Russia Admits Staggering Losses of Museum Items

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Revelations of insider theft at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, shown here in June, spawned a three-year review of the country's museums.

(Sept. 19) – Nearly a quarter of a million museum pieces from collections across Russia  are missing and unaccounted for, the Ministry of Culture has determined after a comprehensive but unpublicized three-year inspection.

AOL News has learned that a consultant to the Museums Department of the Ministry of Culture, Lyubov Molchanova, told a seminar for museum workers in the southern resort town of Pyatigorsk last week that the probe had found 242,000 museum pieces missing. Of those, about 24,500 have been officially registered as stolen and are being sought by the Interior Ministry.

The Culture Ministry's press office has made no official announcement about the finding and offered no details on specific works of missing art. But Svetlana Nekrasova, head of the Museums Department, told AOL News that "the information stated by Molchanova is accurate" and confirmed that the astonishing figures reflected the ministry's most current information.

Nekrasova said that "the review itself was completed at the end of last year" but that the numbers may still change. Culture Ministry officials stressed that many of the missing items would likely be found in the course of organizing the museums' inventory -- some, for instance, may be in special locations for analysis or restoration.

But Molchanova also admitted at the seminar that many more have surely been stolen than the 24,500 registered with the authorities.

Reports of such apparently staggering losses would be hard to sweep under the carpet in the West. "It would be a scandal if a single significant work were stolen from a museum in the U.S.," said Stevan Layne of Layne Consultants International, a leading firm in the protection of cultural properties worldwide. "It happens, but it's usually a big deal."

And if an inventory of U.S. museum collections revealed a similar proportion of works unaccounted for? "You could see museums closing," he said.

Among the losses, according to a 2008 report on Russian television's Culture Channel, was a draft of a painting by Russian artist Ilya Repin, allegedly stolen along with unique works of china, firearms and other art objects, from the museum in the south-central city of Novokuznetsk.

Keeping track of Russia's cultural legacy, scattered in cities and towns spanning nine time zones, is a daunting task. The exhaustive review of Russia's museum inventories took three years and covered 1,881 museums with more than 63,000 employees and more than 73 million objects. "It's the first time in history that an investigation of museums on such a scale has been conducted," Nekrasova said.

The missing treasures throw the problems of Russia's rich museum system into stark relief. In 2008, Mikhail Piotrovsky, then the director of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, estimated that "more than half the country's museum holdings were in desperate need of complete repair and restoration."

The current probe was ordered by then-President Vladimir Putin in the wake of stunning revelations of insider theft at the Hermitage. At the end of 2004, Piotrovsky told a Russian news magazine that "pieces cannot be stolen from the Hermitage without it being noticed. Too many traps have been laid for crooks, you can't slip by them ..." Less than two years later, an internal review found 221 pieces worth tens of millions of dollars missing from the storehouses of Russia's most prestigious museum.

Larisa Zavadskaya, a specialist in decorative art, became the central figure in the scandal. She was an inconspicuous Hermitage employee making $500 monthly, whose family occupied a room in a communal apartment. Shortly after the internal review was announced, she suddenly collapsed and died of a heart attack at her workplace. Eventually, the authorities found in her room receipts for the sale of more than 70 of the missing Hermitage items, ranging from jewelry to icons.

In 2007, Zavadskaya's husband, Nikolai Zavadsky, was sentenced to five years of hard labor and ordered to pay $5 million in restitution to the Hermitage. He was eventually released on the grounds that the statute of limitations on the thefts had passed.

Together with reports of theft at other institutions, the scandals provoked an enraged Putin to order an exhaustive check on museum collections nationwide. He created a commission to oversee the review that included the state security agency FSB, the Attorney General's Office, and the Interior and Culture ministries. Nekrasova said that the Ministry of Culture continually reports to this commission.

Some items may be hard to find because of the manner in which many Russian collections were assembled. Over the years, the Soviet government confiscated masses of valuable possessions from individuals and the church, usually transferring them to museums. As a result, museum collections often include troves of articles better classified as antiques than museum pieces. Simple to dispose of and difficult to track, these are eternal temptations to underpaid museum staffers.

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But the missing items could easily include big-ticket items -- world-class artworks and important antiquities. Soviet state policy frequently favored distributing valuable pieces to museums around the country rather than concentrating them in the capitals. That means that important artifacts and artworks can be found at any number of provincial museums, often inadequately funded and equipped, where the staff and even the administration may be quite vulnerable to pressure from any number of sources.

Molchanova said as much to her colleagues at the Pyatigorsk seminar: "Some governors [of regions in Russia] like to do things like saying: 'Give me some things from your collections.' And the museum staff don't know their rights or just don't have the backbone to refuse."

The hope is that a close study of Russia's museum collections will produce a more transparent and responsible museum system. If collections are fully listed and pictured online, stolen items become harder to sell and and tracking the internal movement of items becomes more straightforward. Layne says that Russia's "management process is not as refined as it should be" and suggests that areas for modernization include increased "video surveillance, electronic access controls in collection storage rooms, much tighter key control, and policy and procedural control."

Whether these problems can be resolved, and how quickly, remains to be seen. But two things are clear: The Russian museum system has a major institutional problems, and the Russian government is making a substantial attempt to address them.