'Cultural Chernobyl': Million rare documents damaged in Moscow library fire

A fire that ripped through one of Russia’s largest university libraries is believed to have damaged over one million historic documents, with some describing the fire as a cultural “Chernobyl.” The blaze, which started Friday and was still not completely out on Saturday evening, ravaged 2,000 square metres of the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences (INION) in Moscow, which was created in 1918 and holds 10 million documents with some dating back to the 16th century.

It’s a major loss for science. This is the largest collection of its kind in the world, probably equivalent to the [United States] Library of Congress.

Vladimir Fortov, president of the Russian Academy of Sciences quoted by Russia press agencies

According to Russian media, investigators looking into the cause of the blaze suspect an electrical short-circuit was to blame. About 15 per cent of the collection had been damaged at the library, which includes one of the world’s richest collections of Slavic language works, but also documents from Britain, Italy and the US. Much of it was damaged by water used by firefighters. No one was injured in the inferno.

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