings; England with flannels, hats
and all kinds of wool cloths; Venice with glass crystals; Cyprus,
Crete and African coastal areas with bleached wax; East India
with fine scarlet cloths, crystals, tortoise shells, marbles and
gemstones; Ceylon with diamonds; Arabia with aromas; Persia,
Cairo, Turkey with carpets; Terranate, Malacca and Goca on all
19
20
21
22
Gunnar Mendoza, Obras Completas, Vol. II, p. 295.

Ibid., p. 298, 301.
Phelan, The History of Potosi of Bartolome Arzans de Orsua and Vela.
Lewis Hanke and Gunnar Mendoza, Bartolom Arzans de Orsa and Vela: su vida
and su obra, in Mendoza, Obras Completas, Vol. II, p. 335.
|449
kinds of spices, musk and civet; fine china and extraordinary

silk garments; Cape Verde and Angola with negroes; Nueva
Espaa with cochineal dyes, indigo, vanillas and precious
woods; Brazil with its timber; the Moluccas with pimiento and
spices; East India, Isla Margarita, Panama, Cuba, Puerto Viejo
and many others with all the varieties of pearls caught there
like a fantasy, ornamental chain, half ornamental chain,
jewellery ; Quito, Riobamba, Otavalo, Latacunga, Cajamarca,
Tarama Bombn, Guamales, Hunuco, Cuzco and other provinces from these Indies with fine cloths flannels, rough
cloths, strips of cotton, canopies, carpets, hats and other textiles; el Tucumn, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Misque, Cochabamba
and other provinces and cities present themselves with large
quantities of wax, elk skins honey from bees cotton balls
and textiles, narrow-mouthed baskets and various resins23.
Nevertheless Arzans History is, above all, narrative prose permeated with
social critique and moralist observations. Some parts correspond accurately with historical events, while others are tales from his time. He provided
very precise accounts of the mining process, descriptions of the authorities,
as well as free narratives about witchcraft or huge banquets and festivities.
On the one hand, he provided statistics about the productivity and the population, while on the other he attributed the mines decline to wrongdoings
over the years. He told stories about demons that linger in peoples homes
in tales from contemporary Potosi; love and sex were also central themes,
personified by the lascivious merchants or beautiful Margarita. Last but
not least, he harshly criticized the rich for making the poor suffer and condemned the greed and tyranny of the government.
A Drummer Boy as the Voice of the Guerrilla Movement or Struggle for
Independence (1814-1825)
The diary of the drummer boy Jos Santos Vargas was another important
work addressed by Mendoza. A preliminary version of the incomplete 300page manuscript was published in 1952 (Sucre-Bolivia) and in 1982 in Mxico
at the prestigious publishing house Siglo xxi.
Jos Santos was 18, when he joined the guerrilla movement fighting for independence in 1815. His diary offers an account of daily life, describing the
war economy (supplies, organization of production and the social groups
that were involved), as well as internal struggles and the strategies and tactics deployed against the royalist armies.
When the long war ended, he decided to live as a simple peasant. Decades
later, in 1851, he tried in vain to convince the Bolivian government to pub-
23
Ibid., p. 347.
450
Painting of Melchor Mara Mercado, 1841. The Libertador Mariscal de

Ayacucho, Antonio Jos de Sucre cutting the slavery chains and pouring the
land where the arts and sciences are growing. Collection Archivo y Biblioteca
Nacionales de Bolivia. Sucre, Bolivia.
Painting of Melchor Mara Mercado, 1841. The popular metaphor of the world
upside-down. The ox, - instead of man - is directing the work while two men
are ploughing the land. Colllection Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de
Bolivia. Sucre, Bolivia.
|451
lish his diary. Finally, suffering from malaria, he died around 1853, lapsing
into oblivion until the late twentieth century.
In the drummer boys colloquial narrative, he wrote that his aim was to
let the people know how much effort, blood, courage, and heroism went
into the liberty of the fatherland. He was aware that his diary would be
useful for future historians.24
The Painter Melchor Mara Mercado (1816-1871)
Mercado was from a middle class family in the city of Sucre and was deeply
influenced by the visit to Bolivia of the French naturalist Alcide DOrbigny
in 1833, when he was only 16. He studied law, one of the main courses of
study available to young people in that period. Throughout his career, he
was active in politics and consequently suffered deeply: his enemies frequently exiled him to desolate, impenetrable regions. But he was also a
teacher and loved natural sciences. He gathered a zoological collection, in
which ornithology and reptiles were especially prominent. He offered his
museum to the local authorities when he was only 30. On his explorations, he travelled in 1859 to the tropical regions on the border with Brazil.
He was also a musician and as such collected sheet music, including traditional religious hymns from the Jesuit period in the eighteenth century and
Indian songs.
Marechal Sucre, one of the great Libertadores, was depicted using one
hand to cut the chains of a slave, thereby making possible the freedom represented by the woman depicted, while using the other hand to pour the
source of the flowers of arts and sciences.
Melchor M. Mercado is well known today for his paintings, although he is
far from a trained, professional artist. His work was influenced by the drawings by DOrbigny, as well as by the work of Fierro, a mulatto painter from
Lima (Peru). He had a naive style, and his most valuable works are in his
album, featuring 116 watercolours painted over the course of 37 years, between 1827 and 1868. The topics are landscapes, plants, buildings, and especially local customs.
Conclusion
Gunnar Mendoza has been enormously influential, although the true impact of his work is difficult to specify, as it is so broad dispersed among archives, libraries, and historians. His impressive professional achievements
are almost inconceivable, given the Spartan circumstances in which he operated: absence of basic working conditions, scarce space for the archive,
lack of adequate equipment. Most importantly, he never gave up and found
ways to overcome every difficulty he encountered. If he lacked sufficient
24
Mendoza, Una crnica desconocida de la Guerra de independencia altoperuana. El

Diario del Tambor Mayor Vargas (1952), in Mendoza, Obras Completas, Vol. II, p. 85.
452
funds to pay salaries for workers, he always managed very well to find the
necessary financial resources, training them as well; when he did not have
money to purchase paper for the library and archive cards, he improvised
by using blank pages from documents dating back to the sixteenth century;
and when he lacked enough typewriters, he and his staff simply performed
their tasks in longhand. He also became skilled at submitting requests: every Minister of Education and Culture received constant calls and requests
from him. He challenged the public administration, managing scarce resources with maximum efficiency and creativity.
Archives, libraries, and historians embraced Mendozas legacy of work
and above all his legacy of life. His life was far from easy, and his impressive
achievements were attributable to his fortitude and perseverance. Times
have changed, since he left us in 1994. Nonetheless, his amazing realm of
accomplishments transcends borders and time.
Jaap Kloosterman
A Tentative
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Hulp of revolutie?, Trophonios, 5, 8 (November 1, 1968), p. 1.
[with J. Riemstra], Afrika specialist Dick Scherpenzeel [Interview],
Trophonios, 5, 8 (November 1, 1968), pp. 3 and 12.
Studentenakties: niet veel te verwachten, Trophonios, 5, 9 (November 8,
1968), p. 1.
Terug in Franse moederschoot. Mali einde van een experiment,
Trophonios, 5, 14 (December 13, 1968), p. 3.
Almost Chinese, Trophonios, 5, 14 (December 13, 1968), p. 3.
Tussen twee wereldoorlogen. De surrealistiese revolutie, Trophonios, 5, 14
(December 13, 1968), pp. 5-6.
Changer la vie et transformer le monde, Trophonios, 5, 14 (December 13,
1968), p. 7.
Latijns Amerika: Documentatiemap [Informatieweek over Latijns-Amerika,
Utrecht, 10-17 mei 1968]. Redactie: Wim van Broekhoven, Jaap
Kloosterman (Utrecht: SSR-U, U.S.V. Prometheus, D.S.S.V. Politeia, 1968).
[Unpaged stencil.] [Co-editor].
1969
[With Ren van de Kraats], Fernando Solanas: Violencia Revolucionario
contra Violencia imperialista, Trophonios, 5, 15 (January 31, 1969), p. 3.
Een moraal voor de enrags. Trotski en Peret, Trophonios, 5, 17 (February
14, 1969), pp. 1 and 8.
The good, the bad and the ugly, Trophonios, 5, 17 (February 14, 1969), p. 8.
De revisionisten zijn de ergsten, Trophonios, 5, 18 (February 21, 1969), p. 1.
|455
456
PSP: wat te doen, Trophonios, 5, 18 (February 21, 1969), p. 3.

Wat doet de PSP?, Trophonios, 5, 18 (February 21, 1969), p. 3.
Lees niet in Lou, Trophonios, 5, 19 (February 28, 1969), p. 8.
[With Wam van den Akker], Kristendemokratie: opkomst of ondergang. De
Latijnsamerikaanse situatie, Trophonios, 5, 21 (March 14, 1969), pp. 4-5.
Tijl Uil, Trophonios, 5, 22 (March 21, 1969), p. 5.
China op weg naar het volledige maosme, Vrij Nederland, March 22, 1969.
Een kleine zaak met grote gevolgen. Zwolsman-van der Gouw, Trophonios,
5, 23 (March 28, 1969), p. 1.
Abwehr-mechanismen van de industrie. Alias Teixeira 2A, Trophonios, 5, 23
(March 28, 1969), p. 3.
Rens tweede jeugd, Trophonios, 5, 27 (May 23, 1969), p. 3.
Het maosme en de Culturele Revolutie (Amersfoort: Werkgroep 2000, 1969). 22
pp.
Michael Bakoenin over staat, maatschappij, god & individuele vrijheid.
Samenstelling Arthur Lehning. Vertalingen Jaap Kloosterman
(Heemskerk: Anarinfo, 1969). Stencil. II + 16 pp. [Dutch translation].
1970
Michael Bakoenin over anarchisme, staat en diktatuur. Samengesteld en ingeleid
door Arthur Lehning, vertalingen van Jaap Kloosterman (Stadskanaal:
Anarchistiese Uitgaven, c. 1970). Stencil. 50 pp. [Dutch translation].
Michael Bakoenin over anarchisme, staat en dictatuur. Samengesteld en ingeleid
door Arthur Lehning. Vertalingen van Jaap Kloosterman (The Hague:
L.J.C. Boucher, 1970). 201 pp. [Dutch translation].
1972
Arthur Lehning, Radendemocratie of staatscommunisme: Marxisme en anarchisme
in de Russische Revolutie. Vertaald door Jaap Kloosterman. Amsterdam: Van
Gennep, 1972. 128 pp. [Dutch translation of Arthur Lehning, Marxismus
und Anarchismus in der russischen Revolution, Die Internationale [FAUD],
1929/1930].
Anton Pannekoek, Partij, raden, revolutie. Samengesteld en van aantekeningen voorzien door Jaap Kloosterman (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1972).
238 pp. [Editing, and concluding theses].
1976
Guy Debord, De spektakelmaatschappij. Vertaald door Jaap Kloosterman en
Ren van de Kraats, Baarn: Het Wereldvenster, 1976. 139 pp. [Dutch
translation, with Ren van de Kraats, of La socit du spectacle (Paris:
Buchet Castel, 1967)].
b i b li ograph y
Michael Bakoenin, Over anarchisme, staat en dictatuur. Samengesteld en ingeleid door Arthur Lehning. Vertalingen van Jaap Kloosterman. Revised
reprint (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1976). 135 pp. [Dutch translation].
Alexander Schapiro, Bericht ber die Confederacin Nacional del Trabajo
(CNT) und den Aufstand in Spanien im Januar 1933. Einleitung von Jaap
Kloosterman, in: Claudio Pozzoli (ed.), Jahrbuch Arbeiterbewegung, vol.
4: Faschismus und Kapitalismus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch
Verlag, 1976), pp. 159-194. [Introduction to, and editing of German
edition of Association internationale des travailleurs: Rapport sur lactivit de la
Confdration nationale du Travail dEspagne, 16 dcembre 1932-26 fvrier 1933
(n.p., n.y.)].
1978
Simon Leys [ps. of Pierre Ryckmans], De nieuwe kleren van voorzitter Mau:
kroniek van de culturele revolutie. Vertaald uit het Frans door M.W. Blok.
Inleiding van Jaap Kloosterman (Baarn: Het Wereldvenster, 1978). 284
pp., pp. 7-29 [Introduction to the Dutch translation of Simon Leys, Les
habits neufs du prsident Mao (Parijs: Champ Libre, 1971)].
1979
Anselme Bellegarrigue, Tegen de volksvertegenwoordiging: manifesten 1848-1850.
Vertaling [uit het Frans] door Gerard van Heeswijk. Ingeleid door Jaap
Kloosterman (Baarn: Het Wereldvenster, 1979). [Archief, vol. 4], 152 pp.
[Introduction to Dutch translation of Au fait, au fait! Interprtation de lide
dmocratique (Paris and Toulouse: Garnier and Delboy, 1848), and two
issues of Lanarchie: journal de lordre, 1850].
Michael Bakoenin, Brief aan een Fransman: de revolutionaire situatie in Frankrijk
in 1870. Redactioneel, bibliografische aantekening en annotatie door Jaap
Kloosterman (Baarn: Het Wereldvenster, 1979). [Archief, vol. 1], 132 pp.
[Translation M.W. Blok.][Introduction and annotation of Dutch edition
of a fragment of Michail A. Bakunin, Lettre un Franais, manuscript,
1870].
Over Buonarroti, internationale avantgardes, Max Nettlau en het verzamelen
van boeken, anarchistische ministers, de algebra van de revolutie, schilders en
schrijvers: voor Arthur Lehning. Onder redactie van Maria Hunink, Jaap
Kloosterman en Jan Rogier (Baarn: Het Wereldvenster, 1979). XII + 527
pp. [Co-editor].
Julco Elysard [ps. of Mikhail Bakunin], De reactie in Duitsland. Een fragment van een Fransman, ingeleid, vertaald en geannoteerd door Jaap
Kloosterman, in: Hunink, Kloosterman, Rogier, Over Buonarroti, pp. 33122. [Introduction, translation, annotation].
Alexander Schapiro, Twee artikelen over de Spaanse klassenoorlog (19361937), ingeleid door Jaap Kloosterman, in Over Buonarroti, pp. 275-316.
[Introduction].
|457
458
Rosa Luxemburg, Alexander Berkman, Alexej Borovoj, Emma Goldman,

Alexander Schapiro, De Russische revolutie. Redactioneel, bibliogra
fische aantekening en annotatie door Jaap Kloosterman (Baarn: Het
Wereldvenster, 1979). [Archief, vol. 2], 104 pp. [Translation of Rosa
Luxemburg, Die russische revolution (manuscript), and Alexander
Berkman, Alexej Borovoj, Emma Goldman and Alexander Schapiro, Die
russische Revolution und die Kommunistische Partei (Berlin: Der Syndikalist,
1921).] [Translation C.E. van Amerongen-van Straten] [Editing, bibliography, annotation].
Alexander Schapiro en Albert de Jong, Waarom verloren wij de revolutie? De
nederlaag van het Spaanse anarchosyndicalisme in 1936-1937. Redactionele
teksten: Jaap Kloosterman (Baarn: Het Wereldvenster, 1979). [Archief, vol.
3], 122 pp. [Dutch edition of Congrs extraordinaire de lAIT [1937]. Discussion
sur le Rapport de la CNT, supplement of lEspagne nouvelle, 15 March 1939
[Translation Joris van Parys]; Aleksandr M. apiro, De Spaanse revolutie.
Enkele beschouwingen, De Syndicalist, 16 and 23 April, 28 Mai and 4 June
1938; Albert A. de Jong, Het Spaanse probleem, De Syndicalist, 3, 10, 17
and 24 June, 1, 8, 15, 22 en 29 July 1939.] [Editing].
1982
Kroonstad 1921. De derde revolutie. Uit het Russisch vertaald door
Ineke Mertens. Onder redactie van Jaap Kloosterman (Baarn: Het
Wereldvenster, 1982). [Archief, vol. 5], 100 pp. [Editing of the Dutch
translation of Stepan M. Petrienko, Pravda o Krontadtskich Sobytijach
(n.p., 1921), and of articles published in Izvestija Vremennogo Revoljucionnogo
Komiteta Matrosov, Krasnoarmejcev I Raboich gor. Krontadta (Kronstad, 1921)].
Jan Beukels [ps.], De Poolse kwestie, of zij bestaat en, zo ja, een toekomst heeft,
gevolgd door Lijsken Rems, Sebastiaan Matte, Kroniek van de gebeurtenissen 19801982 (Bussum: Het Wereldvenster, 1982). 159 pp.
Carl von Clausewitz, Over de oorlog. Vertaald door Hans Hom. Ingeleid door
Jaap Kloosterman (Bussum: Het Wereldvenster, and Antwerp: Standaard,
1982). 247 pp. [Introduction, pp. 7-17].
1984
Max Nettlau, Anarchisten und Syndikalisten. Part 1: Der franzsische
Syndikalismus bis 1909 Der Anarchismus in Deutschland und Russland
bis 1914 Die kleineren Bewegungen in Europa und Asien. Redaktion:
Ursula Balzer, Rudolf de Jong, Jaap Kloosterman (Vaduz: Topos Verlag,
1984). [Max Nettlau, Geschichte der Anarchie, vol. 5, part 1], XV + 553 pp.
[Co-editor].
b i b li ograph y
1985
Het Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis: Geschiedenis en aktiviteiten,
Amsterdam: IISG, 1985. 24 pp. [Anonymous brochure].
1987
The International Institute of Social History, Saothar. Journal of the Irish
Labour History Society, Nr 12 (1987), pp. 90-92.
Informatisations et histoire sociale: le cas de lInstitut International dHistoire Sociale dAmsterdam, Materiaux pour lhistoire de notre temps, Nr 10
(April-December 1987), pp. 9-14.
1988
An Unpublished Letter of Filippo Buonarroti to Charles Teste, International
Review of Social History, XXXIII (1988), pp. 202-211.
1989
Retrieving the Reds: the IISGs Visual Information System (s.l., s.n., 1989). 8 pp.
[Unpaged typoscript].
[With Liebje Hoekendijk], Documentatiecentrum Europees vrijwilligerswerk
betreffende de 19e en 20e eeuw = European Documentation Centre concerning
Volunteer Work in the 19th and 20th centuries = Centre Europen de documentation du travail volontaire aux XIX et XXme sicles (Amsterdam: European
Documentation Centre concerning Volunteer Work in the 19th and 20th
centuries, 1989). 43 pp.
[With Hans van Beek], Moving Marx: the International Institute of Social History
at 31 Cruquiusweg Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Stichting Beheer IISG, 1989). 48
pp.
Review of T.R. Ravindranath, Bakunin and the Italians (1989), International
Review of Social History, XXXV (1990), pp. 132-134.
1990
Geautomatiseerde ontsluiting van beeldmateriaal in het Internationaal
Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, NBBI Bericht, June 1990, pp. 5-6.
1991
Vele gezichten: achter de schermen van het IISG. Bundel aangeboden aan Prof Dr
P. de Wolff en Prof Dr W. J. Wieringa ter gelegenheid van hun afscheid van het
IISG. Redactie: Eric Fischer, Jaap Kloosterman, Henk Wals (Amsterdam:
Stichting Beheer IISG, 1991). 131 pp. [Co-editor.]
|459
460
Collectievorming, in: Fischer, Kloosterman, Wals, Vele gezichten, pp. 57-63.

Het morgenrood opgelost: beeldverwerking in het IISG, Open, 23 (1991), pp.
214-217.
Retrieving the Reds: The IISG Visual Information System, International
Forum on Information and Documentation, 16, 1 (1991), pp. 11-17.
1994
Een eigen/aardig mens, in: Nico Markus and Emile Schwidder (eds), Dertig
jaar tussen stofmappen en kaartenbakken: herinneringen aan dr. Fritjof Tichelman,
hem aangeboden ter gelegenheid van zijn afscheid van het Internationaal Instituut
voor Sociale Geschiedenis (Amsterdam: Stichting beheer IISG, 1994), pp.
47-50.
1995
The International Institute of Social History, in: International Council
on Archives, Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth, Thirtieth and Thirty-First
International Conference of the Round Table on Archives 1993-1995, pp. 111-114.
De schok der herkenning: Scanning (3): OCR in het IISG, Open, 27, 3 (1995),
pp. 97-99.
1997
Rossika za rubezom: Archivy Medunarodnogo Instituta Socialnoj Istorii,
in: Problemy zarubeznoj archivnoj Rossiki: sbornik statej (Moscow: Russkij
Mir, 1997), pp. 121-123.
Geheim!, Archievenblad, 100, 1 (January 1997), pp. 15-16.
Geen partij, Archievenblad, 100, 2 (February 1997), pp. 13-14.
Vreemd land, Archievenblad, 100, 3 (March 1997), pp. 21-22.
Vrije seks, Archievenblad, 100, 4 (April 1997), pp. 21-22.
Arbeid adelt, Archievenblad, 100, 5 (May 1997), pp. 21, 23.
Nooit weerom, Archievenblad, 100, 7 (September 1997), pp. 13-14.
1998
Terugblik, Archievenblad, 101, 1 (January-February 1998), p. 27.
Ante portas, Archievenblad, 101, 3 (April 1998), p. 27.
Waar gebeurd!, Archievenblad, 102, 5 (June 1998), p. 19.
WvSt, Archievenblad, 102, 7 (September 1998), p. 25.
Op zoek, Archievenblad, 102, 9 (November 1998), p. 27.
1935 Gered verleden: het Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale
Geschiedenis, in: P.W. Klein, in collaboration with M.A.V. Klein-Meijer
and I.J. van Houten (eds), Een beeld van een Academie. Mensen en momenten
uit de geschiedenis van het Koninklijk Instituut en de KNAW (Amsterdam: KNAW,
1998), pp. 144-145.
b i b li ograph y
Institut international dhistoire sociale Amsterdam, Materiaux pour lhistoire de notre temps, Nr 49-50 (January-June 1998), pp. 29-30.
1999
Schande!, Archievenblad, 103, 1 (February 1999), p. 33.
Scripta volant, Archievenblad, 103, 3 (April 1999), p. 35.
O, o!, Archievenblad, 103, 4 (May 1999), p. 37.
Vanitas, Archievenblad, 103, 7 (September 1999), p. 27.
European Union Archive Network, Archievenblad, 103, 9 (November 1999),
p. 19.
Economie, Archievenblad, 103, 9 (November 1999), p. 33.
2000
A Librarys Way. De geheime instructies van de Jezuetenorde, in: Menno
Spiering et al. (eds), De weerspannigheid van de feiten: opstellen over geschiedenis, politiek, recht en literatuur aangeboden aan W.H. Roobol (Hilversum:
Verloren, 2000), pp. 135-142.
Dilemma, Jaarverslag Ondernemingsraad KNAW 1999-2000, p. 4.
2001
Review of Paul Gourdot, Les Sources maonniques du socialisme franais 1848-1871
(1998), International Review of Social History, XLVI (2001) 1, pp. 93-94.
2003
Kein Nachruf!: Beitrage uber und fur Gotz Langkau. Hrsgg. von Ursula Balzer,
Heiner M. Becker, Jaap Kloosterman (Amsterdam: IISG, 2003). 147 pp.
[Co-editor].
Phantome. Aus den Papieren Adolf Reichels, in: Balzer, Becker,
Kloosterman, Kein Nachruf!, pp. 64-69.
2004
Les papiers de Michel Bakounine Amsterdam (2004). 13 pp. Available at: http://
socialhistory.org/sites/default/files/docs/publications/bakarch.pdf; last
Der Zugang zu Privatarchiven beim Internationalen Institut fr
Sozialgeschichte (IISG), Archivpflege in Westfalen und Lippe, 58 (2003), pp.
27-28. Also available at: http://www.lwl.org/waa-download/archivpflege/
heft58/seite027_028_kloosterman_jaap.pdf; last accessed 8 May 2014.
|46 1
462
2007
Het nuttige met het aangename, in: Cees Boekraad and Leon Thier (eds),
Wisselwerking. Liber Amicorum voor Hans van Beek (The Hague: Atelier Pro,
2007), pp. 6-9.
2009
In Bebels voetspoor: Wouter Steenhaut en de IALHI, in: Paule Verbruggen
(ed.), Wouter Steenhaut en AMSAB-ISG (Gent: AMSAB, 2009), pp. 27-35.
2010
[With Jan Lucassen], Wereldverbeteraars: Vijf eeuwen sociale geschiedenis verzameld
door het IISG (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2010). 237 pp.
[With Jan Lucassen], Rebels with a cause: Five centuries of social history collected by
the IISH (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2010). 237 pp.
2011
Do Riazanova: razmylenija o pervich bibliotekach, posvjaennych raboej
istorii, in: I.B. Cvetkova and I.Yu. Novichenko (eds), Izvestnyj i neizvestnyi
David Borisovi Rjazanov (1870-1938): k 140-letiju so dnja rodenija: materialy
naunoj Konferencii (Moscow: GOPB, 2011), pp. 73-104.
2012
Unwritten Autobiography: Labor History Libraries before World War I, in:
Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen (eds), Working on Labor. Essays in
Honor of Jan Lucassen (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 395-416.
2014
Review of Guy Debord, Un art de la guerre (2013), International Review of Social
History, LIX (2014), pp. 134-136.
Notes on Contributors
Nanci Adler (*1963; Barnard College, Columbia University; phd 1999

University of Amsterdam: The Great Return: The Gulag Survivor and the Soviet
System). Director of Research, Head of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, niod
Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
E-mail:n.adler@niod.knaw.nl
Bert Altena (*1950; phd 1989 Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: Een broeinest der
anarchie. Arbeiders, arbeidersbeweging en maatschappelijke ontwikkeling. Vlissingen
1875-1929 (1940)) Assistant professor Erasmus University Rotterdam, Erasmus
School of History, Culture and Communication.
E-mail:altena@remove-this.eshcc.eur.nl
Touraj Atabaki (*1950; phd 1991 University of Utrecht: Azerbaijan, Ethnicity
and Autonomy in the Twentieth-Century Iran). Senior Research Fellow at the IISH.
He also holds the chair of the Social History of the Middle East and Central
Asia at the School of the Middle East Studies of Leiden University.
E-mail: tat@iisg.nl
Rossana Barragn Romano (*1959; phd 2002 cole des Hautes tudes et
Sciences Sociales, Paris: Ltat qui pacte. Gouvernement et peuples. La configuration de ltat et ses frontires. Bolivie (1825-1880)). Senior Research Fellow at the
IISH.
E-mail: rba@iisg.nl
Stefano Bellucci (*1971; ba University of Urbino, Italy; ma Miami
University, USA; phd 2003 Universit Paris xi, France, Facult Jean Monnet
of Economics and Political Science: Le Mozambique lre no-librale: bonne
gouvernance et ONG). Senior Researcher at the IISH.
E-mail: sbe@iisg.nl
Aad Blok (*1959; ma History Utrecht University). Executive Editor iish and
Managing Editor ad interim bmgn (Huygens Institute, The Hague).
E-mail: abl@iisg.nl
Alex Geelhoed (*1947; ma Contemporary political and social history
University of Amsterdam). Retired iish research staff member for collection
development.
E-mail: alex.geelhoed@gmail.com
c ontri b u tors
|46 5
Francesca Gori (*1952; phd 1977 Universit degli Studidi Firenze). President
of Memorial Italia; former Head of Eastern Europe Countries Section at
Feltrinelli Foundation, Milan; author (with Elena Dundovich) of Italiani nei
lager di Stalin, Laterza 2006.
E-mail francesca.gori21@gmail.com
Patricia Kennedy Grimsted (*1935; phd 1964 University of California,
Berkeley in Russian history: The Foreign Ministers of Alexander I: Political
Attitudes and the Conduct of Russian Diplomacy, 1801-1825. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1969). Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and
Eurasian Studies and the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University;
Honorary Fellow iish; Visiting Professor and Honorary Fellow, Center for
Russian Studies at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy
and Public Administration (ranepa), Moscow.
E-mail: grimsted@fas.harvard.edu
Francisca de Haan (*1957; phd 1992 Erasmus University Rotterdam: Sekse
op kantoor. Over vrouwelijkheid, mannelijkheid en macht, Nederland 1860-1940).
Professor of Gender Studies and History at the Central European University,
Budapest.
E-mail: dehaanf@ceu.hu
Lex Heerma van Voss (*1955; phd 1991 Utrecht University: De doodsklok voor
den goeden ouden tijd). Director Huygens Institute, The Hague and professor
of the history of labour and labour relations at Utrecht University.
E-mail: lex.heermavanvoss@huygens.knaw.nl
Marien van der Heijden (*1958; ma Art History Utrecht University). Head
Collection Development at iish.
E-mail: mvh@iisg.nl
Gijs Kessler (*1969; ma Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; phd 2001 European
University Institute, Florence: The Peasant and the Town: RuralUrban Migration
in the Soviet Union, 192940). Senior Research Fellow at the iish.
E-mail: gke@iisg.nl
Eric Ketelaar (*1944; lld 1978 Leiden University: Oude zakelijke rechten vroeger, nu en in de toekomst). Former General State Archivist of the
Netherlands; Emeritus Professor of Archivistics in the Department of
Mediastudies at the University of Amsterdam.
E-mail: ketelaar@uva.nl or archivistics@xs4all.nl
466
Andrew H. Lee (*1956; phd 2012 New York University: Mothers without Fathers
or Nothing More than a Woman: Gender and Anarchism in the Work of Federica
Montseny). Associate Curator for History, European Studies, & Politics at New
York University, New York.
E-mail: andrew.lee@nyu.edu
Marcel van der Linden (*1952; phd 1989 University of Amsterdam: Het
westers marxisme en de Sovjetunie: Hoofdlijnen van structurele maatschappijkritiek
(1917-1985)). Research director of the iish and Professor of Social Movement
History at the University of Amsterdam.
E-mail: mvl@iisg.nl.
Jan Lucassen (*1947; ma History Leiden University; phd 1984 Utrecht
University: Migrant Labour in Europe 1600-1900. The Drift to the North Sea).
Honorary fellow at the iish and Emeritus Professor at the Free University in
Amsterdam.
E-mail: jlu@iisg.nl
Coen Marinus (*1949; History Teacher Training Vrij Leergangen, Vrije
Universiteit, Amsterdam (mo geschiedenis)). Retired librarian iish.
E-mail: cma@iisg.nl
Roel Meijer (*1956; phd 1995 University of Amsterdam: The Quest for
Modernity: Secular Liberal and Left-Wing Political Thought in Egypt, 1945-1958).
Visiting professor at Gent University, Dept. of Conflict and Development
Studies and assistant professor Islam Studies at Radboud University,
Nijmegen.
E-mail: roel-meijer@planet.nl
Annette Mevis (*1953; ma History, Radboud University Nijmegen). Archivist
of the collection Internationaal Archief voor de Vrouwenbeweging (IAV), Atria,
Institute on Gender Equality and Womens History, Amsterdam.
E-mail: a.mevis@atria.nl
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk (*1975; ma 1998 Economic and Social
History Utrecht University; phd 2007 Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: De draad
in eigen handen. Vrouwen en loonarbeid in de Nederlandse textielnijverheid 1581-1810).
Associate Professor at Wageningen University and Honorary Fellow at the
IISH.
E-mail: elise.vannederveenmeerkerk@wur.nl
Irina Novichenko (*1967; phd 1994 Institute of World History, Russian
Academy of Sciences: Charles Kingsley i anglijskij khristianskij socialism seredeny xix veka = Charles Kingsley and British Christian Socialism in the middle of the
c ontri b u tors
nineteenth century). Senior research fellow Institute of World History, Russian

Academy of Sciences, Moscow; Head of Special Collections Department of
the State Public Historical Library, Moscow; fellow of the iish.
E-mail: iishmos@gmail.com
Zlfikar zdoan (*1951; Law studies Istanbul and marxist philosophy
Moscow). iish research staff member for collection development, Turkey
and the Osman Empire.
E-mail: zoz@iisg.nl
Jenneke Quast (*1951; ma History and Modern Greek, University of
Amsterdam). Staff member Publications Department iish.
E-mail: jqu@iisg.nl
Kees Rodenburg (*1948; ma Political Science, University of Amsterdam).
Retired iish staff member collection development for France, Spain,
Portugal, Italy, Northern Africa, Israel/Palestine, Utopia, Judaica and
Anarchism.
E-mail: kro@iisg.nl
Francis Ronsin (*1943; phd 1974: Mouvements et courants no-malthusiens en
France; 1988 Doctorat dEtat s Lettres et Sciences Humaines: Du divorce et de
la sparation de corps en France au xixme sicle). Emeritus Professor of History
University of Bourgogne.
E-mail: ronsin.francis@9online.fr
Karl Heinz Roth (*1942; Medical Studies Wrzburg, Cologne and Hamburg
Universities, md 1986 Hamburg University; Historical Studies Hamburg and
Bremen Universities, phd 1992 Bremen University). Co-founder and member of the executive board of the Foundation for Social History of the 20th
Century.
E-Mail: khroth@stiftung-sozialgeschichte.de
Solmaz Rustamova-Towhidi (*1953; phd 2004 Institute of History,
Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences: Comintern Eastern Policy and Iran
(1919-1943)). Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Oriental Studies,
Azerbaijan Academy of Sciences.
E-Mail: sru.tohidi@gmail.com
Anthony Saich (*1953; M.Sc Politics School of Oriental and African Studies,
London University; phd 1991 Leiden University: Science and Technology Policy in
Contemporary China). Director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance
and Innovation and Daewoo Professor of International Affairs, Harvard
Kennedy School.
E-mail: Anthony_Saich@harvard.edu
|46 7
468
Huub Sanders (*1953; ma History Leiden University 1980). iish staff member for collection development. Chairman of the Friends of the iish.
E-mail: hsa@iisg.nl
Willem van Schendel (*1949; phd 1980 University of Amsterdam: The
odds of peasant life: processes of social and economic mobility in rural Bangladesh).
Professor of Modern Asian History at the University of Amsterdam and
senior research fellow at the IISH.
E-mail: h.w.vanschendel@uva.nl
Margreet Schrevel (*1951; ma History, University of Amsterdam). iish staff
member: web editor and text writer.
E-mail: mas@iisg.nl
Co Seegers (*1950; ma 1977 History, University of Amsterdam). Research
staff member for collection development iish (new social movements and
economic history).
E-mail: cse@iisg.nl
Wouter Steenhaut (*1947; phd 1983 Gent University: De Unie van Hand- en
Geestesarbeiders. Een onderzoek naar het optreden van de vakbonden in de bezettings
jaren (1940-1944)). Retired director Amsab-Institute of Social History Gent.
E-mail: wouter.steenhaut@hotmail.com
Franck Veyron (*1968; dea History, Paris). Head of archives department,
BDIC (Bibliothque de documentation internationale contemporaine), Paris
Nanterre.
E-mail: franck.veyron@bdic.fr
Els Wagenaar (*1946; ma 1972 Slavonic studies University of Amsterdam).
Retired IISH staff member collection development for Russia and Eastern
Europe.
E-mail: elswagenaar@yahoo.com
Henk Wals (*1954; phd 2001 University of Amsterdam: Makers en stakers.
Amsterdamse bouwvakarbeiders en hun bestaansstrategien in het eerste kwart van de
twintigste eeuw). General director iish.
E-mail: henk.wals@iisg.nl
Rdiger Zimmermann (*1946; phd 1976 Technische Universitt Darmstadt:
Der Leninbund. Linke Kommunisten in der Weimarer Republik.). Emeritus-librarian
Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Bonn.
E-mail: ruedigerzim@aol.com
Name Index
Abdalhamid, Mohammed 414

Abdalla, Ahmad 414
Abram, Paul 270, 272
Acosta, Jos de 297-300
Adam, Erfried 232
Adama van Scheltema, Carel 57, 213
Adama van Scheltema-Kleefstra, Annie
61-62, 65, 88-89, 96, 98-99, 146, 163-166,
169, 173-175, 183-184, 206
Adams collection 226
Addams, Jane 146-147
Adelaide 101
Adler, Max 213
Adler, Nanci 20, 342-351, 464
Adoratskij, V.V. 109, 113, 140Afanasev, Mikhail D. 340, 352-353,
357-360
Afiani, Vitalii Ju. 335, 356
Africa 29, 31, 58, 103, 118, 177, 232, 297,
386, 409, 427-428, 438-439, 448, 467
Agayev, Mahmoud 396
Ahmadov, Ahmad 396
Aicard, Jean Franois 265-266
Akhundov, Ruhollah 396
Akker, Wam van den 30, 455
Akker, Wiljan van den 292, 295
Alberts, G. 68, 91
Albrecht, Johann Lder 106-107
Alcoy 200
Alexander 132
Alexandria 208, 410
Algeria 255, 266, 409, 412
al-Khaliq Mahjub, Abd 415
Allen, Robert C. 382
Allerdt, Herbert 222
al-Said, Rif at 408, 410, 413-414
Alsace 193
al-Tayyib, al-Tigani 414
Alten, J. von 180

Altena, Bert 36, 158, 169, 464
Althoff, Friedrich 210
Altmeyer, J.J. 177
Amsterdam passim
Andaluca 200
Andean World 443
Anderlecht 173, 175-176, 178, 180, 182
Anderson, Dorothy Pauline 212
Anderson, Kirill 285, 332
Angola 29, 449
Ankara 401, 406
Anne, Queen of England 103-104
Annison, 103
Anseele, Edward 177
Appert, Eugne 187
Apulia 448
Arabia(n Peninsula) 388, 448
Archives Bakounine 33-36, 241, 318-329
Argentina 205, 382, 448
Aristotle 78
Armand, mile 203
Armenia 392-394
Arnhem 67
Arnould, Arthur 175
Arnould, V. 192
Artizov, A. 344
Arzns de Orsa y Vela, Bartolom
447-449
Arze, Ren 445-446
Asgarov, Baba 398
Askew, Anna 131
Askew, John Bertram 131-132
Assmann, Aleida 435
Asturias 200
Atabaki, Touraj 20, 389, 392, 398, 464
Atherley-Jones, Llewellyn Archer
120-121
i nde x
Austin 446
Australia 42, 46-47, 53, 117, 119, 324
Austria 32, 50, 69, 76, 103, 110, 137, 179,
236
Aveling, Edward Bibbens 117-118, 121122, 127-128
Avrich, Paul 240, 247
Axelrod, Pavel 310, 315
Aydn, R. 405
Aymard, Maurice 335
Azerbaijan 20, 385-398, 464, 467
Azov Sea 339
Baar, Peter-Paul de 58, 60
Baas Becking, L.G.M. 59, 68
Bachofen, Johann Jakob 264-265, 267
Bacon, Francis 87
Bad Godesberg 180, 357
Baker Library 101
Bakker, Marcus 286
Baku 386-398
Bakunin, Mikhail Alexandrovich (see
also Archives Bakounine) 10, 13, 15,
20, 32-33, 36, 146, 174-175, 192, 241,
250, 273, 295, 319, 321-326, 328-329,
335, 454, 457, 459
Baldwin, Abigail 101, 107
Balthazar, Herman 181-182
Balzer, Ursula 208, 458, 461
Bangladesh 427-428, 430-432, 468
Baranov (ps; see Zhook) 312
Barcelona 200, 203, 206, 241, 246-250
Brhausen, Anne 228-230
Barilier, Etienne 267
Barnadas, Josep 445-446
Barr Smith Library 101
Barragan, Rossana 21, 442, 464
Barry, (Michael) Maltman 118, 122, 134
Basle 127
Bass, Catriona 350
Batatu, Hanna 409
Batavia 52
Baturinsky (ps) 312
Baudisch, R.A. 64
Bax, Ernest Belfort 121
Beatrix, Queen of the Netherlands 100
|471
Bebel, August 17, 40, 127-128, 138, 462

Beck, 173
Becker, Bruno 80
Becker, Heiner M. 240, 243, 247-249,
461
Beecher, Jonathan 110
Beek, W. 161-162
Beer, Max 110-115, 121
Beerthuis, Jan 64
Beesly, Edward Spencer 118-119, 121
Begum, Rizia 430
Beijing 420, 428, 431
Beirut 410
Beishuizen, Henk 93
Beishuizen, Piet 94
Beith, John 180
Belgium 170-184, 189, 262, 273, 279, 289,
428
Bell, Kathleen 49
Bellegarrigue, Anselme 241, 457
Belleville 190, 270
Belluci, Stefano 21, 464
Benjamin, Walter 30, 32, 84, 264-265
Benser, Gnter 224-225
Benzing, Hermann 232
Berelovich, A. 378
Beresteyn, E. van 74, 79
Beria, Lavrentii 357
Berkeley 421, 465
Berkman, Alexander 243-245, 248, 310,
457
Berlin 33, 86, 131, 137, 144, 165, 210, 224,
228, 234-235, 239, 244-245, 286-287
Bernburg 144
Bernstein, Eduard 127-128, 175
Bernstein, Leon 110
Besselsen, Piet 64
Beukema, F.F. 74, 79
Bhashani, Maulana 431
Bilderdijk, Willem 293
Bilgen, Mehmet 400-401, 405
Birjukov (Biryukov), Pavel I. 313-314,
316-317
Birjukova, P.I. 316-317
Black Earth district 384
472
Black Sea 339

Blair, Ann 46
Blanc, Louis 165
Blaricum 65
Blau, Joyce 412
Blijenburgh, W. van 165-166
Blind, Karl 165
Blois 273
Blok, Aad 454, 464
Blok, M.W. 457
Blok, P.J. 66-67, 71
Blouin, Francis Z. 55
Blcher, Eberhard 180
Blum, Lon 270, 410
Bodleian Catalogue 105, 209
Boer, W. den 71
Bogdanov-Belskij, Nikolaj Petrovi 311
Boissevain, Mia 147
Boitet, Reinier 106-107
Bolivia 21, 297, 442-447, 449-451
Bolkestein, H. 57, 68
Bolkhovitinov, N.N. 354
Bolloten, Burnett 204
Bondareva, T.I. 365
Bonger, W.A. 57
Bonn 180, 224-232, 468
Bonnet, Farnse de 189
Bonset, Helge 29
Booy, E.P. de 54
Borovoy, Alexei 244
Borrs, Jos Ester 250
Bos, Bernadine 322
Bos, Dennis 48
Bosch, Mineke
Bos-Rops, J.A.M.Y. 55
Bossers, Anton 218
Boulanger, Georges (general) 189, 272
Bourke, M. 180
Bourrinet, Philippe 253
Bovenkerk, Frank 72
Bowker, Geoffrey C. 44
Braak, Menno ter 32
Brademas, John 198, 204, 206, 246
Bradlaugh, Charles 273
Bramley, Fred 133
Brand, Onno (ps) 94

Brandt, Willy 223-224
Brazil 382, 427, 449, 451
Brlaz, Michel 180-181, 183-184
Bremen 239, 467
Brendel, Cajo 253, 255-258
Brentano, Lujo 175
Breteuil, Louise 191
Breton, And 30
Brezhnev, Leonid 347
Brooke, C.N.L. 55
Brothman, Brien 45, 48
Brouckre, Louis de 175-177
Brouwers, Arnout 346
Bruggen, Kees van 98
Brugmans, Hajo 67-68
Brll, Marianne 250
Brumfield, Ben 325
Brunner, Detlev 228
Brussels / Bruxelles 182-184, 268, 280, 404
Bryan (Collection) 131-132
Brzhostovskaia, N.V. 355
Budagov, Grigory Grigorevich 345-346
Budapest 279, 465
Buddingh, Cees 31
Bulffi, Luis 279-280
Bungert, Mario 222
Bunyadov, Zia 396
Burgaleta, Claudio M. 297
Burgess, Joseph 117
Burke, Frank G. 44-45
Burke, Peter 51
Burleigh, Ferd. 101, 107
Burns, John Elliot 126-129
Busch, Arthur P. 279
Buset, Max 184
Buttino, Marco 332
Butyrka 345
Butzer, Karl W. 298
Buul, Tineke van 22
Cdiz 246
Cairo 410, 413-414, 448
Cajamarca 449
Calabria 448
Calcutta 430
i nde x
Cambridge 111, 116, 136, 138

Campfens, Mies 76-77, 155
Canada 177, 179-180, 217, 316-317, 427
Caete, Pedro Vicente 446
Canne Meijer, Henk 252, 256
Cape Town 118
Cape Verde 449
Capoche, Luis 447
Carb, Eusebio 246
Carlile, Richard 273
Caroline, Queen of England 318
Carpenter, Kenneth C. 106
Carpentras 269
Carrasquer, Francisco 247, 250
Casas Viejas 246
Castoriadis, Cornelius 254-262
Catalonia 200, 246
Cats, Jacob 299
Caucasus 336, 386, 388-389, 391, 393-394,
396-398
Caul, Ren 256
Causer, T. 325
Certeau, Michel de 437
ertkova, V. 317
Ceylon 448
Chai Ling 424
Champion, Henry Hyde 119
Changsha 423
Changuion, Franois 106
Chapelier, Emile 280-281
Chaplin, Arthur Hugh 212
Charguraud, A. 268
Chaulieu, Pierre 254, 257-261
Chechnya 347-348
Cheliabinsk 339
Chertkov, Vladimir G. 312, 316-317
Chicherin, Georgy 243
Chile 232, 297
China 29-31, 383, 419-425, 427-428, 432,
449, 455, 467
Chivers, C.J. 348
Chokroborti, Gokul 430
Christchurch (UK) 313, 317
Christopher, James William 61
Chubarian, Aleksander 336
|473
Chukavino 348
Chumakovo 346
Cipriani, A. 175
Clapham, John Harold 138
Claris, Aristide 191-192
Clausewitz, Carl von 27, 458
Cleveringa, Hilletje 61
Cleveringa, P.B. 67
Cochabamba 445, 449
Coeurderoy, Edouard Jean 186-197
Cohen, I.B. 74, 79
Cohn-Bendit, Daniel/Gabriel 255
Cole, George Douglas Howard 134-135,
137-138, 181
Colenbrander, Herman Theodoor 71, 77,
81
Cologne 33, 467
Comte, August 265
Conde, Carmen 201
Constantine 78
Constantinople 242
Cook, Terry 55
Cooke, Charles 105, 107
Cooper, James Fenomore 63
Coornhert, Dirck V. 75, 299
Copenhagen 212, 216
Crdoba 448
Cornelissen, Igor 30, 286
Cortlever, Catelijne 424
Costa Rica 231
Cotta, I. 437
Courbet, Gustave 189
Craig, Barbara L. 46
Craig, C.T. 128
Cramer, Dr 69
Crmieux, Adolphe 270
Crete 448
Creuzberger, Stefan 357
Crimea 339
Cronin, Stephanie 389, 398
Cuba 30, 89, 449
Cunningham, Philip J. 424
Cupac, Gordan 371
Curiel, Henri 408, 410-414
Cutter, Charles Ammi 210-212, 219-220
474
Cuzco 449
Cyprus 317, 428, 448
Czbel, Ern 113, 115, 125, 140-141
DAilly, Arnold Jan 62
DAlambert, J. le R. 436
DAspremont Lynden, Gobert 182
Iberville, Charles-Franois de la Bonde,
sieur d 103
DOrbigny, Alcide 451
Daele, Els van 34
Dalsum, Albert van 86
Damme, Bernard 169
Daniel-Nachlass 226
Daniels Company, Charles William 316
Danilov, Victor Petrovich 378
Darchinger, J.H. 223
Daro, Rubn 445
Darmstadt 117, 468
Darwin, Charles 117, 295
Dasgupto, Ronesh 426
Dastidar, Shukhendu 431
Daumier, Honor 188
Davenant, Charles 106-107
Davies, Robert William 379
Davitt, Michael 120
Davos 61
De Beer-Meyers, F. 279
De Clerck, Jose 177
De Coster, Ch. 175
De Muynck, August 170
De Paepe, Csar 174-175
De Schepper, Hugo 176, 180-182
De Smet, Egbert 212
De Steeg 67
Debord, Guy 36, 253-254, 256, 262
Delescluze, Louis Charles 270
Delft 51, 59, 106-107
Delgado, Jos Luis Garca 200
Delhi 426
Delsinne, Lon 186
Dmar, Claire 266
Demeulemeester, Rose 183
Demeulemeester, Victor 183
Denekamp, Paul 28
Deng Xiaoping 418, 420, 427
Denis, Hector 174-175

Derrida, Jacques 53, 152-153, 438
Desbonnet, Edmond 189, 195
Descaves, Lucien 186-187, 190, 192-193
Descleuse 200
Devalds, Manuel 276
Dhaka 427, 432
Diaz van der Goot, An 59-60, 64-65, 206
Diaz, Elizabeth 60, 206
Diaz, Luigi 60
Diderot, Dennis 51, 436
Dietz, J.H.W. 225
Dijck, Jos van 43
Dillen, J.G. van 57
Diocletian 78
Diogenes 199
Dobb, Maurice Herbert 111-113, 115-116,
128, 133-134
Dodge, Peter 179
Doe, Erik van der 320
Dolgikh, F.I. 354
Domela Nieuwenhuis, Adriaan 164
Domela Nieuwenhuis, Cesar 163-164
Domela Nieuwenhuis, Ferdinand 19,
33, 158-169, 213, 243
Dood, Cornelis (Kees) de 19, 84-99
Doorn, Peter 305
Dopsch, Alphons 69, 76, 80-81
Drner, Klaus 239
Dresden 180, 277, 279
Dreyfus, Alfred 165
Drubbel, Ton 26
Drysdale, Bessie 279, 282
Drysdale, C.V. 278
Drysdale, Charles Robert 279
Drysdale, George R. 273, 279
Drysdale-Vickery, Alice 278-279, 282
Dubrovina, Liubov 365
Duchobors 316-317
Dumas (fils), Alexandre 268-269
Dundovich, Elena 338, 340, 465
Dupac, F.J. 58
Durand, Marguerite 145
Duverger de Forbonnais, Franois Vron
106
i nde x
East India (House) 51, 448-449

Ebben, Maurits 48
Ebbinghaus, Angelika 239
Eccarius, John George 118, 122
Eckl, Jrgen 232
Edouard, Jean-Baptiste (= Coeurderoy)
188, 195
Edwards, Joseph 124, 126
El Hajj Malik El Shabazz 199
Elbers, Ed 28
Elias, Mirjam 147
Elisabeth, queen of Belgium 180, 182
Ellman, Michael 343-344
el-Said, Rifaat 409
Eminbayli, Ismail 396
Engels, Friedrich 7, 19, 88, 108-112, 114,
117-118, 121-123, 125-130, 137, 141, 158159, 165, 174, 222, 224, 226, 264-265,
269, 295, 320, 324, 394, 422
England passim
Enkhuizen 51
Epen, Dr. van 280
Eppard, Philip B. 46
Erasmus 70
Eritrea 438
Es, W.A. van 58
Esgleas, Germinal 203
Espartaco (Spartacus) 199
Esteve, Pedro 203
Estienne, frres 106-107
Ethiopia 438
Everard, Myriam 144, 146-147, 154
Fakus, M.E. 391
Falaise 265
Farge, A. 438
Fattahi, Rahmatollah 219
Faubion, James D. 52
Favon, Georges 196
Feith, J.A. 41, 49
Feith, R. 74, 79
Feltrinelli Foundation 331-332, 334-336,
340, 465
Fnelon 103
Feraposhkin, Viacheslav 346
Ferf, E. (Bep) 145
|475
Fernbach, David 22
Ferraris, M. 435
Fierro, painter 451
Figes, Orlando 346
Fimmen, Edo 159
Finland 422
Finneran, Richard 325
Fischer, Eric J. 10, 24, 36-38, 54, 230,
235-236, 302-303, 305, 423, 459
Fisher, Wesley A. 355
Fitzpatrick, Sheila 378
Flanders 177, 448
Flechine, Senya 310
Flige, Irina 347
Flinterman, Jan-Jaap 284
Florence 435, 448, 465
Folkers, Theunis 61
Fomichev, Valerij 110
Fontaine, L. 175
Foote, George William 131
Ford, Edsel 215
Ford, Henry 215
Forel, August 279-281
Foucault, Michel 52
Fourier, Charles 265
Fox, Ralph Winston 113, 136, 140-141
Foyle, W.A. 114-115, 124
Fraigneux, Raphal 280
France passim
Franco, Francisco 15, 203-204, 247-248
Franken, J.H.A. (Jan) 85, 92-96, 99
Frankenstein, Kuno 165
Frankfurt am Main 110-112, 171, 177,
179, 228, 279
Freiburg 180
Freriks, Bert 28
Freud, Sigmund 86, 90, 438
Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung 19, 180, 222-232
Frbel, Julius 165
Froissart, Jean 324
Fruin, R. 41, 49, 67
Fry, Ruth A. 113
Frth, Henriette 279-281
Gaastra, Femme 51
Gabler, Andrea 254
476
Gaillard pre 191-193

Galesloot, Hansje 289
Galicia (Eastern Europe) 79
Galicia (Spain) 200
Garin, V. 317
Garzonio, Stefano 335
Gatrell, Peter 384
Gauci, Perry 105
Gaulle, Charles de 255
Gautrat, Jacques 255
Gavrilov, Lev Gavrilovich 345
Gay, Delphine 267
Gay, Ivo 241
Gee, Joshua 105
Geelhoed, Alex 85, 93, 97, 464
Geerling, Max 92
Geertsema, J.H. 74, 79
Gelder, H.E. van 57
Gelderland 67
Genette, Grard 254
Geneva 146, 191-197, 270, 317
Geniller, Guillaume 267
Genoa 448
George iv, king of England 318
Georgia (Caucasus) 393-394, 397-398
Gerber, John 257
Germany passim
Gerritsen, Carel Victor 279
Gerschenkron, Alexander 383
Gerwen, J.L.J.M. van 54
Getty, J.A. 343
Geyl, P. 69
Gibiansky, Ya. N 334
Gieling, Saskia 22
Ginzburg, Evgeniia 345
Girardin, Emile de 265, 267-270, 272
Giroud, Gabriel 279
Giuva, M. 437
Gloucestershire 247
Glcklich, Vilma 279, 281
Goca 448
Gogh, Vincent van 86
Gogh-Bonger, Jo van 155
Gogh-Vonhoff, A. van 155
Goldman, Emma 241, 243-245, 248, 310,

457
Goldsmith collection 101, 114, 132
Gomez, Freddy 248
Goncourt, Edmond & Jules de 189
Gooch, George Peabody 137-138
Goot, Wilhelmina Hendrika (Willemijn/
Lilly) van der 33,58, 60-62, 65, 87, 91,
98, 142-144, 146-148, 150-153, 155
Gorbachev, Mikhail 312
Gori, Francesca 20, 331-332, 334, 340,
465
Gorky, Maxim 445
Gorlizki, Yoram 344, 379
Goss, Charles William Frederick 134,
136-137
Gosses, I.H. 67, 69
Gottraux, Philippe 254
Gouguenheim & Coeurderoy, Socit
188
Goulooze, Daan 290
Granada 448
Grave, Jean 203
Graziosi, Andrea 376, 378
Greece 20, 31, 63, 199, 254, 410, 467
Greng (bei Mrten) 172, 174-175
Grever, Maria 146
Griffith, William E. 428
Grimsted, Patricia Kennedy 16, 20, 331332, 352-364, 369, 371, 465
Groningen 66-67, 69, 74, 79, 98
Groot, Paul de 285-286, 288
Grozny 348
Grzesinski, Albert 165
Guadeloupe 428
Guamales 449
Guatemala 428
Guercetti, Emanuela 331, 338, 340
Guroult, Adolphe 265
Guerricabeitia, Jos Martnez 247
Guhathakurta, Meghna 426
Guillain, Alix 110
Guillaume, James 321
Gulbranssen, Trygve 57
Gustavo, Soledad 203
i nde x
Haag, Jaap 412

Haan, Francisca de7, 19, 33, 41, 142-147,
149, 151, 153-155, 465
Haan, Ido de 85
Haas, W.J. de 59, 68
Hageraats, Bart 22, 96
Haimson, Leo(pold) 332
Hajj, Messali 409
Halvy, D. 175
Halifax, Lord 104
Hall-Catalogue 215
Hamon, Augustin 165
Han Minzhu 424
Hanke, Lewis 446-448
Hann (Collection) 331-332
Hanover 224
Hanssen, Lon 67, 70, 72
Hardie, James Keir 120
Hardy, G. 279
Harney, George Julian 128
Harrison, Mark 379-380
Harstick, Hans-Peter 158
Hartley, Janet 368
Hartmann, Ludo Moritz 137
Hartog, Thea den 149
Harvard 101, 356, 378, 423, 446, 448,
465, 467
Hasanov, Rahim 396
Haute-Savoie 172, 177, 181
Haynes, Christopher 105
Hazan, Joseph 412
Head, Randolph 45
Headingly, A.S. 123
Hearst, Nancy 423
Hecker, Rolf 109-110
Heerma van Voss, Lex 20, 33, 292, 320,
465
Hger, P. 175
Heidema, Han 29, 31, 454
Heidermann, Horst 223, 225
Heijden, G.J. van der 93
Heijden, Marien van der 19, 22, 190, 371,
465
Heiniger, Alix 186
Heldt, B. 279
|477
Helmond, Toke van 242

Hendriks, Bertus 413
Henkes, Barbara 284
Henttonen, Pekka 45
Hepp, Michael 238
Hricourt, Jenny P. d 265
Hermans, Willem Frederik 27
Herrigel, Eugen 64
Hertogenbosch s 54
Hertzberger, Menno 65
Herzen, Alexander 165, 174-175, 310-312
Heuvel, E.P.J. van den 252
Hifni Nasif, Isam al-Din 414
Hijma, Bouwe 70, 292
Hilberg, Raul 45
Hirche, Kurt 229
Hitler, Adolf 86, 171, 183
Ho Chi Minh 427
Hochedlinger, Michael 50
Hochschild, Mauricio 448
Hockney, Susan 325
Hofman, Jack 28
Hofmann, Norbert von 232
Holst, H.R. 69-70, 159, 181
Holyoake, George 131
Hong Khoo, Agnes Ee 424
Honor, Suzanne 212
Hooft, Pieter Cornelisz. 299
Hoogewoud, F.J. 16, 362
Hoorn 50-51
Hoover Institution 204, 356, 360, 367
Horsman, Peter 41, 43, 53
Horst, Atie van der 152
Houten, Samuel van 277-279, 281
Houten, I.J. van 460
Howell, George 137
Hoxha, Enver 427
Hu Yaobang 419
Hunuco 449
Hubmann, Gerald 158
Huerta, Victoriano 205
Hugenholtz, F.W.N. 67
Huizinga, Dirk 94
Huizinga, Johan 19, 66-82
Humbert, Eugne 276, 278-279, 281-282
478
Humbert, Jeanne 264, 276

Humbert, Lucette 276
Humbert-Rigaudin, Jeanne 276
Hunink, Maria 18, 28, 32, 34-35, 54, 90,
96, 160, 164, 166-167, 186, 200, 214, 241242, 245-247, 249, 457
Hunsinger, Marie-Barbe 195
Huq, Abdul 431
Huygens, Christiaan 294
Huygens, Constatijn 294
Ibrruri, Dolores 427
Ignatius, Adi 420
IJsberg, Joop 284-285, 290
IJzerman, Huibertje 57
IJzerman, J. 57
Ilya Prigogine 184
India 31, 50, 66, 197, 232, 299, 383, 386,
426, 429-430, 432, 448-449, 451
Indians (Americas) 63, 297-298, 443,
446-448
Indonesia 33, 232, 326, 428
Iofe, Veniamin 342, 347
Iongh, Jane de 143, 148-149
Iran 386-389, 391-394, 398, 464, 467
Isla Margarita 449
Ismael, Tareq Y. 409
Israel 60, 411-412, 467
Israel, Jonathan 48
Ivens, Joris 33, 58
Jacobs, Aletta 147, 279
Janssen, Jacques 29
Janssen, Theodore 105-107
Jaurs, J. 175
Jedlitschka, Karsten 45
Jena, Kai von 360
Jeurgens, K.J.P.F.M. (Charles) 41, 45, 55
Johns Hopkins University 101
Johnson Tribunal 29, 454
Jolles, Andr 70, 72
Jones, Ernest Charles 121
Jong Edz, Frits de 24, 27, 34-35, 96,
153-154
Jong, Albert A. de 159, 161, 163-164, 166168, 240, 245, 247, 250, 458
Jong, Frank de 73
Jong, Lou de 61
Jong, Rudolf de 159, 169, 458
Joosting, J.G.C. 74, 79
Juffermans, Jan 354
Justinian 78
Juta, Henry Hubert 118
Kafka, Franz 437-438
Kallus, Felicitas 228
Kamel, Michel 413
Kampen 54
Kansas 372
Kaplan, Hlne 335
Kapoor, Raj 427
Karata, Dursun 406
Kashnor collection 104-106, 115
Kautsky, Karl 128, 131, 280
Keell, Tom 243, 247, 249
Keep, John 345
Kenya 438
Kerch 339
Kern, H. 299-300
Kernkamp, G.W. 67
Kessler, Gijs 20, 75, 465
Ketelaar, F.C.J. (Eric) 16, 19, 37, 41-43, 45,
48, 53, 362, 465
Keyser, Piet de 212
Khlevniuk, Oleg V. 343-344, 377-379
Khodorkovsky, Mikhail 347
Khrushchev, Nikita 344, 379
Khuluflu, Vali 396
Kieft, Wilhelmina Gerarda Maria 25-26
King, Charles 105-107
Kingsley, Charles 108, 466
Kivilcimli, Hikmet 401
Kivit, W.M.G. 56
Klein, Justin 41, 145
Klein, P.W. 59, 68, 460
Kleinhoonte, Lien 150
Klein-Meijer, M.A.V. 59, 68, 460
Klevan, David 325
Kloek, Els 144
Kloosterman, Elly 26
Kloosterman, Jaap passim
Kloosterman, Wilhelmus Johannes 26
Knegtmans, Peter Jan 59, 85, 91
i nde x
Knightley, Phillip 111

Knijff, Rob 344
Knowles, Rob 324
Kokurin, A. 337
Kolasa, Ingo 368
Kolff, Frans van der 292
Kolkata 430
Kollewijn, R.A. 281
Kolpinski, Nikita 322
Kolyma 345
Kool, Ed 405
Kool, Frits 252-253
Kosheleva, L. 379
Kosminsky, Evgenij Alekseevich 133
Kossuth, Lajos 165
Koster, Bep 60
Kozlov, Vladimir P. 331, 352-354, 356357, 359-365, 367-368, 372-373, 375
Kraats, Ren van de 36, 253, 454-456
Kramers, H.A. 59, 68
Kramers, Martina 277, 279-282
Krasnoiarsk 345
Kraus, Werner 226
Kress collection 101
Kretzschmar, R. 45
Kronstadt 241, 243, 458
Kruimel, C.J. 56, 62
Kruimel-Posthumus, Theodora
Wilhelmina 56, 62, 64
Krul, Wessel E. 67, 70
Kudriavtsev, Vladimir 343
Kuenen, Suzanna Maria 78, 82
Kuster, C.M. 91
Kuzmin, Evgenii 353, 358
Kvashonkin, A.V. 379
LOise 273
La Chaux-de-Fonds 195, 197
Lafargue, Paul 174, 264
Lambert, Marc 424
Lambiotte, Auguste 174, 181, 183
Lambiotte-Demeulemeester, Auguste &
Rose 183
Lamboo, Fons 423-424
Landauer, Gustav 164
Lange, Allert de 94
|479
Langkau, Gtz 461

Laplanche, Jean 254
Laren 65
Lasalle, Ferdinand 165
Laski, Harold Joseph 134-135, 137-138
Latacunga 449
Latour, Bruno 14
Lausanne 58, 192
Lavrov, Petr 310-311
Lavrov-Goc library 311
Leavitt, Arthur H. 41
Lecocq, Tyl 183
Lecocq, Yves 173, 175, 178-181, 183
Lecocq-de Man, Elise 174-176, 180,
182-183
Lee, Andrew H. 20, 466
Lee, Henry W. 121-124, 198
Leemans, Emiel 280
Leeuw, Aart van der 57
Leeuw, J.R. (Rein) van der 24, 227, 253
Leeuwarden 54
Lefort, Claude 254
Lefortovo 345
Lefranc, Georges 178-179
Lefranais, Gustave 186, 192
Legne, Susan 284, 287, 289-290
Lehning, Arthur Mller 28, 32-36, 58,
160, 167, 209, 214, 241-242, 246-247,
250, 321, 456-457
Lehnus, Donald J. 210
Lehr, Julius 165
Leibovici, Grard 36
Leiden 24, 35, 41, 57, 59-60, 63-64, 66-71,
75-78, 80-82, 91-92, 294, 304, 348, 401,
423-424, 464-468
Leier, Mark 324
Leipzig 106, 171, 179-180
Lejkina-Svirskaja, V.R. 314
Lem, Anton van der 67, 69-70
Lenin, Vladimir / Leninism passim
Leningrad 342, 358, 367, 372
Lennep, David Jacob van 293
Lenz, Wilhelm 360
Leopold i, emperor 103
480
Leopold iii, king of Belgium 171, 176,

181-183
Leroux, Achille 266
Leroux, Pierre 266
Levada Center 351
Levante, the 200
Lewis, Alison 45
Leys, Simon (ps) 457
Li Lu 424
Li Peng 419
Liamin, Iurii 362-363
Liebknecht, Karl 127-128, 171
Lieme, Nehemia de 54, 146, 215
Ligt, Bart de 32
Likhachev, Dmitrii 353
Linden, Frnk van der 424
Linden, Marcel van der 13, 20, 22, 40,
235-236, 254-256, 301, 340, 426, 454,
462, 466
Linders, Anneke 155
Lindner, Rainer 357
Links, Petra 41, 45
Linschoten, Jan Huygen van 297,
299-300
Little, Malcolm 199
Llallagua 445
Lloyd, Sarah 318
Locher, G.W. 71
Loehr, August von 76, 80
Lofstrom, William 445
Loghem, J.J. van 57
Lokteva, O. 331
Long Bow Group 424
Loon, Dorothea Maria van 56, 69
Louis Napoleon, king of Holland 49, 293
Louis xiv, king of France 103-106
Louis-Napolon Bonaparte 266
Lovell, Phyllis 145
Lubetzky, Seymour 211-212, 219-220
Lubianka 345
Lucassen, Jan 11-13, 22, 40, 56, 96, 146,
292, 295-296, 301, 304, 322, 340, 454,
462, 466
Lucassen, Leo 13, 40, 301, 340, 462
Luhrs, Hans 22
Lusenet, Yola de 322

Lust, Jacques 173
Lthi, Lorenz M. 428
Lux, Kthe 165
Luxemburg, Rosa 241, 244, 457
Lyotard, Jean-Franois 255
Maassen, Theo 255-256, 258
Mabel (ps) 200
Macdonald, James Ramsay 135
MacFarquhar, Roderick 427-428
Macneil, Heather 46
Madrid 200, 203, 447-448
Magadan 345
Mahon, John Lincoln 121-122
Mai Jiesi 423
Maitron, Jean 188
Majskij, Ivan 139
Maksimova, Ella 357-358
Malacca 448
Malandrino, Corrado 257
Malatesta, Errico 243
Malato, Charles 203
Malon, B. 175
Malthus, Thomas 280
Mamadov, Hussein 396
Man, Elise de 175-176, 181-183
Man, Hendrik de 19, 170-184
Man, Jan de 173, 175-176, 179-180, 182
Man, Piet de 176
Man, Rik de 170
Man, Yvonne de 170
Manasse, Peter 144
Ma I Miravet, Teresa 203
Man-Flechtheim, mrs. de 176
Mann, Tom 117, 120-121, 126
Mannheim 229
Manno Tolu, R. 437
Manolo (Restaurant) 11, 348
Manus Rosa 142-144, 146-150, 152-154
Mao Zedong 30, 418, 422, 455-457
Marat, Jean Paul 167
Marburg 33
Marin, Eugne Gaspard 280
Marinus, Coen 20, 22, 37, 231, 446
Marryat, Frederick 63
i nde x
Marseille 190, 273, 410

Marshall Plan 333
Marsman, Hendrik 32
Martin, David 105
Martin, Dr. David 182
Martin, Henry 105, 107
Martin, Joseph 103
Martnez, Marn Civera 201
Martnez, Jos (see Guerricabeitia)
Martov, Julij 33
Marx (- Aveling), Eleonor 118
Marx, Karl / Marxism passim
Maryland 103
Mascaux, Fernand 279
Masereel, Frans 181
Maslova, Natalia 371, 373
Mayer, Paul 222
Maynes, Mary Jo 320
McCants, Anne 320
McCarty, Willard 325
McKemmish, Sue 42-43, 45, 53
Mechelen 280
Medina del Campo 297
Mees, R. 160
Meij, Henritte van der 155
Meijboom, Frederika 155
Meijer, Roel 20, 466
Meilink-Roelofsz, M.A.P. 51
Melis, Franois 224
Mellink, Albert 70, 85
Memory Project 14, 310, 312
Mendoza Loza, Gunnar 21, 442-452
Mendoza, Jaime 455
Mendoza, Jess 443
Menger von Wolfensgrn, Anton 173
Mensinga, Dr. 279
Mentzel, Vincent 424
Mercado, Melchor Mara 450-451
Mertens, Ineke 28, 425, 458
Mesdag, G. 74, 79
Methuen, Paul 106
Metzner & Fils, Paul 197
Meulenkamp, Jaap 257
Mevis, Annette 145-146, 154, 466
Mexico 205, 297, 427, 449
|48 1
Meyer, Ruth 228

Michel, Louis 186
Michelet, Jules 53, 165, 265, 267
Middelburg 51
Mikhaylovsky, Nikolay 314
Miles, James 422, 424
Milikowski, Herman 94
Mill, John Stuart 295
Miller, Carol 146
Milligan, Jennifer 46
Milner, James 105
Minassian, Taline Ter 409
Minnesota 101
Mironenko, Sergej 335
Misque 449
Mitzman, Lee 22, 252
Mitzman, Phyllis 22
Moer, Anke van der 322
Mokyr, Joel 296
Molhuysen, P.C. 68, 162
Molotov, Vyacheslav M. 289, 379
Moluccas 449
Moncada, Augusto de 200
Mondriaan, Piet 32
Montal 254
Monthus, Gaston 274
Montsan, Blanca 200
Montseny I Carret, Joan 200, 203
Montseny I Ma, Federica, 199, 203206, 246, 250, 466
Morat / Mrten 174-175, 179-181
Moree, Perry 320
Moretti, M. 437
Morocco 428
Morrin, Joop 284-285
Morris, William 121, 131
Morus, Thomas 126
Moscow passim
Mosolov, Vladimir 16, 109, 139, 322
Moss, Georges 272
Moth, Daniel 255
Motteler, Julius 226
Moura, Maria Lacerda de 203
Mubarak, Hosni 411, 415
482
Muijzenberg-Willemse, Brecht van den

155
Mul, Alice 252
Mulder, Ditty 208
Mller, Reinhard 109
Muller, S. 41-49
Multatuli 164
Munich 227-228, 235
Mnnich, Monika 217
Munro, Robin 423
Murcia 448
Murray 103
Mrten (see Morat)
Mussolini, Benito 174, 180, 183
Naber, J.C. 59, 68
Naber, Johanna W.A. 142-143, 146-147
Nacquet, Alfred 269-270, 272, 275
Nag, Nepal 426-433
Nag, Nibedita 426-427, 430
Nanjing 423
Naples 448
Naquet, Alfred 269-272, 275
Narimanov, Nariman 388
Narinsky, Mikhail 398
Nau, Alfred 223
Nederveen Meerkerk, Elise van 19, 22,
292, 466
Neef, Sonja 43
Nehru, Jawaharlal 426
Nekrasov, Sergei Mikhaylovich (ps) 313
Nesmith, Tom 42, 46, 48, 55
Netherlands East Indies 58, 71
Netherlands, the (Dutch Republic;
Holland) passim
Nettlau, Max 18, 32-33, 35, 160-161, 164,
202-203, 205-206, 209, 213-214, 241,
321, 457-458
Neuchtel 195
Neuvil 256
New Jersey 205
Newton, Isaac 103
Niazi, A.A.K. 432
Nikolaevsky, Boris 110, 358, 362
Niming, Frank 422
Nobs, Ernst 181
Noordegraaf, Leo 37, 159

Noordwijk aan Zee 59-61, 64, 91
Noordwijkerhout 59
Nora, Pierre 436
Norilsk 345
Novichenko, Irina 19, 110, 336, 340, 462,
466
Novokhatskyi, Konstantin 365
Novosibirsk 345-346
Nueva Espaa 149
Numeiri, Jafaar 415
Nystrm, Anton 279-280, 282
Occasio project 231
Odessa 243
Oegstgeest 60
Offerhaus, M.C. 74, 79
Ogden, Suzanne 424
Okhotin, Nikita 337, 342, 344
Oksenberg, Michel 424
Olafson, Per (ps.) 90
Olaya, Francisco 250
Oort, J.H. 59, 68
Oporto, Luis 444-445
Oprecht, Hans 181
Orelli, Valrie von 162, 183
Osborne, Thomas 52
Oswald, Eugen 165
Otavalo 449
Ottawa 180
Otter, P.W.J. den 55
Ottoman Empire 296, 386, 394, 400-401
Oven, Ro van 148
Overdiep, G.S. 299
Overijssel 67
Owen, Robert 273
Oxford 34, 88, 124, 133, 138, 198, 209
zdoan, Zulfikar 20, 405, 467
Palmer, Madge 140
Panama 272, 449
Panizzi, Antonio 209-212, 219-220
Pannekoek, Anton 252-262, 456
Paris passim
Parvus, Alexander 111
Pasternak, Boris 335
Patio Mining Enterprise 445
i nde x
Pau, Jules 189

Pavlova, Tatiana 335
Pearce-Moses, Richard 53
Peet, Jan 292
Pelt, W.F.S. 289
Penner, Dann R. 378
Pre-Lachaise 196
Pret, Benjamin 30, 455
Pern, Juan 448
Perrault, Gilles 408
Perrier, Jules 197
Persia 391, 448
Perth 46
Peru 297, 451, 455
Peter the Great 103
Petrograd 243
Petrov, Nikita 331, 337, 347
Phelan, John L. 447-448
Philby, Kim 111
Philip v, 104
Philips Company 161, 292
Picquart, Colonel 165
Pieke, Frank 421-424
Pit, Frans 63
Piggott, Michael 45-47
Pikhoia, Rudolf G. 358-360, 367, 373
Pinkus, Theo 236
Place, Francis 273
Plantin, Christophe 75
Plechanov, Georgii V. 130, 310
Ploeg-Ploeg, Anna Catharina 155
Poale Zion 394
Poelman, H.A. 74, 79
Polak, Henri 159
Polak, Wim 36-37
Poland 180, 365, 428
Poliakov, Iu.A. 380
Polian, Pavel 337-378
Poliana, Yasnaia 341
Polling, Wim 64
Pomeranz, Kenneth 383
Pomeranz, William E. 364
Pomian, Krysztof 437
Pons, Silvio 334
Poppe, Stan 28, 256
|48 3
Porter, David 244

Portugal 104, 106-107, 448, 454, 467
Posner, Ernst 43, 52
Postgate, Raymond William 133-135
Posthumus sr, N.W. 57
Posthumus, Claire 19, 33, 56-65
Posthumus, Jan Huibert 56, 62, 64-65,
92
Posthumus, Johanna Arina Hubertha
(Annie) 56-57, 62-63
Posthumus, Nicolaas W. passim
Posthumus, Rob 62, 65
Posthumus, Theodora 56, 62, 64
Potos mines 445-449
Potresov, Aleksandr 310
Potter, A. de 175
Pouget, mile 164
Poutre, Frans la 29
Powicke, Frederick Maurice 138
Pozzoli, Claudio 245-246, 250, 456
Prak, Maarten 37, 48, 52, 208
Presser, Jacques 57
Price, Jacob M. 105
Primo de Rivera, Miguel 200
Princeton 34
Prinzing, Dr. 214
Procacci, Giuliano 334
Prokopenko, Anatolii 357-358
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 265, 270
Providence 447
Prussia 209-210, 212-213, 215-218
Puerto Viejo 449
Pushkareva, Irina M. 336
Pushkin, A. 335
Put, Eddy 41
Quast, Jenneke 20, 22, 292, 305, 467
Quelch, Tom 117
Quintana, Antonio Gonzlez 45
Quito 449
Raben, R. 51
Ragazzini, D. 439
Rahman, Sheikh Mujibur 431
Rambaud, wrestler 195
Randwijk, H.M. van 96
Ravandi-Fadai, Svetlana 398
484
Rav, H. 269
Ravensbrck 144
Ray, Khoka 428
Reclus, Elise 264, 267, 270, 272
Reclus, Maurice 267
Reddies, Bernd 232
Reed, Barbara 45
Renau, Josep 201
Renselaar, Herman van 401
Repulo, Lada V. 352-353, 359, 363, 369
Resnais, Alain 438
Reve, Karel van het 64
Rhoads, J.B. 354
Riethof, H. 175
Rinschen, Angela 228-229
Riobamba 449
Ritter Jr, P.H. 87
Rittersporn, G.T. 343
Rjazanov, David Borisovich 7, 19, 108111, 113-115, 117, 121-122, 125, 127-128,
135, 137-139, 141, 340, 462
Robertson, D.H. 111
Robin, Paul 272-275, 279, 281
Rocker, Fermin 242
Rocker, Rudolf 242-245
Rodenburg, Kees 20, 454, 467
Rodrigo, Florrie (= Flora Rodrigues) 86,
91, 96
Rogier, Jan 28, 35, 214, 241, 457
Roginskii, Arseniy 337
Rojahn, Jrgen 398, 425
Rokitjanskij, Jakov 109
Roland Holst, Henriette (see also Holst,
H.R.) 69, 159
Roland Holst, Richard 70
Roland, Irma 266
Roland, Jean-Franois 266
Roland, Marie 266
Roland, Mose 266
Roland, Pauline 265-266
Rling, H.Q. 281
Romains, Jules 180, 436
Romania 427
Rome 180, 199, 408, 410, 412-413, 448
Romein, Jan 69-72, 78, 82, 85, 89, 93, 95
Romein, Jan-Erik 155

Romein-Verschoor, Annie 69, 155
Ronsin, Francis 20, 276, 467
Rsch, Hermann 226
Rosdolsky, Roman 110
Rose, Gabriele 229
Rosefielde, Steven 343
Rosenberg, Alfred 88
Rosenberg, William 55, 144
Rosenthal, Joseph 409
Rosiello, I. 437
Rosowska, Ewa 365
Rssler, Mechtild 239
Rostov 242
Roth, Karl-Heinz 19, 88, 235-236, 238,
467
Rothstein, A.F. 136
Rotterdam 32-33, 51, 58, 61, 67, 159-161,
164, 299, 464-465
Roussel, Nelly 279
Rubakin, Nikolai A. 313
Rubel, Maximilien 259, 261
Ruchon, Daniel-Franois 196
Rudelson, K.I. 355
Ruedo Ibrico 247-248
Russia passim
Rustamova-Towhidi, Solmaz 20, 389,
398, 467
Rter, Adolf J.C. 10, 24, 33, 65, 71-72, 77,
81, 85, 151, 153, 167, 222
Rutgers, Jan 277-279, 281-282
Rutgers-Hoitsema, Marie 277-278
Rykov, Aleksej 130
Ryner, Han 203
Sadat, Anwar 411, 413
Sadiq Sad, Ahmad 411
Saheb, Rohman 430
Saich, Tony 21, 423-425, 467
Saint-Hilaire, Agla 265
Saint-Simonians 265-266, 270
Saiz, Mara Dolores 200
Salamanca 297
Saleeby, C.W. 279
San Marino 428
i nde x
Sanders, Huub 11, 19, 22, 24, 70, 106,

348, 454, 468
Santa Cruz 449
Santen, Joop van 92
Santen-Moes, Johanna Hermine (Joop)
van 92
Santilln, Diego Abad de 205
Santing, Catrien 70
Santos Vargas, Jos 449
Sapelli, Giulio 332
Sapir, Boris 89, 311
Saramago, Jos 437
Saratov 109
Sarel 254
Sarton, G. & M. 181
Saur, K.G. 219, 436
Savoy 104
Scandinavia 56, 179, 226
Schama, Simon 48
Scheibert, P. 33
Schendel, Willem van 21, 431-432, 468
Scheveningen 144
Schilthuis, U.G. 74, 79
Schleiermacher, Sabine 239
Schlesinger, A. 175
Schlesinger, M. 175
Schmook, Ger 172-173, 176
Scholten, J.E. 74, 79
Schlvinck, Auguste 67
Schoon, Maaike 60
Schorer, Mary Vincentia 67
Schouten, Peter 220
Schreuder-Feith, Fernanda 150
Schrevel, Margreet 19, 284-287
Schulz, Alfred 110
Schumacher, Hans 232
Schurz, Carl 165
Schuster, Dieter 16
Schwimmer, Rosika 154, 278-279, 282
Schwimmer-Lloyd collection 282
Scott, James C. 44
Scotland 118, 120
Seattle 179
Seed, Patricia 44
Seegers, J.J. 19, 54, 468
|48 5
Segovia 448
Senegal 189, 438-439
Sengupto, Kolpotoru 430
Senn, A.E. 314
Sens 188
Sevastianov, G.N. 357
Seville 488
Shakespeare, William 158
Shanghai 423
Shanin, Teodor 384
Shapiro, Aleksandr 240-250, 458
Shapiro, Moses 242
Sharfenstein, Ricardo 200
Shaw, G.B. 158
Shen Tong 424
Sheremetevo 366
Shetter, William 49
Shillingsburg, Peter L. 325
Siberia 346
Sijes, B.A. 252-253
Sikkema, Ivo 22
Silier, Orhan 400
Simferopol 339
Simon, Henri 258
Simons, Ibi 61
Singh, Moni 427, 430-431
Sinha Kerkhoff, Kathinka 426
Six, Jan 72
Slauerhoff, Jan 32
Smirnov, Valerian 310
Smith (-Headingley), Adolphe 123-124
Smith, Adam 165
Smith, Frank (Francis Samuel) 120
Smith, Granville 124
Smith, Ian 100
Smith-Richardson Foundation 359
Sneevliet, Henk 253-254, 423
Snell, K.D.M. 320
Sneller, Z.W. 160
Snijder, Jan 57
Sobolev, Vladimir S. 352-353, 359
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. 345
Sombart, Werner 57
Soros Foundation 359, 363, 366, 370
Souchy, Augustin 245
486
South Africa 58, 118, 177, 232, 428

South Sea Company 105
Souvarine, Boris 110, 165
Spaak, Paul Henri 181
Spain passim
Spanger, Hans-Joachim 232
Spence, J.C. 272
Spijkerman, H. 51
St Gingolf 181
St Michielsgestel 67
St Petersburg 335-336, 339, 346-347,
353, 359, 361, 363-364, 366, 378,
385-386
Stachanov, S. 314
Stackelberg, Frdric 275
Stalin, Joseph / Stalinism passim
Star, Susan Leigh 44
Stauder, W. 297
Steedman, Carolyn 53
Steenhaut, Wouter 17, 19, 40, 172-173,
177, 180, 462, 468
Steenhoff, J.P. 93
Stein, Hans 110, 209
Stein, Leon 110
Steinberger, Sarolta (Charlotte) 279
Sternberg, Benno 254
Stevens, Harry C. 19, 108-141
Stirner, Max 165
Stcker, Hlne 279, 282
Stockholm 244, 248, 279
Stora, Benjamin 409
Straalen, Wil(helmina) van 62, 65
Strachey, Evelyn John St. Loe 136
Stritt, Marie 279
Stutje, Jan Willem 158-159, 288
Su Shaozhi 422
Sucre (Bolivia) 442-443, 445, 449-451
Sucre, Marechal Antonio Jos de
450-451
Sudan 20, 409, 411-415, 417, 427, 438
Slker, Kemal 401
Sullerzhickij 317
Sullivan, Lawrence R. 424
Sutherland, William 296
Suyling, Mr 69
Suys, Jef 72
Suys-Reitsma, S.J. 72
Svetkova, I. 110, 340
Switserland 58, 61, 172-174, 177, 179-181,
183, 191-194, 196, 206, 226, 228, 264,
273, 279-280, 335
Sykes, A.H. 243
Syrup, Peter 61
Taha, Mahmud 415
Taithe, Bertrand 324
Talibli, Biukaga 396
Tang, Dirk J. 320
Tanselle, G. Thomas 325
Tanzania 231
Tarama Bombn 449
Tashin, Hudi 424
Tavera, Susanna 200
Tawney, Richard Henry 135-138
Taylor Collection 132
Teding van Berkhout, J.P.E. 73
Teding van Berkhout, Nicolaas Govert
73
Temperley, Harold William Vazeille
136-138
Tenhaeff, N.B. 88-89
Tern, Judith 442
Terpstra, H. 299-300
Terranate 448
The Hague 25, 51-52, 56-57, 59, 62-63,
84, 87-88, 92, 94-95, 97, 144, 159-160,
163, 215, 277-278, 280, 282, 286, 294,
300, 446, 464-465
Theissen, J.S. 71
Thessalonica 362
Thiel, F.J. van 62
Thijssen de Graaf, E. 34
Thijssen, Peter 61
Thomas, Edith 265
Thomassen, Theo H.P.M. 43, 49, 51, 53
Thorez, Maurice 427
Thorpe, Wayne 250
Tiananmen Square 21, 418-419, 424
Tichelman, Fritjof 37-38, 302, 460
Tijn, Theo van 37
Tilly, Charles 332
i nde x
Tixomirov, B.N. 396

Toaha, Mohammad 431
Toledo 448
Tollebeek, Jo 54, 67
Tollmien, Cordula 239
Tolstoy, Leo/Lev Nikolaevi 247, 312314, 316-317, 341
Tolstoyan Whiteway Colony 247
Tomilina, N.G. 335
Tonra, J. 325
Toonder, Marten 34
Toriano, Nathaniel 105
Toulouse 204, 457
Toussaint, Franois Vincent 436
Trask Collection 131-132
Trevelyan, George Macaulay 136-137
Treydte, Klaus-Peter 232
Trier 226
Trotsky, Leon 27-28, 30, 37, 229, 332, 396
Trusov, A.I. 343
Tsaplin, V.V. 354
Tsvetkova, Irina 110
Tucumn 449
Tuindorp 26
Tunisia 409
Tunkina, Irina V. 352-353, 359
Turkey 20, 232, 387-388, 393-394, 398,
400-406, 448, 467
Turlach, Manfred 225
Tuscany 448
Udias, Augustin 297
Ukkel 177
Ulmen, G.L. 253
Umar, Badruddin 428, 430-431
Unca 445
Unger, Jonathan 423
United Kingdom 108, 110-111, 120, 125,
141
Upward, Frank 42, 45
Urales, Frederico 200, 203, 205
USA 99, 154
Utrecht 24-30, 37, 71, 77, 81, 87, 100, 103104, 294-295, 300, 305, 455, 464-466
Valencia 200, 448
Valle, Adrin del 203
|48 7
Valls, Jules 188

Van Dyck, Leen 177
Vancoppenolle, Chantal 41
Vandervelde, Emile 175, 177
Vanhoutte, Edward 325
Vanschoenbeek, Guy 172
Vasilevskoe 426
Vaucluse 271
Vzquez, Mariano Rodrguez 206
Veen, Sytze van der 95
Velde, Henk te 48
Velde, Jan van der 63
Veldeken, Heynryck van 69
Venice 448
Venturi, Anton(ello) 331
Vermeer, Theo 41, 145
Verona, Eva 212, 216
Verrijn Stuart, C.A. 67, 74, 79
Versailles 187, 190-191
Vershbow, Ben 325
Versigny 270
Veselaia, Zaiara 349
Veyron, Franck 19, 468
Vienna 69, 76, 137, 179
Vietnam 28-29, 232, 427
Viktorovich, Adoratskij Vladimir 141
Vilenskii, Semn Samuilovich 345,
348-349
Villon, Claude 276
Vinnai, Volker 232
Virginia 103
Vitali, Stefano 437, 439
Vizcaya 448
Vlies, Anke van der 159
Vlot, A. 56
Voerman, Gerrit 28, 289
Voestermans, Paul 29
Volga Region 113
Volkswagenwerk Foundation 223-224
Vollgraf, Karl-Erich 110, 224
Vollmar, G. von 175
Volodikhin, Dmitrii 365
Voskuilen-Diaz, E.M. (see Diaz,
Elizabeth) 60
Voth, Hans-Joachim 320
488
Vree, Wilbert van 48-49

Vries, Jan de 48, 320
Vuillaume, Maxime 191-192, 196
Vuilleumier, Marc 192, 197
Wackie Eijsten, Maria Petronella
Margaretha 78
Wadman, Rob 22
Wagenaar, Els 20, 468
Wallace, V. 325
Waller, Augustus D. 243
Walne, P. 436
Wals, Henk 22, 24, 38, 293, 305, 459,
468
Ward, Dana 324
Warmenhoven, Christine 34
Washington 28, 180, 359, 364-365, 447
Wassenaar 61-64, 155
Wayland Barber, Elizabeth 293
Weber, Hermann 229
Weimar Republic 224, 229, 468
Weissman, Friedrich 94
Welcker, Johanna M. (Anneke) 76, 175,
253
Werkman, H.N. 98
Wernitznig, Dagmar 154
Wess, William 248
Westbury 119
Westerman, J.C. 91
Wexler, Alice 244
Wheatcroft, Stephen G. 344, 379
Whistler, James McNeill 85
Whitworth 103
Wiardi Beckman, Herman Bernard 72,
77-78, 81-82
Wibaut, Florentinus (Floor) Marinus
72-73, 159
Wibaut-Berdenis van Berlekom,
Mathilde 155
Wibaut-van Gaskel, A.J.C. 155
Wichmann, Clara 155
Wichman(n), Erich 32, 86
Wicksell, Knut 279-281
Wieder, Frederik C. 63-64
Wiegand, Peter 180
Wieringa, Saskia E. 41
Wieringa, W.J. 459

Wiessing, H.P.L. 57
Wieviorka, Annette 438
Wigboldus, Marianne 412
Wijn, Hendrik van 53
Wijne, J.S. 72
Wille, Andreas 232
Wilton, J.H. 160
Wimmer, Walter 226, 228
Winkel, Lydia 92
Winkler, Irwin 438
Withuis, Jolande 155
Wolfe, Lilian 243, 247-248
Wolff, Jaap 284-285, 290
Wolff, Joop 290
Wolff, P. de 459
Woolgar, Steve 14
Woude, Ad van der 48
Woudstra, Tjeerd 256
X, Malcolm 199
Yad Vashem 60, 91
Yakan, Fathi 416
Yale 103, 356, 363, 365
Yasnaia Poliana 341
Yemen 414
Yugoslavia 289, 305, 334
Yusuf, Abu Sayf 413
Zabavskii, Vladimir G 359, 363.
Zagoria, Donald S. 427-428
Zamalek 410
Zambia 438
Zanden, Jan Luiten van 48, 52, 208, 305
Zasuli, Vera 311
Zeeland 58
Zemskov, V.N. 343-344
Zhao Ziyang 420
Zhitomirskaia, Sara V. 353-354
Zhook, W.P. 312
Zimmerman, Hugo 94-95
Zimmermann, Rdiger 16, 19, 224-228,
468
Zinoviev, Grigory 386
Ziska, Horst 225, 227, 230
Zola, mile 187
Zuidervaart, H.J. 68, 91
i nde x
uk, Vasily Pavlovi 312

Zundert, Joris van 318
Zur Mhlen, Patrik von 232
Zrcher, Erik-Jan 22, 24, 400-402, 406
Zuren, Ian van 75
Zurndorfer, Harriet T. 63
|48 9
Cover illustration: Students in the IISH Reading Room, 1999.

Photograph by Akiko Tobu, collection IISH
Illustration pages 4 and 5: Jaap Kloosterman at work, 1999.
Photograph by Akiko Tobu, collection IISH
Cover design and lay-out: Ruparo (Ivo Sikkema)
Amsterdam University Press English-language titles
are distributed in the US and Canada by
the University of Chicago Press.
ISBN
978 90 8964 688 0
e-ISBN 978 90 4852 385 6 (pdf)
NUR 696
Creative Commons License CC BY NC ND

(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0)
International Institute of Social History /
Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2014
Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, any part of this book may be reproduced, stored in
or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form
or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise).
Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all
copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless,
whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to
contact the publisher.

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Social History is one of the world's leading research

institutes on social history, holding one of the richest

Established in 1935, the International Institute of

ISBN 978 90 8964 688 0

Edited by Aad Blok, Jan Lucassen and Huub Sanders

Amsterdam university press

Social History Sources, Knowledge and Research

How to Qualify for the Directorate of the iish?

part i the emergence of social history collections

Prolegomena to a Social History of Dutch Archives

The founder of the iish, as Experienced by his Daughter

Looking for Traces of Huizinga

Working for the Institute

The Persistent Life of The British Merchant

Harry Stevens, the British Correspondent of David Rjazanovs Institute

The Importance of Friendship

part ii the european collections of the iish:

The Archives of Hendrik de Man

Trying to find a Masked Man

La Rosa de Foc 198

The Key to the Librarys Collection

From Ice Age to Global Warming

Does a History Research Institute Need its Own Archive?

A Manuscript Found at the Institute

Did Castoriadis Suppress a Letter from Pannekoek?

II.10 Matriarchy and Socialism

II.12 Secret Suitcases

II.13 Long live the Library!

II.14 The iish as a Trailblazer in Technology in the 1990s

part iii the iish and eastern europe

III.2 Bakunin and Bacon Cake

III.3 The Activities in Moscow after 1991 and Memorial

III.4 Rescue Efforts in Post-Soviet Moscow

III.5 Archival Revolution and Intellectual Access in Russia

III.7 The Making of Collective Memory

part iv the iisg goes global

The long Journey of the dhkp Archive

The Egyptian and Sudanese Communist Collections

Collecting under Uncertainty

From Dhaka with Love

The Role of Archives and Archivists in the Contemporary Age

Notes on the Contributors

Social History Sources

The International Institute of Social History (iish) in Amsterdam has a

In their introduction (Working for Labour) to Rebels with a Cause Jaap

Jaap Kloosterman, Unwritten autobiography: labor history libraries before World

Coping with Bias

Jaap shares some impressions of the ialhi in Jaap Kloosterman, In Bebels

First, in the collectioning policies, N.W. Posthumus set the standard. As a

course of collecting that Jaap once captured in an iish brochure as Go East,

Of course, some biographical and bibliographical notes on Jaaps career had to be

How to Qualify for

Course 1: The Classics with a Minor in Sports

(2), and of course religious education (2), as he attended a Roman-Catholic

Still, Jaaps parental home was not traditionally academic: grandfather

Course 2: Journalism with a Minor in Politics

Compared to Trophonios, Poly-rood was very amateurish.17 Most contributions,

Course 3: History with a Minor in Anarchism

D.M., Een vriendelijke goedlachse jongen.

On Posthumus wide range of interests as a collector, including anarchism, before

43 Hunink, De papieren van de revolutie, p. 166.

hij daartoe de relatie met de uitgever (de firma Brill in Leiden),

Altena, Arthur Lehning, p. 147.

From Dhaka with Love

The Role of Archives and Archivists in the Contemporary Age

Notes on the Contributors