She did manage to take care of the books. They survived that winter and many more occasions throughout the long ideological "winter" that kept in shackles a huge country. She had navigated the Library through periods of purges, struggle with "enemies of the people", struggle with "bourgeois pseudo-science", struggle with "cosmopolites without kith or kin", and other campaigns.
      M.I.'s biography is actually the story of her Library plus her private life; moreover, there was a standing joke in her family that apart from her two children, a son and a daughter, she had one more, older, daughter, namely the Library. Without quitting her job she graduated from Moscow University's Romance-Germanic Division of the Social Sciences Department in 1926. Without quitting her job she passed the required Master's examinations and started work on a thesis (she never wrote it though, kept from finishing it hy her work again). Without quitting her joh she was building a Library in every possible sense of the word; she was not just its Director but its Custodian, again in every meaning of the word. Academician Sergey Averintsev had every reason to state with reference to her, "M.I. Rudomino's work was heroic in the very literal meaning of the word".
      She was a great librarian. She authored over a hundred works on various aspects of librarianship and library history. She was among the first in a devastated country to realise the cultural and general educational importance of the study of forieign languages and literatures. The language circles she set up at her Library have grown into a big linguistic university. In the post-WWII period she pioneered the use of audiovisual media in the teaching of foreign languages, with VGBIL as their first testing-ground. She restored and updated the tradition of bibliographing foreign materials, which had been cut short. She turned her Library into a meeting place of national cultures, the Library and its users playing host to R. Rolland, Gr; Greene, R. Aldington, ]. Steinbeck, P. Neruda, C. P. Snow, R. Frost, A. Marshall, G. de Santis, R. Chandra and other authors and cultural figures. She worked out and implemented an acquisition policy which she formulated in that laconic and graphic style others: "... by carefully studying the world's book market, to collect only "the cream" and just a little "milk" but not a drop of "water"". Lastly, she represented the USSR in the International Federation i Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) in 1967-1973, as its Vice-President and then as First Vice-President. In recognition other services as "an ambassador of Soviet librarianship abroad" (Ency'eloped of Library and Information Science) IFLA awarded her the title of Honorary Fellow in 1973.

      In her struggle to preserve and develop the Library M.I. had to act as a bidder with the powers-that-be and to try to convince them that her life's work was useful and necessary for the regime. These efforts, as can too easily be imagined, were not always rewarding, seldom pleasant and undoubtedly heroic. But if it were not for these efforts the Library could not have survived, to say nothing of receiving a tacit permission to hire "disgraced" persons such as victims of intelligentsia persecutions, opponents of Lysenko's false biological theories, victims of the campaign against cosmopolitism, etc. As a result, the Library developed a wonderful work team of brilliantly educated and Imowledgeable people, a special spirit of high professionalism and culture which distinguished it from other, bureaucratic institutions. It was an institution, nevertheless, and a Soviet one to boot and so it could not but carry out directives imposed upon it from "them above" and also some ideological functions like those of a "special depository". All of this it did do, although M.I. never went over her head here, nor put forward "counter-initiatives", and wherever there was the slightest chance to relax political directives or to put reasonable limits to their implementation, she would not miss it.
      Thus, in late 1944-1945 M.I. - in the rank of Red Army Lieutenant-Colonel - was in Germany where she led a group engaged in the requisitioning of book collections. M.I. tried, as best as she could, to reduce her assignment to the salvaging, gathering and preserving of books from ruined libraries and collections; some of them subsequently were returned to Germany. She was ordered, among other things, to take to the USSR the total holdings of the Deutsche Biicherei in Leipzig plus the exhibits of its Museum of the Book and Scripts. The exhibits, which included the famous Gutenberg Bible, were, apart from their cultural value, of great commercial value; they were taken out and for half a century buried deep in a safe (though not in VGBIL but in another library). As for the bookstock, M. I. managed to gain access to the High Command and secured a cancellation of the order, thereby saving for Germany her cultural heritage, the Deutsche Biicherei collections.

      In May 1973, M.I. was requested to retire. As she later commented, "It was simply because the then Minister [of Culture] E. A. Furtseva wanted my job for the daughter of the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR". She was not merely discharged but was resolutely ousted, removed from the Library, even her name was taken out of official circulation. She was even denied the opportunity to work in the Library in order to write its history. It was only in the late 80s that M-I.'s experience and wisdom were requested again by her brain-child.
      Justice triumphed at last, posthumously, as is usually the case in Russia. In 1990 "Founder Margarita Rudomino" was added to the title of the Library.

As an ex-librarian I appreciate very much the high professional standards you are maintaining and the difficult challenges you face. It is an honour and a pleasure for Australia to be associated with your Library and I am sure that our cooperation wiU grow rapidly. Good luck and thank you.

12 December 1993
Cavan Hogue
Ambassador Extraordinary and
Plenipotentiary of Australia in the
Russian Federation