The path of the royal treasures to the West
There is no other example of such a large-scale and cynical sale in history. In Europe, the Russian imperial court was famous for its richest jewelry collection. The Bolsheviks inherited an impressive legacy. But they just squandered a significant part of it. Interesting testimonies have been preserved about how the jewels were sorted and the fate of treasures of world importance was determined, which are in the RGASPI (Russian State Archive of Social and Political History).
Gokhran
The Bolsheviks made their first attempt to sell the jewelry of the Romanovs in May 1918. Then, in New York, customs officers detained two visitors with jewelry (worth 350 thousand rubles) that belonged to the daughter of Alexander III Olga.
The following year, the founding congress of the Third Communist International was held in Moscow. Since that time, the agents of the Comintern have regularly exported gold jewelry and precious stones from Moscow. In their own countries, they had to sell them, and spend the money received on local communist parties and underground work. At first, there was practically no control over the agents, so much more was stolen than was spent on preparing the world revolution.
In order to stop the “lawlessness”, in February 1920, “Gokhran was created to centralize, store and account for all values belonging to the RSFSR, consisting of gold, platinum, silver bullion and products without them, diamonds, colored precious stones and pearls”. The famine that began in the summer of 1921 forced the Bolsheviks to look for funds to buy bread. In addition, Poland had to be paid off. According to the Riga Peace Treaty of 1921, the western lands of Ukraine and Belarus were withdrawn to Poland, in addition to this, the Bolsheviks pledged to pay Poland 30 million gold rubles within a year.
Here they remembered the crown jewels that were kept in the basements of the Armory (they were brought here from the capital at the beginning of the First World War, without inventories, and in 1917 jewels from the "royal palaces" were added to them). Crown values were forbidden to give, change or sell by the decree of Peter I, issued in 1719. For almost 200 years, the royal treasury was only replenished. Now the autocrat's decrees did not bother anyone. And the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) outlined a program for the implementation of the so-called "Romanov" jewelry. At first, the Bolsheviks only planned to lay the treasures, but in the end they decided to sell the jewelry abroad. Before selling, the treasures had to be sorted and evaluated. And Gokhran lacked specialists. Back in 1921, thefts were discovered, three appraisers were shot,many were imprisoned. Therefore, the Deputy People's Commissar for Finance Krasnoshchekov in Petrograd reached an agreement with experts and jewelers Faberge, Franz, Kotler, Maseev, Mekhov, Utkin, Bock. And they started to work in Gokhran. We started with the jewels of the Romanovs.
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The boxes of the "former queen"
On March 8, 1922, in the Armory Chamber, the boxes with the property of the “former tsarina” (Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna) were opened. Two commissions were in charge of jewelry: the first in the Armory was sorting out chests and describing things; the second sorted and evaluated them in Gokhran.
“In warm fur coats with raised collars, we walk through the frozen rooms of the Armory,” later recalled a member of the commission, Academician Fersman. - They bring boxes, there are five of them, among them a heavy iron chest, tied, with large wax seals. Everything is whole. An experienced locksmith easily, without a key, opens an unpretentious, very bad lock. Inside there are jewels of the former Russian court, hastily wrapped in tissue paper. With our hands freezing from the cold, we take out one sparkling gem after another. There are no inventories anywhere, no order can be seen."
Kotler and Franz, invited the next day (“serious jewelers,” as Trotsky notes), said that “if there was a buyer who could buy these valuables as things, then the estimate would be 458,700,000 g. rub.". And this, in addition to the coronation treasures, they lay in two separate boxes and were estimated "at more than 7 million rubles." Moreover, the jewelry was examined very quickly, within an hour and a half, and without a detailed determination of the quality of the stones. To the question of the Bolsheviks concerned about the sale of how much the gems would cost if they were sold as a separate commodity (they feared a scandal in Europe that could arise in connection with the sale of crown jewels), experts named the amount of 162 million 625 thousand gold rubles.
The members of the commission were amazed. There was something to be amazed at. Truly beautiful jewelry belonged to the Romanovs' house … For example, a diamond necklace with sapphire cost 3 million rubles, diamond pendants 5 million. The amounts are impressive. Especially when you consider how much these treasures are worth now. So, the Easter egg "Lilies of the Valley", which in 1898 Nicholas II presented to his wife, cost 6,700 rubles. And in 2003 at the Sotheby's auction they were going to put it up for $ 10-12 million.
As a result of such an optimistic assessment, the treasures were quickly (note, again without making inventories) from the Armory to the Gokhran building in Nastasievsky lane. In the boxes from the palace of Maria Feodorovna, in addition to the jewels of the Dowager Empress, rare works of jewelry were kept. Only some things later ended up in Soviet museums, and the rest were sold cheaply to foreigners …
Poles - the best diamonds
By mid-May in Gokhran the sorting and appraisal of the crown jewels, Empresses Maria Feodorovna and Alexandra Feodorovna was completed. The items of the “former Romanov house” were divided into three categories, taking into account, first of all, the value of stones and their selection, the artistry of the work and the historical significance of the product. The first category - the inviolable fund - included 366 items valued at 654,935,000 rubles, of which the coronation regalia decorated with selected diamonds and pearls cost 375 million. As reported to Leon Trotsky, Deputy Special Commissioner of the Council of People's Commissars (Council of People's Commissars) for the registration and concentration of the values of the republic, Georgy Bazilevich, "if these things are pledged abroad, the receipt of 300,000,000 rubles is guaranteed." Products of the second category, which had historical and artistic value, were estimated at 7 382 200 rubles;the third category (not of particular importance) - 285,524 rubles.
At the end of his work, Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and the Council of Labor and Defense Alexei Rykov asked Faberge and Fersman if it was possible to realize the coronation values in the foreign market. They answered: it is possible, although there should be no rush. But the Bolsheviks were in a hurry.
In 1922, emeralds from Gokhran were sold in London and Amsterdam under the guise of those mined in the Urals. A year later, Gokhran pearls and diamonds were brought to Amsterdam. And in the future, the Bolsheviks continued to quietly sell diamonds and pearls from Gokhran, but in Paris.
As for the debt to the Poles, they decided to repay it with jewelry. Bazilevich sent Trotsky a memorandum labeled "Top secret", where he presented a brief specification of the valuations of the former "Romanov House and the values transferred to Poland under the Riga Treaty":
“When preparing the valuables for delivery to Poland, the best diamonds, pearls and colored stones were selected for the reserve. These values are the most popular goods in terms of their quality. In addition to the stones, Gokhran selected for the sale of products and gold: chains, rings, cigarette cases, bags, etc. in the amount of 2.728.589 rubles ….
Wholesale export
The apogee of the work of the Gokhran experts was the appearance in 1925-1926 of four issues of the illustrated catalog "The Diamond Fund of the USSR". The publication was translated into English, French and German in order to attract buyers and was distributed in Europe.
As a result, “art connoisseur” Norman Weiss was not long in coming. He bought items from the Diamond Fund in bulk, weighing only 9.644 kilograms. The masterpieces of Russian jewelry art cost him fifty thousand pounds! In 1927, a resourceful merchant held an auction in London "Jewels of the Russian State". The imperial wedding crown, a diadem made of ears of corn, and the jewels of Empress Catherine II "floated away" from him.
While the crown jewels were being sold in London, the head of the Armory Chamber Dmitry Ivanov (he also participated in the cataloging of the Romanovs' jewels in 1922) begged the officials to return the museum items from the Gokhran. In vain. At the beginning of 1930, it became known about the upcoming seizures of things from museums for sale abroad, and Ivanov could not stand it - he committed suicide.
An illustrative example: when in February 1933 the Armory was transferred to the command of the Kremlin commandant's office, three Faberge Easter eggs were issued from here "on the basis of a verbal order" by Commandant Peterson. In 1932, the royal treasures could be bought at Armand Hammer's American department stores. Later, he opened an antique shop, which sold Easter eggs that belonged to the empresses, icons in jewelry frames of Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna, a Fabergé cigarette case commissioned by Maria Feodorovna, her notebook with a monogram and a crown. Of the 773 items of the Diamond Fund, 569 were sold in the 1920s – 1930s. It is hardly possible to find in history an example of such a rapid and large-scale sale of jewelry.
Petrosova Anna