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On The Trail Of Russia’s Billion-Dollar Culture Thieves

MOSCOW (dpa) – Gold-and silver-gilded icons packed behind fittings in a St. Petersburg-Berlin passenger train; a WWII Messerschmitt fighter plane mixed in with scrap metal exports; a prehistoric cave bear skeleton stashed under the floor of the minibus of a German “tourist”…

Smuggling cultural and historical objects from Russia to the West is a booming business these days.

“Most items go to antique dealers in Poland, Germany, Italy and Israel, but that’s about all we know,” says Colonel Valery Akimtsev, head of Russia’s 300-man police squad fighting the trade in stolen or, in the Messerschmitt’s case, illegally salvaged rarities.

With pitifully inadequate security at many churches, museums and private collections, the vast country is rich with pickings that fetch a handsome price on the black market.

Last year, according to conservative estimates, the damage cost the nation’s heritage 1.2 billion dollars. The total for 2000 looks to be higher still.

But in contrast to the early 1990s, when practically any relics and artefacts were being stolen and shipped abroad in bulk, experts say the business is now far more selective.

“Over the years a circle of people has formed who know what to take,” says Akimtsev. “If they get picked up they serve a prison sentence and then come straight back to it.”

Gangs are far better organized, too. The 1998 Berlin train incident, for example, involving over 50 rare icons and several sackloads of church trappings, would have required the stripping of one entire carriage to hide the items, and the help of a number of railway staff.

Thefts now from museums are in “99 per cent of cases” inside jobs involving security guards or curators, the police believe.

Moreover, the signs say that many crimes are done to order for anonymous clients in Russia and abroad who may even personally browse through exhibits beforehand, searching for desirable acquisitions.

Staff at the Library of the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, are still waiting for news of a pair of 200,000-dollar copies of Nikolaus Copernicus’ 1543 Latin treatise “On the revolutions of heavenly spheres”, stolen with other valuable books in February in what was believed to be an inside job.

Among 107 copies in existence, the copies disappeared along with others taken earlier from libraries in Kiev and Krakow.

“It’s not just by chance, someone ordered the thefts – Copernicus’ works are evidently being collected from all round the world”, says the library’s deputy director Irina Belyaeva.

Some stolen pieces surface unexpectedly. Russian officers perusing the catalogues of famous London auction houses were startled to see one of a collection of 19th century paintings stolen from the Sochi art museum in 1992, known to have left the country via Finland.

A concerned call to Scotland Yard led to the swift recovery of five of these works from sales running at Christies and Sothebies.

“Dealers in the West now seem more worried about authenticity than origin,” says Akimtsev.

His force nonetheless claims that 80 per cent of high-profile thefts are eventually solved and works recovered. As far as more general contraband like icons is concerned, detectives in the front line say they are struggling.

“What we catch represents a drop in the ocean”, said Nikolai Ivanov, head of the St. Petersburg branch, which frequently intercept consignments bound for Scandinavia and Germany.

While the top brass in Moscow says it wants to break the business by identifying the main suppliers, Russian police practices offer little hope of this.

Detectives have no legal power to cut deals with apprehended thieves in exchange for information, leaving the big fish to operate with virtual impunity.

“No one here has ever sent the people behind the orders to prison,” says Ivanov. “The thieves never mention them, they take the rap themselves knowing the sentence will be less if they say they did the job alone.”

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