Gosfond
The origins of foreign acquisitions including the 1946 Gosfond delivery of 1,857 crates of books to libraries in Moscow were carefully concealed from librarians as well as the general public.
[3] The commission became instrumental in the removal of industrial installations, materials, and valuables from all Soviet-occupied territories during the Vistula–Oder Offensive of the Red Army including Hungary, Romania, Finland and Poland (within its prewar borders),[1] and later, from the Soviet Zone of Germany.
[4] As early as 1942,[verification needed] the USSR formed special Red Army Trophy Brigades with the task of removing valuables from occupied territories (including Germany) and taking them back to the Soviet Union - usually by train convoys.
The organization made responsible for receiving and cataloging these items, the "Commission on Reception and Registration of Trophy Valuables", was established just before the war's end in April 1945.
The early part of 1946 saw some 12,500 crates of books and documents, along with other valuables from German libraries, which were allocated to the State Historical Museum in Moscow and to the Hermitage in Leningrad, and as far afield as Turkmenistan and Tajikistan.
Formed in late 1944 and headed by Georgy Malenkov, the committee was charged with removing factories, manufactured goods, raw materials, livestock, farm machinery, fertilizer, crops, laboratories, libraries, museums, scientific archives, engineers and scientists from all of Eastern Europe.
Since the committee had 70,000 greedy agents operating in East Germany, I moved fast to claim this plant for my branch, the Ministry of Building Materials..." — Vladimir Shabinsky[7] The library section of the Russian Trophy Brigades was known as the "State Agency for Literature", or, "Gosfond".
Items which were needed at large research institutes were sent to smaller public libraries and agricultural stations, where the books were never cataloged and could not be recalled for inter-library loan or other useful activities.
