The Arsenyevs Nobles — Employees of the Library of the State Rumyantsev Museum in the Post-Revolutionary Years

Abstract

Basing on the new sources from the Archives of the Russian State Library (RSL), the author reconstructed the insufficiently yet studied and comprehended mechanism of adaptation of Russian nobles to Soviet reality, which is one of the main problems of the social history of the early post-revolutionary years. For the first time in historiography, the paper analyses the work of four representatives of the Arsenyevs family (diplomat, former Russian ambassador to Norway Sergey Vasilyevich, genealogist and archaeographer Vasily Sergeevich, literary critic Sergey Ivanovich and his wife Elizabeth Nikolaevna) in the Library of the State Rumyantsev Museum (since February 6, 1925 — V.I. Lenin State Library of the USSR, nowadays — RSL) in late 1910s — early 1930s. The article introduces into scientific circulation the documents of personal files from the Archives of the RSL. The author shows how nepotism and mutual assistance of members of the noble family helped to overcome the consequences of official sociocide.Two of the Arsenievs got the job at the Library of the State Rumyantsev Museum almost simultaneously — in the spring of 1919: difficult material conditions forced representatives of the former elite to look for new means of livelihood. In library work, the experience of research in the humanities and knowledge of foreign languages were in demand, but successful and long-term activities of family members in the Library were hindered by the repressions carried out after 1917 on social grounds.Personal files from the Archives of the RSL make it possible to reconstruct the process of the Arsenievsʼ employment in the Library and the details of their work activities, to find out the degree of reliability and novelty of the information of the sources introduced into scientific circulation. The author shows that an important aspect of the problem is the analysis of the degree of distortion in the documents of biographical information necessary for the identity of candidates to be acceptable to the Soviet institution.The official persecution of the nobility led to the appearance in the Library of the State Rumyantsev Museum (later — V.I. Lenin State Library of the USSR) of new employees with extensive knowledge in various humanities, who spoke languages and had organizational skills. They contributed to the development of the State Rumyantsev Museum and later V.I. Lenin State Library of the USSR as a major scientific centre.