E lena O sokina . Nebesnaya golubizna angel’skih odezhd

Economic historian Elena Osokina has written a scrupulously scholarly and valuable book on an inflammatory subject, the sale of art objects from Russian museums during the early years of Stalin’s leadership. Iurii Zhukov, Wendy Salmond, and others have addressed the bonanza of art and artifacts of Western origin once held in the State Hermitage Museum. Osokina turns her attention to the holdings of icons in the Tretyakov Gallery and the State Historical Museum. Some earlier accounts (including some by historians) have employed overheated rhetoric about “stolen treasures” while others have conjured up entire “icon factories in the Kremlin” aimed at duping foolish Westerners with modern fakes. Osokina substitutes documentary precision for speculation, using archival records to trace the provenance of items once owned by three major Western collectors: Swedish banker Olof Aschberg, U.S. diplomat Joseph E. Davies, who succeeded William Christian Bullitt Jr. as ambassador to the USSR, and lawyer...

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Business · Cultural heritage · Icon · Library science · Rhetoric · Speculation · State (computer science) · Subject (documents) · Theology · TRACE (psycholinguistics) · European history and politics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Philosophy · Soviet and Russian History