I suppose it’s a feature of the human condition that anything that can be sold will be stolen, and that anything with a significant value will be stolen more enthusiastically. One thinks of the Antwerp diamond heist in 2003 where something of the order of $100 million in diamonds were stolen from a vault at the diamond exchange. Culprits were caught and jailed, but most of the loot remains missing. Of course, the Antwerp Diamond Exchange was well aware of how valuable its stocks were and the gems were well guarded. The thieves needed to be clever and well-organized. How much easier then if the valuable items are basically left lying around. In that case the thieves don’t need to be clever at all. They just need to know what they're looking at and what to do with it once they've stolen it.
Then there's the question of the market. Of course thieves don’t expect to get the
insured value or the open market value, only the black market value. Still,
even 10c in the dollar would give the diamond thieves $10 million. And it seems
that there are diamond traders who are willing to look past the careful steps
to establish the provenance of the gems. When it comes to individual collectors
of, say, rare books or iconic paintings, a few may allow the fixation to obtain
the item overwhelm concerns about where it originated. Maybe not only a few.
Alexander Pushkin 1827 portrait
This brings
us to the Pushkin thefts. Speaking for myself, I knew that Pushkin was an early
nineteenth century Russian writer who died young. I’ve never read anything he wrote – apparently
much of it is poetry that doesn’t translate easily. Probably I wouldn’t have
read it anyway. But Pushkin is a very big deal in Russia, where he is now regarded as the
father of Russian literature. In an age of Russian nationalism, that makes
first editions of his works hugely collectible at home and few questions asked if any.
It turns
out that many of these first editions are (or were) held in European state or university collections
in the company of many other old extremely valuable books. In some cases, they are freely
available to readers to examine, although of course they are not loaned. Well, not usually. As one
of the book thieves described it, “Half a kilo of gold, worth 50,000 euros, is
guarded by 22 armed men. Two books, worth 50,000, are lying somewhere in a
library in Europe, and they are guarded by one little old lady.”
So it’s not
too hard to get what you want. Potter into a library in, say, Warsaw. Ask to examine several classic books of Russian literature. Head out for a smoke break outside the building at some point. Perhaps you are a little beefier under your winter sweater. You
don’t return. At some point the librarian returns to the reading room and finds
that five of the books are gone.
Over the next several days they check the collection and find many other books missing. They've been replaced by “high-quality fake” replicas. Except that they're not very high quality at all. Photocopies on modern paper and shabby binding apparently are enough to persuade the librarians that these are their original books. The thieves are so sure of the casual way this is handled that they cheerfully return multiple times to lift other books. And the gang (or other independent crooks) are repeating this scenario across Europe’s collections. Nearly two hundred books are lifted before the alarm is set off. Interpol sets up “Operation Pushkin.”
You would
expect that the stolen items are making their way to collectors with plenty of
money but few scruples, and that these collectors will keep very quiet about
their ill-gotten prizes. Well, not quite. The books are sold on public auctions
in Russia! A particularly rare parcel made the TV news, which commented dryly that the origin of the material was "murky". Probably, they were quite happy to poke their ex allies in the eye with
a pointed stick. It took Interpol more than a year to track down (some of) the
thieves. Most of them received three year sentences. They'll have plenty of money
to spend when they get out, and not much remorse. Two of the culprits,
Druzhinin and Tsirekidze, put it this way in an interview with the BBC:
The narrow
circle of buyers of expensive books, Druzhinin suggested, could see their
purchases as a patriotic act. “It is a moment of historical return of
significant books to their homeland,” he said.
From his
prison in Estonia, Tsirekidze described the motives of Russian buyers of
antique books differently.
“Why the
hell does anyone still need [Pushkin]? This is purely Russian imperialism,
chauvinism, this idea that he is ours, so he is great. If they think so and
will pay tens, hundreds of thousands [of dollars] - let them pay, what’s wrong
with that?”
Well, apart
from the fact that it’s theft and that they're in prison for it, I suppose it
comes down to a rich fool and his money.
I wish the
libraries good luck with getting their property returned…
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