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Russian State Library

Lyudmila Zinchenko

The Rus­sian State Lib­rary  is the national lib­rary of Rus­sia, loc­ated in Moscow. It is the largest in the coun­try and the third largest in the world for its col­lec­tion of books (17.5 mil­lion). It was named the V. I. Lenin State Lib­rary of the USSR from 1925 until it was renamed in 1992 as the Rus­sian State Lib­rary.
The lib­rary has over 275 km of shelves with more than 43 mil­lion items, includ­ing over 17 mil­lion books and serial volumes, 13 mil­lion journ­als, 350 thou­sand music scores and sound records, 150,000 maps and oth­ers. There are items in 247 lan­guages of the world, the for­eign part rep­res­ent­ing about 29 per­cent of the entire col­lec­tion.
Between 1922 and 1991 at least one copy of every book pub­lished in the USSR was depos­ited with the lib­rary, a prac­tice which con­tin­ues in a sim­ilar method today, with the lib­rary des­ig­nated by law as a place to hold a “man­dat­ory” copy of every pub­lic­a­tion issued in Russia.