The Nazi confiscation of art from Jewish families and occupied countries during World War II has been well-documented. Now, the complicated and still-evolving story of how the Soviets plundered Europe's art treasures at the end of World War II - and kept them hidden for 50 years - is brought to light in great detail by art historians Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorii Kozlov in "Beautiful Loot."
The book retraces the perilous steps taken by Akinsha and Kozlov to uncover guarded Soviet museum records after Akinsha stumbled upon books, manuscripts and paintings stamped with the word "Berlin."Despite the atmosphere of perestroika under Gorbachev, there was considerable danger in the historians' investigation. Only in 1991 were the two men able to tell the world about their discoveries.
The scope of the book is limited to the period from 1943 after Stalingrad to the fall of Berlin and Dresden in 1945 and the aftermath.
Just before the end of the war, secret "trophy brigades" were established by Stalin with specific instructions to remove art from Germany and ship it back to the USSR on special trains. The operation began while fighting was still going on and was conducted at a frenzied pace for several months. It was the largest transport operation of artworks in the history of mankind.
Works by such masters as Botticelli, El Greco, Goya, Delacroix, Picasso, Velazquez, Matisse, Renoir, Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian and Degas made their way to the Soviet Union.
The rationale behind the work of the trophy brigades was that the Russians had suffered terribly when their country was invaded by the Germans in 1941, and that the artworks taken back to the USSR were simply reparation for things stolen or destroyed by the Nazis. Ironically, the art was not destined to enrich the lives of the Russian people. It, like them, was the victim of Cold War politics. Too "cosmopolitan" for the party ap-pa-rat-chiks in authority after the war, most of the art ended up in secret depositories where much of it still remains today.
"Beautiful Loot" is written chronologically but with considerable dramatic tension, taking the reader through the elaborate propaganda years of Stalin and Khrushchev and beyond.
A particularly fascinating early segment of the book discusses the looting of the famous "Trojan gold."
In 1873, the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann unearthed a treasure of gold on the site of what he believed to be the Troy of Homer's Iliad. The gold, then presented by Schliemann to Germany and housed in Berlin for permanent viewing, was later moved to the elaborately fortified Zoo Flakturm (antiaircraft tower) during the war. When the Soviets entered Berlin, they loaded the gold onto a truck and drove it away into 40 years of secrecy.
With the assistance of Sylvia Hochfield, editor-at-large for ARTnews magazine, Akinsha and Kozlov have come up with a spell-binding book that is sure to cause hours of discussion and debate.