A book the ALA needs to read

Not Seeing Red: American Librarianship and the Soviet Union, 1917-1960, by Stephen Karetzky. From the Claremont Review of Books 's commentary :

Stephen Karetzky, Library Director at New Jersey's Felician College, has produced a compelling indictment of prominent American librarian's affection for the Soviet Union from the time of the Russian Revolution through the 1950's. "In thought and deed," Karetzky writes in the introduction, "they betrayed the fundamental values, goals, and interests of their profession and their country." He weaves together institutional and intellectual history to place these attitudes in the context of similarones held by many leading American educators and cultural figures during these years -- including their willful ignorance of conditions in the USSR, despite numerous reliable accounts of those conditions that were published as early as the 1920s.

One of the more interesting aspects of this book, in fact, is its description of the transformation of pre-Revolutionary Russia's libraries to a centralized, totalitarian library system that promoted literary primarily to propagandize the citizenry.... The Soviets consistently boasted of having an astronomically high number of books and libraries, but the the regime defined a "book" as anything more than a few pages and a "library" as any collection of more than 50 books.

American librarians often repeated such fantastical claims in what Karetzky terms "wonder stories" about Soviet libraries that periodically appeared in professional publications. Several of these authors actually believed that the USSR was on the road to utopia and clearly envied the power of Soviet librarians, conveniently overlooking the fact that they were functioning almost exclusively as propaganda agents....

Sounds familiar. Those who refuse to learn from history....