The trial is the latest case aimed at delivering justice after a series of similar thefts in libraries across Europe, allegedly by an organised network.
Who says a love of reading doesn’t pay? Sometimes, though, the payoff can translate into years in prison.
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Six Georgian nationals appeared before a Paris court on Tuesday for stealing rare editions of classics of Russian literature from prestigious French libraries, including works by Alexander Pushkin whose name in Russia is often accompanied (albeit with a hint of irony) by the phrase “Pushkin is everything to us”, a measure of his importance to Russian culture.
This trial is the latest in a string of similar thefts carried out in recent years in libraries across Europe, suspected of being the work of an organised network.
The thefts targeted rare Russian classics worth a total of several million euros, including works by leading 19th‑century authors such as Pushkin, the father of “Eugene Onegin”, and Nikolai Gogol, the author of the immortal “Dead Souls”.
The defendants, tried in France, are being prosecuted for criminal conspiracy and attempted theft. Some of them also face charges of stealing cultural works on display.
They face up to 10 years in prison.
Seven people were initially due to stand trial, but at the opening of the hearings on Tuesday afternoon it was announced that one woman would be tried separately, on 2 December 2026, for procedural reasons.
Of the six remaining, two are being tried in absentia, with arrest warrants issued for them.
The hearing is scheduled to run until Friday.
Two other people, identified only as Mikheil Z. and Beqa T., have already been convicted and imprisoned in other countries for similar crimes and have been provisionally surrendered to the French authorities.
Mikheil Z., aged 50, was sentenced last year in Lithuania to three years and four months in prison for the organised theft of 19th‑century publications worth 606,000 euros (698,000 dollars).
Beqa T., aged 49, was sentenced to three years and six months in prison in Estonia.
Another man in pre‑trial detention and a woman who has not been remanded in custody were also among the defendants present in court.
According to investigation documents seen by AFP, French investigating judges suspect the defendants of belonging to an organised criminal network.
These thefts, which have also affected Germany, Switzerland and the Czech Republic, led to the creation of a joint investigation team under the aegis of Europol and Eurojust, the European Union’s police and judicial coordination agencies. The team has already led to several arrests in 2024.
All in all, around ten European countries have seen manuscripts disappear from their libraries. European investigators estimate that nearly 170 rare Russian works are thought to have been stolen in several countries.
“Strengthening its protection”
The thefts committed in France took place in 2023 at the Diderot library of the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Lyon, as well as at the National Library of France (BnF) and the University Library of Languages and Civilisations (BULAC) in Paris.
According to investigators, the thieves went to the libraries to consult rare, valuable works, photographed and measured them, then returned to replace them with near‑undetectable copies.
Between March and October 2023, Mikheil Z. went to the National Library of France (BnF) on forty occasions to request access to manuscripts, mainly by Pushkin, claiming to be conducting research into democracy in 19th‑century Russian literature.
In November, the library discovered that nine works had been replaced by copies, for an estimated loss of 650,000 euros: eight by Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) and one by Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841), leading figures of Russian Romanticism who both, as it happens, died in duels.
Another literary twist is that Lermontov is the author of “The Death of the Poet”, devoted to the death of Pushkin, killed by Georges Charles de Heeckeren d’Anthès, a French soldier and politician who later became a senator under the Second Empire.
All of which was no doubt lost on the perpetrators: Mikheil Z. admitted to investigators that he had stolen the works, but denied any complicity with the other defendants, saying he had acted out of greed and had sold the books in Russia to a certain “Maxim”.
In June 2024, the Russian auction house Litfond listed in its catalogue a second edition of Pushkin’s “The Prisoner of the Caucasus”, a copy matching the one stolen from the BnF.
The auction house told the French authorities it had documents proving that the book had been acquired from its owner in Russia in 2014 or 2015.
In the investigating judges’ view, these thefts may be linked to a desire to repatriate Russian cultural heritage, at a time when relations between Moscow and Europe are increasingly strained following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
None of the stolen works has been recovered, but the lawyer for the National Library of France, Alexandre de Konn, said the institution “has not given up hope of getting them back”.
“The Library remains true to its mission: to keep making heritage accessible to the public while constantly strengthening its protection,” he told AFP.
