Stolen history: how Russia loots Ukrainian museums

An army of marauders. Retreating from Kherson, Russian military personnel, with the help of the local occupation authorities, looted the regional local history and art museum, as well as the St. Catherine’s Cathedral. What did Ukraine get rid of, is it possible to return the looted goods, and why does Russia need Ukrainian valuables and artifacts – journalists were trying to figure out.

15 thousand unique exhibits

Eight months in the occupation. Kherson, captured in the first days of the war, which survived the pseudo-referendum and pseudo-accession to Russia, became a true witness of violations of international law and war crimes by the Russian army.

After the liberation of the city, it became obvious to Ukraine and the world that Russia looted and, under the pretext of “evacuation”, took out of the museums almost all Ukrainian artifacts and historical values. 15,000 unique art objects were stolen. This is the largest theft of cultural property since World War II.

The secretary of the Kherson Regional Museum of Local Lore, Olena Yeromenko, shows the shop windows looted by the occupiers, in which items of daily life of the ancient Scythians were exhibited. The most valuable is a gold Scythian ornament. She is not there either.

The Kherson Museum of Local Lore is the oldest in the south of Ukraine. His collection was formed from the 19th century. Artifacts from the Scythian and Ancient Greek periods, the Cossacks and the Russian Empire were stored in these walls. Now the halls of the museum have been emptied.

“They took the gold, they took the collection of icons. All the weapons were brought out – starting from ancient times and ending with modern weapons. Awards, medals — everything was taken away,” Olena Eremenko enumerates.

Currently, Olena is almost the only employee of the museum who has remained at her workplace. The rest have either left since the first days of the war or fled with the Russians.

Collaborators in local history

After the capture of Kherson by the Russians, the director and part of the staff of the local history museum immediately went over to the side of the invaders. They acted in propaganda stories, repeating Kremlin narratives, and organized exhibitions commissioned by the occupiers. Those who did not support the occupiers were released.

“They expected that the museum would start to flourish, that they would cooperate with Russian museums. They expected that they would be given money. They came here, promised so much money that we would do everything, there would be a museum. But it didn’t turn out the way they wanted. For them, I think, it is also a shock,” says Olena Eremenko.

Not everything could be stolen 

For three days, the Russian military took everything they could out of the museum. What remains are sculptures and stone stelae too heavy to lift. Like the cannon, it could only be brought to the next hall.

The occupiers knew in advance what exactly needed to be stolen.

“At the invitation of the director of the museum, who became a collaborator, the employees of the Crimean museum came. She showed them everything, boasted. They looked where everything was. Probably, they already came with the goal that we will take it all away,” says Olena Eremenko.

The exact number of stolen exhibits is still unknown. Museum staff are now making lists.

“It will take a year, and maybe more. As of January 1, 2022, we stored 180,000 exhibits. And now all this needs to be checked,” Olena Yeremenko clarifies.

Devastated artist

The entire list of stolen goods has already been compiled in the Kherson Art Museum. The works of Aivazovsky, Vrubel, Konchalovsky — only the names on the labels of the empty frames remained from the paintings.

The museum collection included works of art of the 17th-20th centuries. Masterpieces of French, German, Italian artists. Out of more than 13,000 exhibits, 80% were stolen. Only modern works of local artists remained and what the occupiers simply could not take away.

The museum is located in the building of the former city hall. At the end of 2021, it was closed for restoration. All the exhibits from the halls were packed and taken to the fund storage. All the documents were hidden there and the safes were disguised.

Perhaps it would have been possible to hide the exhibits until the liberation of Kherson. If not for one of the former employees of the museum. FSB representatives have already come following her tip-off. As it turned out later, she helped the Russians restore the deleted electronic database.

“They came and said: “We are people with weapons. You don’t understand who you are talking to. If you don’t want it in a good way, everything will break here, and you will be taken to the commandant’s office.” All of our phones were taken away. I said: if you want, search, search me, search the offices, but there is nothing, everything has already been taken away. They didn’t believe me, they collected my things and took me home with a search,” recalls Anna Skrypka, chief custodian of the funds of the Kherson Art Museum.

The search yielded no results. All personal documents were taken from Hanna, and on November 1 they were called to the museum. She stayed there for the next two days – she was forbidden to leave until the Russians removed the entire collection from the museum. Anna’s task was to draw up “deeds of transfer”. No destination.

“I at least understood that I would see the numbers – how global it would all be. A group of people came twice a day, a crowd of 30-40 people. They go into some hall, line up in a chain to pass the picture before the exit. One truck goes, after lunch other people arrive, another truck is loaded. When I asked: “Excuse me, but to whom do I “pass” this?”, I was answered: “I am an authorized representative of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation.” Everything,” continues Anna Skrypka.

Base point — Crimea

The occupiers transported looted goods from two museums to Crimea. Paintings from the art museum have already been seen in Simferopol. Ordinary theft was called “evacuation”, and the results of an illegal “referendum” were covered up.

Kherson was allegedly part of the Russian Federation for 41 days. This time was enough to sulk and call artistic values ​​Russian property.

Damages caused to Ukrainian museums are estimated in millions of dollars. The exact amount will become clear after compiling the list of the stolen and comparing it with the registers of artifacts.

Theft of monuments

The Russians even took Potemkin’s remains with them. This practice was already there – in the last years of the existence of the Russian Empire. At that time, before the enemy’s offensive, the clergy evacuated bones, not people.

Potemkin is called one of Putin’s idols.

Recently, the Russian dictator mentioned his name in his pseudo-historical speech. The Kremlin never gets tired of repeating its favorite myths about the historical unity of Ukrainians and Russians. The memory of the conqueror of the Ukrainian lands, General Potemkin, is alive for those who want to recreate the Russian Empire. But at the same time, Russian troops are destroying the very cities that Potemkin himself allegedly founded.

Gold of the Scythians

However, not only soldiers steal in Russia… The Golden Ridge, probably from the 4th century BC. It is decorated with five figures of reclining lions, over which warriors are fighting. This decoration is the pride and symbol of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The comb was also stolen. Illegally exported from Ukraine. It was discovered in 1913 during the excavations of the Solokha barrow in the Zaporizhzhia region.

“With finds in the imperial period, it was absolutely normal. If it was financed by the Imperial Archaeological Commission, then, as a rule, it all went to St. Petersburg, to the Hermitage. They had priority for the selection of finds,” explains archaeologist Yevhen Synytsia, a member of the Union of Archaeologists of Ukraine.

And they didn’t just take out everything that was most valuable, but also hid the origin of the relics.

This practice was followed by the Russian Empire and adopted by the Soviet Union. There are thousands of valuables whose history has been rewritten in Russian museums. The Kremlin hunted Scythian gold with particular zeal.

A masterpiece of jewelry craftsmanship — the Golden Pectoral — was found under the Tovsta Mogil mound in the Dnipropetrovsk region. And they could not take it to Moscow, because at that time there was already an institution in Ukraine that matched the artifact in terms of level – the Museum of Historical Jewels. And after the restoration of the pectoral in Moscow, the Scythian ornament had to be returned to Kyiv.

“Such things have a special mode of storage. They are stored in museum collections, and there must be an institution that provides this mode of storage. We had such an institution, that is, there was no question that we could not provide proper conditions and security,” says Yevhen Sinytsia.

A new round of the battle for Scythian gold began in February 2014. Exhibits from six Ukrainian museums—Kyiv, Odesa, and Crimea—were brought to the exhibition at the Allard Pearson Archaeological Museum in Amsterdam.

At the same time, the Russian army invaded the Ukrainian Crimea and annexed the peninsula. And together with him, she tried to appropriate the Scythian gold. For example, Crimean museums are autonomous and do not report to the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture. And based on this, they demanded the return of the collections from the Netherlands to Crimea.

After 7 years of lawsuits, the Court of Appeal of the Netherlands decided: the exhibits must return to Ukraine, as Ukrainian legislation says. Now the case is being considered by the court of cassation — lawyers want to ensure that the decision is made not on the basis of national laws, but on the basis of the UNESCO convention.

“Since precedent law in Europe and one court decision entails similar decisions in other cases, this is the “first swallow” on the basis of which all subsequent lawsuits will be filed. But here it should be understood that the Russian Federation, although it is a party to many conventions, does not observe them. They adopted their national law, which states that everything they have belongs exclusively to Russia and will never be returned to anyone,” says former Deputy Minister of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine Svitlana Fomenko.

“Soviet” thieves

Famous Russian museums would simply be empty without these exhibits. For hundreds of years, their funds were replenished precisely with stolen artifacts. The Russians brought them from the occupied territories, mostly from Ukraine.

In 1918, the Red Army under the leadership of Mykhailo Muravyov looted Kyiv for several weeks. Soviet officials continued his case. So, in 1934, the unique frescoes and mosaics of Dmytro Thessalonica of the 12th century were taken away.

Resistance in the conditions of Stalinist repressions was useless. The Russians allegedly took the artifacts to a temporary exhibition. With incredible efforts, it was possible to return only part of the frescoes to Kyiv. The mosaic by Dmitry Thessalonica is still in the Tretyakov Gallery.

A new wave of robberies took place during the Second World War. Fascist invaders and the Soviet army stole Ukrainian cultural values, so to speak, with all four hands. The “Soviets” took out exhibits under the pretext of evacuation. The soldiers of the Wehrmacht took the exhibits of almost 200 Ukrainian museums with them during the retreat.

After the fall of Hitler’s regime, Germany returned the stolen goods, but not directly to the museum, but to the states. So tens of millions of exhibits settled in the capital of the USSR – in Moscow.

During the independence of Ukraine, a little more than 150,000 stolen exhibits were returned to the museum. But this is a drop in the ocean.

Already after the Second World War, Russia exported cultural values ​​from Ukraine in echelons. Russian archaeologists, who worked on excavations, took the most valuable finds for exhibitions or research.

Museums are under attack

Historical values ​​from colonies and captured countries were exported by many armies of the world. But the main goal of Russia is not material enrichment, but the destruction of Ukrainian identity.

“The Russians are fighting against our identity, which is represented by our cultural heritage. And the fact that they are looting museums absolutely fits into the logic of the war against our values, against our heritage, they not only loot, but in some places they deliberately destroy museums. In Ivankiv [Kyiv Oblast], the museum where Maria Prymachenko’s paintings were kept was destroyed, these paintings were saved. And in Skovorodinivka [Kharkiv region], the museum was bombed, but the museum workers were able to hide the most valuable things. That is, it is a war against our cultural code and against our values, and the history of robberies is a component of such a policy,” comments Oleksandr Tkachenko, Minister of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine.

It was virtually impossible to save Ukrainian museums from looting, the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture says. There was no mechanism for preventive evacuation from potentially dangerous regions in Ukraine. And after the full-scale Russian invasion, there was not enough time for that. After all, the Russians occupied Kherson in the first days of the great war.

But the museum in Sloviansk in Donetsk region is one of the successful examples of evacuation. His collection includes more than 30,000 items. They decided to save the exhibits on their own. The management provided the museum with everything necessary. Packing materials and transport were provided by public organizations. Museum employees do not say where the collection was taken. For the safety of the exhibits.

Losses of museum funds in the current war have only begun to be counted. The Russian military took away valuables from the museums of all the cities they occupied. Stolen Scythian gold from the Melitopol museum, Kuindzhi and Aivazovsky paintings taken from Mariupol, unique exhibits from Kherson. And dozens of looted museums of Donetsk, Luhansk regions and Crimea during more than 8 years of occupation. In total, Russian barbarians devastated about 40 Ukrainian museums.

Experts note that Ukraine will be able to return what was stolen by Russia in the process of restitution. This mechanism was used, in particular, after the Second World War, when Germany returned the values ​​stolen by the Nazis to their rightful owners. After Ukraine’s victory over Russia, this procedure will become possible again. The Ministry of Culture is already preparing lists of stolen valuables.

And for the “disappeared” artifacts, Russia will have to pay billions in compensation and transfer to Ukraine equivalent relics from its museums.

During the day of January 29, the enemy launched 24 attacks from rocket salvo systems, in particular, on populated areas near the contact line.

There are wounded and dead among the civilian population. The threat of air and missile strikes throughout the territory of Ukraine remains high. Oleksandr Shtupun, spokesman of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, announced this in the evening summary of the operational situation.

According to him, the enemy continues to conduct offensive actions in the Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiiv and Novopavliv directions. In other directions, it defends itself on previously occupied borders. Enemy units are being trained on the training grounds of Belarus, but no enemy offensive groups have been detected.

“According to available information, the Russian occupiers took all the medical equipment from the local hospitals of Kakhovka and Novaya Kakhovka to Novotroitsky, Kherson region. The occupation authorities are closing medical facilities in the mentioned cities, contrary to earlier promises. The personnel were faced with the fact of transfer or dismissal,” said Shtupun.

In addition, he reported that during the day of January 29, the Air Force of the Defense Forces struck the anti-aircraft missile complex of the occupiers and carried out two attacks on the areas of concentration of manpower, weapons and military equipment.

At the same time, units of missile forces and artillery hit two enemy radar stations and an ammunition depot.

Meanwhile, the Russians continue shelling Kherson. As a result of enemy bombings on January 29, two men and a woman were killed.

In Melitopol, jewelers buy stolen gold from Russian soldiers.

In the first months of the occupation, the Melitopol dynasty of once respected jewelers – the owners of the workshop “Jewelir” located on Bohdan Khmelnytskyi Avenue, actively bought stolen gold from Russian soldiers. During the day, you could see soldiers entering this jewelry store with backpacks.

Today, jewelers are already working for the Russian system – they received permission for trade activities from the so-called “fiscal authorities” of the occupiers. They pay taxes to the treasury of Russia, where the money goes to finance the occupying army. The Russians once again confirm their status as an army of marauders. Unfortunately, there are those who help them in this.

The people of Melitopol also complain that some local entrepreneurs who trade on the Central Market raise the prices of their goods by 3 or more times, thereby making money from their compatriots.

And at the end of last year, local merchants everywhere refused to accept the hryvnia, despite the fact that Melitopol was in the bi-currency zone until the end of the year.

Groups “detecting disloyal residents” work in public places. The occupiers walk in civilian clothes in groups of 2-3 people and gather information. To do this, they deliberately provoke local residents into political conversations, pretending to be pro-Ukrainian people or simulating a quarrel among themselves. After they are joined by another interlocutor who shows disloyalty to the occupation authorities, he is subsequently monitored.