Baker Bell Dedication Rings in HBS Centennial
REPLICA UNVEILED: Dean Light talks with Father Alexander Abramov of the Russian Orthodox Church and second-year MBA student and Moscow native Konstantin Kuzovkov (far left).
Photo by Neal Hamberg
In a ceremony on the Baker Library steps in early October, Dean Jay Light paid tribute to a Russian monastery and officially launched the School’s Centennial, an unlikely pairing until you know the backstory.
It begins in 1930 when American industrialist and diplomat Charles R. Crane purchased a set of eighteen bells taken from the St. Danilov Monastery in Moscow, saving them from certain destruction under the antireligious Stalinist regime. The Moscow City Council priced them as scrap metal, and Crane donated the set to Harvard University. Seventeen were hung in the tower of Lowell House, a Harvard undergraduate residence. One came to HBS, which paid $4,000 to have it hung in the cupola of Baker Library. And there it remained for the next 77 years. As the decades passed, few remembered its origin or appreciated its link to Russian history.
But the Russian Ortho-dox church never forgot. With the church’s official restoration in the 1980s, talk soon turned to repatriating the exiled bells to the monastery, the spiritual home of Russian Orthodoxy. In 1988 President Ronald Reagan visited the St. Danilov Monastery, and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev used the occasion to inquire about the bells’ return. But nothing came of the idea.
More than a decade passed before talks between Harvard University and the monastery got under way. After four years of negotiations, the two parties reached an agreement in which the bells would be returned to Russia and replaced by a new set. But the church couldn’t finance the project alone. That’s when Russian oil and metals tycoon Viktor Vekselberg got involved. Through his Link of Times Foundation, he agreed to pay several million dollars to forge the new bells in Russia and to orga-nize the exchange.
Looking ahead, HBS requested that its new bell be crafted to celebrate the School’s 100th anniversary in 2008. The Centennial Bell was hoisted into place atop Baker Library on August 15, and the monastery bell was sent on its way back home. The remaining replacement bells will arrive at Lowell House next spring after Harvard Commencement, and the originals will be returned to Russia. The mid-August bell swap attracted several Russian TV crews and reporters and made headlines in the Russian press.
On October 1, Dean Light presided over the official dedication of the new bell, an event that culminated with the unveiling of a half-size replica bell that will be on permanent display in front of Baker Library. Like the Centennial Bell, the replica bears the inscription “Harvard Business School, 1908–2008” and the words “Leadership–Excellence–Integrity.” Both also feature images of Baker Library and the St. Danilov Monastery, the shields of both Harvard University and HBS, and a Fabergé egg nestled in ivy.
“Today, we launch the HBS Centennial celebration and a new century for the School,” said Dean Light. “We are all fortunate to be here at this historic moment in the life of the School. In a few minutes we’ll hear the bell toll for the first time. Let it be a reminder of our shared mission, of our connection to one another as members of this remarkable community, of our past, and of our future.”
For more information, visit www.hbs.edu/news/releases/092807_nrb.html.
