She was the most famous librarian and library expert in Russia. No more, but no less. Margarita Rudomino’s name was given to the All-Russian State Library for Foreign Literature. Margarita Rudomino worked in libraries since she was eighteen. In a cold and hungry Moscow, the young soldier of the book front personally convinced the new government that the victorious proletariat should know foreign languages in order to win at a worldwide scale, and that bourgeois books with strange letters should not be thrown into fire and left in the dust heap of history. And luckily, some directors understood her: in 1921, Margarita Rudomino came to Anatoly Lunacharsky, Soviet People's Commissar for the Ministry of Education, and proved to him that the country had to open the Neo-Philological Library.

Now, there are legends about how she collected and organized the future library for foreign literature. She developed and implemented the principle of fund compilation that she formulated with her typical laconism: “We should study the world book market very closely, gathering only the “cream” and very little “milk,” but not a single drop of “water.” At the same time, Margarita Rudomino found readers for her library: wherever it was possible, she organized clubs for foreign languages. The Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages was founded on the basis of the courses that she organized at the library. With her active participation, the Internatsionalnaya Literatura magazine appeared in the 1930s (later, it became the famous Inostrannaya Literatura). And the Publishing House for Foreign Workers in the USSR, which gave rise to the Progress and Inostrannaya Literatura publishing houses. Margarita Rudomino even saved a church: St. Cosmas and Damian church in Stoleshnikov lane stands there until now only because a book warehouse was organized there at the behest of Margarita Rudomino.