Published 21 January 2024 at 08.48
Foreign. Assets that belonged to the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union but are currently located abroad must be returned to Moscow – that is the goal of a new decree by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Bloomberg has read. Such assets can be found, among other things, at the National Museum in Stockholm, where stolen icons from the communist banker Olof Aschberg's rampages in the Soviet Union are kept today.
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Vladimir Putin has pulled launched a treasure hunt and is now ordering Russian government officials to track down Russian assets that once belonged to the former Tsarist Empire or the Soviet Union.
A decree from the Russian president published late Thursday allocated funds to a state agency to conduct searches for property abroad and ensure that Russia's “property” is entered into a national registry.
When the empire was as at its largest, it covered areas in present-day Poland, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as Finland. It ended in connection with the 1917 communist revolution, which was led by Vladimir Lenin and financed by, among others, a group of Western bankers.
Shortly thereafter, the Soviet Union was formed, covering a large part of the empire's former territory.
At the time of the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Soviet state, religious groups were persecuted in the Soviet Union. The Russian Orthodox Church was then, as now, regarded as strongly connected to the prevailing Russian social order and was particularly vulnerable during the ravages of the Bolsheviks, but other religious groups were also, with the exception of Jews, exposed to persecution on a large scale during and after the revolution.
One of the western bankers who helped finance the Russian revolution was the Swede Olof Aschberg, who was the grandfather of the well-known journalist and media ethicist Robert Aschberg, 71.
Olof Aschberg seized a large amount of priceless Russian icons that were stolen during looting of Orthodox churches in connection with the communist takeover, something he describes in the autobiography “A wandering Jew from Glasbruksgatan” which was published by Bonniers in 1946. In the book, however, he presents it as that he bought the icons at a “market in Moscow” and that they may have come from private and legal collections.
Aschberg eventually donated his icon collection to the National Museum in Stockholm, where it remained to this day. The collection contains approximately 200 Russian icons and is highly controversial. For that reason, it has not been shown to the public since 1933.
Vladimir Putin's new decree does not specify the size of the budget for the outreach activity or the type of property to be tracked down, writes Bloomberg.
According to the news agency, however, “Putin's interest in the former possessions of the empire will hardly calm the concern about his ambitions that exists among neighboring countries after Russia's invasion of Ukraine”.
That Sweden, which soon hopes to become a member of NATO, would return the icons voluntarily, however, is unlikely. According to media reports, the issue was discussed before the pro-Western Russian president Boris Yeltsin's state visit to Stockholm in 1997, but was written off at an early stage.