In the MSU Main Library, important works are a dime a dozen.

But the manuscripts and personal writings of Russian philosopher Ivan Il'in are harder to come by.

MSU library officials returned Il'in's collection to Russian representatives of President Vladimir Putin and other significant scholars in a formal ceremony Monday. The actual collection — 102 boxes of papers, photos and drawings — will be packaged today and transported to New York where a private carrier will ship them back to Russia. When the documents arrive, they will be given to archivists who will process the documents before they are permanently stored at Moscow State University.

"It's going from one MSU to another," MSU spokeswoman Deb Hammacher said.

Il'in was a renowned anti-Communist who criticized the Bolsheviks after the Revolution of 1917. He was expelled from Soviet Russia in 1922 and fled to Germany, where he took up teaching. But after the rise of the Nazi movement, Il'in refused to spread Nazi propaganda in his courses and was forced to flee to Switzerland in 1938, and died there in 1954.

After the death of his wife in 1963, the vast collection was stored in Zurich, Switzerland since the communist government was still in power in the Soviet Union. Il'in was considered an enemy of the government still and his works might have been destroyed, had they been returned.

Former MSU professor and friend of Il'in, Nikolai Poltoratzky, had the collection shipped to the United States for safekeeping.

The collection in the Special Collections department of MSU's Libraries was on loan from Poltoratzky for about 40 years, until his wife, Tamara, took over the guardianship after his death in 1990. In 2005, the Rossiikii Fond Kultury, part of the Russian Ministry of Culture, formally requested the collection as part of its mission to reclaim scattered cultural relics.

Peter Berg, head of MSU's Special Collections, said the library never made plans to return the collection to Russia because it was on loan from Poltoratzky, and the country's political climate wasn't always stable.

"I don't think in that time that there was ever any thought that things would be different, and the Soviet Union would always be the Soviet Union," he said. "And so those papers would always be here.

"But with the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, there was a renewed interest in bringing back papers, materials and whatnot of people who were forced to flee Russia."

Alexis Klimoff, professor at Vassar College in New York and an MSU alumnus, remembers Poltoratzky bringing the collection to the university when he was a student in 1965. Klimoff's father was a personal friend of Il'in and frequently corresponded with him while he was in exile.

When Klimoff visited MSU in 1993, he found the collection in "rather disheveled shape," with documents in bundles and rusted paper clips holding papers together. In order to archive the information, he made seven trips to MSU, staying for four to five days at a time in order to catalogue Il'in's work.

"I recognize it is important material which was not being used," he said. "I went through the papers one-by-one."

Berg said some of the papers are more than a hundred years old, but are still in excellent condition.

Cliff Haka, director of MSU Libraries, said the library has made microfilm and paper copies of the works for students and researchers at MSU to access.

At the ceremony, the Russian representatives officially signed for the collection and gave gifts to the MSU library officials, including certificates, library contributions and vodka. Berg, Haka and Klimoff were given medals displaying two clasping hands and inscribed with "for contributions to friendship."

Mikhail Pronin, vice consul to the Consulate General of the Russian Federation, said Il'in's writings have influenced current Russian politics, including Putin's latest speech to parliament.

"Some of the statements in his speech, they were very close to ideas of Il'in," he said. "Il'in really understood what Russia needs in terms of the political structure."

Il'in's remains, which were buried in Zurich, were unearthed in 2005 and shipped to Moscow to be reburied in the cemetery of the Donskoy Monastery. Pronin said that without the collection, Il'in's legacy is only half complete.

"All his thoughts and all his life, which (are) in these papers (are) here," he said. "He will be fully back to Russia. He's back home."

Lindsey Poisson can be reached at poisson4@msu.edu.