Journalism and historical studies
The first studies by A. Mosyakin were published in 1983 in the Grozny Worker newspaper, followed by numerous articles in the local and central press (the newspapers Social Industry, Labour, Common Newspaper, Evening Leningrad, Smena and the journals Ogoniok, Our Heritage and others). The author writes in the genres of journalist study, historical journalism and historical study based on archival documents.
Sales of museum treasures
A series of articles by Mosyakin entitled “Sale” (Ogoniok 6-8, 19 (1989) [5], telling about the sale of cultural heritage by the Bolshevik in the 1920-30s caused union-wide concern. This publication resulted in the cancellation of a new wave of sales of the country’s museum treasures, which was about to take place at the end of the 1980s. The sale was under preparation, with trial auctions having been conducted in Greece, the Federal Republic of Germany and Switzerland, and negotiations were under way with large antiquarian companies. Working on the materials and its publication, the author received assistance from Dmitry Sergeyevich Likhachov (Дмитрий Сергеевич Лихачёв), having received access to secret archives with the aid of Raisa Maksimovna Gorbacheva (Раиса Максимовна Горбачёва), who occupied the position of vice-president of the Soviet Culture Fund. The material led to charged debate on this issue, which was a taboo I the USSR, and the discussions are still ongoing. Not only the wide audience, but also reputed researchers, including Y. N. Zhukov (Ю.Н. Жуков) justify the sale of centuries-old Russian cultural heritage by the need to get foreign currency to fund industrialization at any price, but such foolishness is unjustifiable. Mosyakin sees a different reason for what happened.
In the early 1920s the Bolshevik leaders took the gold bullion of the Imperial Russia, which they got after seizing the power, abroad. The Bolsheviks appropriated 852.5 tuns of gold from the bank to the value of 1101.1 million golden rubles (in addition to the gold they have seized from the population and Romanian gold for 117.9 million rubles = 91.3 tuns). By 1 September 1921, the gold bullion of the RSFSR has diminished to 73.5 million rubles (56.9 tuns), and 12.6 million of the Romanian gold has been spent, too. Between November 1920 and September 1921 over 485.3 million of rubles (375.7 tuns) in gold has been taken from the Soviet Russia to the west (mostly through the Baltic countries and Sweden). In all, between September 1918 and September 1921 the Bolsheviks exported into western banks 608 tuns of Russian gold and 10 tuns of Romanian gold (A. V. Kolchak (А.В. Колчак) spent and lost 187 tuns). Only a part of this gold was spent to buy food, goods and equipment for the Red Army and make payments on international agreements, etc. The major part of the Russian gold that was taken by the Bolsheviks under the pretext of buying a thousand steam engines in Sweden and Germany, ended up in the treasuries of the world financial oligarchs, first and foremost the Federal Reserve System of the US. This was acknowledged by the empowered representative of the Politburo of the Russian Communist party of Bolsheviks for gold currency operations abroad M. M. Litvinov (М.М. Литвинов) in April 1928 at the 3rd session of the Soviet CEC [6], and the currency received from selling gold ended up at secret accounts of western banks [7]. The aim of this grandiose special operation was for V. I. Lenin and his associates to form a substantial fund of gold value (“the party gold”) in case of the Bolsheviks losing power in Russia. I. V. Stalin later returned part of these resources and used them for funding industrialization, but the loss of call could not be compensated for [8]. But this is not the only problem. Here is what A. Mosyakin says about it:
“The sale of heritage objects could in no way solve the problem of funding industrialization. The initiative for the sales came from the Ministry of Foreign Trade “Antiquities” office and the administration of the People’s Commissariat of Trade, presided over by I. A. Mikoyan (А. И. Микоян) in 1926. His institution failed the work on export – the source of foreign currency – and was severely criticized for it at the 15th and 16th meeting of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the party conferences. In order to patch the holes in his work, Mikoyan and the director of “Antiquities” Ginzburg & Co. suggested selling the country’s cultural heritage, promising fabulous incomes. They were believed, and between 1928 and 1933 an unprecedented series of museum sales took place, which brought nothing but damages. Firstly, it damaged the prestige of the USSR. One buyer of the Hermitage treasures, the French oil industrialist Calouste Gulbenkian wrote in a letter to the Soviet administration: “You can sell whatever you want, but not the objects from museum collections. The sale of the national heritage suggests the gravest diagnosis.” [9]. But, above all, these sales brought negligible profit in terms of foreign currency, which could have been received by improving the work of the foreign trade system. The National Commissariat of Trade sold over six thousand tuns (!) of cultural heritage objects, bringing prices down and receiving less than 20 million rubles of income [10] — three rubles for a “kilo of Rembrandt” [11]. Industrialization required at least 4.5 billion rubles in gold. Without touching the Hermitage and the State Depository for Precious Metals, the Hard-Currency Shop sacrificed 287 million rubles in gold for the sake of industrialization [12]. The sale of the cultural heritage of Russia mainly benefitted German antiquarian companies, which bought everything at bargain prices and re-sold it at much higher prices. The remains of “Mikoyan’s gifts” were confiscated by the Nazis during Hitler’s regime, and they sold them on international art markets, the revenues going into the treasury of the Third Reich. How can these things be justified?”
The theft of Filonov’s paintings from the Russian Museum
In spring 1990, Alexandre Mosyakin published in Ogoniok journal (Nr. 15) and the Leningrad newspaper Smena (17-18 May) his investigation “The Filonov Fervour” («Страсти по Филонову») [13], based on the materials of the investigation conducted by the KGB [14], documents of the State Russian Museum (SRM) and testimonies of its employees [15].
The investigation uncovered the true picture of the theft of paintings by the outstanding painter and philosopher Pavel Filonov and other important Russian painters from the collection of the SRM. The originals were taken abroad, and copies were left in their place. The same happened with paintings, diamonds and other valuable objects in Moscow and Leningrad – a series of events known as the “Kremlin contraband.” Clues to the “Filonov” crime, which amounted to millions of dollars, pointed to the Soviet leaders in Moscow. The publications in Ogoniok and the Smena, which involved risks for all people involved, enabled the law-enforcement authorities to undertake an investigation, which was compromised at a number of stages, and single out the members of the criminal group, most of whom were duly punished. The publications formed the basis of a later book The Filonov Fervour, and in 1998 the National Television made an eponymous film based on the book. The events described in the book were also used in the National Security Agent film, starring Mikhail Porechenkov (Михаил Пореченков).
Later, Mosyakin covered these and other historical events related to the theme in more detail in his book Forgeries and Mystifications: from Art to Politics [16].
Antiquarian export fund and the Romanovs’ treasures
The investigation “Antiquarian export fund” published in the elite Soviet journal Our Heritage (1991, Nr. 2-3) is the first publication supported by careful documental research on this previously taboo theme, which was later used by numerous researchers, who did not mention the author but referred to the archival references made in the article. The plagiarizers were betrayed when they cited the mistakes taken from the texts by Mosyakin, which he made in quoting the originals.
Mosyakin’s article “Four tapestries with Boucher’s pastoral scenes” (Evening Leningrad, August 20, 1990) about the Bolshevik sales of treasures from the Pavlovsk Palace and other suburban Imperial residences in the vicinity of Leningrad was written with the aid of the museum’s main curator, nominee of the USSR Lenin Prize Anatoly Mikhailovich Kuchumov (Анатолий Михайлович Кучумов).
The investigation “Mandate Nr. 2739” ” (Evening Leningrad, November 19-20, 1990) uncovered the story behind the Bolshevik sale through Chita of the Romanovs’ personal jewelry, which was found by L. D. Trotsky’s (Л. Д. Троцкий) subordinates on 9 March 1922 in the Kremlin Armoury. These were the first publications in the USSR on this issue.
The fortunes of the Amber Room
After many years of painstaking research, Aleksandr Mosyakin uncovered the mystery of the disappearance of the Amber Room, which was stolen by Hitler’s followers in autumn 1941 from the Catherine Palace near Leningrad, taken to Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad) an disappeared at the end of the war. The custodian of the Amber Room before the war was A. M. Kuchumov, who knew the truth about the fate of the treasure and kept it secret throughout his life, having signed a pledge of secrecy. In 2011, while working on papers in Kuchumov’s private archive in the Russian Central Archive of Literature and Art (RCALI) in St Petersburg, Mosyakin found the documents that shed light on this mystery. The documents were first published in facsimile edition in 2014 in the author’s book The Pearl Necklace of St Petersburg, and later in 2015 in his book The Amber Room. The Fate of a Priceless Masterpiece, based on which a two-series documentary film was made in spring of the same year by Ostankino television company entitled The Amber Room. The film was broadcast many times on the Russian television Channel 1. A year later S. K. Medvedev (С. К. Медведев) made an analogous film, Following the Trail of the Amber Room, for Zvezda television channel. The following year the A. Mosyakin published a new book The Prussian Curse. The Mystery of the Amber Room, which included new information about the facts and events involved.
The discovery made by Mosyakin based on documents from A. M. Kuchumov’s archive is the fact that the main part of the Amber Room, stolen by Hitler’s followers from the Catherine Palace near Leningrad – the smaller “German Amber Room,” put together in spring 1942 in one of the museum rooms of Konigsberg Castle – was already in the hands of the Soviet occupying force on the night when Konigsberg was taken by the Soviet army (9 April 1945). As elsewhere in the occupied Europe, the Soviet army in Konigsberg was engaged in searching for trophy treasures, including details of the “German Amber Room,” registered in the Donation register of Konigsberg Castle. According to the testimony of the directory of the Konigsberg Art Collection Dr. A. Rode, who was the curator of the Amber Room, deposited at the end of June 1945 at the city’s military police office, “four weeks before the Anglo-American attack (30 August 1944 – A. M.), the Amber Room was transferred to safe premises, so that it was not damaged by the attack. Lately, the property of the Amber Room was packed in boxes and placed in the northern wing of Konigsberg Castle, due to which it was preserved in its entirety until 5 April 1945” – the eve of the Soviet assault on the city. The northern wing of Konigsberg Castle, which survived the above-mentioned bombing, included the ceremonial Order Hall, where the Prussian Museum treasures and the “German Amber Room,” which was packed in boxes, were stored at the beginning of April 1945. The employees of the Soviet trophy services view it as the German war trophy. Apart from the army trophy teams, which operated under the direction of the military police, the search for treasures and documents was undertaken by the special search groups of the NKVD-NKGB and Smersh. The fact that Konigsberg Castle housed not the “German,” but the “Russian” Amber Room, which was stolen by the Germans in Russia, was revealed only much later, when Kuchumov took up the search for the lost treasure of the Catherine Palace. In spring 1946, Kuchumov questioned the employees of Konigsberg Castle, who were eyewitnesses to the transfer of amber plates to a Soviet colonel and found the forbidden truth.
Mosyakin found and published Kuchumov’s interrogation report dated 2 April 1946 of P. Fieierabend – director of Bloody Trial restaurant, which was housed under the Order Hall of Konigsberg Castle, where panels of the “German Amber Room” were lying in wooden crates during the Soviet assault on the city. On midnight of 9 April 1945, Fieierabend and other employees working in the castle were near those crates, when a “Russian colonel” entered the room (it was probably P. F. Tolstikov (П.Ф. Толстиков), commander of the 1st Guard Motor Rifle Division, whose forces had occupied the castle). Fieierabend gave him all the museum property and, together with other Germans, left the castle. All museum treasures, stored in the Order Hall, including the amber panels, were untouched at that point. Based on Kuchumov’s documents, reproduced in our gallery section, Mosyakin tracked the later fate of the amber panels discovered in Konigsberg Castle, as well as the fate of other parts of the legendary Amber Room, which was undone by the war. The German professor G. Strauss informed in a coded letter he sent from Berlin to Kuchumov that the details of the Amber Room found in Konigsberg Castle were delivered to Eastern Berlin. In 1950, they were transferred from there to the American sector of occupation of Western Berlin, which was confirmed by an independent witness. In 1946, the Amber Room still stored in crates was seen in Easter Berlin by General K. F. Telegin (К.Ф. Телегин) – close friend of Marshal G. K. Zhukov (Г.К. Жуков) and also at the time a friend of Colonel General of the NKVD I. A. Serov (И.А. Серов), who was responsible for the Berlin stores with trophy treasures. Telegin took from Berlin to Moscow an outstanding trophy art collection, including a few amber details. This was the Telegins’ family secret, but in 2004 the General’s descendants told about it to the journalists of the Komsomolskaya Pravda. The husband of the General’s granddaughter showed him the very same fragments of the museum amber. Using these photographs, the specialists of the Amber Room from Tsarskoye Selo workshop, T. Makarova and B. P. Igdalov, who have restored the Amber Room, decided that “these fragments had been part of the royal amber objects, which were located in the Amber Room” (Komsomolskaya Pravda, September 3 and 10, 2004). The artefacts that were taken from Berlin by General Telegin confirm the information provided in the documents from Kuchumov’s archive. The Ministry for State Security (MSS) of the USSR found out about it and made Kuchumov sign a pledge of secrecy of the classified information. The same pledge was signed by Moscow professors A. J. Bryusov and D. D. Ivanenko, Prof. G. Strauss and all the people who were involved in the affair. They kept the secret until their death.
In his research, Aleksandr Mosyakin came to the conclusion that the issue of the Amber Room, which had been sought for so many years in vain is not about finding a deposit but a political one, related to the secrets of relocated trophy treasures (gold, works of art, archives, etc.), that had been seized by the winning countries at the end of the war and exchanged among each other based on secret agreements, which had not been declassified yet. Mosyakin thinks that the Prussian trophy treasure found by the Soviet seekers that cost billions of the Reich marks (including details of the Amber Room) were used, together with gold, to pay the Soviet debt on the land lease from 1950 onwards. At the same time, the Americans were given other trophy treasures, including the art collection of General Telegin (its current cost is about 2 million USD), which was seized by the MSS when Telegin was arrested at the beginning of 1948. The MSS officers gave the Americans the “German Amber Room” by accident as a war trophy following the Donation Register of Konigsberg Castle. When the truth came out, they had to cover up for everything. It was followed by a misinformation campaign through the Soviet and foreign media after General Serov became head of the KGB in 1954 and later head of the Military Intelligence Service. This is the way the myth about the mysterious fate of the Amber Room emerged, which has since mesmerized researchers and treasure-seekers, giving rise to “sensational news.” The myth was created in the 1950s by the KGB and the German Democratic Republic intelligence service Stasi in order to lead people away from the classified truth. Based on archival documents, Mosyakin told the story of the Amber Room in his books and articles, as well as the films made after his publications. In May 2015, Mosyakin presented his archival findings that clarified the fortunes of the Amber Room at a scientific conference dedicated to cultural heritage objects relocated during the Second World War, which took place in the Catherine Palace of Tsarskoye Selo. His paper was received with considerable interest by the museum staff and invited members of the audience and did not register any objections.
Gold of the Third Reich
While investigating the mystery of the disappearance of the Amber Room, A. Mosyakin studied in detail the fortunes of the “gold of the Third Reich” – treasures of European countries, peoples and private individuals, stolen by Hitler’s adherents between 1938 and 1945. For more than half a century after the end of the Second World War, this theme remained taboo in the west, because the plunder of European peoples involved not only the Nazi Germany and its allies, but also the so-called “neutral” counties (Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Turkey, Argentina, etc.) as well as the western winning countries, primarily the USA.
It was only in 1995 and 1996, when international European organizations obtained secret documents on the subject, which were to be destroyed in one of the Swiss banks, and a scandal broke out that western political leaders, ministers and bankers dared to life the veil covering the great secret of the past war. In December 1997, a closed conference dedicated to the gold of the Third Reich took place in London. One of the presentation highlighted a report of a Swiss independent commission of experts presided over by Prof. J.-F. Bergeaux, which revealed for the first time on a documentary basis, using account books of banks, financial links between the Third Reich and the Swiss Confederation as well as other “neutral” countries [17] .
In December 1998, an international conference about objects of cultural heritage relocated during the Second World War took place in Washington, sponsored by the US Department of State. Based on the conference materials, A. Mosyakin wrote several books, which tell about not only the plunder of European peoples by Hitler’s regime and its followers, but also about the postwar fortunes of the treasures that were stolen by Hitler’s followers. A considerable part of these treasures was seized by the western allies, including the US, as a result of secret operations, who used them to their political and economic ends.
Precise numbers related to the stolen “gold of the Third Reich” and its fortunes were first published in Mosyakin’s book Beyond the Veil of the Amber Myth. Treasures Behind the Scenes of Wars, Revolutions, Politics and Special Services (2005). Later the theme was expanded upon in his book The Plundered Europe, which has gone through three editions already. In 2019, the Russian television channel Zvezda made a film about the secrets of the “Arian gold” based on these books.
Gold of the Russian Empire
A large-scale study “The Fortunes of the Russian Imperial Gold at the Section of History. 1880-1922” sheds a new light on the role of the imperial gold in the history of the October Revolution and the Civil War in Russia. Using this context, the author wrote a fundamental three-volume study “Gold of the Russian Empire and the Bolsheviks. 1917-1922,” which for the first time makes public hundreds of archival documents about the export of gold from the Soviet Russia between 1918 and 1922. The abstract states that “The study by A. G. Mosyakin ‘Gold of the Russian Empire and the Bolsheviks’ introduces considerable archival materials revealing the fate of the world’s largest Russian gold bullion, created before the First World War, which disappeared in eight years, to scientific and popular discussion. The fortunes of the Russian gold, which was exported by the Imperial government abroad during the war, is largely well-known. But the fortunes of the gold bullion of the Imperial Russia, which fell into the hands of the Bolsheviks, remains an almost entirely unstudied issue in Russian history. The documents published in this work shed light on this theme. They show the special role played by the Imperial gold in the course and outcome of the Civil War in Russia and reveal secret alliances between the Bolshevik leaders and the world financial oligarchs, allowing the reader to take a look behind the scenes of historical events that saved the Bolshevik regime from destruction. Nearly all of the 742 documents reproduced here come from the Russian State Archive of Economics and are published for the first time, in facsimile. The book also includes a facsimile document about V. I. Lenin’s accounts in New York banks, which the author received from the US. The documents presented here and their analysis make one take a new view of historical events that took place one hundred years ago and determine the future of Russia and the world.”
Notes
5. ↑ The material was initially prepared for publication in the Social Industry newspaper, but it was banned from inclusion by the Department of Ideology of the CPSU Central Committee, after which the author submitted it to the Ogoniok.
6. ↑ M. M. Litvinov (М.М. Литвинов) remembers: “In 1921, I was the general proxy of the Council of People’s Commissars for currency operations and the sale of our gold abroad. I was in Revele, and I have transferred several hundred million rubles of our gold, which was sold abroad. A larger part of this gold was sold by me or by proxies to large French companies, which melted the gold down either in France on Switzerland, with the gold ending up in the storerooms of an American reserve bank. This was not a secret: it was known to the Banque de France and other banks.” // 3rd session of USSR CEC of the 4th election (April 1928). Verbatim record. — Moscow: Gosizdat, 1928. — Pp. 792—793.
7. ↑ See.: A. G. Mosyakin. The Fortunes of the Russian Imperial Gold at the Section of History. 1880—1922. — A historical study. — Moscow: КМК, 2017. — 657 с. — ISBN 978-5-9500220-7-4; also by A. G. Mosyakin. Gold of the Russian Empire and the Bolsheviks. 1917–1922 . Documents with commentaries and analysis, 3 vols. –– Moscow. Mezhdunarodnye otnoshenija, 2021. –– ISBN 978-5-7133-1649-5.
8. ↑ On 1 January 1928m the gold currency reserve of the USSR equaled 285.5 mln. of gold rubles. Out of them 188.6 mln. gold rubles consisted on gold, 20.7 mln. – of platinum and silver, and 76.2 – of foreign currency.
9. ↑ The Russian State Archive of Economics. F. 5240. Оp. 19. D. 846. F. 24v.
10. ↑ Williams, R. Ch. Russian Art and American Money. 1900—1940. — Cambridge (Mass.) — London, 1980. — P. 266; A. G. Mosyakin. Beyond the Veil of the Amber Myth. Treasures Behind the Scenes of Wars, Revolutions, Politics and Special Services. — М.: РОССПЭН, 2008. — С. 250—254.
11. ↑ To compare, 154 objects of personal jewelry of the Imperial family hidden in two glass jars in Tobolsk and found in 1933 by the OGPU agents were assessed at 3 270 693 gold rubles (see: A. A. Petrushin. Tyuman without secrets. Tyuman. 2014), while six and a half thousand tons (!) of first-rate works of art, which constituted the national heritage of Russia, Mikoyan’s Antiquary Shop got six times as much income. Having poured tons of artwork on the world art market, the National Trade Commissariat beat the prices almost to zero and sold at very low prices, making western antiquarian companies fabulously rich. This cannot be called anything else than giant-scale criminal pilfering of priceless national heritage.
12. ↑ E. A. Osokina. Gold for Industrialization: Torgsin. — М.: ROSSPEN, 2009. — P. 531.
13. ↑ See also: А. Mosyakin. The Filonov Fervour // Common newspaper. 1994. Nr. 48/73. Dec. 2-8; also by A. Mosyakin. The Filonov Fervour // the SM (formerly The Sovietskaya Molodezh). Riga. 1996. Nr. 143, 145—148, 151—155, 157—158.
14. ↑ This work was curated by deputy head of the USSR KGB Administration for the Leningrad area Lieutenant General V. S. Novikov, head of the investigation administration of the Leningrad UKGB Colonel V. V. Cherkesov, and the author was in direct contact with the KGB Lieutenant Colonel P. K. Koshelev, who later became head of the administration of the Petrograd district of St. Petersburg.
15. ↑ Response of the SRM to the article “The Filonov Fervou”» was published in the Ogoniok journal (1990, Nr. 32).
16. ↑ See also: А. Mosyakin. Magnificent Forgeries // SM (Riga). 1996. Nr. 221—226, 228—235.
17. ↑ Switzerland and Gold Transactions in the Second World War / Jean-Francois Bergier. — Interim Report. — Bern: Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland – Second World War, 1998. — С. I-IV. — 250 с. — ISBN 3-908661-00-5; U.S. and Allied Efforts to Recover and Restore Gold and other Assets Stolen or Hidden by Germany During WWII”. // Directed by Undersecretary of Commerce Stuart E. Eizenstat and the State Department's chief historian William Slaney. Washington, May 1997 – May 1998.