Russian State Library
Whole view of Russian State Library
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| Established | 1862 |
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| Location | Moscow, Russia |
| Branches | 3 |
| Collection | |
| Size | 44,800,000 (2012) |
| Access and use | |
| Population served | 93,100 (2012) |
| Other information | |
| Budget |
 1,740,000,000 (2012) |
| Director | Alexander I. Visly (General Director), Vladimir I. Gnezdilov (Executive Director), Viktor V. Fiodorov (President) |
| Staff | 1830 (2012) |
| Website | http://www.rsl.ru/en |
The Russian State Library (Russian: Российская государственная библиотека) is the national library of Russia, located in Moscow. It is the largest in the country and the fourth 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.
The library was founded on July 1, 1862, as Moscow's first free public library named The Library of the Moscow Public Museum and Rumiantsev Museum, or The Rumiantsev Library. It is nicknamed the "Leninka."Rumyantsev Museum part of the complex was Moscow's first public museum, and housed the Art collection of count Nikolai Petrovich Rumyantsev, which had been given to the Russian people and transferred from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Its donation covered above all books and manuscripts as well as an extensive numismatic and an ethnographic collection. These, as well as approximately 200 paintings and more than 20,000 prints, which had been selected from the collection of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, could be seen in the so-called Pashkov House (a palace, established between 1784 and 1787, in the proximity of the Kremlin). Tsar Alexander II of Russia donated the painting The Appearance of Christ before the People by Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov for the opening of the museum.
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