The British magazine tells about a 49-year-old Georgian man who was arrested at the airport in Brussels, accused of having stolen 17 books by Pushkin and other Russian 19th-century authors from the library at Vilnius University. The week before, he had requested to look at two original editions of the Russian national poet Alexander Pushkin at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) in Paris, but was denied.
At the arrest, forgeries of the books he had requested were found in the man's luggage. At the NBF in Paris, it was discovered a month later that nine of the titles the man had actually been allowed to see were now missing. Instead, they were replaced by extremely skillfully made forgeries.
Warsaw worst affected
Libraries in Berlin, Geneva, Helsinki, Lyon, Munich, Prague, Riga, Tallinn, Vienna, and Warsaw have also been affected by similar thefts - also there, books have been replaced by hard-to-detect copies. The worst affected is the university library in Warsaw, which has lost 79 books.
Polish prosecutor Bartosz Jandy describes the whole thing as organized crime:
The only mystery is who ordered the books. And unfortunately, the profile matches the methods of the Russian Federation.
Cultural war
During the war in Ukraine, Russia has also waged a cultural war, including with images of Pushkin put up in occupied areas, writes The Economist. After the bombing of the theater in Ukrainian Mariupol - where hundreds of people had sought shelter from the fighting - Russian soldiers adorned the destroyed facade with portraits of Russian playwrights and authors.
In Kherson, posters with Pushkin's face and text about Russia being there "forever" were put up.
