Rare Russian books keep vanishing from libraries in Europe
In April 2022, soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, two men arrived at the library of the University of Tartu, in Estonia’s secondlargest city. They told the librarians they were Ukrainians fleeing war and asked to consult 19thcentury first editions of works by Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s national poet, and Nikolai Gogol.
Speaking Russian, they said they were an uncle and nephew researching censorship in czarist Russia so the nephew could apply for a scholarship to the United States. Eager to help, the librarians obliged. The men spent 10 days studying the books.
Four months later, during a routine annual inventory, the library discovered that eight books the men had consulted had disappeared, replaced with facsimiles of such high quality that only expert eyes could detect them. “It was terrible,” said Krista Aru, the director of the library. “They had a very good story.”
At first, it seemed like a one-off – bad luck at a provincial library. It wasn’t. Police are now investigating what they believe is a vast, coordinated series of thefts of rare 19th-century Russian books – primarily first and early editions of Pushkin – from libraries across Europe.
Since 2022, more than 170 books valued at more than $2.6 million, according to Europol, have vanished from the National Library of Latvia in Riga; Vilnius University Library; the State Library of Berlin; the Bavarian State Library in Munich; the National Library of Finland in Helsinki; the National Library of France; university libraries in Paris and Lyon in France, and Geneva; and from the Czech Republic. The University of Warsaw library in Poland was hardest hit, with 78 books gone.
The books are worth tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars each. Inmost cases, the originals were replaced with high-quality copies that mimicked even their foxing – a sign of a sophisticated operation. The disappearance of so many books of the same ilk from so many countries in a relatively short period is unprecedented, experts said. The thefts have led libraries to boost security and put dealers on high alert about the provenance of Russian books.
According to Europol, authorities have arrested nine people in connection to the thefts. Four were detained in Georgia in late April, along with more than 150 books. In November, French police placed three suspects into custody. Another man has been convicted in Estonia and a fifth suspect is in jail in Lithuania.
A special French police unit dedicated to fighting cultural theft is overseeing the investigation in France and coordinating across Europe. Authorities paint a picture of a network of associates, some blood relatives, traveling across Europe by bus with library cards sometimes under assumed names to scout rare Russian books, make high-quality copies, then swap them for the originals, case files reviewed by The New York Times reveal.
The investigation, dubbed “Operation Pushkin,” was reported in depth by Le Parisien, a Paris daily. The director of France’s culture police unit, Col. Hubert Percie du Sert, declined to comment on an ongoing investigation.
In Russia, Pushkin is a national icon with the status of William Shakespeare but the familiarity of a friend. A romantic poet, novelist and playwright, aristocrat, libertine, writer on freedom and empire, he brought Russian literature, and the Russian language itself, into modernity before dying in a duel at age 37, in 1837.
Prices of books published during the lifetimes of the holy trinity of Russian romantic writers – Pushkin, Gogol and Mikhail Lermontov – have risen dramatically in the past 20 years, in line with the rise in wealth of Russian collectors. It’s a small market with relatively few books and collectors who often have a checklist of the books they want, dealers say.
Pushkin died young and so “lifetime” Pushkins are scarce. He published “Eugene Onegin,” a novel in verse, as a serial; a first edition with some chapters in their original wrappers sold for more than 467,000 British pounds ($581,000) at auction at Christie’s in 2019.
Western sanctions put in place after Russia invaded
Ukraine prohibit dealers in the West from selling to residents of Russia, fueling an existing shadow market for rare books. In thismarket, sales are often brokered privately through middlemen, with cash transactions that are difficult to trace, dealers say. Libraries are easy targets for thieves because they are intended to serve the public; they are often underfunded, without the same security asmuseums and other institutions with valuable works.
“It’s easy to get the books, it’s easy to know which books you should get and it’s easy to know the value,” said PierreYves Guillemet, a dealer in London specializing in
Russian rare books.
Guillemet and other dealers said it would be unlikely for the Russian books stolen from European libraries to turn up at official auctions in the West. The International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, a trade organization, has listed many of the recent library thefts on its Missing Books Register.
Angus O’Neill, the group’s vice president and security chair, said the organization had been in regular contact with Europol to inform its members about the thefts. “Booksellers are advised to be cautious!” the State Library of Berlin wrote on the Missing Books Register, listing
the five Russian books it had lost, with a total value in the low six figures.
Absorbing so many stolen books into the relatively small market for Russian books could be difficult. But these are the most famous books in Russia, Guillemet said, potentially attractive not only to seasoned collectors but also to “rich people wanting trophy items.”
Europol said some of the stolen books had already been sold by auction houses in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia, “effectively making them irrecoverable.” The agency did not reveal which books, citing the ongoing investigation.