THE SPOILS OF WAR

By ROBERT HUGHES

SHORTLY AFTER THE FALL OF NAZI Germany in May 1945, a young Russian field engineer named Victor Baldin was poking through the cellars of Karnzow Castle, just north of Berlin, where he and other Soviet Army officers were billeted. By the dim light of a candle, he found several bulging portfolios of drawings and watercolors. Their names leaped out at him: Durer, Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Gogh. Amazed at the discovery, Baldin begged his officers for transport space to carry this abandoned trove back to the Soviet Union-to no avail. There was no room on the trucks, and the brigade was pulling out in the morning.

Fearful that his find would be lost forever in the chaos of occupation, Baldin worked all night, removing 362 of the drawings from their mattes and packing them, as best he could, in a suitcase. They went with him, locked up, all the way out of Germany; finally, in January 1946, he turned them over to the state restoration workshops at Zagorsk (now Sergeyev Posad), near Moscow, and was able to take a long look at them. "I was surprised by what I saw," Baldin recalls a half-century later. "All the masters of Europe, from 14 different countries. They had to be saved, but I also knew they had to be returned. This collection wasn't mine; it belonged to the culture of humanity."

It belonged, in fact, to a German museum--the Kunsthalle in Bremen--and was part of a group of some 1,700 drawings, 50 paintings and 3,000 prints that had been squirreled away for safety in Schloss Karnzow. Baldin made a careful inventory of the drawings he had taken and arranged for their transfer to his future place of work, the Shusev State Scientific Research Museum of Architecture in Moscow. And there they remained, unseen, under wraps, for 45 years. When Baldin became director of the museum in 1963, he began to petition first Leonid Brezhnev and then Mikhail Gorbachev for permission to give the works back to Germany.

Baldin's trove--whose existence was first officially revealed in 1990 and exhibited in St. Petersburg in 1993--is among the mass of art stolen from German collections that has only recently come to light in Russia. Some of the most celebrated of these works, a collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, will go on display this week at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The exhibit comes on the heels of another display of looted art mounted a few weeks ago by the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. These exhibitions have renewed an emotional, historically charged debate over what should be done with art looted by Soviet troops from the former territory of Nazi Germany at the end of World War II.

Most of this art was not taken in the benign and desperately idealistic way that Baldin made off with his trove. Unlike Hitler, who had a paranoiacally complete plan for removing most of the key art-works of a conquered Europe to a massive complex in the city of Linz, Josef Stalin had no set plans to create a centralized supermuseum of war loot, though there is some evidence that he entertained the idea. Some of the Red Army's thieving was opportunistic; then it became more comprehensive, driven by Russian anger at the destruction of their own culture by the Germans. Gregory Ingleright, an American art writer who has been following the "trophy- art" case while living in Moscow for the past five years, points out that looting brigades were formed in Russia to take works of art during and after the war. "Certainly hit lists were made of what the Soviet Union wanted," he says.

Huge amounts of material vanished behind the Iron Curtain--perhaps 2.5 million artworks and 10 million books and manuscripts. Much of this material is no doubt of little value, but at the top end it ranges from Gutenberg Bibles, to Impressionist paintings once in German private collections, to the 260 gold and silver objects that, though actually pre-Homeric, were dubbed "the Treasure of Priam" after they were excavated by Heinrich Schliemann from the site of Troy. (These were looted from a Berlin museum and stored at the Pushkin, which plans to show them in 1996.)

Russian authorities have never disclosed the full extent of their collections of looted art; perhaps they do not know themselves. Some of it--about 1.5 million items--was returned to East German museums in the 1950s, to places securely in the Soviet bloc. But last October Mikhail Piotrovski, director of the Hermitage, revealed that 700 paintings and 2,000 archaeological objects looted from Germany had been kept in tightly secret "special storage" in the museum's basements since 1945. For the show that opens this week, the Hermitage has chosen to display more than 70 French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, all but one (a Monet) originally from private collections in Germany.

The title of the show is "Hidden Treasures Revealed," a mild exaggeration since not all of them are treasures (whatever that hopelessly debased word now means). But some are important works, and one really is a "lost" masterpiece, hitherto thought to have been destroyed and known only through photographs: Edgar Degas's spatially daring, wonderfully stylish slice-of-life image called Place de la Concorde, depicting a Parisian artist-dandy, Viscount Lepic, cigar and brolly rakishly cocked at opposing angles, out for a walk with his two daughters and a borzoi. The show also includes an exquisite Seurat seascape, some notable Cezannes and considerable paintings by Courbet, Gauguin, Van Gogh and others. The catalog, by art historian Albert Kostenevich, thoroughly documents each picture and is marred only by an insistence that the activities of the Russian art takers and the Western teams who gathered up displaced art in Germany in 1945 and after were essentially the same.

Of course they were not: the Allied committees restored the art to its rightful owners as fast as possible after the war, whereas the Russians refused to. The catalog affects pained astonishment that the Western press should adopt the "quite ridiculous" habit of calling a theft a theft, but that's what it was, and no mealiness of the mouth can change it. Piotrovski insists in his catalog preface that the show "is not being held to make a point in an argument but is rather an event in the life of the arts." Well and good, but the argument will survive the show and go on for years longer.

The situation was further complicated when Moscow's Pushkin Museum beat the Hermitage to the punch by setting up in February a hastier and less focused show of Impressionist paintings, together with some older ones by Goya, El Greco and others. Its director, Irina Antonova, a cultural bureaucrat in the traditional Soviet style, made no suggestion that these works were going anywhere after the show-least of all to Germany. "Soviet troops saved these artworks, while the fascists wrecked ours," she declared at a press conference. "We deserve some form of compensation."

Understandably, few German experts have much sympathy with this attitude, though most realize that direct demands for restitution will simply be rejected. "It was by no means necessary to transport the artworks to the Soviet Union for conservation," protests Werner Schmidt, general director of the Dresden State Art Collections and chairman of the joint Russo-German commission deliberating on the mutual return of art loot. In 1955, when the Russians returned paintings to the Dresden Gallery (in communist East Germany), they made a huge, face- saving fuss over the allegedly terrible state in which these treasures had been found at the war's end. In fact, Schmidt's sources show, they were in "impeccable condition," in quarry tunnels and fortresses undamaged by the fighting. And Wolfgang Eichwede, of the Eastern Europe Institute at Bremen University, who has taken part in countless talks with Soviet officials to negotiate the return of works to Bremen, points out that the two sides approach the issue from drastically different perspectives: "While the Germans cite legal arguments, the Russians cite historical responsibility. While the Russians still have a great deal to return, the Germans no longer have much to offer, since the Allies returned what art they found to its countries of origin soon after the war."

In theory, the principle ought to be easy. Looting is wrong, looters have no legal title to the things they steal, and the descendants of those looters do not gain such title merely because a half-century has closed behind the theft. There is not a single object--not a book, not a letter, not a musical manuscript, a drawing, a painting or a vase--that the Russian forces of occupation ripped off from the museums and private collections of Germany and Eastern Europe that should remain, seen or unseen, in Russian hands. And the same goes for what the Germans stole from Russia. To claim otherwise is, in effect, to legitimize looting as an outcome of war and to deny the validity or permanence of ownership.

"Trophy art" is a preposterous euphemism, suggesting the stuff was awarded to the victors in some noble contest involving shields and javelins. But for full-blown hypocrisy, it would be hard to outdo director Antonova's title for the Pushkin show: "Twice Saved"--as though its pictures had undergone some religious conversion by being dragged off to Mother Russia, "saved" by conservators after being "saved" previously by the Red Army in what she called "an act of heroism." Maybe some of these objects would have been burned to ashes or blown to pieces if they had remained in Germany. And maybe not. Nobody knows, and the question is irrelevant to the morality of keeping war loot.

At least the Russian museums have made an essential first step in revealing what their government had previously concealed. But is it a step toward restitution? Russia signed agreements with Germany in 1990 and again in 1992 to return "unlawfully removed cultural property." But Russian negotiators now claim that the seizure of German artworks may not have been "unlawful." They point out that it was a response to Germany's attempt at cultural genocide. The Versailles Treaty, they argue, contained formal provisions for reparations from Germany to Belgium, to compensate for the enormous destruction wreaked by the Kaiser's troops on the country in 1914. They also cite the Allied Control Council at World War II's end, which endorsed reparations for war damage.

Now Russian nationalists are getting into the act, demanding that their government stand firm on the issue and give nothing back. One may not agree with them, but their arguments are at least understandable. Suppose you are a patriotic Russian in your 60s. Your childhood was passed amid the horrors and suffering of the Great Patriotic War, in which millions died to defend the Motherland against Nazism. Then you survived Stalin, watched the utopian fantasies of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat go into sclerosis in the 1960s and '70s, and saw the imperium collapse in the '80s. Today the yellow arches of McDonald's shed their plastic gleam on Red Square, and gangsterism rules instead of socialist virtue. You know the Nazis inflicted incalculable damage on your nation, with the intent to obliterate all traces of "Slavic culture" from the earth. Why, in this time of collapsed dreams and national humiliation, should you listen to Germans preaching about restitution?

This is an emotional argument, deeply flawed. But it is also deeply felt, and it illustrates the prudence of Wolfgang Eichwede's warning that "maximal demands will not bring about a solution." As things stand, Russia may not be able to dispel all doubt about her will to return the loot until Germany makes an impressive gesture-impressive, that is, to the Russians. What could this be? An agreement to pay for the restoration of the church frescoes of Novgorod, destroyed by the Nazis (frescoes for which one Russian ex-soldier has collected 1.2 million fragments, the biggest and most tragic jigsaw puzzle in the world)? A German-established museum of modern art in Kiev? A symbolic museum of trophy art without discoverable heirs, to which the German state would waive all claim? "It's a crazy situation," says Eichwede. "The two countries agreed on the unification of Germany, but they can't settle on returning Durer. It's a sign that relations between the two countries are not yet normal." As well as proof that art divides cultures as much as it unites them.

--With reporting by Constance Richards/Moscow and Rhea Schoenthal/Bonn

With reporting by CONSTANCE RICHARDS/MOSCOW AND RHEA SCHOENTHAL/BONN