SELLER OF RUSSIAN BOOKS PROFITS ON CULTURE SWAP

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00806R000100590004-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 24, 2010
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: January 3, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/24: CIA-RDP90-00806R000100590004-2
WASHINGTON TIMES
3 January 1986
Seller of Russian boos
profits on culture swap
By Sue Baker
REUTERS NEWS AGENCY
All this prompts right-win rou s to
charge that the store is an extension o t e
Soviet government aF tTCI its
Soviet counterpart, the KGB, freouent it to
kee an eye on each other.
Mr. a avs ty shrugs off such allegations.
"We are not agents of the Soviet Union;' he
says. "We are strictly an American corpora-
tion. We are here for profit"
He is also circumspect about his custom-
ers:
"You could be a KGB agent or a CIA agent:'
he said, "but if you walk in here, nobody :s
going to ask you who you are or w a You '
doing here.
One Washington Sovietologist and Kamkin
customer said he had never been approached
by the KGB in the store but added that, given
the number of "highly secretive" U.S. govern-
ment agencies involved in studying the Soviet
Union, "it would be amazing if the Soviets
would not be interested:'
On a busy day in Kamkin's, which first
opened its doors in 1953, there might be as
many as 50 people browsing among the tomes,
which are crammed into 12-foot-high book-
shelves, stacked precariously on top and piled
in the aisles.
Despite a brisk local business generated by
Washington's government agencies, embas-
sies, universities, institutes and think tanks,
however, Mr. Zabavsky said 95 percent of
Kamkin's business is conducted by mail.
A computer keeps track of some 18,000
mail-order customers - mostly in the United
States but also in Canada, South America,
Australia and Western Europe.
While Mr. Zabavsky is cagey about the
bookstore's exact turnover, he said he buys
about $200,000 worth of books from Moscow
each year, and sales are in the several "hun-
dreds of thousands [of dollars] worldwide."
But he is looking for that boost from the
summit's afterglow, and added he hoped that
A Geneva summit decision to expand U.S.-
Soviet cultural exchanges may not do much
for superpower relations, but it could be a
boon for an unusual shop tucked away in
Rockville, near the nation's capital.
"Any exchange type of situation would gen-
erate some sort of interest and therefore
sales;' said Anatoly Zabavsky, the affable
Polish-born director of Victor P. Kamkin
booksellers, believed to house the biggest
stock of Russian-language material outside
Moscow.
"People would be traveling, needing city
guides, maps;" Mr. Zabavsky said in an inter-
view. "It stands to reason, if the Bolshoi The-
ater comes here, I'm pretty sure that people
would like -a recording ... and, of course, we
are the source"
The sprawling-12 000-square-foot store is
well own to suc as ington-area browsers
"We are not agents of the
Soviet Union. We are
strictly an American
corporation. We are here
for profit."
Central Intelligence Agency and other U.S.
?ovyernment types, as well as Soviet buffs and
Kremlinoloaists from the capital's slew of for-
eign oolicv think tanks.
If Kamkin's three million volumes falls
short of the 4.2 million in Moscow's showplace
Dom Knigi or House of Books, the inventory
here boasts many a title long-banned, out of
print or in short supply in the Soviet Union.
Most of Kamkin's materials, however, are
official Soviet publications ranging from po-
litical tracts by Kremlin leader Mikhail Gor-
bachev, President Reagan's partner at the
Nov 19-21 Geneva summit, to statistical data
and technical journals - a magnet for an un-
usual clientele and occasional target for con-
troversy.
Mr. Zabavsky, who has managed the busi-
ness since founder Victor Kamkin died in
1974, obtains 95 percent of his 3 million-book
inventory from Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga or
International Books, the Soviet government
agency that supplies official Russian books,
magazines, newspapers, party speeches and
other publications to countries around the
world.
Kamkin's also is the sole agent in North
America for recordings from the official So-
viet music agent, Melodiya.
a second Kamkin store - a retail outlet
opened three years ago on New York's Fifth
Avenue - will also see an increase in its
mostly "off-the-street" business.
He said the store's wide selection of chil-
dren's books, language texts, scientific publi-
cations, newspapers, magazines and more
than 1,500 dictionaries is "what makes us so
unique."
Unavailable in Moscow but well stocked at
Kamkin's are works by Alexander Sol-
zhenitsyn, who denounces the Soviet system
from exile in America, futurist writer Yev-
geny Zamyatin and satirists Alexander
Zinoviev and Vladimir Voinovich.
Such forbidden books, Mr. Zabavsky
chuckles, are favorites with Soviet Embassy
employees or Soviet visitors and come from
Russian-language publishers in New York,
London and Paris.
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/24: CIA-RDP90-00806R000100590004-2