Vol. XIII (2007), no 20 - The International Newsletter of Communist ...

The International Newletter of Communist Studies Online XIII (2007), no 20 31
prolonging the First World War, or in facilitating the advent and spread of Bolshevism. To
take one obvious measure of comparison: of the $398 million in gold shipped by Nazi
Germany to Switzerland from 1939 to 1945, Lebor estimates some $289 million worth was
obtained from the looting of central banks in occupied countries, plus an unspecified (though
much smaller) amount taken from Holocaust victims. 61 This figure is less than the dollar value
of gold sold abroad by the Bolsheviks in just 18 months during the murderous final stretches
of the Russian Civil War (about $294 million), even without adjusting upwards to account for a
quarter-century’s inflation. 62 Like the Nazis, the Bolsheviks obtained this gold by looting
banks and robbing whole categories of people — and they procured substantially more gold,
silver, and other precious stones (especially diamonds) from “class enemies” than did the
Nazis from Holocaust victims. 63 Like the Nazis, the Bolsheviks had gold melted down and sold
to obtain hard currency, which they used to purchase desperately needed war materiél.
Unlike the Nazis, however, the Bolsheviks’ audacious looting of an entire continent has
attracted little notice from historians, aside from books in the “Anastasia” genre, which
examine the legal claims of purported Romanov descendants to the family’s lost fortune, and
specialist art-historical studies on the provenance of looted paintings, antique books, and
icons. 64
61 Lebor, pp. 68-69.
62 Roughly $214 million worth of gold was exported from Soviet Russia via Reval, Estonia, between May
1920 and April 1921, according to Charles Westcott, whose “Origin and Disposition of the Former Russian
Imperial Gold Reserve,” was submitted from the U.S. Consulate in Paris to Washington on 21 April 1921,
in U.S. State Department Reports on Russia, National Archives Annex (NAA) Microfilm Section 316, roll
120. Another 160 million gold rubles, or $80 million worth of gold, was sold and shipped by the
Bolsheviks through Reval from May to November 1921, according to the report of Captain Kelley,
Assistant Military Observer at the U.S. Commission in Reval, submitted to the State Department on 20
March 1922. In NAA, M 316, microfilm roll 121.
63 Lebor never does arrive at an estimate for the amount of Nazi gold sent to Switzerland which had its
origins in the tooth fillings and crowns of Holocaust victims, which “dental gold” was processed through
the so-called “Melmer” system. The closest to a concrete estimate of quantity Lebor found was in a
postwar U.S. intelligence report describing “4,173 bags said to contain 8,307 gold bars inasmuch as
these gold bars may…be determined to represent melted down teeth fillings and therefore classifiable
as non-monetary gold.” As such inferior gold was valued much less than fine gold bars (which sold at
roughly $700 per kilo), this could not have represented more than a few million dollars (and it had not
been sent to Switzerland, anyway).
Irregular Bolshevik looting of aristocrats, “kulaks” and other class enemies, private bank safe deposit
boxes, abandoned households, and churches between 1917 and 1922 was on a much larger scale. The
Gokhran, or State Treasury for the Preservation of Valuables, founded in February 1920 to handle an
ever-increasing volume of intake, processed many thousands of tons of loot, including fine gold ingots
and high quality diamonds and other easily saleable jewelry. Just between 6 April and 18 July 1920, for
example, the Gokhran received 21,500 carrots worth of diamonds, 20,000 carrots of pearls, 6,300
carrots in gold-plated jewels, plus 20 million Tsarist rubles ($10 million) worth of fine gold ingots and
coin. Gokhran files at the Russian Government Archive of Economics in Moscow (RGAE), fond 7632, opis
1, del’ 4, list’ 8.
64 The best overall survey of Bolshevik looting and laundering of arts and antiquities is Verkaufte Kultur.
Die sowjetischen Kunst- und Antiquitätenexporte 1919-1938, ed. Waltraud Bayer (Frankfurt-am-Main:
Peter Lang, 2001), although the coverage of the Civil War years is spotty. The most thorough study of
the claims by Romanov descendants is William Clarke’s The Lost Fortune of the Tsars. The Search for
the Fabulous Legacy of the Romanoffs (London: Orion, 1996; first published 1994). On artwork
specifically, see Robert Williams, Russian Art and American Money, 1900-1940 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1980). On antiquities, early memoir accounts include Percy Muir, “A Russian