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Why Do Captured Archives Go Home? Restitution Achievements under the Russian Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2010

Patricia Kennedy Grimsted
Patricia Kennedy Grimsted
Affiliation:
Senior Research Associate, Ukrainian Research Institute, and Associate, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Honorary Fellow, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

The return of captured French archives—not art—ignited debate in the Russian Duma in the spring of 1994, leading to the passage of the 1998 Federal Law “On Cultural Valuables Displaced to the USSR as a Result of the Second World War and Located on the Territory of the Russian Federation.” Yet, a decade since the law was signed, there have been five cases of captured archives from the Second World War returned to Western European countries, as explained in the recent book, Returned from Russia. The aim of this article is to examine major factors involved in the restitution of archives from Russia, and why amid the politics of restitution the return of archives has been more successful than art.

The article first successively examines the major factors involved, namely, foreign political pressure; the underlying support of international law, both in specific instruments and historical archival practice; the circumstances and Soviet aims of archival plunder; the present contrast with Soviet political ideology and alignments; the fact that Russian archivists were more willing to return their loot than museum directors; and that archival returns were easier to conform to the 1998 law, because the receiving countries were willing to offer the “compensation” Russian archivists were demanding. Country by country, first in Western Europe starting with France and now Austria and Greece, archives have been going home, but so far only a few symbolic files from Germany have been returned. A final section of the article briefly singles out the captured records from several other countries remaining in Moscow, including many Jewish records, even some representing Holocaust losses.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Cultural Property , Volume 17 , Issue 2: SPECIAL ISSUE: Spoils of War v. Cultural Heritage: The Russian Cultural Property Law in Historical Context , May 2010 , pp. 291 - 333
Copyright
Copyright © International Cultural Property Society 2010

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