“The Soviet people did not want bread; they wanted information!” Helen Teplitskaia slaps the table to make her point. “The easiest way to control people is to deny them access to ideas, to limit what they can hear and see, prevent them from reading books and magazines that do not follow Communist thinking.
By the time she left Leningrad two years ago to seek medical help in the U.S. for her young son, she had already introduced some important changes.
“Even Xerox machines were under strictest control in the Soviet Union because they could reproduce materials,” she says of the job she held overseeing 140 Soviet libraries. “There was practically no desktop publishing available, not because Russia couldn’t afford it. Russia is a wealthy country. Millions were spent on God knows what–Soviet cosmonauts were the first in space. Because there was little computer technology doesn’t mean there was a lack of know-how or technology available. They didn’t want the computer systems to be widely available because they didn’t want information out of their control.”
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Teplitskaia, who is 36, became a librarian by accident. Her mother, a musician, insisted that she be proficient in English. Teplitskaia wanted to use her language skills in some sort of job, but school teaching was about all that was offered.
“Competition was scary,” she says. “Nine candidates for any one space in the college. Chances were little I would pass the exams and enroll at the first attempt.” But she did pass and discovered she enjoyed learning how to put together a bibliography, organize a library, find material quickly.
No other library would hire her, she says, because “being a refusenik means that this person is not reliable in a political sense. So nobody wanted to risk.”
“A big part of my responsibilities was advising on how to follow this course. It was obligatory that I would attend the meetings of executives in the Communist Party in this area.”
