CASES AND RECOVERY EXPERIENCE
Russia: Complex History, Very Few Returns
Nations (such as Germany and Hungary) as well as individuals whose collections were taken from them in Budapest are seeking to recover property taken in the time of the Holocaust and now found in Russia. Claims in the courts of the Russian Federation have yielded no recoveries, and negotiations have been long and mostly frustrating. Some Russian libraries have found ways to return books to Germany, and some stained glass windows were returned to a church in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder. Russia produced a partial list of paintings and sculpture from Hungarian collections that are now in Russia, and this was published in 2003. A complete inventory of this art has yet to be made public.
At the end of the Second World War, the Red Army in northeast Germany came across many works of art that had either been sent to this sparsely populated region for safekeeping (for example, by German museums) or trainloads of art and valuable objects taken from Hungary and shipped there during the final months of hostilities. Trainloads of art and archives were taken to the USSR. In the decades that followed, the “Iron Curtain” effectively obscured the fate of thousands of works of art and a huge number of archives. For almost fifty years, most of the world forgot about it; under the Soviet regime, it was virtually impossible for a foreigner to bring a claim, and archives were open to a miniscule number of foreigners.
When the USSR was on the verge of collapse, two art historians from the Soviet Union published in ARTnews the secret survival of many great works of art missing since the end of World War II. Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorii Kozlov, who later published more information in their book Beautiful Loot, were largely responsible for the government’s admitting that both the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow had secretly held art taken in the Second World War. Both museums held exhibitions that drew tremendous international attention, and the Hermitage catalogue, Hidden Treasures Revealed, provided further detail and excellent photographs of the paintings. Among the masterpieces revealed to be in Russia were a major Degas painting, Place de la Concorde, and the Gold of Troy from Berlin’s Museum of Pre- and Early History. This public admission ended fifty years of speculation in the West as to the whereabouts and even the survival of these works.