Fire at Moscow library destroys rare texts in cultural 'Chernobyl'

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 on Friday, ravaged 21,500 square feet of the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences 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," said Vladimir Fortov, president of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

"One can find documents there that are impossible to find elsewhere - all the social sciences use this library. What has happened here is reminiscent of Chernobyl," he said, referring to the 1986 nuclear catastrophe.

Fortov said 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, and also documents from Britain, Italy and the US.

Fortov said that much of the damage was caused by water from the firefighting operations.