The Victor Kamkin Bookstore was a retail book shop with a main location in Rockville, Maryland and a smaller store in New York City in the United States.
Established in 1953 by Victor Kamkin and his wife Elena Kamkina, the store maintained continuous operation throughout the Cold War era, specializing in material published in the Soviet Union.
[1] He moved with this publication to the eastern Chinese city of Qingdao in 1948 before successfully emigrating to the United States in 1952, settling in the Washington, DC metropolitan area.
In a field largely devoid of competition, Kamkin managed to gain a lucrative exclusivity agreement with the Soviet government for the importation of books and periodicals from the USSR.
The reprieve proved to be short-lived, however, and although some more marketable titles made their way to the inventories of other retailers of Russian-language books, hundreds of thousands of volumes were ultimately destroyed at the time of the store's forced liquidation in 2006.