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A fire in one of Russia's major state libraries, in Moscow, has damaged an estimated 15% of the 10 million volumes and materials, the New York Times said. The fire broke out at the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences on Friday and wasn't fully extinguished until Saturday.
Institute director Yuri Pivovarov said that while many copies of books can be found abroad, the institute had been "a research conveyor, and this conveyor has stopped."
Alexander Visly, director of the Russian State Library, told Tass that most of the rarest volumes and manuscripts at the damaged library, primarily about economics, philosophy and Marxism-Leninism, had been brought to the Soviet Union from Germany as war trophies.