A Siberian American: How a Krasnoyarsk merchant's library ended up in Washington
Author: Andrey Filimonov
On March 12, 1840, Gennady Yudin was born—a Siberian merchant who amassed the largest private library in the Russian Empire. This library is now located in the United States. Yudin made his fortune in vodka and gold, which he spent on books. He won huge sums in the lottery twice, but didn't buy a palace or a yacht with it—only rare volumes. The Russian emperor rejected his collection due to "insufficient funds," and it sailed overseas to become the foundation of the largest Russian book collection in America.
Gennady Vasilyevich Yudin was born into a family involved in the state-owned distilling business. He spent his childhood between the factory village, Tobolsk, and Minusinsk, where, from the age of 12, Gennady worked in the alcohol tax system. He graduated from high school, combining his service with self-education: he studied German and French and subscribed to periodicals from the capitals. Even then, at the age of seventeen, he had already developed a formula for his entire future life and communicated it to his parents in a letter from Krasnoyarsk: "I absolutely do not spend money on anything except books. I consider the benefit from them more valuable than the money."
Starting with a modest 600 rubles, Yudin became a major Siberian entrepreneur within a few decades: he entered the wine trade, built a factory, and entered the gold mining industry. This was his element: like King Midas or some medieval alchemist, Yudin produced gold from practically nothing. Fortune favored him generously: he won the lottery twice—first 200 rubles, then another 75. Someone else in his place would have been tempted by the temptations of the sweet life, but not the Siberian Midas, Gennady Yudin, who put his easy money to good use. "My gold is flowing steadily," the merchant remarked with a matter-of-fact tone, as if he were producing sausage. This phrase conveys his approach to business: no gold rush, just a healthy business with a cool focus on results.
Yudin was a merchant by birth and occupation, but a systematizer by nature. He maintained a voluminous correspondence and kept copies of his own letters, binding them into volumes. He collected not only books but also all manner of cultural artifacts: documents, tickets, catalogs, and historical records. His library served as both a book depository and a historical archive. For example, he acquired a collection of documents from the Russian-American Company, which included official correspondence, ship logs, expedition reports, tariff and cargo registers, commodity lists, documents on trade with Japan, and materials on the colonization of Alaska and the Pacific coast. For a Siberian merchant of the second half of the 19th century, a passion for history was an unusual hobby.
Yudin was an exceptional individual. In 1869, having "completely ceased his commercial activities," he set off on a journey to the Middle East with 25 rubles. He visited Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem, inspected the newly opened Suez Canal, and learned about the port of Alexandria. He then returned to Irkutsk via Odessa, Crimea, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. The route was both ambitious and informative. Yudin studied logistics, modern maritime technologies, and trade methods. Travel was part of his self-education. He visited the World's Fair in Vienna in 1873 and the Paris Fair in 1889. Throughout his life, he followed a simple business strategy, formulated in his youth: knowledge is capital invested in books, and those who increase knowledge become richer than their competitors.
In 1866, Gennady married seventeen-year-old Evgenia Nigritskaya. They had ten children, seven of whom survived—an outstanding achievement for the time. Yudin adored his sons and daughters, though he was reluctant to express his feelings in letters. He had a plan for each of his children: he named the Leonidovsky distillery after his son, Leonid, to whom he intended to pass it on, and for his eldest, Alexei, he acquired gold mines. His daughter, Maria, willful and withdrawn, dreamed of attending the Bestuzhev Higher Courses in St. Petersburg—and her father, though hesitant, allowed her to go to the capital alone.
But he loved books no less than children. Before moving to Krasnoyarsk, Yudin spent 200-300 rubles a year on his library, but then his spending scale changed dramatically. He bought not individual volumes, but entire collections. Thus, he acquired the rarest Russian editions of the 18th century: a first edition of "The Tale of Igor's Campaign," Radishchev's "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow," which Catherine the Great ordered destroyed, unique Siberian maps, and notes by European travelers on Siberia. By 1898, his library expenses amounted to 127,000 rubles. Yudin himself said that studying books gave him "a much-needed break from the worries of life."
After the great Krasnoyarsk fire of 1881, Yudin moved the books to his dacha in Tarakanovka, constructing a separate two-story building for them. The library became an independent entity. Vladimir Ulyanov spent several weeks there in the spring of 1897, waiting for the opening of the navigation season before departing for exile in Shushenskoye. He worked in the library daily, compiling material for "The Development of Capitalism in Russia." Yudin allowed the future leader of the proletariat to study in the library, but only with the authorization of the Krasnoyarsk police chief—he did not allow anyone into his library without permission. The assessment Ulyanov and Lenin made after these visits was crudely complimentary: "Your entire Krasnoyarsk isn't worth Yudin's library."
The black bar
At the end of the 19th century, the successful industrialist was beset by blows of fate. Business at the factories and mines declined. But this could have been endured. The greatest tragedy occurred in 1896, when Yudin's sixteen-year-old son, Mikhail, shot himself. According to Gennady Vasilyevich himself, "Misha was the family's favorite, an excellent student, gifted, but unfortunately, he found himself in the wrong classroom environment." It was a time of decadence, the end of the century, the fin de siècle, when suicide became fashionable as a romantic protest against the vulgarity of life. Yudin, of course, could not understand this.
Three years later, in 1899, another son, Vasily, died in Kyiv at the age of just twenty-seven. This shock forced the collector to consider the fate of his life's work. After much hesitation, he decided to sell his book collection. Perhaps Gennady Vasilyevich wasn't such a balanced and rational person after all. The deaths of his sons devastated him; it seemed to him that the fickle fates had finally abandoned him. Having lost his children, he wanted to save his library. The First Russian Revolution hadn't yet begun, but it was already brewing. Unrest and strikes were raging in the railway workshops near the estate. Yudin had a keen sense of the future of current events and serious grounds for concern. He offered his library to Nicholas II and received the emperor's personal resolution: "Due to insufficient funds, decline." For comparison, the tsar spent roughly the same amount on a few Fabergé Easter eggs at the time.
The merchant then placed an ad in the Washington Post. A response came almost immediately—from Alexey Babin, head of the Slavic Division at the Library of Congress. The Americans agreed, in principle, to the bibliophile merchant's key condition: the book collection must remain unified and indivisible—it could not be divided into separate collections and transferred to different hands.
Who was this Babin, who was destined to become the main character of the Siberian-American book odyssey?
A man with two homelands
He possessed a rare combination of skills: a knowledge of Russian book culture and American library experience. Alexey Babin was born in 1866 in Yelatma, a sleepy town proudly featured on the map of the Ryazan province. The fact that Babin graduated from the local gymnasium suggests that his parents were relatively well-off and educated. At the gymnasium, he excelled in English and other foreign languages. His outstanding academic achievements secured him a place in the History and Philology Department of St. Petersburg University, where he studied from 1885 to 1887. He then worked as a librarian at the Okhta Trade School. Returning home for the holidays, Babin encountered a childhood friend. They decided to play William Tell in the woods. The friend placed a pine cone on his head, and Babin shot and killed him instantly. After a tragic accident, Babin's parents spent their savings to pay compensation and send their son away from Yelatma. He left for Riga, where he found work as a stoker on a German steamship, which in 1889 brought him to New York. Babin soon enrolled at Cornell University and, to pay for his studies, began working in the university library. He eventually made a career in librarianship. In 1902, the Library of Congress invited Alexei Babin to become a specialist in Slavic literature.
In the fall of 1903, library director Herbert Putnam sent Babin to Siberia to negotiate with Yudin. Babin inspected the book-filled two-story log building in Tarakanovo and realized he was looking at not a provincial collection, but a national treasure. In 1905, Babin created a bilingual catalog of the library, after which the American side decided to purchase it.
In total, negotiations lasted three years. In November 1906, the contract was signed: 81,000 volumes were shipped from Siberia to America for 100,000 rubles—significantly below their actual value. But for the owner, the most important thing was not the money, but the safety of the collection. Babin, who had already left the library, personally returned to Siberia to oversee the packaging. The books were packed into 500 crates and shipped via Hamburg to Washington. Each volume was marked with a bookplate featuring Yudin's portrait and views of Moscow. In the spring of 1907, the shipment arrived in the United States.
The reaction of contemporaries was expressed in the journal "Siberian Questions." A note devoted to the "deal of the century" stated that "Siberia has suffered damage, the full grave consequences of which will become clearer to future generations." The Krasnoyarsk journalist had no idea that the next generation living in Russia would no longer have time for the Yudin Library. But Gennady Vasilyevich seemed to have had a premonition.
But he couldn't curb his passion, and after selling his first library, he began collecting a second—before his death in 1912, Yudin managed to accumulate another 15 volumes. Today, the majority of this second book collection is kept in Krasnoyarsk. The merchant and bibliophile's children did not continue his work, although they inherited the collecting instinct: his daughter Maria collected herbariums, and his eldest son, Alexei, studied Siberian ornithology and donated his collections to the Academy of Sciences. But the library remained the mission of one man.
Alexei Babin returned to Russia in 1910 to care for his elderly mother. He lived in Saratov, worked as a correspondent for the Associated Press, taught English at a newly opened university, and wrote a two-volume "History of the North American United States"—one of the first in Russian historiography. After the Revolution, he began keeping a diary, chronicling the events of the Civil War and the establishment of Soviet power—a unique document of the era. In 1921–1922, Babin served as a translator for the American Relief Administration (ARA), which was providing relief from famine in the Volga region.
[EXTRACTS FROM BABIN'S DIARY] Notes from the ARA Translator
- February 22, 1922. I was told of Professor Stadnitsky's statement... that in one of the remote regions, starving peasants ate a village doctor. Dr. Uroda corrected this statement: in Balakovo, a paramedic was eaten... One of Dr. Uroda's friends. The doctor also had the opportunity to taste human flesh. Lost in a snowstorm... he and his companion came across frozen bodies... and, to save themselves, butchered, cooked, and ate some of them. The doctor stated that the worst part of the experience was the overwhelming and unpleasant desire to eat human flesh that arose in him and his companion.
- February 22, 1922. A resident of a German village, riding his horse, caught a glimpse of two little girls running toward the road. He looked back and saw the girls pick up fresh, warm horse manure and eat it.
- February 23, 1922. Our translator in Pugachev was told that people who have tasted human flesh experience a special craving for it… In Pugachev, children were not allowed to go outside after dark – to protect them from attacks.
- April 12, 1922. For the past two days, ARA cafeteria workers have been finding small shards of glass in their food and coffee. This appears to be a deliberate attempt to harm the staff.
- April 14, 1922. Prices: black bread - 140,000 rubles, sugar - 500,000, American pork fat - 1,000,000.
In the autumn of 1922, Babin miraculously escaped "the Soviet paradise." Just as 30 years earlier, his route led through Latvia, from where he sailed to London and then returned to America. In 1927, he returned to the Library of Congress, where he assumed a leadership position in the Slavic Department. He died in 1930.
History remembers Alexey Babin as the man who brought Siberia to Washington. Gennady Yudin, a merchant philosopher, saved his books by shipping them overseas. Each volume of his collection, housed in the Library of Congress, bears his bookplate—a portrait of Yudin, the Tsar Bell, and an image of a house near Krasnoyarsk—a reminder of the origins of the book the American reader holds in his hands.
