Gennadii Vasilevich Iudin

Born Feb. 29 (Mar. 12), 1840, in Ekaterininskii Zavod, Tara Okrug, Tobol’sk Province; died Mar. 18 (31), 1912, in Krasnoiarsk. Krasnoiarsk merchant and bibliophile.

Iudin’s library was the largest private collection in Siberia. At the beginning of the 20th century it contained more than 80,000 volumes, mainly books on the history of Siberia’and Russian America. It also had sets of 18th and 19th-century Russian journals and several hundred thousand manuscripts from the 13th through 19th centuries. In the spring of 1897, V. I. Lenin spent two months in ludin’s library working on The Development of Capitalism in Russia.

In order not to break up his collection, Iudin attempted to sell it to the Imperial Public Library in St. Petersburg, but his offer was rejected by the tsarist government. On the verge of bankruptcy, he was forced in 1907 to sell the library to the United States. It became the Yudin Collection of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Before his death, Iudin was able to assemble another collection, which contained approximately 15,000 volumes and several tens of thousands of manuscripts. ludin’s second library was nationalized after the October Revolution of 1917.