Russia's Secret Spoils of World War Ii

By ROBERT HUGHES

It is one of the most vexed questions left over from World War II: What, 50 years later, has become of the immense quantities of works of art -- paintings, sculptures, drawings, antiquities, textiles -- that Germany stole from Russia and Russia from Germany? Many of the missing objects, no doubt, were destroyed; others, stolen by individual soldiers. But systematic cultural looting was also policy for both Hitler and Stalin, and both sides carried it out on an unprecedented scale, using art specialists to pick the goodies.

In 1954 Russia and Germany signed the Hague Convention, under which both sides had to return their illicit booty. In 1990 they made a bilateral agreement further binding them to return captured artworks. Since then the negotiations of the Russian-German restitution commission have gone on at a snail's pace. The Russians presented the Germans with a catalog of about 40,000 missing objects. The Germans came up with their own list, involving some 200,000 museum objects, 2 million books and three kilometers of archival material. The actual volume of German loot hidden in Russian storerooms is an enduring mystery, but from time to time a tantalizing glimpse is seen -- a small corner of the canvas, no more.

Such a peek was given last week by Mikhail Piotrovsky, since 1992 director of Russia's greatest art institution, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. While on a trip to the U.S., planning to set up an international funding body for his beleaguered museum, Piotrovsky disclosed that some 700 paintings and 2,000 archaeological objects looted from Germany, many from private collections, have been kept in storage in the Hermitage basements since 1945. Their existence was a state secret, and Piotrovsky himself did not see any of them until 1992. Piotrovsky plans to put 70 of the paintings on view in a major exhibition next March. He gave out no list, but among them are thought to be works by Van Gogh, Monet and Renoir. The star of the show -- as far as anyone knows -- is to be one of Edgar Degas's finest paintings, listed as "presumed destroyed" in studies written since 1945 and known only through a black-and-white photograph: Place de la Concorde (1875), stolen from the Gerstenberg collection in Berlin.

Whatever money the Hermitage can scare up from this venture is sorely needed. Of all the world's great museums, it is in the worst physical shape. It is an enormous and, to the tourist, impossibly labyrinthine array of 1,050 rooms in six buildings along the bank of the Neva, the oldest of which, the Winter Palace, was finished in the 1750s. Though extremely art rich, the Hermitage is sustenance poor, from its crumbling basements to the cracking veneer on its intarsia doors. Its storage and conservation facilities are woefully inadequate: the walls weep with rising damp, and the lighting is poor -- the "babushka brigade" of women guards has the habit of lifting the frilly curtains of the gloomy galleries to expose fragile Rembrandts and Poussins to direct sunlight. Rumors abound that the primitive cataloging and security systems have made it easy for thieves to purloin objects from storage to sell on Russia's flourishing black market.

Before the collapse of communism, all Russian museums got government support, meager though it was by Western standards; but now, laments Piotrovsky, "even the Hermitage is getting much less than it was getting before." The financial crunch has revived talk of selling off items from the collection, as the Hermitage did in the 1920s; but that, the director points out, would be "a disaster -- you have only to begin, and you will finish and the museum has nothing."

As to the myriad looted artworks left over from the war, there is only one ethical course open to the Russian authorities: they must honor Russia's signature on the 1954 and 1990 accords and let the works go back to Germany -- on condition that the Germans return a proportionate amount of the things they swiped. It would be intolerable for President Yeltsin to give in to the pressure of the ultranationalists and nostalgic apparatchiks who want to keep the looted art in Russia as "reparations." Theft is theft. But there may be capital to be made from letting go. Is it too hard to imagine an accord between Germany and Russia through which the mutual return of the loot was preceded by a series of spectacular international exhibitions of it?

One may assume that not everything that has been kept out of sight is a masterpiece -- but a lot of things on both sides must be, since they were not chosen at random. How much could the financially strapped Hermitage reap from a royalty on the tickets, catalog sales, replicas and other spin-offs? One thing is certain: kept unseen, in the basements, such treasures profit no one and are a liability to both sides.

With reporting by Melissa August/Washington and John Kohan/Moscow