It is Kafkaesque. At a time when Russia was struggling to preserve civil peace, and with the shadow of outright civil war barely a month behind it, some enlightened bureaucrat at the State Customs Committee found nothing better to do last November than to issue a new regulation requiring that people leaving the country present a detailed list of their books or leave them behind.


And by detailed, he meant detailed: author, title, publisher, date of publication, number of pages, price of the book and even the print run (which, by the way, is a feature of Russian but not Western books since royalties here have historically been determined by number of copies printed rather than number of copies sold).


The aim of this new rule is ostensibly to protect Russian culture by preventing the export of rare books. The result, for the thousands of foreign business people, diplomats and journalists here, is an absurdist nightmare -- because instead of ignoring this odd rule, Western moving companies are enforcing it, compelling their customers to provide the list or forfeit their books.


Any pretense that this regulation is other than nonsensical flies out the window when one considers that it is not limited to antique Russian tomes but applies to all books -- in English, in French, published last week, brought in when the owner moved here, whatever.


So, as one prepares to leave the country, one finds oneself obliged to spend hours if not days cataloguing one's collection of Ross Thomas or Elmore Leonard detective novels, making lists of the latest travel books one has acquired about Provence or Tuscany, and even supplying the publication dates and print runs of one's cookbooks.


Just exactly how the enlightened bureaucrat at the Customs Committee thought this would protect Russian culture is a mystery. What is certain is that the rule will spark a significant increase in smuggling as people seek and find creative ways to circumvent the rules.


The imposition of this new regulation is all the more absurd given that this is supposedly the age of post-glasnost. Those of us who worked here in the Soviet era well remember the difficulty we had at times bringing books into the country -- how ironic that we now face an even worse time getting them out.


This Stone Age mentality with regard to literature flies in the face of all the Helsinki Agreements and similar accords designed to open borders to a free flow of information. That the Russian state would use this form of what can only be called harassment is shameful for a country purportedly seeking to become a democracy. That Western moving companies have made themselves accomplices to it is a disgrace.