Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T05:35:51.636Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Stalin's Decrees and Soviet Trophy Brigades: Compensation, Restitution in Kind, or “Trophies” of War?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2010

Konstantin Akinsha
Affiliation:
ARTnews

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the official decrees issued by Joseph Stalin in 1945 ordering the Soviet removal of cultural property from Eastern European and German territories occupied by the Red Army. As opposed to popular belief dominant today in Russia, such decrees were few. Preparation for the removal of cultural property from enemy countries had started before the fate of the war was decided. In 1943 on the request of academician Igor Grabar, the Bureau of Experts was established with the task of composing lists of so-called “eventual equivalents,” which Soviet officials wanted to receive after the war as “restitution in kind,” to compensate for the cultural losses of the USSR. The listed equivalents included art works from museums and private collections in the Axis countries. However, the projected provisions for “restitution in kind” were never approved by the Allies, in large part because during the last months of the war and immediately thereafter, the Soviet Union had already begun massive removal of cultural property from territories occupied by the Red Army. Different trophy brigades sent to the front lines were authorized or ordered to send back home whole collections of German museums and libraries. Only rarely were any of the ‘trophies’ labeled “compensation.”

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © International Cultural Property Society 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Akinsha, Konstantin, and Kozlov, Grigorii. “Die Beute lag auf dem Flugplatz im Schnee,” Art, no. 5 (May, 1993), pp. 6066.Google Scholar
Akinsha, Konstantin. Beautiful Loot: The Soviet Plunder of Europe's Art Treasures. New York: Random House, 1995.Google Scholar
Akinsha, Konstantin. “Diplomatic Debates on Cultural Restitution Matters in 1945–1946”/“Diplomaticheskie debaty po povodu restitutsii kul'turnykh tsennostei v 1945–1946 godakh”. In Kul'turnaia karta Evropy: Sbornik materialov mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii “Kul'turnaia karta Evropy: sud'ba peremeshchennykh kul'turnykh tsennostei v tret'em tysiacheletii,” Moskva, VGBIL (10–11 apreli 2000 goda)/Mapping Europe: Materials of the International Conference “Mapping Europe: Fate of Looted Cultural Valuables in the Third Millennium,” Moscow, VGBIL (10–11 April 2000), 44–49 (Russian); 246–50 (English). Moscow: Rudomino, 2002. ⟨http://www.libfl.ru/restitution/conf/kozlov_e.html⟩.Google Scholar
Grabar, Igor. Istoriia russkogo iskusstva. Moscow: I. Knebel, 1910–1914.Google Scholar
Grimsted, Patricia Kennedy. Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War II, and the International Politics of Restitution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Papers of Ukrainian Studies, 2001.Google Scholar
Knyshevskii, Pavel. Dobycha: tainy germanskikh reparatsii. Moscow: Soratnik, 1994.Google Scholar