On August 26, 1991, Nikolai Kruchina, head of the CPSU, fell out of the window of his house. The death of the party's chief treasurer raised many questions. He was considered a person close to Gorbachev and had nothing to do with the Emergency Committee. A month later, in a similar way, Brezhnev's longtime associate Georgy Pavlov, Kruchina's predecessor as manager of the business, died. He held this position for 18 years. Both Pavlov and Kruchina were undoubtedly well aware of the party's financial affairs.
A few days later, Dmitry Lisovolik, head of the American sector of the international department of the Central Committee, fell out of his apartment window. This department was a kind of analogue of the former Comintern and carried out communications with foreign communist parties. The mysterious death of three high-ranking officials at once, well aware of the hidden financial activities of the party, gave rise to a very convincing legend about the party's gold, which mysteriously disappeared in the last year of the existence of the USSR. The legend was so popular in the 90s that even the highest government officials were looking for the missing gold. Life found out where the gold of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union disappeared.
Party gold
The CPSU ruled the Soviet Union for 74 years. And if at first it was an elite organization of several thousand chosen ones, then by the end of its existence it had grown thousands of times. By 1990, the party had 19.5 million members. All of them paid regular party dues, of which the CPSU treasury was formed. Part of these funds went to the salaries of the party nomenklatura, but how much money was actually in the treasury and where it was spent, no one knew except a few selected people. This information was closed to outsiders.
In addition, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union received considerable income from publishing. Party literature was published in millions of copies. According to the most minimal estimates, the party's treasury received monthly amounts of hundreds of millions of rubles.
Do not forget about one more source. Huge sums were accumulated in the Soviet Peace Fund. The church, as well as ordinary citizens who periodically donated one day's salary, donated their income there on a voluntary-compulsory basis. Although the foundation was formally a non-profit public organization, it was under the control of the party. Since the existence of independent organizations was not provided for in the USSR. And even more so with huge funds. The Peace Fund was an extremely closed structure and did not publish any financial statements. According to rough estimates, its budget was about 4.5 billion rubles. Part of these funds went to finance the Soviet Peace Committee.
It was from these funds that the gold of the party was formed. However, even an approximate estimate of the size of the assets of the CPSU is impossible. The party was a supranational structure, party and state ownership were often indistinguishable. Nevertheless, there are known cases when the party used the state treasury for its own purposes. But the opposite is not.
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When Yeltsin, after the August putsch, issued a decree on the transfer of all the property of the CPSU to state ownership, it turned out that this was impossible to do. And not only because his decree is unconstitutional, but also because it is almost impossible to determine where whose property is. The Constitutional Court then ruled: “The uncertainty of the subjects of ownership of the property that was under the control of the CPSU does not allow us to unambiguously recognize them as its owners. Property was easily transformed from one form of socialist property to another by the will of the CPSU bodies that managed the property, but not the formal owner. The Constitutional Court proceeds from the assumption that the property managed by the CPSU belonged to three categories of owners: a) the state; b) the Communist Party; c) other owners. However, with regard towhere the property of one subject ends and the property of another begins, and in some cases, with respect to who is the owner, there is a legal uncertainty that can be eliminated only through civil or arbitration proceedings."
Search
The search for the party fund was taken quite seriously. The party's gold was much more than just a newspaper sensation and an urban legend. In the conditions of the collapsing Soviet economy in 1991 and the "shock therapy" of 1992, there was an urgent need for party treasures.
In 1991, the State Bank first published data on the amount of gold stored in it. It turned out that the gold reserve of the USSR was reduced several times and only 240 tons of gold remained. This information amazed Western experts, who estimated the gold reserves of the USSR at least at 1-3 thousand tons. It turned out that even Venezuela has more gold than the Soviet Union.
Rumors immediately spread that the gold had been secretly taken by air to Switzerland, and high party officials were in charge of these processes. However, later a simpler explanation was found for the disappearance of the gold reserve. In the last years of the existence of the Soviet economy, the USSR was actively crediting against the security of gold, since it badly needed currency, the flows of which were cut off simultaneously with a sharp drop in oil prices and the collapse of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance.
In addition, this gold was state-owned and was stored in the State Bank. This had nothing to do with the gold of the party, and they continued to search for it. They were looking for both Russian prosecutors and Western private detectives. In Russia, in addition to journalists and public figures, the prosecutor's office was engaged in searches. There were small amounts on official accounts, which were significantly lower than expected. So I had to be content with only party real estate, which was privatized.
At the same time, searches were conducted in the West. To this end, the government used the services of the world famous detective agency Kroll. This private detective agency specialized in finding money. The organization's staff consisted of retired intelligence officers, accountants with experience in top companies, etc. It was Kroll who searched for the money of the Philippine dictator Marcos, the Haitian dictator Duvalier, the money of Saddam Hussein, etc. personalities.
In early 1992, Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar met with representatives of the firm and signed an agreement. For one and a half million dollars, the Americans pledged to check all suspicious foreign trade transactions, bank transfers and overseas assets that may be associated with the party.
Yegor Timurovich Gaidar, Acting Chairman of the Government of the Russian Federation. Photo: RIA Novosti / Sergei Guneev.
According to Gaidar's recollections, the Americans soon sent materials in which fairly high-ranking party officials appeared, but there was nothing concrete yet and it was necessary to dig further. The Americans asked for more money, but the government decided to refuse their services. Gaidar motivated this by the fact that it was required to spend a lot of money in order to find something specific, besides, the search was hampered by the state security, without whose participation it was difficult to count on success. The report passed by the Americans disappeared without a trace. It has never been published or submitted to law enforcement agencies.
Later, one of the employees of the detective agency said that the Russian government gave the impression of people who did not need the ordered information, and the whole operation was organized for the sake of “a diversion” to receive the next tranche from the IMF.
Where did the party money go
So, it is obvious that the party had a large cash desk and calmly disposed of the big money of some public organizations. But where did this money go? Do not think that these billions of dollars were withdrawn abroad. Although some of them really could have left the country.
The USSR had a whole network of banks abroad, they were called sovzagranbanks. Some of them were exclusively engaged in servicing the foreign trade operations of Soviet companies, but some worked as ordinary commercial banks. Banks were located in Paris, Zurich, London, Singapore.
In theory, these banks could be used to withdraw funds, but this was hardly carried out in practice. Firstly, 95% of the employees of these institutions were foreigners and it was risky to make dubious transactions through them. Secondly, it is these banks that would be checked in the first place if they were seriously looking for money.
Since the 1920s, the USSR had a large network to finance covert operations. Both legal and illegal. Couriers and proxies of the Comintern carried suitcases of money and valuables to Western communists. Then these operations were in charge of the special services. But couriers cannot take out the entire cash register. Yes, and in these cases it was about millions, but not about billions. In addition, keeping a lot of money in the West was risky, especially in the face of regime change. After all, Western banks at the snap of their fingers could arrest such accounts.
Most of the party's money remained in the USSR. But she did not lie dead weight in secret vaults and crypts. The capital was put into circulation. In 1988, a law on cooperation was passed, which effectively legalized commercial activities in the country. However, Soviet citizens did not have the initial capital; moreover, the party, by tradition, was supposed to show the way by its example. So gradually the CPSU began to turn into the country's main businessman.
But back in 1987, the creation of joint ventures began. Formally, they were conceived with the good purpose of attracting foreign investment. In practice, only 20% of open enterprises carried out at least some kind of activity. But the existence of these companies made it possible to transfer valuable assets to their balance sheets and work with currency. Some of the enterprises were opened under the auspices of the Soviet Peace Committee, which had huge funds and was not accountable to anyone.
In the same year, NTTMs appeared - centers of scientific and technical creativity of youth. They were created under the auspices of the Central Committee of the Komsomol. In fact, these were commercial enterprises that enjoyed a lot of benefits and paid almost no taxes. Formally, all this was supposed to work for good purposes, improving the scientific and technical base and new technologies, but in fact, NTTMs quickly turned into ordinary intermediary companies, only enjoying huge benefits and the patronage of the party.
Photo: RIA Novosti / Yuri Prostyakov
In 1988, private cooperatives appeared. They were supposed to cover the shortage of consumer goods thanks to private initiative. Formally, they were completely independent from the state, which had no right to interfere in their economic activities. But in fact, no cooperative could exist without close ties with party officials. After all, the Soviet economy still remained planned, and in order for the cooperative to create something, it had to have raw materials. But where to get it, if the amount of raw materials is limited and has already been assigned to departments, and cooperatives are not provided for in the plans? The only way is to bow to party officials.
So the symbiosis of cooperatives and parties began to take shape. The party needed cooperators, since it was inconvenient for many high-ranking nomenklatura leaders to directly participate in cooperatives alone. And the co-operators needed the party because with one stroke of the pen they could solve any issue.
In 1989, the first private banks began to appear. There were no questions to the departmental banks, but where did Soviet citizens get the money to open banks? In just a year, almost one and a half hundred such institutions appeared in the country. From the outside it looked amazing: a cooperator was selling copper bracelets or bulbs for himself on the collective farm market and suddenly saved up for opening a bank in a few months. Moreover, the authorized capital of a Soviet bank was required to have at least five million rubles. Obviously, this was not without the help of the party. These banks were founded, among other things, with party money, and in some Soviet banks local administrators of regional committees worked as chairmen of the board of directors.
But the main gold mine was foreign economic activity. It remained a monopoly of the party for a long time, but in the late 1980s it was still allowed to engage in private companies. However, strangers were not allowed there to see the cannon shot. Foreign trade relations were very carefully supervised by the party and the security forces. All those who worked on the foreign market were either prominent party officials or had the closest ties with them. There was no foreign exchange market in the USSR, so the dollar rate was artificially lowered. Foreign trade activity boiled down to the fact that rubles were exchanged at an artificially low rate for currency. Then, with this money, inexpensive equipment was bought abroad, most often computers, for which there was a huge demand. After that computers were sold in the USSR with a huge mark-up. Conventional 100 rubles without much hassle turned into 10 thousand.
So did the gold of the party exist or not?
The answer to this question is yes and no. If you imagine the party's gold as a huge underground vault, where the general secretary languishes over the gold, and the business manager dives into gold coins, like into a pool, then nothing like this existed. There were no crypts stuffed with banknotes and planes loaded to the top with gold. Some things, of course, could have been sneaked off the official accounts, but not many. Some of the money left in the accounts simply turned into candy wrappers in 1992.
The real gold of the party was the administrative leverage that allowed the nomenklatura to put party money into commercial circulation and form the initial capital in the last years of the Soviet Union. The party was the first businessman in the USSR; it operated on a completely unoccupied platform and had no competitors. Business in the Union began with her knowledge and under her tutelage. Valuable assets were transferred to the balance sheet of joint ventures and cooperatives with a stroke of the pen. All this was done quite officially and under the pretext of good intentions. After the collapse of the Soviet system, privatization began, and in these conditions it became clear that the nomenklatura had already privatized certain assets. It is no coincidence that Gaidar said that all Russian capital formed in the period from 1988 to 1991, when there was still no full-fledged market in the USSR. The loans-for-shares auctions were already the second stage, when millionaires turned into billionaires.
Of course, most of the party members received nothing. Only the most far-sighted and prudent understood where everything was going, and managed to create capital for themselves. That is why even meticulous American detectives did not find any gold of the party. Party members turned into businessmen with their own assets, and it was difficult to trace which of them were party members and how they became private. And the new authorities were clearly not up to it.
The party's gold was not hidden in secret cellars of Swiss banks, but put into circulation. And in the dashing 90s, other mechanisms of competition have already started working. And then everyone was on their own. Some became billionaires, while others lost everything they got in the last Soviet years.
Evgeniy Antonyuk