There's a great article in the New York Times this morning about the 11,000 item erotica collection that's been accumulating for decades in the Russian State Library in Moscow.

"There is still no comprehensive record of the collection's contents or provenance because the trove was never methodically assembled. It accrued over decades thanks to customs officers, the secret police, the Soviet government's censorship bureau, and ideologically obedient library patrons who turned in material that even hinted at sex, whether erotic, pornographic, suggestive or even scientific in tone."

"The library still holds secrets, though, among them the fate of books taken from the Romanov family after 1917. They were brought to Leninka, and Stalin later insisted that they be destroyed. But Ms. Chestnykh said the director of the library, Vladimir Nevsky, could not bear to lose the fine old texts and tried to keep them. For his efforts, he was shot in 1937, but his staff hid volumes throughout the library, shoving them pell-mell into the stacks.
"'We are still finding them," Ms. Chestnykh said, adding that many of the nearly 1,000 books are cataloged among various collections. "But nobody knows where they all are. Sometimes a reader will bring us a book and point out that the ex libris is the czar's. It is all part of a tragic history.'"