Russia: Russia's law enforcers and politicians are embroiled in a bitter battle over the future of a $50 million art collection smuggled out of Nazi Germany as war booty by a cultured Red Army captain, writes Dan McLaughlin, in Moscow
Viktor Baldin discovered the 364 drawings and paintings by Rubens, Rembrandt and Van Gogh in a German castle during the final, chaotic days of the second World War. He cut them from their frames, hid them in suitcases and headed for Moscow, where he secretly catalogued his spectacular prize before handing it over to the city's Shusev museum in 1948. He became the museum's curator 15 years later.
Now Russia's culture minister wants to send the art back to the Bremen Kuntshalle, where the collection hung before hostilities forced the Reich to hide it in the castle.
The head of St Petersburg's huge Hermitage museum also wants to repatriate the art, which includes work by Degas, Goya and Dürer, and says the Bremen museum has agreed to return some of the pictures to Russia as a gesture of goodwill.
But, just as the collection seemed poised to head back to Germany, Russia's prosecutor general slammed on the brakes, saying proof of actual ownership was lacking.
"The documents of the Bremen Kunsthalle on the works of art and a copy of the inventory prove only that the works were kept or exhibited there," the prosecutor's office said in a statement this week.
It was an unpleasant surprise for the culture minister himself, Mr Mikhail Shvydkoi, who had just said a public farewell to the collection and was suddenly faced with the threat of legal action by a former culture minister, who accused him of trying to sneak the art out of the country after secret talks with the Germans.
"I made no secret of the talks, which took place over two years," Mr Shvydkoi said, insisting that Capt Baldin, who died in 1997, had wanted the art to go home. "Aware that he was the unlawful owner, Baldin repeatedly asked the Russian government, and even [former Soviet leader\] Mikhail Gorbachev, to give the collection back to Bremen," he said.
The ire of parliament and the general prosecutor here has chilled an improving relationship between Germany and Russia over the estimated two million works of art stolen by Soviet troops.