Thursday May 7, Friday May 8 - Moscow

Thursday, May 7 and Friday, May 8. I have a very nice apartment made available to me for the remainder of my stay in Moscow. At the office, among other things I help open the day's mail. This is quite interesting--an astonishing number of subscription items arrive with enclosed letters with proposals of all kinds. A publisher of one newspaper simply writes saying that she needs money--therefore, if we have any extra, we should send it as soon as possible.

We visit the offices of SovAm teleport to straighten out some changes that have been made in the protocols for logging onto email. Here I again see a demonstration of the kind of security that is widespread in the former Soviet Union--we must call in advance the office we wish to visit in advance, so that our names will be given to a militiaman at the building's entrance. In this case, he is a very large militiaman, so I am glad we meet with his approval.

Otherwise I meet with many different people who come by the office, including Boris Belinkin of Memorial and Olga Krasnikova, who is the acquisitions librarian for BEN. Dr. Levner and I also visit Knizhnyi mir, where there are even fewer books for sale than during Levner's last visit only two months ago. We meet Olga Pokhlomkina, who is the person at the store who used to manage the sales of books from the republics of the FSU. She admits that there is virtually no activity now in this area.

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The availability of SovAm Teleport to provide email access for the Library of Congress operation/office in Moscow was important as a way of making regular acquisitions and other activities possible - both in the sense of being economical and efficient. I think for the first few years of the 1990s, it was a little complicated to use, but it was far better than sending international faxes, which was the only real alternative. The email access was not available for some time anywhere other than the Moscow Office - we didn't have access to any email while traveling in the various countries, for example. It is hard to imagine now, but there was no dialup access to some server from which we might have telnet to our email services while we were traveling. At that time, the only way I could access my email was to be at work in Washington.