Late in the evening of June 12, the Paris Criminal Court handed down a verdict in one of the most unusual cases of recent years – a series of thefts of rare Russian books from the largest libraries in France. As AFP reports, six Georgian citizens accused of stealing lifetime editions of Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov and Yevgeny Baratynsky received from one and a half years of probation to seven years in prison.
The most severe punishment – seven years in prison with a preventive measure in place – was received by Mikhail Zamtaradze, who had previously been convicted in Lithuania for a similar crime. After serving his sentence, he is banned from entering France for life. His alleged accomplice Beka Tsirekidze, handed over to French authorities from Estonia, was sentenced to four years in prison. Two more defendants were convicted in absentia: they are in Georgia, which does not extradite its citizens. A French court sentenced them to six years in prison and issued international arrest warrants.
The prosecutor’s office called the incident a “real treasure theft” – a carefully prepared, cynical and organized operation. In 2023, attackers disguised as researchers and readers came to the National Library of France, the library of the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon and the BULAC Library of Languages and Civilizations in Paris. They ordered rare editions, photographed them, measured them, examined the bindings and paper, and then went back and replaced the originals with elaborate copies. The substitution went unnoticed for a long time.
From the National Library of France disappeared six rare editions of Pushkin, two volumes of Lermontov and one edition of Baratynsky. The damage from these episodes alone was estimated at €770 thousand.
The story was called “Operation Pushkin.” However, it quickly became clear that this was not a single theft, but an international network. Similar disappearances of Russian books were recorded in Germany, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, the Baltic countries and a number of other European countries. According to investigators, a total of about 170 rare Russian publications of the 19th century with a total value of several million euros disappeared from libraries in about ten countries. A joint team was created to investigate, with the participation of Europol.
This story has already attracted attention in Russia. Back in 2024 “Kommersant” wrote about how French librarians discovered the disappearance of rare editions of Pushkin and, as a result, tried to find out the fate of the books that, according to law enforcement agencies, could have ended up in the possession of Russian collectors. The court cited information that at one of the Russian auctions a second edition of the poem “Prisoner of the Caucasus” appeared, which coincided with the copy that disappeared from Paris. The auction owner claimed that the book was purchased legally and long before the theft.
Another version was also discussed at the trial – about the possible connection of the kidnappers with an organized criminal network that specialized specifically in Russian literature of the 19th century.
However, no direct evidence of the existence of the customer was presented. It’s time to recall Vladimir Sorokin’s 2017 novel “Manaraga,” translated and even awarded literary prizes in France. There, the rarest books from museums and libraries are used to prepare meals in a literary spirit, book’n’grill specialists fry meat over the burning pages of the originals, and the main character of the book specializes in stolen Russian classics.
