In August 1916, royal Romania, hoping for a quick victory over Austria-Hungary, which, as it seemed, was broken by the Brusilov breakthrough, entered the First World War on the side of the Entente. However, three months later, the Romanian army was utterly defeated by the German, Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian troops. The Russians came to the aid of their hapless ally after the Germans entered Bucharest on December 5, 1916.
How Romanian gold ended up in Russia
Before the evacuation from Bucharest to Iasi, the royal court and the Romanian government decided to transfer to Russia for storage of the gold reserves of their country and the dynasty's jewelry. No one then suspected that a revolution would soon break out in Russia, and the government to which Romania would entrust its gold would no longer be.
In December 1916, the first echelon with Romanian gold arrived in Moscow (and not in St. Petersburg, because due to the threat of a breakthrough by the German fleet in the Baltic, the main state assets of the Russian Empire were also evacuated to Moscow in 1915). In August 1917, when the tsar's power passed to the Provisional Government, the second, the main batch of the Romanian gold reserves arrived in Moscow from Iasi. The total value of valuables sent in 41 wagons exceeded 7.5 billion Romanian lei, and the weight of gold was 150 tons.
But the value of the valuables delivered to the capital was not limited to these figures alone, since dynastic jewelry and relics (in particular, unique jewelry), works of art, rare coins and archival documents were also transferred to Russia.
At the end of 1917, turmoil began in Russia. Taking advantage of the right to self-determination given by the Bolsheviks, the Moldovan nationalists of Bessarabia came out for unification with Romania. Romanian soldiers entered Chisinau in January 1918. However, Lenin and his comrades agreed to recognize only such an independent state, headed by the local Bolsheviks. Considering the annexation of Bessarabia to Romania as an occupation, Lenin ordered the confiscation of the Romanian gold reserves before the "revolution in Romania".
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What the USSR returned to Romania
In 1935, trying to build a system of "collective security" in Europe and drawing closer to France, the Soviet government restored diplomatic relations with the allied France, Romania, without yet demanding concessions from Bessarabia. As a sign of goodwill, the leadership of the USSR sent 1,436 out of 3,469 boxes to Bucharest, in which Romanian valuables were transported to tsarist Russia. But the impressive figure shouldn't be misleading. The boxes contained mainly the archives of the Romanian kingdom. Gold there was only 12 tons out of 150.
The USSR promised to return the entire Romanian gold reserve with the "final settlement of the Bessarabian question." However, when in the summer of 1940, under the threat of a Soviet military invasion, Romania agreed to give the required lands to the Soviet Union, it did not wait for gold in response due to the fact that it did not voluntarily transfer the territories, but under pressure.
As a result of the Second World War, Romania turned from the enemy of the USSR into its ally. And although according to the Paris Treaty (also signed by the Western powers) of 1947, Romania, as a former ally of Nazi Germany, had to pay the USSR $ 300 million in reparations, Stalin knocked off this debt in exchange for the confirmation of the communist regime in Romania. In addition, in the late 1940s, Stalin ordered the return of part of the gold reserve to Romania, and in 1956 Nikita Khrushchev sent another shipment of Romanian values to Bucharest.
Nevertheless, in 1965 the Romanian communist leader N. Ceausescu proposed to L. I. Brezhnev to give the remaining in the Soviet Union (according to his calculations) about 93 tons of Romanian gold. The reluctance of the USSR to consider this issue became a stumbling block in Soviet-Romanian relations, which were the most tense within the bloc of pro-Soviet states in Europe.
After the 1989 revolution in Romania and the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the new Romanian governments do not cease to demand from the Russian Federation to return the majority of the gold reserves of royal Romania, which, in their opinion, remain in Russia.
Ambiguities and ambiguities remain
When Presidents Vladimir Putin and Ion Iliescu signed the Russian-Romanian Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in Moscow in 2003, it was decided to create a Joint Bilateral Commission to investigate the fate of Romanian values transferred to Tsarist Russia. The Russian Federation assures that all Romanian gold was returned to Romania back in Soviet times. The Romanian side continues to deny this.
The problem of Romanian gold is not limited to the value of the precious metal alone, since the gold reserve included many unique items. It is possible that modern Russia really no longer has them (which, however, does not remove the question of compensation for lost values).
Recall that back in 1917, about half of Russia's gold reserves (together with Romanian values) were transferred to Kazan for storage. But in the summer of 1918, Kazan was captured by the White Guards, and during the retreat they took out all the gold that Kolchak had inherited. After the flight of the White Guards and interventionists from Siberia, the Reds discovered the remains of this gold and brought them back to Kazan. Some part of the gold reserve was spent and plundered by the White Guards and Czechs, some probably by the Bolsheviks during its transportation.
Recall that at the end of the 1920s, raising funds for industrialization, the Soviet government arranged a sale of works of art that were kept in state museums in our country. Among them there could be some art objects belonging to the Romanian royal family.
Assuring that the USSR in the 1940s - 1950s. returned all the valuables to Romania, the publishers of such information nowhere provide quantitative data on when and how much was returned. They either repeat these assurances, referring to the statements of the communist leadership of Romania at that time, then they argue that the rest of the gold reserve the Soviet Union was supposedly entitled to keep at the expense of reparations for the Second World War. However, it is forgotten that the USSR officially refused to collect reparations from Romania, its newfound ally. Such contradictory statements themselves give rise to suggestions that a significant part of the Romanian royal gold is still in the Russian Federation. What is specific - there is no clarity.
Characteristic in this regard is the recent appearance of publications that do not have references to sources, that the second, main batch of Romanian gold, sent from Iasi to Moscow in August 1917, did not reach its destination, but disappeared somewhere along the way.
Yaroslav Butakov