Russian and Ukrainian Libraries
Are Targets for Theft
Col. Alexei Bykotsev, a senior investigator with the Russian Interior Ministry, admitted to the Associated Press August 23 that thefts of valuable materials from libraries in Russia, Ukraine, and other former Soviet republics have become a major business for organized crime. “We see that the criminals are becoming more educated,” he said. “They have escape and sales venues ready, and the thefts often come on order.”
More than 40 gangs of Soviet emigrés living in the West are said to traffic in Russian cultural treasures. In one case last year, a Ukraine National Library patron posing as a policeman made off with a rare first edition of Copernicus’s 1543 treatise on celestial mechanics. In another, curators at the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg took weeks to discover that at least 38 medieval Jewish manuscripts had been stolen.
The police have made some recoveries. A former aide to President Boris Yeltsin was sentenced to five years in prison for his involvement in the 1994 theft of ancient Asian and Near Eastern manuscripts from the Russian National Library.
Posted August 30, 1999.
|
