A BOOKSELLER WITH A SELECT CLIENTELE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00806R000201160024-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 19, 2010
• Sequence Number: 24
• Publication Date: December 26, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/19: CIA-RDP90-00806R000201160024-5
WASHINGTON POST
26 December 1984
A Bookseller With a Select Clientele
Rockville Store Stocks 90,000 Volumes in Russian
By Dana Priest
w" who lives in Toronto and visits the ,
~"'"?" P??` Staff w""` store each time he is in town. "It's Kamkin s is a convenient backup
The warehouse storage room is dim and full of card-
board boxes and maps of the communist world. A
stocky man with a broad chin has just unpacked leather-
bound Edgar Allan Poe poem collections and a shipment
iif paperbacks titled "Cooking for Children." They share
a table with "Capital Promotes Imperialist Expansion,
-the latest from the Soviet Union's foreign minister,
Andrei Gromkyo.
But what makes this place special is that from poetry
to political science, all the tomes are in Russian..
-- For two decades, high-ranking diplomats, working-
class emigrants, government analysts and college stu-
dents have hunted for treasures in this 12,000-square-
foot Rockville warehouse that experts on the Soviet.
Union say is the largest Russian-language bookstore in
the United States. I
State Department Sovietologists, Defense Depart-
ment experts and, in all likelihood, Central Intelligence
you include Russia itself." ' which usually buy books directly
Jim Shoemaker of the State De- from the Soviet Union, said Shoe-
partment's Soviet desk said profes- maker. "It's a lot like the Library of
sional Soviet aficionados shop there Congress," he said. -"You don't go
for everything from spy novels to there too often, but it's nice to
technical manuals. "I've bought a lot know it's there."
of books there myself," he said. It was a circuitous route that led
Shoemaker's latest find is a Rus- Victor P. Kamkin to Rockville.
sian-Buryat dictionary, published Shortly after the Russian Revolution,
exclusively in the Soviet Union, and Kamkin's family escaped to China.
one of the 1,200 dictionaries Kam- There he met and married Elena and
'
kin
s offers. This dictionary trans-
lates a language spoken just along
the Mongolian border.
Ninety percent of Kamkin's busi-
ness is in mail orders from the Unit-
started a bookstore outside Peking.
After the Communists came to pow-
er there, the two fled to San Fran-
cisco; they moved to D.C. in 1952,
"where they did business for more
than a decade before moving to the
suburbs. Victor Kamkin died of a
heart attack in the Rockville book-
store in 1974 at age 72.
Selling Russian-language books.
Agency employes, peruse the books that come from the said coowner and manager Anatoly
Soviet-Union to the Victor P. Kamkin Bookstore, just Zabavsky.
-north of Randolph Road near Rockville Pike. . One-third of the sales are Ian-
"It certainly would not be erroneous to draw the con- guage textbooks, but the Boston
clusion that we do business with them," said Patti Volz, and - Cleveland public libraries,
a CIA spokeswoman. -but can't co irm it. which serve Russian populations,
Being the largest disseminator o ussian.literature,
as well as what is often referred to as Soviet-propagan-
da, makes the store a curiosity to some. The propri-
etors have responded by shunning media attempts to
publicize their story and by guarding their customers'
identities.
s a
e
AIM.
Ency- Press accoun
The CIA in Latin America.
Politics, said the owners, is not sold with the mer- c ope ias oil ballet are stacked next To stay out of politics, the own-
chandise. to those on flowers and birds. Im- ers said, they try to keep the store
"We have very good customers," said coowner Elena . portant political debates-dialec-
Kamkin, 71, a White Russian who ami.grated-to the tical materialism discussed by out of the limelight. "We always
United States in 1949. Marx, Lenin and Stalin, and "Mil- kept a low profile," said Zabavsky,
"I will never give [information] about whom we sell itarism in Peking's Policies"-share whose worn cowboy belt and fre-
to" she sail "T will never talk about it Thi
-..-
i
h
s
s t
e
tomer's privilege.. Universities,
government, everybody - buys
books."
With 90,000 titles on everything
from political, terrorism to. home;;
remedies for the- new housewife,::!
the bookstore outstocks the shelves
of The Book Annex in Georgetown
(40,000) and even the Barnes and
Noble store on Fifth Avenue in New
York City (80,000).
I
t's a golden dream of 'any per-
son who knows, Russian," said
Vadim Bytensky, If Russian chemist
. has attracted misguided attention
for the business on occasion In the
. 11c w?ccuvn is as oroaa as the station, "Life Line, " launched a
waah-se=weh its faded blue tile broadcast attack on what it called "a
facade -is large, large Red propaganda center in the
An English translation of "Laser
Physics" sits on the floor, next to very heart of the city," according to
t
t th
ti
"
"
the store with glossy coffee table
books on Russian churches.
The military section-an aisle of
technical works, memoirs of famous
combatants and such collections as
the 1984 edition of "The ArtilleryDivision in Battle"-sells well
quent use of American colloquial-
isms adds to the distance he wants
to put between himself and the
turns in U.S.-Soviet relations. "We
buy directly from, the Soviet Union!
They offer, we buy and we resell.
Zabavsky said. Since April, the U.S. It's a purely capitalist approach." - {
Defense Supply Service, which
makes purchases for the Army and
Air Force libraries at the Pentagon
and bases in the Washington area,
spent $1,333 on Kamkin's books,
said Richard Walker, who handled
the orders.- -
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/19: CIA-RDP90-00806R000201160024-5