In April 1998 under Boris Yeltsin the Russian Duma nationalized these items; it also relieved any claims made on all Russian property still remaining in foreign lands. The Trophy-Brigade concept included dismantling anything of utility in Germany, and using it to rebuild the Soviet economy as retributions.   … The most important dismantling action, however, was carried out beginning in March 1946. Leuna [the Leunawerke, an I.G. Farbenindustrie manufacturing plant in Merseburg] deployed 30,732 of its workers and 7,376 other plant personnel to assist 400 Soviet officers and 1,000 to 1,200 soldiers from the Red Army to remove 120,000 tons of machines and structural iron and steel from the works. Included in a long list of affected installations were eight working compressors for synthetic gas, large scale installations for methanol synthesis, and various machines, apparatus, and installations for synthetic gasoline production. What is more, the Soviets seized 117 journals and 514 books from the works library, in all a total of 1,067 volumes. Vladimir Shabinsky, a Russian officer who later defected to the West, gave his personal account of his own service as member of a Soviet Trophy Brigade. The library section of the Russian Trophy Brigades was known as the "State Agency for Literature", or, "Gosfond". The Soviet government had set up this agency to allocate the confiscated literature to Soviet libraries and cultural institutions. The plan involved Gosfond allocating the materials to enhance existing collection in Russia and acquiring meaningful additions. However, the Agency became overwhelmed with the numbers of books sent from Germany. Eventually, the exercise degenerated into a mechanical process of distribution, and the beneficiary libraries proved unable to absorb the works, or in some cases, even to store them. In a meeting of March 14, 1946, a committee distributed 1,857 crates from some thirty institutional and private libraries (including those of top Nazis as von Ribbentrop and Goebbels) among five Soviet libraries: the National Lenin Library of the USSR, the National Historical Library, the National Polytechnical Library, the National Library for Foreign Literature and the National Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library. Lieutenant Colonel Margarita Rudomino, director of the Library for Foreign Literature in Moscow, and an associate on the staff of the "Plenipotentiary State Special Defense Committee", and part of the Soviet Trophy Brigade, argued that the German Library ("Deutsche Bibliothek-Deutsche Bücherei") in Leipzig was needed for re-building Germany and restoring German cultural identity.