Sean McMeekin: The staggering thievery of Lenin and the Bolsheviks
Since 2006, visitors to the NeueGalerie, the boutique museum of German and Austrian art in New York City, have had the chance to view one of Gustav Klimt’s most celebrated paintings—his seductive, gold-spangled portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. For the 70 years before that, however, you would have had to go to Vienna’s Austrian Gallery to see Klimt’s masterpiece. That’s because the painting, along with four other Klimts the Bloch-Bauer family owns, was stolen by the Nazis after the Anschluss, and retained by the Republic of Austria after World War II ended. It took another six decades for the Austrian courts to rule that the Klimt had to be returned to Adele Bloch-Bauer’s rightful heir, who was 90 years old when she finally reclaimed her family’s property and sold it to the NeueGalerie. The wheels of justice ground very slowly in that famous case, but in the end—thanks in part to increased public awareness of Nazi looting—justice was done.
At the National Gallery in Washington, DC, however, the masterpieces on the wall have a different story to tell. When visitors marvel at the jewels of that collection—Jan van Eyck’s Annunciation, Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi, the five Rembrandts—they are benefiting, unwittingly in most cases, from a historical crime that puts even the Nazis’ looting to shame. The core of the National Gallery’s collection was bequeathed to the nation by Andrew Mellon, the industrialist and Treasury secretary who helped to start the museum. But Mellon’s masterpieces started out on the walls of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. They were stolen, along with an incalculable quantity of other art objects, religious icons, jewels, silver plate, bonds, and cash, by the Bolsheviks who seized power in Russia in November 1917. And they made their way to the West, along with the rest of the nation’s accumulated treasures, thanks to European middlemen, who laundered Soviet loot as surely as the Swiss banks laundered Nazi gold.
That’s the powerful and surprising argument that Sean McMeekin makes in History’s Greatest Heist, his careful tally of the world-historical theft that Lenin and his followers carried out between 1917 and 1922. The surprise consists in McMeekin’s relentless insistence on a historical truth still not automatically accepted: the moral equivalence of the Nazi Party and the Soviet Communist Party. Yes, in the abstract, most thoughtful people would acknowledge that Lenin’s and Stalin’s crimes rivaled Hitler’s, that the Gulag was as evil as the concentration camp. But while Nazism is treated as a crime whose effects ought to be reversed, Communism is granted the grudging respect we give a historical fait accompli. In other words, no one is about to sue the National Gallery to demand that the Rembrandts go back to Russia....
Read entire article at City Journal
At the National Gallery in Washington, DC, however, the masterpieces on the wall have a different story to tell. When visitors marvel at the jewels of that collection—Jan van Eyck’s Annunciation, Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi, the five Rembrandts—they are benefiting, unwittingly in most cases, from a historical crime that puts even the Nazis’ looting to shame. The core of the National Gallery’s collection was bequeathed to the nation by Andrew Mellon, the industrialist and Treasury secretary who helped to start the museum. But Mellon’s masterpieces started out on the walls of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. They were stolen, along with an incalculable quantity of other art objects, religious icons, jewels, silver plate, bonds, and cash, by the Bolsheviks who seized power in Russia in November 1917. And they made their way to the West, along with the rest of the nation’s accumulated treasures, thanks to European middlemen, who laundered Soviet loot as surely as the Swiss banks laundered Nazi gold.
That’s the powerful and surprising argument that Sean McMeekin makes in History’s Greatest Heist, his careful tally of the world-historical theft that Lenin and his followers carried out between 1917 and 1922. The surprise consists in McMeekin’s relentless insistence on a historical truth still not automatically accepted: the moral equivalence of the Nazi Party and the Soviet Communist Party. Yes, in the abstract, most thoughtful people would acknowledge that Lenin’s and Stalin’s crimes rivaled Hitler’s, that the Gulag was as evil as the concentration camp. But while Nazism is treated as a crime whose effects ought to be reversed, Communism is granted the grudging respect we give a historical fait accompli. In other words, no one is about to sue the National Gallery to demand that the Rembrandts go back to Russia....