Stolen Treasure [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION In 1920, the Russian economist and writer Alexander Chayanov published, under the pseudonym Ivan Kremnev, a Utopian novel, a vision of the future Russia entitled My Brother Alexei's Journey to the Land of the Peasant Utopia. Among other events, he described a war with Germany: On 7 September three German armies escorted by clouds of aeroplanes invaded the Russian Peasants' Republic Two days later the invasion was halted. The Berlin government surrendered and said that it was ready to pay a contribution in any form. The Council of People's Commissars chose a few dozen canvases by Botticelli, Domenichino, Titian, Holbein, the Pergamum Altar, and a thousand Chinese prints of the Tang dynasty. Chayanov was wrong about the date, the duration, and the difficulty of the actual war with Germany, which began twenty-one years after his book appeared. Indeed, his only accurate prediction was about one of the German 'contributions'. At the end of the war, in 1945, the huge Pergamum Altar, built in the second century bc, was transported to the Soviet Union from Berlin. Reality was in fact more extravagant than Chayanov's fantasy: not just a few dozen canvases but more than two and a half million art objects, books and archival documents were confiscated from the defeated Germans. It was the most prodigious secret removal of looted cultural property in human history, carefully organized and carried out by the Red Army and the Soviet military administration. Museum collections and the property of German citizens were ransacked and hauled back as war booty, along with objects that had been 'bought' by the Nazis in France and the Netherlands, seized in Poland, or confiscated by Eichmann from Hungarian Jews bound for the gas chambers. The Soviet government had been planning since 1943 to strip the conquered enemy of all kinds of property in compensation for its own terrible losses. Works of art were to be collected by special trophy brigades made up of art historians, museum officials, artists and