26
PARTISAN REVIEW
The upper grade of readers inhabits a different realm still , ac–
cess to "restricted reading rooms ,"
spetskhran
in Russian or "spets" for
short. Spets house the books defined as anti-Soviet and that require
of their readers a greater political maturity . By definition, all of these
should have been published after 1917, but there are also prerevolu–
tionary works of authors who managed to write an anti-Soviet some–
thing even before the revolution. The majority on'\'estern editions,
except for technical and pure science texts, are found in the
spetskhran.
To gain entrance into the spets one first obtains a supporting
letter from a reputable research institute or university, signed by its
troika of Director, Party Secretary, and the Chairman of the Trade–
Union Committee. But the decisive information characterizing the
candidate's political maturity arrives through the invisible network
that links the spets to the departments responsible for state security
in every respectable organization. The supporting letter should con–
tain the subject of the proposed research, lest the spets librarian
hand out books on unrelated topics. Hence , those coveting the spets
try to formulate their topics in the vaguest of terms. Almost everyone
admitted to the spets examines all-encompassing topics , such as
"culture and personality," "criticism of bourgeois ideology ," and the
like .
The
spetskhran
is located in Room 88. I would enter the spets
trembling and proffer my internal passport and pass to the guard
with a shaking hand, trying to appear exactly like the photographs in
my documents . I trembled openly , for I knew the guards took plea–
sure in that.
It
was easy, as I really was afraid: what if the guard
should detect my political immaturity, notice my moral infirmity, or
simply observe in my eyes the desire that he and his organization go
to hell? To my good fortune, the guards had not yet learned to read
minds.
The spets room had space for no more than a hundred at a
time, but it was never full. Apparently , politically mature research–
ers were as hard
to
come by in the city as ripe pineapples in its
vegetable stores. To the newcomer the most striking aspect of Room
88 was the high shelves on the walls, crammed not with the habitual
blue-brown volumes promising the last word on every subject, but
with endless rows of bright covers - the cry of advertising, the chaos
of the ideas market. The forbidden fruit could be plucked directly
from the shelves. A strange feeling would grip me, a mixture of con–
fusion, elation, and, most of all , the stupefaction of freedom.
The elation passed fairly quickly when it turned out that in the
