Old Prints Stolen from the University of Warsaw Library Were Transported to Moscow via Minsk
The Polish prosecutor's office is preparing to bring charges of mediating in the sale of stolen goods against Sergey Burmistrov — owner of a Moscow auction house and former expert of the Russian Ministry of Culture. According to the investigation, he was involved in the trade of rare 19th-century books stolen from the University of Warsaw library, writes Onet.pl.
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A Georgian citizen, Mikhail Z., played a key role in the thefts. For several months, he regularly visited the library, posing as a researcher. Exploiting control deficiencies, he took out original books and replaced them with crudely made fakes. Library staff did not notice the substitutions for a long time, as they only checked barcodes.
In this way, 78 valuable editions disappeared from the library — including first editions of Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, and Krylov — with a total value of about 3.8 million zlotys (about 1 million dollars).
The books were illegally transported via Minsk, and payments to the perpetrators were made in cryptocurrency.
It later turned out that an entire organized group of Georgian citizens was involved in the case, which operated using a similar scheme in other European countries — Germany, France, Austria, and the Baltic states. In total, about 170 rare books were stolen from European libraries.
Some of the editions stolen from Warsaw appeared at auctions in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Despite the obvious stamps of the University of Warsaw library, the books were sold, and the auction house earned a profit of about a million zlotys.
The investigation believes that such trade would have been impossible without the tacit consent of the Russian authorities, but there is no direct evidence of state involvement yet. Polish investigators do not rule out that wealthy Russian collectors, for whom such books became a symbol of imperial nostalgia, were behind the thefts.
It is unlikely that the stolen editions will be returned in the near future, but all of them have been entered into international registers of lost cultural property. Investigators hope that over time, the books may surface in private collections.
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