The Bolsheviks Sold Imperial Wealth

La Peregrina pearl drop

The Bolsheviks, before they even murdered the Romanovs, took possession of the bank safe deposit boxes and palaces of the Czar's family and other relatives, and began to inventory everything. This stolen wealth became a source of cash to fund their nascent revolution and to launch the new Soviet government's plan of grandiose industrialization.

"Lenin stole treasures for Soviet tractors. The Bolshevik government (early 1920s) looted churches, palaces, museums, and bank vault safe deposit boxes" all over Russia to fund their proletarian revolution with Russia's cultural patrimony.

The Bolsheviks organized special sales where foreigners were encouraged to purchase the imperial wealth. These sales were forbidden to Russians, as the communists became well known for dealing only in hard currency such as dollars or British pounds.

Armand Hammer is the best-known collector of 20th century Russian art. Armand Hammer (the Arm & Hammer fortune) bought many pieces for his art collection and sold the rest to wealthy Americans in his department stores in New York City. Many of the Romanov treasures thus became part of private art collections and perhaps lost to history. 

Another collector was Marjorie Merriweather Post (Post cereal fortune), who, in her position as the wife of U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1936-1938), Joseph E. Davis, visited such salesrooms in Moscow and was able to find several beautiful pieces, and large amounts of tarnished silver and pewter which she bought by weight. Her purchases and those from the 1927 Christie's sale in London are now displayed in her former home Hillwood, now a museum in Washington, D.C.

Malcolm Forbes and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art have built a collection of former imperial valuables as well, as a second generation of collectors. Malcolm Forbes has nine Faberge eggs that had been created for the Tsarinas Marie and Alexandra.

After the "fall" of the Soviet Union, Russian industrialist Viktor Vekelsberg purchased collections of imperial art, including the Forbes collection, and repatriated it to Russia. This may have bought him a special place in the new Russia.

Princess Zinaida Yusupova escaped Russia with her La Peregrina 203,84 grain pearl which, upon her death in 1939, was sold to a Geneva jeweler and then purchased by actor Richard Burton and given to his wife, Elizabeth Taylor. Elizabeth had the pearl set as a drop in a pearl and ruby necklace made by Cartier. This necklace remains today in the Taylor estate.

Lenin stole one of the Romanov emperor’s luxury automobiles, a Delaunay-Belleville limousine, in which he had himself driven around Saint Petersburg. One day Lenin was carjacked and had to walk back to the Duma. After that, he took a more “proletarian” automobile, a Rolls-Royce limo.

Commies are never just about their ideological lies; they steal by confiscation as much wealth as possible for themselves and for their “cause.” 

Note: Research credit to U.K.'s Future, Issue 6.