Foreign Affairs
Related: About this forumPutin Orders Hunt for Property of Russian Empire, Soviet Union
Source: Bloomberg
Putin Orders Hunt for Property of Russian Empire, Soviet Union
Bloomberg News
Fri, January 19, 2024 at 4:16 AM EST·1 min read
(Bloomberg) -- Vladimir Putin is going on a property hunt, ordering officials to find Russian assets that once belonged to its former empire or were owned by the Soviet Union.
An order from the Russian president published late Thursday allocated funding for a state unit to conduct searches for property abroad and ensure Russias ownership rights are registered. The document didnt indicate the size of the budget for the operation or what kinds of property are being sought.
While its unclear what prompted the order, Putins interest in former imperial possessions is unlikely to ease concerns about his ambitions among neighboring states after Russias invasion of Ukraine upended European security.
At its peak, the Russian Empire extended into territories of modern Poland and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as Finland. It dissolved under the pressure of World War I and the 1917 Bolshevik revolution led by Vladimir Lenin that marked the birth of the Communist state.
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Read more: https://news.yahoo.com/putin-orders-hunt-property-russian-091640990.html
Original Bloomberg link (paywall): https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-19/putin-orders-hunt-for-property-of-russian-empire-soviet-union
Duncanpup
(12,860 posts)AllaN01Bear
(18,261 posts)dchill
(38,505 posts)...means no longer belongs. But we're talking about a man who actually has absolute immunity, I guess.
bucolic_frolic
(43,182 posts)Seems I recall Malcolm Forbes owned a few. And in the 1970s with the first loosening up of USA-USSR relations, it was fashionable for Americans to try to buy Russian religious icons as investments.
brush
(53,787 posts)Irish_Dem
(47,131 posts)CanonRay
(14,104 posts)You might want to start there lol
getagrip_already
(14,764 posts)Sarah Palin might want to start stacking sand bags on her back porch........
But more concretely, oligarchs everywhere better start living in basements and stop wearing underwear or drinking tea.
Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin
(108,034 posts)They sold it to us because after getting their asses kicked in the Crimean war they didn't want the British (Canada) on their doorstep.
DFW
(54,405 posts)And now, he wants $20 million more plus 157 years worth of interest.
MOMFUDSKI
(5,556 posts)The country is panked.
DFW
(54,405 posts)I knew an official of the post-Soviet state bank in the 1990s. I knew that some Russians had been selling off hundreds of millions in old gold coins starting around 1990, but I didnt know the story behind them.
The Soviet Union kept their gold in five immense depots. Four of them consisted of gold bars and recently minted Soviet gold coins, sold abroad for a premium that the Soviets pocketed. But the fifth depot, hidden in the Ural Mountains, held the real treasure: the millions of older gold coins accumulated since 1917, the inception of the Soviet state. This included not only what was there in 1917.
In 1936, the Spanish Republic sent all of Spains gold, including millions of old gold coins minted under the Spanish Empire in Latin America, which Stalin had promised to store for safekeeping, for their socialist compatriots. But at the handover at the dock, the Soviet ship refused to hand Spain a receipt, said gracias, you guys, and confiscated Spains gold in its entirety.
Then, in 1945, the Soviet Union was allowed by the allies to take Berlin, where the Reichsbank held tens of millions of old gold coins. Some of these, including 3,970 Danzig 25 gulden gold coins out of 4000 minted in 1930 (one each had been given to the 30 members of the Danzig parliament), were easy to identify, when an ex-KGB contact in Florida (once removed) started marketing them.
One group of 20,000 old American $20 gold coins minted in 1908 was put on the market by a California firm in 1998. Their first ad crowed that this group of coins has been held intact since 1917. I have to assume the ex-KGB people went ballistic when they saw that, since all subsequent ads had that particular piece of information removed.
Millions of rare German (or formerly rare) German gold coins have been showing up in Switzerland, then England, and then the USA since 1990.
My friend at the Russian state bank told me that a rogue group of sly KGB guys managed to ship the whole contents of the Ural Mountains depot out of Russia as the Soviet Union was collapsing, starting already in 1990.
These coins have been distributed around the world since the early 1990s. No way Putin can gather them all back. I have heard that many still remain, but I have no idea if so, or how many. There COULD be millions of them. The Florida guy was supposedly told that his children were already too old to see the end of the Ural Mountains stash. If Putin thinks he has a path to grabbing whats left, I guess he could try, but if they are lodged in some secret immense bank vault in Las Vegas, I doubt he will have an easy time of it.