The Secrets of Nineteen Levels
In 2026, the RSL Department of Storage of Main Collections will celebrate its 100th anniversary. The country's primary library storage will turn exactly a century old. To mark this occasion, we are launching a series of stories about its history, its people, and its secrets.
Storage facility of the Russian State Library
Photo: Maria Govtvan, RSL
What is the Main Collection?
What does an average library user picture when they hear the word “storage”? Endless shelves, silence, and books. However, experts know that behind this word lies a vast space with its own rules, logistics, history, and people.
This space is the Main Collection of the Russian State Library. It occupies the 19 level building on Vozdvizhenka Street and, to a lesser extent, the storage facility in Khimki. Together, they function as a single, complex mechanism—host to processes that the reader never sees.
Photo: Maria Govtvan, RSL
Scales
The Department of Main Collection was established at the Lenin Library in 1926. At the time, it held several million publications—though the exact figure remains unknown. In those years, there was little opportunity for meticulous statistical work; the country was still in a period of recovery, and the priority was to rescue, preserve, and inventory the book collections. Part of the Pashkov House—specifically the old 1890s Reading Room from and the adjoining spaces—was converted into the new storage facility, which was originally intended to house 750,000 volumes.
Then began a period of movement and development that continues to this day. In 1928, construction started on a new building. By 1941, it stood in the centre of Moscow, housing books that immediately required protection from bombing and fire during the war. The most valuable portion of the collection was almost immediately moved farther afield, not returning until 1944. As the collection grew, it became increasingly stratified: maps, sheet music, dissertations, newspapers, and literature in Asian and African languages were gradually separated into specialised departments. The collection remained in constant flux, perpetually restructured to keep its enormous holdings manageable. In 2001, electronic ordering was gradually introduced, and in 2015, a new Telelift—spanning all floors and structures—began operation.
Photo: Maria Govtvan, RSL
Figures
A few figures help convey the scale: as of 2026, the entire Russian State Library collection numbers 50 million items. Of these, 14 million consist of dissertations, newspapers, specialised department holdings, subsidiary collections, and loan collections. The remaining 36 million items belong to the Main Collection.
This, in turn, is divided into two parts. Eleven million items are housed in Khimki, where readers can also request materials. The other 25 million—fully half of the Library’s entire collection—are concentrated in the famous main building on Vozdvizhenka.
Photo: Maria Govtvan, RSL
The building on Vozdvizhenka was designed on a grand scale: each floor is 103 meters long, 17 meters wide, and 5 meters high—enough space to accommodate two-tiered stacks. Custodians walk among them with carts, climb ladders and stepladders, search for and retrieve books from the upper shelves, check them, and return them.
If you mentally stretched out all the shelves of the Main Collection in a single line, it would be 300 kilometers long—three laps around the Moscow Ring Road.
To walk that line from start to finish would take 60 hours without sleep or rest.
To leaf through (not even read!) every book in the library would require several human lifetimes.
The main difference between 2026 and 1926 is the close attention to metrics. Today, we know how many readers request each book, where, and how often. Professionals maintain loan statistics, track the movement of copies, and record and correct order errors. However, one thing remains unchanged: behind each “storage item” a librarian sees a book that has already been handled, read, loved, and cherished. And the library’s primary concern is to preserve it for future readers.
Album: “A Chronicle of the Main Collection”
Photo: Maria Govtvan, RSL
A Handwritten History
The Main Collection holds not only books but also its own chronicle. In the 1970s, the storage department staff created a handwritten album, “A Chronicle of the Main Collection”, pasting in photographs and recording events and names.
Flipping through its pages, you see not only history but also faces. Here are portraits of the curators who oversaw the collection over the years. Here are photographs from community service days—staff with carts, stepladders, and in work lab coats. Photos of the conveyor belts that once transported books, representing the most advanced mechanization of the time. Here are veterans of the work, still remembered: some of today’s curators began their careers under their guidance. On separate pages are the mentors who passed on their experience to younger staff.
The album preserves more than just work. It also captures leisure: shared trips, hiking tours, and holidays. People did not simply work side by side—they shared a common life.
Today, these pages are not a museum exhibit but a living testament to an era, telling a story of continuity. Those who worked within these walls half a century ago passed on their craft to today’s curators, and those working now may, many years from now, find their way into someone else’s album.
Three Pillars: How the Work Is Organised
A collection of this scale cannot exist on its own. It is supported by three departments—three sectors—that manage the entire flow of books.
The Sector of Preservation extends the lifespan of books. It handles dust removal, climate control, damage prevention, and, in extreme cases, restoration. It also protects the collection through duplication, selecting documents for microfilming and scanning.
The Sector of Organisation processes new acquisitions. It accepts, describes, records, and directs them to the appropriate storage level. Here, librarians also resolve order errors and address the consequences of retroconversion—the transfer of catalogues from paper to electronic format.
The Sector of Research and Methodology is responsible for the collection’s discovery. Staff present at academic conferences, publish research in journals, organise exhibitions, and consult with colleagues from other Library departments. They work with Book Monuments and maintain provenance indices: using the seals, signatures, and bookplates recorded in these indices, they can reconstruct a book’s history—determining whose hands held it and where it came from.
The RSL Storage Facility and its Curators
The RSL storage facility is divided into sections, each with its own specialisation. The life of the books is maintained and supported by 150 curators, each responsible for their own section. Each has their own way of memorising books and their own relationship with the collection.
Levels 15 through 19 are occupied by the vast personal collections of Rumyantsev, Soldatyonkov, Rubakin, and others. These volumes have survived wars, relocations, and the turn of the century.
Levels 5 through 8 house the legal deposit copies sent by modern publishers—these are the ones most frequently ordered by readers. Here, the pace, rhythm, and challenges are different.
Curator Natalia Tumanova at work
Photo: Maria Govtvan, RSL
Levels 1 through 4, along with three additional levels in another building, house periodicals. The curators in this section can locate a fifty-year-old magazine issue in just minutes. Superior memory? That too—but the actual secret is that they know the principles and algorithms of fast searching, and they have studied their building as intimately as their own apartment.
Level 12 holds military literature, and level 14 contains collection groupings: calendars, postcards, booklets, and brochures. Finally, Level 9 is for Russian abroad literature. The previously restricted-access collection, now designated “For Official Use” (FOU) is also located there. Each section has its own workflow, its own tasks and challenges, and its own memorable books.
The main library collection in Khimki houses everything that could not fit in the main building: some foreign periodicals, books in European languages from the third quarter of the 20th century, and publications in the national languages of the former Soviet republics. It is a different space, with different principles and approaches, but the same attention to books and readers’ needs remains. Once a year, in autumn, the curators display their treasures at Biblioday in Khimki, and each time it turns out that even those who have worked at the Lenin Library for a long time are seeing some of the books for the first time.
Each of the 150 curators of the main library collection is more than just an “employee”: they know their area so well that they could find a book in the stacks even with their eyes closed
Curator Elena Medvedchenkova conducts a tour of the storage facility
Photo: Maria Govtvan, RSL
This was just the first glimpse from nineteen levels up. Throughout the year, we will be going lower and higher, opening doors to departments and telling the stories of the people who make every book you order travel from the depths of the collection to your hands.
In the next issues, you will learn:
How a book travels from your order to the delivery desk
What the three sectors – organisation, preservation, and methodology – are responsible for, and how they work
What is kept on the very top levels
What is stored in Khimki, on the “military” level, in periodicals, in the Russian abroad collection – and why the library needs microfilms
And much more.
Stay tuned!
This material was prepared by
Natalia Kopylova,
Head Curator of the RSL Department Main Collections,
and Maria Govtvan, RSL Photo Editor
Photo: Maria Govtvan, RSL