G rego ry A fin o g en o v I'm not original. My ideal is the creative mind, or, in terms of mottoes: IBM 's "Think" and the poetic "never a day without a line."-A. P. Ershov When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, the Soviet Union was suddenly confronted with two major, imminent transformations. The first was the restructuring and liberalization o f Soviet society under the banner o f glasn o st' and free market reform, the subject o f the most influential studies o f the late Soviet era, which depict the break o f the early perestroika years primarily in ideological or personal terms.* 1 The second, in a longer timeframe, was the arrival o f the post-Fordist information economy, heralded in part by the worldwide explosion in personal computing over the course of the decade. Although it has received little attention, the plan to modernize and retool the Soviet economy using advanced scientific and technological means was integral to Gorbachev's promise. If the Soviet Union was to present an effective counterpart to the "capitalism o f the age o f electronics and informatics, o f computers and robots"-as he put it in his address to the 27th Party Congress-it needed to turn the "acceleration o f scientifictechnical progress" to its advantage, making the most o f the "transformation I would like to thank Loren Graham, Terry Martin, Rachel Koroloff, and Kritikas anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous versions of this essay.
This Research Note follows the development of Manchu-language print and manuscript collections at the Library of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. It focuses especially on the works collected in Beijing by Larion Rossokhin, the first graduate of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Beijing to have any significant knowledge of Manchu. These collections formed the basis of one of the first large-scale Western Manchu translation projects, the publications of Aleksei Leont'ev in the 1770s and '80s, and eventually for the emergence of academic Manjuristics in the Russian Empire and beyond. Included in the note is a series of complete library catalogues from the St. Petersburg branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, documents hitherto largely unknown to the Western reader. 1. I am grateful to Mårten Söderblom Saarela, Devin Fitzgerald, Matthew Mosca, and Saksaha's anonymous reviewer for feedback on previous versions of this material.
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