Millions of euros worth of 19th-century Russian literature have been stolen in Poland, Lithuania, and other Baltic countries over the past two years, replacing the originals on the shelves of libraries with fakes.
The Warsaw University Library only became aware of the thefts last month. Among the stolen valuables were the first editions of works by Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol.
One university employee estimated the value of the stolen books at around 1 million euros.
“It’s like robbing the crown jewels,” Hieronim Grala, a former diplomat, Russian political expert, and professor at Warsaw University, told AFP news agency.
“Fortunately, not everything was taken, but a few emeralds, diamonds, and rubies are missing,” he added.
Thieves have also targeted Russian literature in all three Baltic countries.
Experts believe that the stolen books ended up in Russia, where at least some of them were sold in hastily organised auctions.
The first such thefts were reported last year at the National Library of Latvia, where three books were missing.
A Georgian national was later found guilty of the theft and sentenced to six months in prison.
In the same month, two men came to the university library in Tartu, Estonia, claiming to be studying censorship and printing policy in early 19th century Russia. They asked for books by Pushkin and Gogol that were almost 200 years old.
It was only four months later that the library realised that the men had left eight convincing-looking copies instead of the originals. The damage was later estimated at 158 000 euros.
In May, Vilnius University Library also discovered that 17 of its rare Russian books were missing.
“Most of the stolen books had been replaced with non-original ones,” Gintarė Vitkauskaitė-Šatkauskienė, a spokesperson for the Lithuanian prosecutor general’s office, told AFP.
According to Lithuanian investigators, the stolen books are worth around 440,000 euros. These include Taras Shevchenko’s poems from 1840 and Alexander Pushkin’s poems from 1826, Mikhail Lermontov’s 1840 novel A Hero of Our Time, Nikolai Gogol’s 1841 edition of the play The Government Inspector, Pushkin’s play Boris Godunov, published in 1831, and his book The History of Pugachev, published in 1834.
Seventy-nine books are also missing from the University of Warsaw. At least some of these books were sold in auctions in Russia.
“There is a record dated December 22, 2022, that these books are in their place,” said Grala. “On the same day, one of these books was sold at an auction in Moscow for 30,500 euros.”
Newsletter
Every Friday morning.
