On 16 October 2023, a young man and woman sat down in the back row of the second-floor reading room of the university library of Warsaw, Poland. Their reading cards carried the names Sylvena Hildegard and Marko Oravec. On the desk in front of them were eight books with yellowing pages that they had ordered up from the library’s closed-storage 19th-century collection: rare editions of classic works of poetry, drama and fiction by two greats of the Russian canon, Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol. They studied the books closely, taking photographs on their phones and measurements with rulers.
When the duo did not return from a cigarette break and the invigilators checked their desk, they found that five of the eight books had gone. One of the missing Pushkin works was a narrative poem about the adventures of two outlaws, The Robber Brothers. It was as if the thieves had wanted to send a message.
In the days that followed, a more thorough investigation of the library’s stocks revealed that a further 74 books of Russian literature had been stolen in the weeks, or even months, leading up to the final swoop. The thieves had managed to avoid detection by replacing the books they had stolen with what one newspaper described as “high-quality facsimiles” of the originals. They did not have to worry about causing a scene when they left the building. Most books in the Warsaw library have been fitted with a magnetic strip that raises an alarm at the exit unless deactivated. But older books went without this, as an expert had advised that the glue on the magnetic strip could damage the paper.
The books’ disappearance made headline news in Poland. “It was like gouging out the crown jewels,” said Hieronim Grala, a former diplomat who helped the university assess the damage. Established in 1817, in a period when Poland was ruled by the Russian tsar, the library collection has been shaped by complex historic ties to Russia. “Those books were given to Poland at very significant historical moments,” said Bartosz Jandy, the Polish chief prosecutor who was tasked with investigating the thefts. “The fact that they are a testimony to Russian imperialism doesn’t mean they don’t belong to our heritage.”
The Warsaw book heist was not an isolated incident but one of the final stops on an unprecedented grand tour of bibliophilic crime, which snaked its way from north-east to south-west Europe between spring 2022 and winter 2023. As many as 170 rare Russian books, valued at more than £2.5m, vanished from the shelves of the National Library of Latvia in Riga, two university libraries in Estonia, Vilnius University Library in Lithuania, the National Library of Finland in Helsinki, the National Library of the Czech Republic in Prague, Bibliothèque Diderot in Lyon, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the National Institute of Languages and Civilisations in Paris, the Bibliothèque de Genève in Switzerland, the State Library in Berlin and the Bavarian State Library in Munich. “In terms of scale and sophistication, we have never dealt with anything like this before,” said Laura Bellen of Estonia’s southern district court, one of the first public prosecutors to investigate these thefts. “Libraries just aren’t used to thinking of themselves as targets for major crime.”
The thieves’ tactics in each of these cities were broadly the same: two people would use fake identities to order up rare Russian books from the stacks. If they were being watched closely, one would distract the librarians while the other walked out with the books. Their cover stories varied, and they were not always the same two people. In Warsaw they posed as Slovakians, in Helsinki as Poles. In Riga, they claimed to be Ukrainian refugees who wanted to research Russian history. In Paris they were Bulgarians studying “democracy in Russian literature of the 19th century”.
As early as the spring of 2022, authorities had begun to suspect that these were not isolated crimes. In December that year, police in Latvia arrested a man whose DNA had been found on books left behind during the theft at the National Library in Riga eight months earlier. The suspect owned library cards from Munich, Vilnius, Paris, Kyiv and Vienna, as well as a collection of library stamps and tools for restoring printed matter, such as a set of needles and spools of thread. Burly and balding, with salt-and-pepper stubble, the man was identified by his passport as Beqa Tsirekidze, a 46-year-old Georgian citizen. Investigators discovered he had a background in antiques dealing and a criminal record for theft. His DNA also matched that found at the scene of the April 2022 book thefts in neighbouring Estonia, where he was extradited and put on trial.
Tsirekidze’s arrest was far from the end of the story. During two trials in Tartu and Tallinn in the first half of 2024, he remained tight-lipped about whether anyone had commissioned him to steal books, even though this would have alleviated his sentence. He was given a compound sentence of three and a half years in prison. “I would say it’s rather likely that there is some kind of other force that made him carry out these thefts,” said Bellen. “But we don’t have any evidence of who that may be.”
To solve the continent-spanning riddle of the Pushkin heists, a moment of pan-European cooperation was required. In March 2024, the EU crime-fighting agency Eurojust set up a joint investigative team consisting of police from France, Lithuania, Poland and Switzerland. Georgia, which is not formally a member state of the cross-border crime agency but only an “operational partner country”, was invited to join, too.
These countries were unified in their determination to crack the crimes, but their working theories weren’t necessarily the same. Were all the thefts masterminded by the same set of people, or were authorities looking at rival gangs, competing with each other for the same prized titles? Above all, there was the uneasy fact of the thefts’ timing. The crimes began two months after Putin had announced the full-scale invasion of Ukraine with a speech that evoked the “culture and values, experience and traditions of our ancestors”. In the aftermath, relations between Russia and the European Union had reached new levels of hostility. Was this a bunch of small-time criminals making use of lax security, or were investigators looking at something bigger, a state-sponsored Russian exercise in recouping cultural heritage that had been scattered across the continent? “In my opinion,” said Jandy, the Polish prosecutor, “it’s impossible that a group of thieves initiated this action without the involvement of a state.”
The common denominator in all the thefts was the work of Alexander Pushkin, the early 19th-century Romantic poet and playwright. Outside Russia, Pushkin is mainly known for two works that inspired operas by Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades. He is otherwise little read. “The problem with Pushkin is that he was mostly a poet, and poetry is very difficult to translate,” says Pierre-Yves Guillemet, a London-based bookseller who specialises in Russian literature.
In Russia, on the other hand, Pushkin is regarded as a foundational figure. Over the past two centuries, his ambiguous politics have enabled very different regimes to embrace him. “He was definitely a great patriot, and like nearly his entire aristocratic class, he was a monarchist,” says Andrew Kahn, a professor of Russian literature at the University of Oxford. Yet there was rebellion in Pushkin’s writing, too. In his youth he wrote a poem, Dagger, which celebrated regicide, and he was personal friends with some of the key players in the failed 1825 coup d’etat against the Russian empire.
In 1937, Stalin chose to mark the centenary of Pushkin’s death with statues, commemorative exhibitions and plays, and new multilingual anniversary editions of his books. It was, in part, a calculated move to create a unifying figure that the multi-ethnic empire could rally around. Later, in the twilight years of the Soviet Union, dissident writers such as Andrei Sinyavsky tried to wrestle Pushkin back from the hands of the communists, emphasising his sensuality and eroticism over his ideological leanings.
In the 21st century, however, the Russian state has chosen to emphasise his most jingoistic works. Pushkin supported the violent suppression of the November uprising of 1830-31, in which Poles, Lithuanians, Belarusians and Ukrainians revolted against the Russian empire. His poem about the revolt, To the Slanderers of Russia, suggested that the choice for the Slavic peoples was either to merge their streams “into the Russian sea” or simply to “dry up”. In November 2022, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, released a video of himself reciting To the Slanderers of Russia, interspersed with images of US president Joe Biden and the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen. Earlier that year, as Russian troops advanced into Ukrainian territory, they put up placards with Pushkin’s portrait in towns they captured.
Ukrainians who grew up on Russian culture in the post-Soviet era have come to see the veneration of Pushkin as propaganda, and a smokescreen for war crimes. “The world is still so sentimental about Russia’s great cultural heritage,” says Oleksandr Mykhed, a Ukrainian writer and literary scholar. “It makes it so easy for Russians to say: we will kill you and then we will ask for sorrow and forgiveness, and then we will kill another people in another country, but what can you do, our soul is just a mystery.”
One of the striking things about the thefts was how straightforward many were. The first “heist” was barely worthy of the name. Between 24 March and 8 April 2022, Beqa Tsirekidze was able to borrow 10 volumes of rare books from the Tallinn University Academic Library, including an 1834 edition of Pushkin’s The History of Pugachev. The only criminal energy required was resisting the urge to return them.
In April 2022, Tsirekidze and an accomplice visited the National Library in Riga, Latvia. They were able to order an 1829 edition of Pushkin’s Poltava – worth an estimated €10,000 – to the library’s unsupervised main storage reading room, alongside two other valuable works. To prevent theft, most academic libraries in Europe rely on trackable tags that are typically glued on the inside of a book’s back cover. In Riga, the thieves merely found a quiet corner, scraped off the tags, put the books under their sweaters and walked out.
What about the supposed “high quality” of the forgeries some of the thieves left behind? Nick Wilding, a British-born Renaissance historian who is also one of the world’s leading specialists in print forgeries, is sceptical about that description. In 2012, Wilding gained international fame for de-authenticating a copy of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius, a treatise that includes the first printed depiction of the moon as seen through a telescope. Its forger, Italian librarian Marino Massimo de Caro, had taken great care: he had made his own paper, then artificially aged it by steaming it in sulphuric acid on a low heat. The only things that aroused Wilding’s suspicion about the book’s authenticity were a minor irregularity in the library stamp and a typographic impossibility. By De Caro’s own account, it took him over a year to make his master forgery.
By contrast, Wilding reckons that most of the Pushkin and Gogol facsimiles could have easily been made in a day. Photos of a facsimile of one 1802 book show a stark contrast between the pristine paper colour of the title page and the yellowed pages of the rest of the book. To trick overworked librarians at the checkout desk, Wilding believes that the thieves merely copied and pasted a facsimile of a work’s title page into a less valuable 19th-century book, possibly a second edition of the same work. At Tartu University in Estonia, librarians found that Pushkin and Gogol books were forged by simply stuffing pages from 19th-century German books into the original leather or paper bindings. “It’s pretty amateur,” he told me. “I’m not sure forgery is even the right word, they are so bad.”
All this left investigators with one central question: were these thefts really the work of a team of criminal masterminds, or just a bunch of chancers grabbing cultural treasures that were there for the taking?
After Estonia and Latvia, the thefts moved further north to Finland in spring 2023, and on to Lithuania in May. Then they hit France. In July 2023, 10 books were stolen from the Diderot Library in Lyon, including an early copy of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov worth an estimated €70,000.
In Paris, a librarian named Aglaé Achechova noted this development with alarm. Achechova is head of the Russian collection at Paris’s University Library of Languages and Civilisations (Bulac) and in July 2023, she sent an email to her French colleagues. “As a former curator of 18th-19th century books in the Pushkin memorial museum in St Petersburg, I am convinced that this was a commissioned theft,” she wrote. The thieves who stole these books, Achechova believed, must have been hired by a wealthy collector. She warned her colleagues that the collection at their university might be next.
Until the Pushkins started to vanish across Europe, the most spectacular book crime of recent times was the so-called “Feltham heist” of 2017, when a gang of Romanians abseiled into a warehouse near Heathrow airport to steal 200 rare books valued at more than £2.5m. Because the gang left behind a considerable number of books, the thieves were initially thought to have been working from a master list provided by a book collector. But by the time of their 2020 trial, this theory had been discarded. “The suspects stole as many books as they could carry, and there was no obvious thought put into selecting one book over another, other than [taking] the ones with ornate fonts,” DI Andy Durham, the lead investigator in the case, told me. The thieves appeared to have struggled to offload their goods, eventually burying their entire haul under the floorboards of a house in the Romanian countryside.
Achechova believes the Pushkin thefts were different and that there really was a rogue collector or knowledgable dealer behind them. What convinced her, she said in her email to colleagues, was that all the books that had been stolen up to that point were “legendary items for any serious Russian-speaking bibliophile”.
From a collector’s point of view, what makes the stolen Pushkins so alluring is less the ideology contained within their covers than the fact that they were published before the author’s death at the age of 37. (In an echo of his verse novel Eugene Onegin, Pushkin died in a duel with a French officer rumoured to have had an affair with his wife.) The two other authors whose books were second and third on the list of stolen works in 2022 and 2023 were Mikhail Lermontov and Gogol, who lived until just 26 and 42 respectively. Tolstoy, by contrast, died aged 82. “It’s the same logic you have with rock stars: the younger they die, the more valuable they become,” says Guillemet, the bookseller.
In the late 2010s, so-called “lifetime editions” of Pushkin sold for remarkable sums. In 2018, an 1829 edition of the narrative poem Poltava went for £32,500 – more than double its estimate – at an auction at Sotheby’s in London. In 2019, a first edition of Eugene Onegin, estimated at £120,000, fetched £467,250 at Christie’s. In the wake of Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, the biggest auction houses in western Europe have stopped working with buyers and sellers in Russia, which has throttled the supply of rare books and further driven up the prices of works that are available.
In her email to colleagues, Achechova attached a list of the rarest Pushkin books in Bulac’s own collection. “In a way, we began to wait for the criminals to arrive,” she told me. They did not have to wait long. Three months later, on 9 October 2023, two men claiming to be Bulgarian nationals registered at Bulac and ordered precisely the titles highlighted on Achechova’s list.
Unlike at previous libraries, the men found they were only able to look at the Pushkins under the eyes of watchful staff. That evening, Bulac’s management contacted Paris police, but the thieves made their move before the authorities could act. Overnight, they broke one of the street-facing windows with an iron bar and entered the reading room they had visited during the day. Finding that the most valuable books had been locked away in the basement, the thieves left the premises with only a few handfuls of worthless pamphlets. Worse still, in entering through the broken window they had injured themselves and provided detectives with further evidence: the next morning, police found bloodstains on one of the wall racks and on the yellow carpet.
A week after the botched attempt in Paris, the final Pushkin thefts in Warsaw took place. And the following month, in November 2023, librarians at the Bavarian State Library in Munich discovered that they, too, had been targeted. Two books by Nikolai Gogol, published during his lifetime, had vanished and been replaced with facsimiles. What was notable about the theft was that the two books were volumes two and three of a four-volume collected works of the writer. The thieves had ordered up and inspected all four volumes but decided to steal only two, further hardening the impression they were ticking off a list.
That November, eight months after Eurojust’s joint investigative committee had been formed, it notched up its first success. Mikheil Zamtaradze, a Georgian citizen who had been identified as a suspect in connection with the thefts in Paris and Vilnius, was arrested at Brussels airport and extradited to Lithuania on a European arrest warrant. On 24 April 2024, four further Georgian nationals were arrested in Georgia, followed by a fifth suspect on 16 May.
During the interrogation of the suspects in Tbilisi, the investigators achieved a breakthrough. In custody, one suspect confessed that she was one of the pair who had stolen the books in Warsaw. Finally, it seemed, investigators had a source who could shed light on the inner workings of the Pushkin heists.
On 21 October 2024, the woman identified on her Warsaw university reading pass as “Sylvena Hildegard” appeared in front of a judge in Tbilisi. Her real name was Ana Gogoladze. The courtroom was packed with spectators, friends and members of her family, and the 23-year-old woman, who had dyed red hair, initially appeared nervous. As she described how she had gone about stealing the books, her voice became calmer.
A month before the Warsaw theft, Gogoladze had received a message from her husband, Mate Tsirekidze – the son of Beqa Tsirekidze, the man convicted earlier that year for book thefts in Latvia and Estonia. Gogoladze and Mate had married a few years earlier and become parents, but at the time that Mate contacted her on Telegram, they were on bad terms. She was raising their child as a single mother in Tbilisi, while he was mostly working abroad as a builder. His message contained an unusual proposal: Mate asked if she would accompany him to Poland to steal rare books. Since she needed the money, she begrudgingly agreed.
In Tbilisi, Mate’s sister handed them fake IDs and their plane tickets to Warsaw. On arrival, they checked into a guesthouse, and the next day they registered at the library under their fake names. Gogoladze, who has no university education and reads only basic Russian, did not bring any expertise to the job. She told the court that she had only recognised Nikolai Gogol’s name on one of the book’s covers because it reminded her of her own. After the theft, the couple threw away their fake IDs and travelled by taxi to another Polish city whose name Gogoladze could not recall, before moving on to Vienna, where they handed the stolen books to a contact and flew back to Tbilisi.
Far from resolving all the questions swirling around the thefts, Gogoladze’s testimony had thrown up numerous new puzzles. If she and Mate had stolen only five books, who took the other 74 books missing from Warsaw? And then there was the fact that when Gogoladze and her husband returned to Tbilisi, her sister-in-law handed them back the five books they had stolen and told them that they were worthless: they were replicas that had already been forged by someone else. It was a crushing blow for Gogoladze. Instead of receiving a handsome reward, she was reimbursed only for her travel expenses. By the end of the year, she and Mate had split up again, this time for good. (In February 2025, Mate, Gogoladze and three other defendants were found guilty of stealing Russian books from libraries in eight EU countries. All were sentenced to several years in prison, with Gogoladze receiving a suspended sentence.)
Rather than a coordinated effort by a single gang, Gogoladze’s testimony suggested an alternative possibility: the Pushkin thefts as a Marx Brothers-style farce, in which competing gangs swapped real books with fakes at dizzying speed. According to several sources involved in Eurojust’s joint investigative committee, there was significant disagreement among the national crime agencies looking into the thefts. The Georgian prosecutor was convinced that some of the books that Gogoladze had taken in Warsaw were real, and that her sister-in-law had simply lied to her in order to swindle her out of a reward. The Polish side was not so sure. They believed that the young couple had indeed stolen worthless facsimiles, possibly as a carefully planned attempt to cover the tracks of an earlier heist.
Conflicts over what may seem like minor details pointed to a broader debate: the more sophisticated the operation, the more plausible the theory that the Russian state had played a role in its facilitation. Prosecutors from EU states became increasingly frustrated with the narrowness of the charges brought by the public prosecutor in Tbilisi – one source told me that more suspects allegedly involved with the thefts should have been charged – as well as the glacial pace of court proceedings, which were slowed down by high-profile trials of pro-European protesters taking place at the same time. Georgia, one prosecutor from a European country told me, was “scared of doing anything that could worsen its relationship with Russia”.
The lack of a breakthrough was also testing everyone’s patience. Fourteen months into the investigation, the National Library of the Netherlands belatedly reported that six rare Pushkins had also been stolen in March 2023 from its premises in The Hague, not far from Eurojust’s headquarters. Instead of zeroing in on a mastermind, there was a sense that the scale of the crime they were uncovering was ever-expanding.
It was not until April of 2025 that the picture began to become clearer. Mikheil Zamtaradze, the man arrested at Brussels airport in November 2023, appeared in front of a court in Vilnius, Lithuania. He was accused of stealing 17 books, worth more than €600,000, from the city’s university library in May 2023. Zamtaradze, a thick-set 50-year-old Georgian with a high forehead and a chinstrap beard, did not deny stealing the books. He did, however, present the theft as a crime of opportunity. He told the judge he earned an income by buying and then selling old items, and that he had visited the Lithuanian capital with the intention to buy books, not to steal them.
Evidence presented in court painted a different picture. From library staff, the judge heard how Zamtaradze had charmed them and how he had moved piles of books between different rooms to confuse the supervisors. Information obtained by French investigators also showcased Zamtaradze’s ingenuity: when visiting the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris later the same year he did so with what appeared to be a broken arm, hiding stolen pages inside his sling. He created basic forgeries by printing copies of the title pages in his hotel room with a colour inkjet printer – so cheap that he threw it away when the cartridge ran out. GPS data from his iPhone showed that Zamtaradze had spent much of 2022 and 2023 jetting across the European continent, visiting not just Lithuania but Poland, Germany, France, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Estonia and Ukraine – a remarkable itinerary for a father of five who claimed to be unemployed and on benefits.
Zamtaradze presented himself as a lone wolf. In cases where there was a proven personal connection to other suspects, he claimed not to have been in touch with them for years. But booking receipts and CCTV footage showed Zamtaradze had often stayed in the same hotels – sometimes the same hotel rooms – as the other Georgian suspects he claimed to have not been in touch with. One of these, a 45-year-old used car salesman called Robert Tsaturov, was a former acquaintance from military service years, though messages extracted from his phone suggest their relationship wasn’t exactly one of equals. “You’re pissing me off,” Zamtaradze admonished his former comrade in one message; “You’re a good kid,” he praised him in another. “Are you [expletive] blind or just pretending,” reads the transcript of a voice message dated 4 August 2023.
One particularly damning exchange fell into the hands of France’s art police unit because Zamtaradze had typed it into his phone right underneath a CCTV camera on the terrace of the François-Mitterrand site of the Bibliothéque nationale de France on 25 October 2023 while on a cigarette break. In it, Zamtaradze appears to be directing Tsaturov to swap out a book with a forgery inside a library: “Act cool and everything will be fine,” he wrote. “No one is following you, it’s just your inner fear. The most important thing is the discreet exchange, everything else is irrelevant.”
In June 2025, Zamtaradze was found guilty and sentenced to three years and four months in prison in Lithuania. By the end of the trial, the judge concluded that the accused had not acted alone but operated within “an organised group whose members, having divided roles among themselves, sought to carry out a premeditated plan to steal books and exchange them”. Mikheil Zamtaradze and Beqa Tsirekidze had been the group’s brains, while a host of relatives and old acquaintances acted out their scheme. Within this group, there appeared to have been a degree of coordination but also an element of competition and mutual deception. When interrogated by Polish investigators after the Vilnius trial, Zamtaradze claimed it was he who had stolen the books from the Warsaw library, pipping Mate Tsirekidze and Ana Gogoladze to the post and leaving them to steal worthless forgeries.
One larger question remained: on whose orders were the Georgians acting? On this, Zamtaradze was surprisingly forthcoming, though his story sometimes strained credulity. While in Vilnius, he said, he had received a phone call – apparently out of the blue – from a man saved in his phone as “Maxim”. He described the man as a Russian collector and dealer of rare books to whom he had sold antiques in the past. On the phone, Maxim allegedly expressed an interest in old books by Pushkin, and Zamtaradze had sent him photos of the most valuable Pushkins in the Vilnius library. A week later, Maxim sent Zamtaradze 12 forgeries of the same titles via a coach from Minsk, Belarus. These were of considerably higher quality than the amateurish copies that Zamtaradze had manufactured in his hotel room. Zamtaradze claimed that he entered the library, swapped the originals for the fakes, and placed the originals in a parcel on a coach back to Minsk. In return, he claimed to have received cryptocurrency worth $30,000.
In court, Zamtaradze gave his buyer’s full name as “Maxim Tsitrin”, though no person with that name is known to operate in the Russian rare books trade. There is, however, a Russian book dealer named Maxim Tsipris, who is executive director of Moscow-based online bookstore Staraya Kniga (“Old Book”). In a 2019 interview, Tsipris described “lifetime editions by classic authors” as the “most interesting” items on his shelves. In a phone call, Tsipris confirmed he had received my email outlining the story Zamtaradze had told the court, but failed to take up his right of reply.
Whether Tsipris is the buyer of the stolen books is not known – some inside observers of the Russian book trade suggest he is too small a player to orchestrate such a large crime, and speculate that Zamtaradze may have been trying to frame him. It is also possible that there were many different buyers. According to the internet history on his iPhone, Zamtaradze searched for a Russian auction house that specialises in books, Litfund. Its director is Sergey Burmistrov, a bibliophile with impressive contacts in high office: he has previously offered expert consultancy to the Russian ministry of culture and used to run a magazine for book collectors, having been appointed to the role by Mikhail Seslavinsky, the head of the federal agency for press and mass media. After its foundation in 2014, Litfund quickly became a market leader and now operates from offices in Moscow, St Petersburg and Krasnoyarsk. In July 2023, Litfund set a new Russian record for the sale of antique books, when a copy of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin went under the hammer for 26m rubles (£233,000).
Librarians in Warsaw believe that just a few months before this record sale, Litfund also auctioned off Pushkins that had been freshly stolen from their shelves. Checking this claim is not easy, mainly because information about the content of these suspect lots has been scrubbed from the internet. Litfund’s website says the relevant lots have been “moved, deleted or may never have existed”. There is similarly no record of these lots on Bidspirit, an Israel-based web portal that tracks international auction sales. But a snapshot of the catalogue of the sale archived on Wayback Machine shows that on 22 December 2022, Litfund’s St Petersburg house did fetch 12m rubles (£107,000) for “one of the rarest editions” of Pushkin’s poems, which carried a Warsaw University Library stamp on its front page.
When I contacted Burmistrov via email to ask whether Litfund had sold stolen editions of Pushkin, he told me: “We do not sell any books that carry on their pages any stamps or marks indicating their belonging to any existing state libraries, and our experts are very careful about it; we work in accordance with existing Russian laws.” Yet on 20 April 2023, Litfund sold another edition of Pushkin’s poems, this one for 2.6m rubles (£23,000). And a screenshot of the picture in Litfund’s catalogue, taken by Warsaw librarians before it was scrubbed from the web, once again shows a Warsaw University Library stamp on the first page, as well as imperfections that the librarians say were distinct to the copy held by them. Burmistrov did not respond when I put these allegations to him in an email.
Even if these books were indeed sold through Litfund, this does not prove that the auction house commissioned their theft. Meanwhile, the idea that the Kremlin coordinated the repatriation of valuable cultural heritage remains extremely speculative. The apparent unwillingness of Russian authorities or private companies such as Litfund to aid in the European investigation, however, suggests they are at the very least comfortable with the current outcome. Of the approximately 170 books that have gone missing, none of the originals have been recovered. “I don’t have any hope we will get them back in the near future,” said Jandy, the Polish prosecutor. “That would need cooperation with Russia, and while we’re almost at war that’s impossible.”
In an article for the Russian edition of Forbes magazine published in 2024, Burmistrov waved off the allegation that the Pushkin thefts could be traced to Russia or were even part of “a special operation to export Russian books from Europe”. But his article strikes a bullish note. European libraries did not do as much to protect these valuable literary works as their Russian counterparts, he claimed – a result of a lack of interest in Russian culture, owing to geopolitical tensions. That common criminals were able get their hands on lifetime-edition Pushkins in the first place, Burmistrov seemed to imply, was above all a sign of European weakness.
Additional reporting for this piece by Natalia Jalaghonia and Ada Petriczko
