May 15, 2021 9:54 am
When in March 1946 in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill gave the famous speech on the “Iron Curtain” which had descended on Europe, he certainly hoped that sooner or later that same curtain would fall. When and how, however, he could not foresee it. And even less could he have imagined that, once it fell, its memory would be cultivated in a small town in Trentino, known more than anything else for the lake and for the properties of the waters that flow from the mountain above. The town is Levico Terme, where there is a unique library in Italy, the library-archive of the Center for Studies on the History of Eastern Europe (Csseo). The headquarters are in via Stazione and you can’t believe it when you enter: in a condominium like many others, a medium-sized apartment is literally lined with hundreds of volumes along each wall. And in the neighboring building, in a basement, endless shelves, also overflowing with books.
In all there are about 50 thousand, most of them in the original language: Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Czechoslovakian. And another 60 thousand must be added in digital format. Books but not only: the Csseo heritage also includes the collections from 1917 to today of Pravda and Izvestija, the two historical newspapers of the former USSR, these too digitized in high resolution. And only here in Levico, throughout Italy, can you find them, as well as the collection up to 1976 of Neues Deutschland, the party newspaper of the former German Democratic Republic (Ddr). Then much more: documents of political and trade union movements (starting with Solidarność), historical literary magazines, whole packs of samizdat illegal immigrants from the sixties. For example breaking latest news of current events, directed by the Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov, “father” of dissent in the USSR by Brežnev and Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. And more material relating to the Caucasus and Transnistria, areas that have always been at very high geopolitical tension. And then China, with rare editions of Mao’s unpublished texts.
Solidarność clandestine newspapers, after the introduction of the state of war. (Csseo)
A couple of wardrobes immediately refer to the “cold war” and to the atmospheres of John le Carré’s books, to counterintelligence analysts, to Smiley and the novel’s spy hunt The mole: they are in fact full of files edited by US agencies attributable to the CIA (ie the “cousins”, cross and delight of her majesty’s services) that dealt with the translation of press articles, radio broadcasts and party documents of the former countries communist bloc. And it deals with more than three million pages that cover the two decades 1976-1996, on politics, economics, military and social organization of the so-called (then) “popular democracies”. All stuff from another century, it is true, but of renewed interest after the story of the frigate captain Walter Biot, arrested red-handed while selling military secrets to a Russian spy for a few thousand euros: a case with very Italian and farcical implications, but which shows, if need be, how espionage has never stopped. Not even in the days of the pandemic.
An unpublished Musil
The author of all this is Fernando Orlandi, born in 1956, from Forlì for decades in Trentino, teacher, essayist, animator of conferences, seminars, meetings and debates: all or almost all in the sign of Eastern Europe and its recent past. Central Europe included, as in his most recent curatorship with Massimo Libardi, another column of the Csseo: The last newspaper of the emperor (Reverdito 2019), a volume that collects almost unknown articles by Robert Musil.
The Austrian writer is universally known for The man without qualities, but he was also an officer in the Hapsburg army stationed right in eastern Trentino and then assigned to the army command Prince Eugenio, in Bolzano, where he directed the newspaper Soldaten Zeitung. In the light of the Bolzano experience, in 1918 Musil was commissioned in Vienna to direct Heimat, a war-patriotic weekly that exceeded the circulation of 30 thousand copies. Texts then published anonymously, in which anti-Bolshevism is often transparent, and extracted from oblivion – as well as finally attributed to its author – precisely thanks to the work of Libardi and Orlandi.
How the center was born
It all began in the mid-nineties, when Orlandi was teaching Eastern European history at the faculty of literature at the University of Trento. After the academic experience, Orlandi gave birth to the Csseo: it was 1997. The first major conference, in December 1999, was organized to remember Sakharov ten years after his death. A few weeks later, here is the one entitled “Russia after Yeltsin”: and it happened that Yeltsin himself had resigned from the Russian presidency just a few days earlier.
At the conference, in Trento, a parterre of the highest international level thus met for the first time to discuss it. Among them also a representative of the former Reagan and Bush administrations (father), Fritz Ermarth, who from 1988 to 1993 was head of the National intelligence council, that is, in charge of the lines that guide the US intelligence network. With him, then, many important Russian names. The echo was therefore enormous, even in the United States.
Rare editions of unpublished texts by Mao Zedong published during the Cultural Revolution.
From then on, the road to further research projects opened up for the Csseo. And with it the sharing of materials: that is, of books, first by photocopying them, then precisely by digitizing them. “And neither do I”, Orlandi jokes, “I know everything we have”.
The consequences of the emergency
In the days of the pandemic, the comings and goings among the hordes of books in the Csseo library-archive obviously failed: scholars, researchers and undergraduates who arrived in Levico Terme from everywhere could no longer travel. And at the same time, funding from public bodies for conferences has been stopped. Hence the decision to deal with the inevitable, one could say: and therefore to make the immense material available in digital format, mainly thanks to private funding, but also through a fundraiser among all those who had had a what to do in the past with the Csseo: congressmen, researchers, teachers and essayists.
“We had a huge response, exceeding 20 thousand euros,” says Orlandi. A site is therefore being created, with a search engine that for now indexes about 60 thousand books in digital format. A service that will be increased, soon including magazines and newspapers. For the latter, however, a free delivery service is already active (with sending the required pdf, email to [email protected]), as obviously free is also all the rest: naturally in compliance with copyright, therefore following the rules of any library.
However, a large part of the Csseo’s assets were already available digitally. After having photocopied hundreds of books and magazines for years (exchanging material with other institutes and researchers), at a certain point Orlandi and his collaborators have in fact seen fit to start doing without postmen and couriers, making everything travel by email. “And from 2002 to 2021”, Orlandi says, “we put a lot of stuff together”.
The next step is the purchase of a scanner to transform the numerous microfilm documents into pdf. And this year the longed-for inclusion in the Trentino bibliographic catalog, the fundamental cultural portal of the territory, should also take place.
With respect to the health emergency, not being able to guarantee a sanitation of the offices for now, thanks to an agreement with the municipal administration, a special station will be created at the municipal library of Levico Terme for access to digital consultation of the Csseo material, and always the address to the municipal library of any paper, upon reservation. Meanwhile, the acquisition of the Valerio Riva fund continues, that is the archive of the journalist who was Giangiacomo Feltrinelli’s right hand man and then at the helm of Rizzoli libri: a very precious heritage that has already arrived in Levico Terme.
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