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

The International Newletter of Communist Studies Online XIII (2007), no 20 32
The disparity in attention paid to Nazi and Communist crimes is itself old news. But in the
problem of gold movements, the disparity is not only acute, but injurious to historical
understanding. To begin with, gold sales, and the imports they financed, were much less
important to the Nazi war machine than they were to the Bolsheviks’. The economy of Nazi
Germany was entirely functional during even the bleakest war years, producing the vast
majority of sophisticated manufactures and armaments essential to the Wehrmacht.
Famously, the I.G. Farben company even perfected the technology of producing gasoline and
fuel oil from coal. Other strategic materials were obtained by the Nazi war machine through
conquest, as with iron ore in Norway, or by coercing satellites, like Romania with its
petroleum. German gold sales in Switzerland in the early 1940s financed the purchase of
little more than a few metals from neutral states, like manganese, tungsten and chrome,
admittedly important but hardly dear compared to everything else required by the
Wehrmacht. Had the army not been so ravenous, the Nazi government could have simply
traded for these metals with surplus manufactures. Lebor’s $289 million in gold meant a lot
to the occupied governments being looted, but when set against total expenditures by the
German war machine from 1939 to 1945, it is rather small beer.
By contrast, gold was virtually the only moveable asset the Bolsheviks enjoyed for many
years after the Russian Revolution. Economic production under the draconian regime of “War
Communism” was insufficient to supply even food and fuel to Moscow and Petrograd, let
alone produce surpluses in traditional Russian export sectors such as grain, timber, hemp,
flax, and furs. A country where emaciated urban dwellers were tearing down entire buildings
for wood to heat their apartments was not likely to have export surpluses on hand. In fact,
excepting a few leftover stocks of flax and hemp they inherited in 1917, the Bolsheviks had
only confiscated gold, silver, platinum, diamonds, and jewelry to “trade” for desperately
needed imports.
The flip side of an economy producing nothing worthy of export was that the Bolsheviks,
again unlike Nazi Germany, had to import virtually everything their own war machine
required. War needs money, and the Bolsheviks were fighting many different wars in
succession from 1917 to 1920, against Whites, Poles, Finns, at times Germans, and Allied
expeditionary forces from Japan, America, France, and Great Britain. Thanks to Orlando
Figes and others, we now know of the ferocious civil war which erupted in the Russian
countryside in 1920-1921, as bands of peasant partisans and anarchist “greens,” many of
whom had cooperated with the Red Army against the Whites and foreign troops, turned their
Adventure,” The Colophon (New York, 1932). An up-to-date bibliography, including an impressive guide
to related materials catalogued in the New York Public Library, is provided by Robert H. Davis et al, in A
Dark Mirror: Romanov and Imperial Palace Library Materials in The New York Public Library: A
Checklist and Agenda for Research (New York: Norman Ross Publishing, 2000). For details on which
Russian Imperial Art treasures ended up where in American museums, galleries, and private collections,
see, for example, Anne Odom and Liana Paredes Arend, A Taste for Splendor. Russian Imperial and
European Treasures from the Hillwood Museum (Alexandria, Virginia: Art Services International, 1998).
In recent years, a traveling exhibition of “The Jewels of the Romanovs: Treasures of the Russian
Imperial Court” made its way through America in 1997, prompting renewed interest in the subject. See,
for example, Jo Ann Lewis, “Crowning Glories: The Romanov Treasures,” in the 31 January 1997
Washington Post.