In the spring of 1930 Tatiana Tchernavin received mysterious instructions from the short-lived Marxist director of the Hermitage, Leonid Obolensky. She was to stay behind in the museum after it closed at 6 p.m., take one of the masterpieces of the collection off the walls, Jan van Eyck’s Annunciation, and hand it to an unnamed representative of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. She was then to rearrange the way the paintings were hung so that the public would not notice a gap. She was not permitted to ask for an explanation of what she did.

Negotiations for this painting’s sale were already under way and the following June it was bought by Andrew Mellon, the United States Treasury Secretary, for $502,899. The Annunciation was one of the twenty-one paintings that he acquired from the Hermitage, including several of the stars of the museum collection. Mellon, a vastly wealthy banker, went on to found the National Gallery, Washington – he paid for the building himself and filled it with pictures. The Hermitage paintings have thus voyaged across the world to become the stars of America’s national collection.

How much it matters whether great masterpieces of Western art are exhibited to the public in St Petersburg or Washington is open to debate. However, the massive sales from the Hermitage collection that took place between 1928 and 1932 are still regarded at the Hermitage itself as a criminal act on the part of the Soviet government. It is an interesting reflection on Russian mentality that the senseless arrest of curators, followed by their execution or sentence to terms of hard labour, arouses less passionate comment. Such summary punishment, aimed at the protection of the State, has been part of the texture of Russian life for centuries and is, in some sense, regarded as ‘normal’ – while the art sales were definitely ‘abnormal’.

In all, several thousand items were sold from the Hermitage collection, principally Western European works of art and coins. The collection of Classical antiquities was only marginally trimmed since there was little market for such works at the time, while most of the collection now curated by the Russian Department did not arrive at the Hermitage until 1941. The furnishings of the Winter Palace, which were not technically the property of the museum, were sold off in bulk since the Hermitage curators – shortsightedly – considered them of no historic interest. However, it is the loss of great Old Master paintings that still rankles most. Roughly twenty-five world-class paintings were sold. The Hermitage collection was so rich that even without these paintings it remains one of the two or three greatest collections in the world. To give some idea of the dent caused by the sales, one can look at the 1914 edition of Baedeker’s Russia. The scholarly guidebook’s introduction to the picture collection cites fifty-six major paintings by name, of which nine were sold.

The political background to the sales lies in Stalin’s first Five Year Plan and the country’s shortage of foreign currency. In his determination to build up Russia’s industrial base and create the first economically viable Socialist state, Stalin was prepared to demand unlimited sacrifices from his people. Millions of kulaks, or prosperous peasants, were executed or shipped to Siberian labour camps for resisting collectivisation. So critical was the need for foreign currency that in 1929–30 Stalin chose to export grain and allow his own citizens to starve. Establishing new industries and buying new technologies took precedence over all other considerations. That he should not have spared the nation’s museums is hardly surprising in these circumstances. It is almost more surprising that he should have ordered the cessation of sales from the Hermitage in 1932 just as he launched the second Five Year Plan.

The decision may have reflected a realistic appreciation of the diminishing returns of the art market, as much as sympathy for the museum. The Wall Street Crash in October 1929 led to the collapse of one major Western company after another and ushered in the Great Depression. The art market was not immediately affected by the crash, but as collectors became poorer its activity wound down until, some two years later, art became almost unsaleable. This meant that the Russians’ auctions in the West of art treasures confiscated after the Revolution became less and less successful. By 1932 their chief salesman was arguing against delay on the grounds that ‘each extra day reduces the price of goods and makes a loss for the State’. The period 1928–33 was, therefore, an unfortunate one to choose for a major art sales campaign.

There was nothing new about the idea of selling art abroad to generate foreign currency – just the scale on which it was attempted during this period. Stalin’s minions had long experience of selling confiscated treasures when they began to rob the Hermitage in 1928. Revolutions inevitably lead to the breakup of old collections, and the Russian one was no exception.

During the six-month reign of the Provisional Government in 1917, and the early months of Bolshevik rule, emigrating Russians sold art on a massive scale. In September 1917 the American who headed the Red Cross mission in St Petersburg wrote home to his wife:

Today I saw a beautiful Fragonard and some other pictures at the home of one of the princes, and I have appointments at several palaces shortly. Thus far I have purchased you a beautiful set of Dresden dishes…. I expect to look at some Gobelins tomorrow, and will have an important collection of Russian pictures Wednesday, and it is possible that I shall find a French Gobelins set for you. Am only looking at the finest things.

Lenin quickly realised the possibilities offered by art and antiques and, after introducing export restrictions to stop private sales, began to sell confiscated art on behalf of the State. In the early years of the Civil War, when the Soviet government was not recognised by any of the Western nations, art, along with silver, gold and jewels, was bartered across the northern frontiers for tractors and guns. Since his trading partners would have been arrested had their governments realised what was going on, Lenin’s art sales were treated as top secret. The first accounts of what happened were not published in Russia itself until the late 1980s. The art sales in the late 1920s were also surrounded by a wall of silence although they were legal in terms of international law. Lenin and his successors did not want their citizens to know that the nation’s cultural heritage was being sacrificed.

The government’s official position can be gauged from a publicity booklet of 1967: ‘From the first days of the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution, the Soviet state paid immense attention to the preservation of historic treasures,’ it stated. In fact, the beginnings of Soviet art sales stretch back to 30 December 1918 when the Commissariat of Trade and Industry put Maxim Gorky in charge of an expert commission whose aim was to select and evaluate objects of artistic significance from the thirty-three depositories of nationalised objects in St Petersburg. These contained items collected from pawn shops, antique shops and the apartments of émigrés and Gorky was asked to create an Antique Export Fund from them. It is a curious task to have given to the nation’s most famous author. His companion, the former actress Mariya Andreeva, also became an important player in the art trade. She was made a Commissar of Gorky’s Expert Commission in July 1919 and in 1921 she was sent to Berlin to set up a sales organisation there. Their relationship was over by this time and she remained in Berlin for almost ten years.

By October 1920 Gorky’s Commission had selected 120,000 items, including pictures, antique furniture, bronzes, European and Oriental porcelains and Antique glass, whose value he estimated at more than a billion roubles. Lenin needed the money badly and wrote to the Trade Commissariat to ‘insist on the extreme speeding up of this matter’. At the time, Gorky had eighty people working for him and Lenin now increased the number to 200. ‘I consider it absolutely necessary to increase the expert commission and give them a special ration on condition they finish the work soon,’ he wrote. It is characteristic of the harsh realities of the time that Lenin hoped to increase the productivity of the Commission by increasing the staffs’ food ration.

In February 1920 a second organisation, called Gokhran, was set up under the auspices of the Finance Ministry – Gorky was working for Trade and Industry – to collect and curate the national stock of items made from gold, silver and precious stones, a role it plays to this day. Gokhran itself was not a trading organisation but government trading organisations were allowed to take stock from Gokhran for sale abroad. The scale of its activities soon eclipsed Gorky’s; gold, silver and jewels were much easier to sell than pictures and antiques. A massive calling in of the nation’s privately owned gold and jewels was launched in July 1920; individuals were required to hand in all gold, silver, platinum and precious stones above a set ration per head. Private individuals had to hand in ‘(a) gold and platinum objects weighing more than 18 zolotniki per person, (b) objects from silver weighing over 3 lbs per person, (c) diamonds and other precious stones of over 3 carats per person and pearls over 5 zolotniki per person’.

A Latvian businessman who was employed as a consultant by the Moscow Currency Administration, Moisey Lazerson, has left a vivid description of what he found when first inspecting the Gokhran stores in 1923: ‘Confiscated silver, gold, precious stones and pearls and sequestrated church property had been accumulated in the Gokhran in such enormous quantities as could hardly be conceived in Western Europe. I passed through the vast halls crammed on both sides up to the ceding with all sorts of luggage-cases (trunks, baskets, boxes, satchels and so on).’

Lazerson also wrote about the mass destruction of confiscated church silver:

I came to a hall where I found a man engaged on the task of hammering off the silver binding from an old service book. I examined the book and found it to be a work of the seventeenth century. To my question how he came to be removing the binding from the book, he replied that he was doing it at the express command of the chief of Gokhran. He had been engaged on this task for months. Considering the very large size of the books and the fact that he had already hammered off a respectable number of them, a good deal of silver had thus been gained, in spite of the thinness of the bindings.

The sequestration of church art – monasteries had been closed in 1918 and other churches in 1929 – should also have been a source of enrichment of the Hermitage but, in fact, very little church silver was saved from Gokhran’s melting pot. And icons only began to be rescued from closed churches on a substantial scale in the 1950s. Lazerson comments that ‘The Administration of the Museums did everything in its power to sift from the huge mass of silver all that was most valuable from the antiquarian, artistic or purely historical point of view. The director of the Hermitage, Professor S. Troinitsky, arranged in the rooms of the museum an excellent exhibition of the confiscated Church silver which was qualitatively of a high level.’

Virtually everything in Troinitsky’s exhibition was subsequently sold abroad but his initiative had one, small bonus for posterity – it was sold as antiquarian silver and not melted down. One exceptional piece remains in the Hermitage to bear witness to his battle with the authorities, a huge silver monument known as the Sarcophagus of Alexander Nevsky, which came from the monastery church dedicated to the saint. Nevsky was a prince of Novgorod who won the territory around St Petersburg from the Swedes in the thirteenth century and died in 1263. He was declared a Russian saint in 1549 and Peter the Great had the idea of making him the patron saint of the Petersburg area, commissioning the construction of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery at the other end of Nevsky Prospect from the Admiralty. The saint’s relics were brought from Vladimir and installed in the monastery in 1724.

It was Peter’s daughter, the Empress Elizabeth, who commissioned the spectacular, pyramid-shaped sarcophagus, the largest silver monument in the world. It is made up of several pieces, several of which have now been returned to the church. The central pyramid-shaped construction some sixteen feet high, remains, topped by angels holding inscribed shields. Two pedestals on each side supporting arms and banners, two massive candelabras and a box-shaped sarcophagus ornamented with battle scenes in high relief and surmounted by a crown and a broken sword. A silver sarcophagus made in 1695, in which the saint’s remains had been brought from Vladimir, was placed inside the new one. The monument is a magnificent example of Russian rococo and was designed by the court portrait painter Georg Christoph Grooth – not Carlo Bartolomeo Rastrelli, as Troinitsky was later to argue. It is made from sheet silver spread over a wooden carcase but, all told, contains so much silver that, one and a half tons of silver. Despite the discovery of new silver mines at Kolyvan, the treasury could not come up with enough silver for its construction for several years. Commissioned in 1746, it was not completed until 1753.

Gokhran’s eyes grew very large when they lighted on it and St Petersburg connoisseurs had to battle to save it. The Hermitage archives contain a telegram sent on 10 May 1922 to Mikhail Kalinin, the nominal head of State (chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee), with a copy to Mrs Trotsky at Narkompros. ‘The State Hermitage and Russian Museum request urgent order stop destruction of iconostasis Kazan Cathedral and shrine Nevsky Monastery – monuments of world artistic significance.’ It was signed by Troinitsky, Benois and Ivan Sychov, the director of the Russian Museum. The solid silver iconostasis designed by Andrey Voronikhin for the Kazan Cathedral was melted down but the telegram saved the sarcophagus.

At the height of the museum sales, the idea of melting the sarcophagus was raised again. By this time Troinitsky had been demoted from the directorship and headed the department of applied art – but he went back into battle, sending the following letter to the new director:

1 The Sarcophagus of Alexander Nevsky is an outstanding work of art of the middle of the eighteenth century and at the present time is almost the only monument of its kind in the world. It was made by a Russian master to a design undoubtedly from the hand of the famous architect Rastrelli.

2 On one hand, the Sarcophagus is a cultural historical monument of outstanding significance and, on the other, it is an effective tool for anti-religious propaganda.

3 In monetary terms it is not as valuable as is generally believed since most of the structure is made from thin sheets of silver laid over an oak carcase.

Thus, the financial return gained from destroying a unique work of art, which has become an integral part of our museum, could be a comparatively modest sum and, as such, can hardly be considered worthwhile.

The argument that this magnificent creation was ‘an effective tool for anti-religious propaganda’ was a wily move on Troinitsky’s part in an era when Christianity was regarded as dangerous superstition and was being actively suppressed. The archives also contain the resolution of Comrade Saakov — whoever he may have been — dated 20 September 1930: ‘Leave it in the State Hermitage.’ The Hermitage, however, was required to supply other silver to be melted in its place; large quantities of coins and domestic silver were sacrificed.

In the early 1920s, trading organisations came and went, mostly in line with particular deals, but in 1925 the government decided to set up a central organisation through which all art exports would be channelled. It was called the Central Office for State Trading of the USSR for the Purchase and Sale of Antique Objects, or Antiquariat for short, and came under the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Trade (Narkomvneshtorg). The key figure behind the museum sales was thus Stalin’s Armenian friend, Anastas Mikoyan, who was Commissar for Foreign Trade from 1926 to 1930. The government also maintained foreign trade delegations in New York, Berlin, Paris and London which sometimes took a hand in selling, notably the New York agency known as Amtorg.

Since Germany was the first country to recognise the Soviet government, under the Rapallo Treaty of April 1922, Berlin became a particularly important conduit and Gorky’s mistress, Mariya Andreeva, who had been sent there in 1921, played a key role in arranging art sales. Britain recognised the USSR in February 1924 and the other great powers followed in the course of the same year with the exception of America, which stuck it out until 1933. Thus Andrew Mellon, the supreme guardian of the US economy, in his role as First Secretary to the Treasury, paid for his art purchases in pounds sterling in Berlin. Not surprisingly, he tried to keep them secret.

Major art sales began in 1928. In January Sovnarkom, Stalin’s inner cabinet, issued a document titled ‘Measures to increase the export and sale abroad of objects of art and antiquity’. The following year Trotsky was exiled and his wife lost her job as head of the Narkompros Museums Department. In the same year Lunacharsky himself was sacked as Commissar for Culture. Yatmanov, who still had charge of the Leningrad museums, was discredited. Effectively, all those in prominent positions who opposed the sales were removed.

The Hermitage did not go down without a fight. Reacting to Sovnarkom’s demand that thirty million roubles be raised through the sale of works of art, Troinitsky launched into a new letter of protest:

The very fact of mass sales, all of top quality objects, creates the impression that the country is in a catastrophic state and will lead to a desire to make use of this.

The truth of this is shown by the offer from Mr Gulbenkian who wishes to purchase pictures for ten million roubles and put forward a list of eighteen of the best pictures in the Hermitage, worth on the most modest assessment no less than twenty-five to thirty million roubles. The open sale of some of them, such as Raphael’s Alba Madonna, Giorgione’s Judith and Rembrant’s Prodigal Son, would undoubtedly lead in some countries to national subscriptions for their purchase, and would well exceed the sum of ten million roubles.

Of the sum of thirty million, it is suggested that twenty-five million should be from the allocation of one hundred objects of a value of no less than 100,000 each, i.e. an average of 250,000 each. In Moscow and provincial museums only a few such objects can be found and thus the whole burden of this operation will be placed on the Hermitage, above all on its picture gallery.

At the same time a reasonably precise assessment has shown that the Hermitage has only around 115 pictures of a value of over 100,000 roubles and between twenty-five and thirty other objects of such value.

Thus the realisation of one hundred objects of such quality will result in the destruction of the Hermitage and reduce it from its place as the first museum in the world to the status of a store of second and third rate objects.

When he received no answer, Troinitsky recruited other, more powerful voices to fight for the cause. Among those who struggled to persuade the government against the sale were Sergey Oldenburg, the Secretary of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, and Nikolay Marr, the linguist, archaeologist and philologist who was given charge of the new Institute of Material Culture in 1919. Both of them were members of the Hermitage Council and had the museum’s interests close to their hearts. Oldenburg’s wife kept a diary which describes a visit they made to Moscow around this time:

Worst of all is the question of the sale of museum objects. Literally an orgy of selling, at the head of it all the Commissar for Trade, Mikoyan. On the first day he arrived in Moscow, Sergey had a phone call from Vladimir Ivanovich Nevsky who asked Sergey and Marr to come and see him in the Lenin Library [Nevsky was director]. He told them of the catastrophic state of affairs with the sale of valuables from the Hermitage, showing them in confidence the lists of objects intended for sale: five Rembrandts, Raphael, Correggio, and various other objects which Sergey could not remember. We must hurry and save them from this despoliation…. From Nevsky, Sergey went with Marr to Litvinov, who is deputising for Chicherin. He is upset by the sales, but says that he can do nothing. From him Sergey went on the same matter to Enukidze, then to Kalinin. Kalinin is terribly against it, he knew nothing, this was done in his absence. He told Sergey roughly this: ‘People who have wormed their way in are trying to make money out of this. We will get only kopeks from all these millions, compared to what we need.’ He promised to do everything which depended on him. Lunacharsky is also against, although, of course, he has far too little influence.

By 1928 Lunacharsky’s star had waned and in 1929, as Stalin began to purge the intelligentsia whom Lunacharsky had always supported, he resigned from Narkompros. However, it is interesting that Mikhail Kalinin, who survived as head of State up to his death in 1946, did not have the power to dissuade Stalin and Mikoyan from selling off the Hermitage treasures – although maybe he helped delay the sale of major pictures. In October 1928 Oldenburg attempted a blitz on Party leaders, explaining to them the shame for the Soviet Union if the rest of the world knew they were selling their museum collections and the very modest financial returns that such sales could achieve. He wrote to Kalinin, to Alexey Rykov, chairman of the Central Executive Committee, to Nikolay Bukharin, chairman of Comintern and to Stalin’s friend Avel Enukidze, then chairman of the Commission for the Support of the Academy of Science.

It was to no avail. Antiquariat dispatched teams of ‘experts’ to pick out exhibits from the museum collection which they considered suitable for sale abroad. At the urging of the Hermitage staff, they concentrated first on the selection of duplicates and items whose sale would not substantially damage the collection. Karl Maison, the Berlin dealer in Old Master drawings, remembered working through the Hermitage collection making balanced piles of drawings – four Fragonards on the export pile, for instance, had to be balanced by four Fragonards on the pile that was to remain in the museum. Within the restrictions of the existing political situation, the staff seem to have fought to retain their collection as fiercely as they dared.

The Hermitage archives contain two letters of complaint of April 1929, marked ‘Top Secret’, from Troinitsky, then head of applied arts, to Pavel Klark, the Party activist who was director of the museum from December 1928 to December 1929. Troinitsky says that the commission selecting objects for sale was only giving the keepers twenty to thirty seconds to explain why an object was necessary to the museum collection and continues:

The battle between museum curators and Antiquariat was not restricted to the Hermitage. A 1929 letter from Viktor Lazarev, keeper of the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts – now the Pushkin Museum – to the head of Glavnauka, the section of Narkompros that dealt with educational institutions and museums, suggested ‘the radical reorganisation of the staff of Antiquariat through the replacement of those employees who comprehend nothing of antiques and carry out one act of sabotage after another with those party comrades who would feel the deep and principled difference between trading in pickled cucumbers and Rembrandts’.

In the 1990 official history of the Hermitage Boris Piotrovsky, the former director, quotes from a letter the museum received from Antiquariat in January 1930 in which they demanded “superfluous” gold and platinum objects, 250 paintings with an average value of not less than 5,000 roubles each, weapons from the Arsenal to the sum of 500,000 roubles, Scythian gold “to a sum to be agreed with the administration of the Hermitage” and duplicate engravings’. Only the Scythian gold was denied them.

Almost every department still mourns losses from its collection. A two-volume book on the Hermitage silver collection was published by the keeper, Baron Ariny Foelkersam, just before the Revolution from which Antiquariat selected the material it wanted for sale – the lost pieces are neatly identified. For instance, only forty-six items from the famous Orlov Service – ordered from Roettiers in Paris by Catherine the Great for her lover Count Grigory Orlov – are left in the Hermitage collection. There were over 1,000 pieces before the Revolution.

The duplicates sold from the Print Department included the original set of Piranesi engravings Count Ivan Shuvalov sent Catherine the Great from Rome and about which she wrote with such enthusiasm to her confidant Melchior Grimm. There are still plenty of Piranesis in the collection but Catherine’s historic folios have been lost. Or again, most of the battle paintings commissioned by Nicholas I from contemporary Russian artists were sold off. Nineteenth-century painting was out of fashion at the time and the Hermitage curators, no doubt, felt that such paintings were easier to part with than earlier and more distinguished works, but a whole, historic unit has disappeared for good.

Now that they were preparing to sell on a massive scale, the Soviets turned to auctions rather than private dealers. The first two sales took place at the end of 1928, one at Rudolf Lepke’s auction house in Berlin and the other at the Dorotheum in Vienna, both devoted mainly to applied arts and furnishings with only a smattering of minor pictures. The Lepke catalogue was a very grand affair, with many illustrations and an introduction by Wilhelm von Bode, director of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin and one of the great connoisseurs of his day. It contained more than 400 items from the Hermitage and confiscated aristocratic collections. Local émigrés made a small splash by trying to stop the sale and some items were withdrawn on the orders of a Berlin court – but the ruling was subsequently cancelled by a higher court in Leipzig.

Despite the ‘legality’ of the sales, the prices were low. The Russians responded by pouring more and more material onto the market, sometimes identifying their ownership in catalogues and sometimes not. Lepke’s auction house was the most favoured outlet – the firm had been working with Gorky’s mistress Mariya Andreeva, since 1922 – but the Russians also sold through dealers such as Hugo Helbig in Munich, Gilhofer and Rauschburg in Lucerne, Boerner in Leipzig, Hase in Berlin and Kende in Vienna. Boerner sold the best of the Hermitage drawings and prints in lavish, carefully researched catalogues – frequently quoting from the compendium of Hermitage drawings, Dessins des Maitres Anciens, which the keeper Mikhail Dobroklonsky had published in 1927.

The contents of the Stroganov Palace, a ‘branch’ of the Hermitage from 1918 to 1928, were also sold at Lepke in Berlin on 12 and 13 May 1931. The Hermitage had been allowed to retain some special items but the sale was sensational – and the prices abysmal. Rembrandt’s Christ and the Samaritan at the Well made $49,980, an Adam and Eve by Cranach the Elder $11,186, a Houdon bust of Diderot $6,188; the top price was $157,080 for a pair of Van Dyck portraits. The 256 lots, including fine French furniture, bronzes and sculpture, made only $613,326. Then the Princess Stroganov in Paris claimed ownership of the collection and her nephew George Shcherbatov requested the US customs to seize any of the ‘stolen property’ that was shipped to America. The legality of the sale was, however, upheld. The customs wrote back to Shcherbatov to say that ‘the Bureau is unaware of any provision of the law which would warrant the detention of the merchandise referred to unless it is brought into the US illegally. Your request, therefore, must be denied.’

Although they were prepared to sell the Stroganov collection for rock-bottom prices, Antiquariat held back from offering the great masterpieces of the Hermitage at auction. According to Oldenburg they were already slated for sale in 1928 when he attempted, unsuccessfully, to lobby the government against such a move. Indeed, the list of paintings with which he was provided included several masterpieces that have remained in the Hermitage, such as Rembrandt’s Flora and Giorgione’s Judith. Antiquariat had apparently realised that selling paintings of this importance required long and careful negotiations.

Armand Hammer, later chairman of Occidental Petroleum, and his brother Victor were the first Americans to go after the paintings. Neither had yet achieved fame or fortune but their father, Julius Hammer, who ran a small chain of drug stores, was a committed Communist and worked for one of the first Soviet trading organisations in New York, the Ludwig Martens Bureau, from 1919–20. When Julius became ill, the mantle descended on Armand’s shoulders and he travelled to Russia where he set up a series of trading deals. In the later 1920s and 1930s, the Hammers secretly became the American agents for the sale of the Soviet government’s stock of Fabergé jewels and other precious Russian baubles.

Towards the end of 1928, Armand and Victor received a mysterious letter from a leading New York lawyer called Max Steuer, asking them to find out whether paintings from the Hermitage were for sale and, if so, to act as agents in purchasing them. They went to see the head of Antiquariat, a man called Shapiro, who pretended to be enraged at the proposal, according to the account they gave John Walker, director of the National Gallery, Washington. ‘What!’ he said to Victor, ‘Sell treasures from our great Hermitage – ridiculous!’ However, he then added, ‘If your friends in America want to make offers we are obliged to submit them to the proper authorities, and then whatever happens, happens.’ The Hammers understood the hint.

It turned out that Steuer was representing Joseph Duveen, later Lord Duveen of Millbank, the most famous art dealer of his day – he had the simple insight that there was a lot of art in Europe and a lot of money in America and the two could profitably be put together. When Shapiro’s promising hint was passed back to him, the Hammers received a cable asking them to negotiate the purchase of forty itemised masterpieces, including works by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Van Eyck and Rubens, and offering a flat five million dollars.

This time Hammer took the offer to Anastas Mikoyan himself. And, according to his autobiography, ‘Mikoyan, who knew the price of a button let alone a Leonardo, dismissed the bid out of hand, calling it ridiculous. “The Leonardo alone is worth two and a half million dollars,” he said.’ It was the Benois Madonna that was in play at this point. Hammer inaccurately describes it as ‘even finer than the Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre’ but correctly notes that there was no Leonardo in the United States at that time, so ‘the offer of the Madonna aroused huge excitement’.

Informed of Mikoyan’s reaction, Steuer and Duveen apparently felt the picture was already within their grasp. Hammer received the following cable: ‘Concrete offer on Leonardo da Vinci $2,000,000. If offer accepted will arrange irrevocable letter of credit and ask Bernard Berenson to go to Leningrad to seal up the picture.’ Berenson was a distinguished American art historian and specialist on Italian painting who made a tidy income on the side by authenticating pictures for Duveen. However, the Russians did not allow themselves to be parted from their Leonardo that easily. Nothing came of these negotiations. Quite why is unclear. It has been surmised that Antiquariat felt it could get better prices by dealing directly with collectors rather than dealers, but maybe Duveen’s prices were just too low.

Next on the scene was Calouste Gulbenkian, an Armenian businessman who was a naturalised British citizen and head of the Iraq Petroleum Company. He is said to have helped the Soviets sell Baku oil on the Western market, which would explain his friendship with Georgy Piatakov, Mikoyan’s trade delegate in Paris. Gulbenkian was an avid art collector, with both knowledge and taste, who was interested as much in the applied arts as in painting. His private collection has now been turned into a museum and is one of the glories of Lisbon.

He bought four separate groups of art works from the Hermitage between 1928 and 1930. According to José de Azeredo Perdigao’s book, Calouste Gulbenkian, Collector, the procedure that he followed was always more or less the same:

On his first ‘fishing trip’ Gulbenkian acquired twenty-four pieces of fine French silver and gold tableware made by the top craftsmen of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century: François-Thomas Germain, Jacques-Nicolas Roettiers, Jean-Baptiste-Claude Odiot, besides two pictures by Hubert Robert, both depicting the creation of the royal gardens at Versailles, a painting of the Annunciation by the rare fifteenth-century Flemish master Dieric Bouts and a Louis XVI writing table by Jean-Henri Riesener. On Sergey Oldenburg’s list of Hermitage paintings slated for sale, the Bouts alone had been valued at 500,000 roubles but Gulbenkian got the lot for £54,000.

The second purchase comprised another fifteen superb pieces of silver, valued at £100,000, and a Rubens Portrait of Helene Fourment for £55,000. The silver included two tureens from the Paris Service, made by Germain for Empress Elizabeth, and Gulbenkian’s contract stipulated: ‘As there are eight equally fine tureens in the Hermitage Palace Collection, you have agreed to sell me the two most beautiful ones and the ones in the best condition as to gilding etc.’

Then came Gulbenkian’s biggest snip, Houdon’s marble statue of Diana, two paintings by Rembrandt: his Portrait of Titus and Pallas Athene, a Watteau, a Terborch and a Lancret, all in for £140,000. The Hermitage archives contain a delightfully illiterate telegram confirming this purchase: ‘Convey information re Antiquariat decision pictures Rembrandt Pallass Rembrandt Tatus Watteau Musician picture glass of lemonade Vamdondiana.’ The Russian alphabet does not contain an H, which clearly presented the Antiquariat clerk with insuperable difficulties over identifying Houdon’s Diana.

Antiquariat, quite rightly, got cold feet over this purchase. Gulbenkian realised something was amiss after the expert that he had sent to Leningrad was kept waiting for two weeks without any communication from the Soviet authorities. He stayed at the Hotel Europe, the best in town, where ‘he ate little but at great expense, saw nobody and was unable to buy any French or English books or newspapers’. Gulbenkian brought this ordeal to a close by sending a cable and a letter to his friend George Piatakov who was now the governor of the Soviet State Bank, Gosbank, in Moscow and a very important person. In a letter dated 22 June 1930 the governor replied that the order to suspend the sale contract had been cancelled and that the agreement would be implemented although the Russian authorities believed the prices were too low. Gulbenkian wrote back:

You have been told that I have obtained the objects in question at ridiculously low prices. In virtue of the mutual and friendly trust which exists between us and of our past relations, I would never dream of imposing either upon you or your friends in such a manner.

The trouble is due to the fact that several of your Departments, who regard these works of art from the point of view of the ‘savant’ or custodian, are very reluctant that they should be sold. I heartily approve of their feelings and I have no doubt that a great many of these people are attaching to these works of art a value which, from a commercial point of view, is quite absurd. ‘The proof of the pudding’ as the saying goes, ‘is in the eating’. Your friends, when you were in Paris, asked tremendous prices, but they afterwards discovered that they could not get a quarter of what they asked for many of the objects.

The Russians clearly suspected that they were being cheated by Western dealers and collectors – probably rightly so. The director of the Lenin Library in Moscow wrote Lunacharsky a ‘Top Secret’ letter towards the end of 1928, protesting at the planned sales, in which he points out: ‘In March of this year museum objects to the sum of around 700,000 roubles were sent abroad. Of these only pieces to the sum of around 10,000 roubles were sold. This reveals that (1) the market in the West has limited capacity for works of art, and (2) that Western European antiquarians have agreed among themselves, coming together also possibly with Russian speculators, with the aim of lowering the prices of the pieces exported by us onto the market.’

Gulbenkian only managed to squeeze one more bargain Old Master out of the Hermitage, Rembrandt’s Portrait of an Old Man, which he acquired for £30,000 in October 1930. However, the careful documentation of his purchases at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon throws interesting light on the secret despatch of art works from the museum. An expert he sent to St Petersburg to supervise the collection of one group of acquisitions submitted a report which contains this passage: ‘As for the packing, it was quite a difficult and delicate work for we lacked tools and the men were not very expert. The workers used small hatchets with, I must say, great skill, but it was not easy for me as it was not possible to work during the day. The packing took place at night, by the light of ordinary candles.’

Gulbenkian’s star waned in Moscow when Antiquariat discovered a new, more profitable, sales channel – leading indirectly to Andrew Mellon, First Secretary of the US Treasury. It is unclear whether Mikoyan and his associates knew where the paintings were going since Mellon did not personally intervene in the negotiations as Gulbenkian had done. He bought from the Knoedler Gallery in New York, which, in turn, was working with Colnaghi’s in London and the Matthiesen Gallery in Berlin, with the latter handling the negotiations with Antiquariat. The Matthiesen Gallery was run by a brilliant and scholarly German art dealer called Franz Zatzenstein – he changed his name to Francis Matthiesen when he moved to London in the 1940s.

Matthiesen’s gallery was in the Victoria Strasse and he rented rooms on the first floor to Karl Maison, the young drawings dealer who helped sort out which of the Hermitage drawings should be sold; Maison and Matthiesen later became partners. When he discovered the Hermitage paintings were for sale, Matthiesen had to find capital to buy them and turned to his friend Otto Gutekunst, who owned Colnaghi’s, a Bond Street firm of Old Master dealers, for help. Gutekunst approached Charles Henschel who ran Knoedler’s in New York. Henschel turned out to have a client with an unlimited bankroll – Andrew Mellon. The Mellon Bank had a stake in many of the largest corporations in America and Mellon himself was one of the richest men in the world. He was also a passionate art collector. He had begun collecting Old Masters in the early 1920s under the guidance of Henry Clay Frick, founder of New York’s Frick Collection.

Henschel’s reaction to Gutekunst’s suggestion is recorded in a letter he wrote in January 1930 to his own European representative, one George Davey:

I told him [Gutekunst] that we were prepared to buy a number of these pictures for a good round sum, provided that we got the pictures that we wanted and not necessarily the pictures that they wanted to sell. My idea was that if we purchased about £500,000 worth, it would tempt them, and we could then get some other pictures on consignment from them. Zatzenstein has apparently put this matter up to Gutekunst.

By April 1930 the deal was beginning to bear fruit. Henschel had already taken delivery of Franz Hals’s Portrait of a Young Man and two Rembrandts, A Girl with a Broom and A Polish Nobleman now in the National Gallery, Washington – for an outlay of $559,190 and the ongoing agreement with Mellon had been finalised. He was to act as financier for Knoedler’s purchases from the Soviets and take first pick among the paintings for himself. A letter from Knoedler’s confirmed the arrangement:

It is understood that you have authorised us to purchase for you certain paintings from the Hermitage Collection in Petrograd, and that if you decide to retain them you will pay us a commission of 25 per cent of the cost price. In the event you do not wish to keep any of them, it is understood that we will sell them for your account, and pay 25 per cent of the profit on the price we receive for them. We have shown you reproductions of the paintings which we decided to purchase from the above Collection, and it is understood that we will acquire them at a price at which we consider they can be disposed of, should you not care to retain them, of approximately 50 per cent profit.

Henschel was excited and decided to visit St Petersburg himself. On board ship – he travelled on the Olympic – he received one of the first ever shore-to-ship, radio telephone calls. It was from Matthiesen’s Moscow representative, Mansfeld, to tell him that the Soviets were prepared to sell Van Eyck’s Annunciation for $500,000. Once arrived in Europe, Henschel travelled on to St Petersburg with his nephew, Gus Mayer, from Colnaghi’s and Mansfeld from Matthiesen’s. Like Gulbenkian’s experts, they found themselves spending long hours in their hotel waiting for a communication from Antiquariat. Only Mansfeld could speak Russian and all he could find for them to eat was sturgeon, caviar and vodka.

A chink of light is thrown on the condition of life at the Hermitage by a story told by Henschel of how he offered a cigarette to one of the museum officials and was wistfully turned down. The official explained that unless Henschel was prepared to give a cigarette to everyone at the Hermitage, including labourers and guards, the acceptance of such a gift might very well cost him his job. Nevertheless, Henschel’s team pulled off the deal of the century, obtaining an agreement for the purchase of twenty-five paintings for something over seven million dollars, twenty-one of them for Mellon.

It took another year to get the pictures out of Russia after a series of setbacks and delays. It had taken all of Matthiesen’s wiles to make Antiquariat honour its undertakings and he clearly considered Henschel ungrateful. In a letter of early 1931 he told Henschel in his appealingly broken English: ‘I quite agree that it is a tremendous sum you paid out, but you must not forget that you would have lost this business entirely not having your European partners and you also do not give care enough to the fact that this business is giving us such a lot of work, that we are more or less since we started it a branch of Knoedler’s, eagerly proceeding in the art to perform and exquisitely display how to be successful in social communication with the Bolsheviki.’

A few of Henschel’s paintings ended up in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, while the Philadelphia Museum managed, in 1932, to buy Poussin’s Birth of Venus for $50,000 through Amtorg, and a few other museums successfully negotiated purchases. However, most of the major masterpieces from the Hermitage ended up with Andrew Mellon. As Treasury Secretary he had overall control of America’s economic policy and it is not surprising that he kept his very controversial purchases secret. Not only was the Soviet government not recognised by America but 1930, the year he negotiated his purchases, saw fierce lobbying from the business community for legislation to prevent the Soviet Union dumping goods on the US market at bargain prices. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of June 1930 imposed import duties on Russian goods and only by a paper fiction did Mellon purchase his paintings in April and May 1930, thus avoiding customs duty – most of them were actually delivered several months later.

Public knowledge of the Mellon purchases had to wait for a sensational court case brought against him by the Internal Revenue Service for allegedly cheating on his tax returns. He had taken a tax deduction of over three million dollars in 1931 when he passed ownership of several Hermitage paintings to the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust through which he intended to pay for the new National Gallery, but he had overlooked some of the necessary paperwork that would ensure this was classified as a charitable donation. Mellon had been forced to resign as Treasury Secretary in 1932 after the Democrats ousted the Republicans from the White House – he had served under three Republican presidents. He was compensated by being appointed British ambassador and retired to London where he hung his pictures in the embassy there. Then, in 1935, came the challenge from the Internal Revenue service.

Leading museum curators and dealers were summoned to give evidence on Mellon’s behalf. William Valentiner, director of the Detroit Art Institute, characterised the Hermitage’s Alba Madonna as ‘one of the greatest pictures of Raphael’ and Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi as ‘one of the greatest masterpieces of the world’. Duveen told the court that Van Eyck’s Annunciation was a bargain at $503,000. ‘If Mr Mellon would like to dispose of it,’ he offered, ‘I will give him $750,000 for the picture.’ He added: ‘The Hermitage is no more the greatest collection in the world, it has gone to pieces. I do not see how a nation could sell their great pictures of that kind.’

In this Valentiner was coincidentally echoing Viktor Lazarev’s January 1929 letter to the head of Glavnauka. After expressing his distress at the sale of eight pictures of major importance, including Van Dyck’s Suzanna Fourment and Franz Hals’s Portrait of a Young Man, both of which went to Mellon, Lazarev said: ‘It is sufficient to sell another fifteen to twenty pieces of similar quality, for the Hermitage – which could be the central attraction for foreign tourists – to cease to exist as a collection of world importance. For it is clear that the significance of the Hermitage is based not on the quantity of paintings but on the quality of two or three dozen world masterpieces, of which eight have already been sold by Antiquariat.’

The sales did not, in fact, destroy the Hermitage but it was a close-run thing. In the event, neither of the Leonardos was sold, nor Giorgione’s Judith, nor the two great Rembrandts, The Return of the Prodigal and Flora, all of which had been on the list of potential sales handed to Sergey Oldenburg. The Hermitage may have been demoted from ‘the greatest collection in the world’ to ‘one of the greatest’, but no more than that.

The bitter struggles within the museum which the sales generated are still treated as confidential. They set curator against curator, as some gave in and collaborated easily, and some did not. To save their skins and stay out of prison, curators were forced to help Antiquariat on the selection and cataloguing of items for sale. However, few did it willingly. Troinitsky, who had struggled so long and relentlessly to protect the collection, actually worked for Antiquariat after he was sacked by the museum in 1931. His attitude appears to have been that he was better qualified than most to decide what could be sold and what could not. Vladimir Levinson-Lessing, the picture curator responsible for the present hang and one of the best loved scholars working in the museum from the 1920s to 1960s, is listed as a member of the Expert Assessment Committee of Antiquariat from 1928 to 1933. Grigory Borovka, a keeper in the Antique Department before he was arrested and shot, used the sales as a means of visiting his family in Berlin and explained to them that the items sent for auction were purposely miscatalogued in the hope that they would not sell and be returned to the museum.

Quite a lot of material failed to sell at the various German auctions and was returned to Russia. Sometimes Antiquariat gave it back to the Hermitage. On other occasions it was given to provincial museums. For instance, some of the 500 drawings from the collection formed before the Revolution by the artist-curator Stepan Yaremich, which he gave or sold to the Hermitage in the 1920s and 1930s, can now be found not only in Amsterdam and Stockholm but also in provincial Russian collections.

The sticking point came with Iosif Orbeli’s new Oriental Department. Having spent a decade building up this collection by ardently searching every major or minor institution in Russia for hidden treasures, or even wrongly attributed pieces, Orbeli was not going to lightly hand over his trove to Antiquariat. According to a story told within the Hermitage, when the Commission came to select Sassanian silver for sale, Orbeli personally blocked the door to the storeroom and, holding up the key, threatened to swallow it if they attempted to enter.

Boris Legran, the Communist apparatchik who was then director of the museum, clearly fell wholeheartedly under the influence of Orbeli’s fiery charm and supported his campaign with notable courage. An undated letter from Legran to Ivan Luppol, the head of Glavnauka, reads in part:

Legran’s opposition to Antiquariat clearly went further than just protecting Orbeli’s department. A letter, dated 14 February 1932, that he received from the chairman of Antiquariat contains an undercurrent of threat. ‘With regard to the essence of your letter stating that the Hermitage does not accept Antiquariat’s “ultimatum” I would like to say that no ultimatum has been or is being presented,’ he begins and, after some argument, finishes:

It is totally understandable that the pace of work seen in resolving the question of letting us into the Hermitage stores to look at bronzes for allocation should not suit us at all and cannot suit us. We desire that the work on allocation should go quickly, energetically and with a full consciousness that each extra day reduces the price of the goods and makes a loss for the State.

If this our desire – in our opinion a totally valid desire – is qualified by you as an ‘ultimatum’ then we, as Bolsheviks, do not understand and cannot find an explanation of your attitude.

We feel it would be useful that the competent party organs should look at this question and establish whether or not our demand that the lists should be studied within five days is an ‘ultimatum’ or the most urgent necessity and part of the battle which the whole party is fighting for hard currency.

The final lifting of the threat to the Hermitage collection was engineered by Legran and Orbeli acting in unison. The idea was to convey a personal letter to Stalin, playing on the fact that he was a Georgian and pointing out that the treasures of southern Russia and the Caucasus were under threat – his own heritage. Rather than writing to Stalin directly, as had been done by other friends of the Hermitage anxious to protect its collection, they had the idea of passing Orbeli’s letter through the hands of a close associate of Stalin who also had roots in the south. Stalin’s Georgian intimate, Avel Enukidze, who was an old friend of Legran’s from his days as a Party activist, was chosen as the most promising carrier for the letter. And the strategy worked.

Stalin’s answer was brief but to the point: ‘Respected Comrade Orbeli! I received your letter of 25 October 1932. An investigation has shown that Antiquariat’s requests are not justified. In this connection, the Commissariat of Foreign Trade and its export bodies have been ordered by the respective agency not to touch the Oriental Department of the Hermitage. I think that should take care of the problem.’ It was written in green ink on a sheet of jotting paper which was enclosed in a plain envelope and passed back to the Hermitage through the Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Over the following months any works of art demanded from the Hermitage by Antiquariat were found to be ‘Oriental’ – carpets, porcelain, paintings. After some fruitless skirmishes, Antiquariat threw in its hand and demanded nothing more from the museum.