It was in the summer of 1921 that the statute of an experimental model library within a plannned Neophilological Institute (which has never came to be) was approved by the People's Commissariat of Education. Margarita Rudomino, who was to become the library's founder and director for fifty-odd years, succeeded in convincing People's Commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky of the need for such a library. In October of the same year it received its official status as the Neophilological Library and in April of 1922 it served its first users. Then, everything went on by the established procedure: the bookstock grew and collections were formed, the readership expanded, and new services and divisions emerged.
      In 1924, the Neophilological Library was renamed the Library for Foreign Literature, or BIL, and commissioned to purchase foreign publications both for its own use and for other research institutions and selected scientists. It hosted language learning circles, which in 1926 were converted into the Higher Foreign Language Courses; in 1930 they branched off as the First Moscow Institute of Modem Languages, later the M. Thorez Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages, which is now known as the Moscow Linguistic University.
      Before the Second World War, BIL acted as a public, research and academic library plus a lecture hall, and carried out a number of government assignments which met its unique profile and cultural and educational mission. It provided foreign-language materials to foreign specialists working in the USSR, did its best to promote language learning, and set up foreign literature divisions in big libraries outside Moscow. And it conducted anti-fascist propaganda - until the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 when the propaganda was cut short by order of the authorities and a special emphasis was laid on the learning of the German language and literature. The German attack on the USSR put an end to this ambiguous policy.
      "During the Great Patriotic War," wrote M. Rudomino, "everything was subjected to the goal of assisting the front. We helped the Red Army General Headquarters and Main Political Administration, collected material for the Sovinformhureau, translated German documents and leaflets brought from the front lines, taught commanders to read texts in Gothic and did a lot more - whatever was necessary."
      In 1948, the Library was reorganised by a government decree into a general one, and its acquisition policy came to cover the natural sciences as well as the humanities. It was granted the status of a Union State library, its abbreviated title changing from B1L to VGBIL. (Some of its departments received scientific status at a later date, in April 1973.) The Library was required to provide foreign books to government ministries and departments, central publishing houses and editorial boards, and scientific institutions and organisations not affiliated with the USSR Academy of Sciences. It was entrusted with methodological guidance and supervision of the foreign acquisitions work of public libraries across the country. Funds were allocated which were quite large by the standards of the period, allowing VGBIL to scale up its lecture and exhibition work, to start the compilation and production of scientific bibliographies and information and specialised publications, to carry out intensive guidance work among libraries and, most important, to embark on a purposeful collection development effort.

      These and some other activities initiated by Margarita Rudomino received a new impetus under the next Director: in May of 1973 Mrs. M. Rudomino was forced to retire by the authorities and was replaced by Ludmila Gvishiani, the daughter of the then Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, Aleksey Kosygin; on her father's death she adopted the family name Gvishiani-Kosygina. During her directorhsip (1973-1987) the allocations for foreign acquisitions almost tripled and the Library stood particularly firmly on its feet.
      The most momentous change which deeply affected the life of the Library was a revision of its acquisition policy in 1975: the building of the natural sciences collection was stopped, with VGBIL turning from a general library back into a humanities-orientated one. This step, of which Mrs. Rudomino strongly disapproved, was largely forced upon the Library: on the one hand, its stacks and its information capacity no longer could cope with the incoming literature flow; on the other hand, the channelling of the acquisition funds into two distinct areas, the humanities and the natural sciences, precluded the development of truly representative comprehensive collections in either. The resources released after the change of policy were directed at the expansion and completion of the collections of fiction, social sciences, linguistics, art and literary criticism, and reference information - all the collections in which the Library tal      In the 1970s, a complex Acquisitions and Stock Control Division was formed. The Book Hygiene Laboratory was converted into the Book Restoration and Conservation Research Department. A Rare Book Department was formed within the Library structure; rare and particularly valuable books were brought together in a separate collection and their scientific description started. VGBIL entered into direct partnership with major libraries and cultural centres in Poland, Mongolia, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Bulgaria, Hungary, what was then Yugoslavia and the GDR; with most of them cooperation has continued to this day.
      Throughout its history VGBIL has lived up to its mission as a civilised library and in a very direct sense brought culture to the masses. Therefore, it took the Order of Labour Red Banner awarded in 1972 on the occasion of its 50th anniversary as its due, even though it was given more for the Library's services to the Communist state than to culture. Even as a specialised library of foreign literature was established the authorities saw it as a censorship "filter" for that kind of literature; this view took shape in a government decree of 1948 whereby a renovated centralised system to control print materials coming from abroad and to supervise their strictly selective use was established on the basis of VGBIL. Titles regarded by the regime as undesirable were kept away from the general public and settled down in a "Special Depository" where users were only admitted who had a permit with a .state security visa, who were also requested to give a written undertaking not to disclose the subject-matter of their reading. It was an easy and handy arrangement for protecting the public from "the pernicious influence of seditious publications" and incidentally keeping an eye on who was reading what. As historical changes eliminated the ideological prerequisites for concentrating most of the foreign literature in a single central repository, VGBIL had to seek a "niche" of its own in a deideologised society.

      This and some other challenges were faced by new administrators of the Library. In October of 1989 a Director-General vacancy was announced and the VGBIL staff elected Doctor Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, a hereditary philologist. He did not stay long in this position: his 'scholarly and teaching pursuits forced him to leave the Library in November of 1993. But it was he and his deputy (and successor), Ekaterina Genieva, who developed and began to implement a new conception of VGBIL as a cultural and educative institution combining the functions of a public humanities-orientated research library and an international meeting place of national cultures - an international cultural centre of an ecumenical nature; for all practical purposes, this conception has been implemented.

      Early in 1990, VGBIL was one of the first among the still-Soviet libraries to eliminate its "Special Depository" and make its holdings available to the public. That same year the Library gained the right to add "Founder M. Rudomino" to its name; the Centre Culturel Franpais was established on its premises. Following in its steps were the British Council Methodological Centre in 1991, the American Center in 1993, and the Japanese Embassy Information Department in 1995.
      An agreement with the BBC World Service to set up its standing TV and radio display on the Library premises was signed on 20 August 1991 (the second day of the failed coup). Finally, the Library established its own Cultural Centre on 2 January 1992 by merging several independent departments; it was designed to develop, coordinate and carry out its numerous cultural programmes and individual actions. After the disintegration of the USSR and the liquidation of Union ministries the Library passed over to federal jurisdiction and changed its status from a Union library to an All-Russia (federal) one. It is meeting its 75th anniversary as M. Rudomino All-Russia State Library for Foreign Literature; meeting it in a state of reconstruction: the repair and rehaul of its buildings and rooms, the intensive introduction of state-of-the-art library and information technologies, and the broadening of its general cultural activities.