By Yaroslava Muzychenko
The Cabinet's National Commission for the Return for Cultural Treasures to Ukraine, jointly with the Ministry of Culture and Art of Ukraine and the Kyiv City State Administration's Department of Culture, organized a course of training for the capital's museum workers to produce experts on restitution who would search for lost valuables and keep the public informed on what is found and returned.
A round table called Cultural Valuables of Kyiv: Losses and Ways to Return Stolen National Property took place at the Kyiv History Museum. It was the first opportunity for museum workers to put their heads together and work out methods to return stolen relics or at least make people remember.
The Reference Library of Kyiv University lost its stock (over 1,300,000 copies of printed matter) during World War II and the same lot befell the historical, research-and-technology, and medical state book funds. 320,000 manuscripts, among them texts in Persian and Chinese, were confiscated from the Central Library of the Academy of Sciences and shipped off to Nazi Germany. Precious prewar photos and films vanished from the Central Cinema and Photography Archives. Ancient manuscripts and acts from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries were taken away from the Monastery of the Caves, along with a collection of weapons and portraits from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Ukrainian Art Museum was relieved of 90% of its stock. Kyiv Museum of Western and Eastern Art lost almost 25,000 items on display (e.g., canvases by Bernardo Strozzi, Jose Ribera, Jacob Jordaens, Pieter Brueghel, works of bronze, terra-cotta, marble, and silver from Egypt, Greece, and Rome). The Nazis robbed the Russian Art Museum of 4,873 exhibits, including works by Brullow, Repin, and Wrubel...
Many of the relics stolen from Ukraine vanished without a trace abroad. In some cases the routes could be traced, and even the current whereabouts, but no documents could be obtained to corroborate their belonging to Kyiv museums. Of course, this does not make their recovery any easier.
The Nazis made no secret of the confiscation of Ukrainian cultural relics. Alfred Rosenberg, Reichsleiter of the Third Reich's Ministry of Occupied Eastern Territories, declared, "It suffices to destroy the cultural monuments of a people to make it cease to exist as a nation in the second generation." The Russian big brother robbed Ukraine in a roundabout way. Ukrainian exhibits were "borrowed" for display at Russian academic institutions or for "additional study." Some of the relics never returned from "evacuation," others, transferred from German stocks as restitution remained "in storage" outside Ukraine. At present, the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences stores records and finds of archaeological studies made by M. Karger on the premises of the St. Sophia Museum-Preserve in the 1950s. Moscow's State Museum of History has relics from ancient Kyiv; the Tretiakov State Gallery has a tiled plate and a mosaic portrait of Dimitri Salunski from St. Michael's Gold-Domed Cathedral; the Hermitage boasts 11 frescoes from the same cathedral. Ukraine lost the priceless Ostoh Gospels (written in Kyiv, 1056-57) which is currently at St. Petersburg's Russian National Library), The Code of Prince Svyatoslav (1073 parchment from Kyiv, currently at Moscow's State Museum of History), and Kyiv-Pechersk Patericon (1462, currently at Moscow's Russian State Library).
"We are not likely to have them back in the foreseeable future," says Valentyna Achkasova, director of St. Sofia's Museum-Preserve. "It would take a different mentality, ours and our neighbor's. If we become too insistent, the Russian museum authorities may well bar access to their stocks. All we have is a single deed of transfer for an icon of Archangel Michael to be displayed in Moscow. Using it we can't expect to get anything of value back. What we need in the first place is a complete catalogue of lost valuables. This and copies of frescoes and mosaic pictures currently outside Ukraine."
For a number of years Polish and German museum workers have been meticulously studying Ukrainian museum stocks, looking for anything previously handed over as restitution that could be taken back. More often than not they came with genuine documents and they are learned in international law. Most importantly, they are determined to have national relics returned to where they belong. We have practically no such documents. The Nazis robbing our cultural relics made sure to take all the files and registers. During Soviet times our authorities would not dare to hint to Moscow that things borrowed should be reflected in appropriate documents.
The round table stressed that making a catalogue of Kyiv's lost cultural relics was a priority. The good news is that an illustrated Catalogue of Cultural Valuables Stolen from Ukrainian Museums and Religious Premises (1991-97), prepared jointly by the Ministry of Culture and Art, National Commission for the Return of Cultural Treasures to Ukraine, Ukrainian National History Museum, and the Ukrainian Interpol National Bureau, will come off the presses soon. It will be an extremely important tool in the hands of customs, law enforcement, and museum authorities. Incidentally, two pictures stolen from Poltava's art museum will soon return from Great Britain. If we had a register, not two but hundreds of canvases would be on their way to Ukraine.
Kostiantyn Netsher (1668-1723), Portrait of a Lady with a Dog, 1709
Rashel Reish (1664-1750), A Bouquet of Flowers








