Preserving Legal Heritage

The Harvard Law School Library’s Pre-Soviet collection demonstrates an example of its commitment to collecting, preserving, and providing access to items of world legal heritage that might otherwise be inaccessible. Following the Russian Revolution, the fate of the holdings of Russia’s museums and libraries was uncertain. As early as 1918, librarians at Harvard expressed concern about the fate of the Russian collections and were eager to acquire the at-risk material. This became possible in the 1920s and 1930s, as Soviet state export agencies collected books and artifacts from across Russia to identify items that were considered duplicative or otherwise unsuitable for libraries. The export agencies offered books and artifacts for sale in the West in order to fund the new government’s priorities. By the end of the 1930s, the HLS Library had acquired one of the largest collections of pre-Soviet Russian legal material in the US. For the past 85 years, the collection has provided researchers in the United States access to the primary materials of Imperial Russia.

Pre-Soviet materials are rare in the United States. Before widespread digitization, microfilm was the format of choice for expanding access while preserving delicate originals. In 1989, Harvard received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and began the huge project of microfilming the majority of the Pre-Soviet collection, which numbers in the thousands.

Beginning in the 1860s, the Russian government published a series of lithographs illustrating everything from military and civil uniforms to cavalry maneuvers, to accompany the text of its compiled laws: the Polnoe sobranīe zakonov Rossīĭskoĭ Imperīi. Lithographs in the print set of the laws were in basic-black-and-white, but luxurious full-color lithographs, some of them-hand colored, were housed in supplementary leather portfolios produced for public display and presentation to the imperial libraries. The Harvard Law School Library has an almost complete set of these portfolios, including four with imperial markings. The portfolios are made of dark green, blind tooled leather and are secured with green or red silk ties. The cover of each portfolio is adorned with the stamp of the Russian Imperial eagle.