The Romanov Dynasty and the Hunt for Russia' s Incredible Tsar' s Treasure

The Crown of the Tsars, embodiment of the wealth and power of Russia. It was always fascinating, the Tsar, this immense wealth. The treasure chambers of the palaces used to hold diamonds and jewels of infinite splendor. This shows me how serious, rich and successful Russia used to be. War and revolution destroyed the Tsarist empire. Everything concerning the treasures and jewels of the House of Romanov is hidden behind a veil of secrecy. The ruling family was toppled and murdered, their treasures confiscated. There were indescribable treasures amongst the so-called blood jewels. A fortune disappears, the time of the treasure hunters has begun. There's a legend that there's a train full of gold that has sunk. The Romanov dynasty. What about the palaces, the jewels, the money? Jewels, diamond and gold, gone forever? The lost treasures of the Tsars, no more than a myth? Saint Petersburg, summer 2012. A gala in the hermitage, the former Tsarist palace. It's the city's most exclusive event of the year. Prince Dmitry Romanov is the guest of honour. For over 300 years, his ancestors sat on Russia's throne. Very little has remained for the Romanovs. Prince Dmitry lives in Copenhagen and he last visited the land of his forefathers in 1991. I asked myself the question, how is it going to be? Going down at the airport as the Pope said, no, no, no, no. But what is the future? Nobody really knew which way it would go. So what is our role? Tsar and Tsarina owned crowns, tiaras, bracelets, necklaces, hairpins, covered in precious stones and pearls made from gold or platinum. You do ask yourself what happened to the Tsar's treasure. In 1913, the Romanovs celebrated the tercentenary of their rule. Their wealth was estimated to be worth 55 billion euros in today's money. Of course, they celebrated their 300th anniversary in style and handed out many presents left and right. Presents that can now be admired in museums across the world. For the anniversary, the legendary court jeweler Fabergé crafted 2,000 presents for the guests, made out of gold, silver and jewels. Tsar Nicholas II gave Tsarina Alexandra one of the famous Fabergé eggs. It shows 18 miniature likenesses of all the Romanov Tsars. Fabergé is more than a name. It's a symbol. A symbol of Russia's wealth, but also its fall. Nicholas II was to be the last Tsar. Russia was the world's leading country, the number one, and then it turned to ruins. He was to blame for that in many ways. He was not strong enough. He didn't take care of Russia World War I and the revolution forced Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate. In 1918, the whole family was murdered. Nobody mentioned the Romanovs after that. We were like blind kittens, not knowing the truth about our own history. Art historian Nadezhda Danilevich, searches archives around the world for signs of the Tsar's treasure. The billionaire Alexander Ivanov has been buying treasures of the Tsar's family for 20 years. The investigative prosecutor Vladimir Zolovyev has been working on a comprehensive report on the murders for 16 years. To this day, the report cannot be published in Russia. I think that Russia is still in civil war. The fate of many victims of the civil war is still unclear. In particular, the Tsar's family. Nadezhda Danilevich was a member of the commission to clear up the murder of the Romanovs. It was her job to investigate the fate of the Tsarist family's personal treasures. That was very important because many things that belonged to the members of the Tsarist family had found their way abroad in a number of ways. Moscow. For decades the center of Soviet power. The Kremlin, built by the Tsars, became the palace of the communist leaders after the revolution. Catalogs pile up in Nadezhda's office. Dossiers and secret files from all over the world. Our main task was to shine some light on the matter. Everything concerning the treasure and jewels of the Romanovs is behind a heavy veil of secrecy, covered in the dust of history. Nobody could sweep this weight, this heavy dust aside. I wanted to clean the matter up and answer the question. Three or four days before the murder of the Romanovs, a law was passed by the Council of People's Commissars to confiscate all the belongings of the Tsarist family. Nadezhda Danilevich finds files in the KGB archives on the whereabouts of the treasures during the confused years of the revolution. There was a secret catalogue of the diamond fund, in which all the crown jewels of the Tsarist family were depicted. The catalogue, named the Firstman, after the editor, lists the entire royal treasure in great detail. That was very easy to carry out because it was all together. At the end of the First World War, all the crown jewels were sent to the Kremlin so the Germans wouldn't get them. When the Bolsheviks came, they found it all as if prepared for them. All the crown jewels were in the Kremlin. The Bolsheviks wanted to realize their newfound asset. The precious items were prepared for sale, some dismantled, much disappeared. The odyssey began. London, spring 2012. The city has been a center of the international art trade for many generations. It is Russian Arts Day at Christie's. Russian art of past centuries is being auctioned. Amongst them, several Fabergés. Alexander von Solidkopf is considered one of the leading experts on the court jeweller. After 1918, when my grandparents left Russia, it was always, well, we had to sell the Fabergé pieces we had over the years. When I was 14, I decided that I wanted to find those treasures again. For the first time ever, Christie's is granting a camera team permission to film in its archive. One old catalogue contains indelible signs of the legendary treasure of the Tsars. So this is the old, original auctioneer's book. You could say that was a milestone in auction history when, on the 16th of March 1927, the first items from the Tsarist treasure were sold at auction in London. The Soviet state transferred them to a consortium of jewel traders who sent them to auction. So here you can see a wedding crown of the Romanovs. It was worth 6,100 pounds, or guineas at the time. That's over a billion euros in today's money. A Russian wedding crown goes to America. It would probably be worth a hundred times more today. Russian art of the Tsarist time is being traded at astronomical prices. Everyone comes into town. It's one of the few auction house events where the room is full, there's an atmosphere, everybody's bidding in person, everybody wants to know who's here. The Tsar attracts the big money. You can see the Tsar's monogram is set in diamonds and precious stones on the lid of this tin. And here is the Russian N for Nikolai, surmounted with the imperial crown in diamonds. These boxes are fairly rare, and it's also rare for them to appear on the market. On the other hand, and that is the surprising thing, sometimes things appear that were hidden in drawers. More than half the potential buyers in the room are Russian. That was my first auction just now. He bought something himself the first time today. Alexander Ivanov is considered one of the most respected collectors of Fabergé in the world. We collect what we love, what we like, but it also has a high commercial value. Our collection is worth a few billion dollars. An American pays 400,000 pounds for the small box. Alexander Ivanov had already bought something before the auction began. This tiara cost around the same as the box, which we didn't buy. No, no, I don't think that was expensive. I even think we were lucky. Anyway, as specialists, we know how much work goes into this. I would say the bulk of our really serious collectors are Russian and very much interested in acquiring things that were possibly sold off after the revolution, really. Soviet Russia needed the money after the revolution. The old treasure of the Tsars had little meaning for the Bolsheviks. They had new values. It did, however, bring necessary funds into the empty coffers. There isn't a country that didn't buy some gem of the Romanovs. I'm thinking of Europe and America. Even in Hong Kong, I found things by Fabergé, which used to belong to the Tsarist family. A large proportion of the Tsar's belongings were sold. Many treasures flogged off from their palaces. But what about the personal jewelry, necklaces, rings and cufflinks, which the Tsar and the Tsarina wore daily? The personal items of the Tsarist family were in Tobolsk. Following the February Revolution and the abdication of the Tsar in 1917, Tobolsk, a small town in western Siberia, 3,000 kilometers away from the Tsarist palace, was the first stop of the Romanovs after their banishment. The former monarchs arrived under a foreign flag. In August 1917, two trains arrived under the flag of the Japanese Red Cross. In them were the Tsarist family, the Tsar's staff, the servants, the guard and 300 soldiers of the Georgian cavalry. The governor's house became the Tsar's new home. There is no sign of the splendor of their palaces here anymore. Only the Tsar's study has been kept in its original state. Alexander Petruchin has worked on the fate of the Romanovs in Tobolsk for years. It was a simple life, focusing on gardening and caring for the haemophiliac heir, Alexei. You see, they liked the house and conditions were good. Then, following the October Revolution, their lives changed radically. October 1917. A second communist revolution rocked Russia. Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power. A civil war broke out. The anti-communist Whites fought the Bolshevik Reds not far from Tobolsk. The communist guards decided to kill the imperial family. The Romanovs started hiding their remaining treasures. When at first Tsar Nicholas, Tsarina Alexandra, their daughter Maria and the servants were moved to the Ipatiev house in Yekaterinburg on the 13th of April 1918, they searched everything in the even the medicine tins. They found nothing. Yekaterinburg, 600 kilometers west of Tobolsk, was to be the next and final station of their exile. A brutal civil war was raging in the wide expanses of Siberia. It was a fight for money and power. On the outbreak of the First World War, the Tsar had had the state gold moved here, the east of the huge empire, as he was afraid of a German occupation of Kiev and Riga, where the gold had previously been stored. Never to be seen again? There is a legend that a train full of gold sank. Moscow. The historian Oleg Budnitsky is searching for the gold treasures of the Tsar in the state archive Garth. I have here a few folders of documents dealing with the gold of Kolchak. Because what is commonly known as the gold of the Tsars was really the gold of the Russian Empire, which came under Admiral Kolchak's control later. In precise terms, that would be more than 645 million gold rubles. Admiral Kolchak was the leader of the White Army, the anti-communists, whose main base was in Omsk, Siberia. Records say that Kolchak sent a large proportion of the gold to Vladivostok, 6,000 kilometers away. The road from Omsk to Vladivostok was rather dangerous and not all under Kolchak's control. Here it is described precisely how many boxes of gold were sent to Vladivostok. The precise sum 190,899,651 rubles and 50 kopeks. Lake Baikal is halfway between Omsk and Vladivostok. Russia's largest inland lake, the deepest and oldest freshwater lake in the world. This is where the Tsar's gold is thought to have sunk. In 2009, a laborious diving project started. Is the legendary gold really on the floor of the lake? The Mir, the Russian Academy's famous boat, had managed to find the Titanic a few years previously. On board, Anatoly Sokolyevich, boss of the Mir mission. We hadn't even discussed it, said no word about gold, when one of our colleagues called to say he saw the gold on the bottom. But it was in a crack, so it was impossible to get it. It is a myth that one would like to believe. And when they saw something shining underwater and thought it could be gold, my telephone didn't stop ringing. All the radios and newspapers called me and asked. And? Please tell us. I answered, I don't think that it's gold. And I could literally hear their disappointment. Divers discover the remains of a train. But is it the train with gold? I know if there had been gold, we would have got it out of every crack. Maybe not with that dive or the next, but we would have used a special machine, would have sunk that five or ten meters down to get the gold. But there was no gold. The treasure hunt was unsuccessful. The gold of the Tsars wasn't found, the researchers announce. The gold wasn't the reason for this expedition. The most important thing was the scientific exploration of Lake Baikal, with the aim of making important discoveries for science. No Tsarist gold. The ingots presented to the cameras were fake. The whole diving project turns out to be a banker's marketing gimmick. Even so, the belief in the legendary gold at the bottom of Lake Baikal remains unbroken. These people looking for gold in a lake simply can't be bothered to go to the archive. They tell fairy tales about a train with gold in a lake or similar nonsense. That is, of course, much more exciting and interesting than looking at boring mountains of files by finance officers. Oleg Budnitsky is the first person to carry out that work, and his research brings exciting discoveries to light. What do the documents show? That the gold never just disappeared. Some was stolen, but that wasn't a significant proportion, less than 0.1 percent. That's very little, only 13 boxes. Budnitsky can show that following the defeat of the White Army by the Bolsheviks, most of the gold was taken back to Moscow and then spent by the Bolsheviks. The historian found something else in the files. The gold in foreign accounts was managed by émigré organizations for the benefit of their members. Somehow, there is this belief in Russia that if someone has something to do with money, especially without controls, then he will want to steal it. He can't help himself. That isn't true. There were certainly people in Russia who managed to keep the money and spend it for their compatriots during the course of decades under unbelievably harsh conditions. And that is one of the wonderful aspects of the history of the Russian emigration. Back in Tobolsk with Alexander Petruchin on the search for the treasures the Tsar's family left behind in 1918. The Yanov Edensky convent is one of the oldest in Siberia and has a clear line to the exile of Nicholas II and his family in Tobolsk. The nuns provided them with food. They were always in the governor's house and when they were asked, they obviously hid the Romanov's treasures. The Tsar and Serena thought their treasures were safe behind the walls of the convent with the nun Marfa. At first, Marfa hid the precious packet in the well. But out of fear the treasures would be found, she got them out again and hid them amongst the graves over there. When the nunnery closed, she was in such a panic she even considered throwing them into the water. She only told the Bolsheviks about the treasures in 1933. The desperate nun confided in a fishmonger he would betray her. These photos are from the KGB archive. The agents found the treasure in old fish tanks. I will tell you an easy number. This proportion of the treasure of the Tsar's family in Tobolsk were valued. It wasn't just about the artistic execution. A piece by Fabergé, for example, was valued at just two to three rubles. But the value of the entire collection was estimated at 3.21 million gold rubles. If you convert that into gold, that's nearly 3.5 tons of gold. The most expensive item at one million rubles is at the top of the list. That was a diamond of 100 carats. They took it with them to Tobolsk. It would have secured their survival in a foreign country, to wherever they wanted to flee. Was that all? Is this find from 1933 the entire personal treasures of the Tsars? Alexander Petruchin and his colleagues are not convinced there could be more in this former convent. It's a complex building with hidden rooms, secret and underground corridors. And here I am convinced there is a hiding place somewhere with the treasures of the former Tsarist family. The fact is they only found some of the treasure in Tobolsk and the rest has remained here. Is the really treasure hidden here? The legend lives on. You have seen yourselves. There are holes. People dig secretly. The archaeologists come here in secret. I know. Maybe they'll find something. But maybe only when they renovate it. Time will tell. In Yekaterinburg in April 1919, the lives of the entire Tsarist family were to be brutally extinguished. In this city, named after Catherine the Great, Alexander Avdonin grew up here. I was born in 1932 into a family of railway workers who lived by Shertash station. We lived in a barracks with 60 to 70 other families and a few of them could still remember when the imperial family arrived. Some can remember how the train just stood there. The Ipatiev house, named after its original owner, became a prison. The Tsarist family spent the last weeks of their lives behind a wooden fence. Alexander Avdonin remembers those days in a small Tsar museum. The square in front of the Ipatiev house was called the square of the people's revenge. Nobody asked why it was called that. I didn't know that there had to be corpses somewhere. I didn't even know they had been shot. Alexander Avdonin couldn't let the matter of the fate of the Tsar's family rest. He is a geologist. He researched together with friends, spoke to witnesses. By 1979, he thought he knew where the Tsarist family had been buried. But I prayed to God we wouldn't find anything because I didn't know if we found something, what we would do with it. The group, dressed up for a geological mission, dug for remains of the imperial family in a birch wood outside Yekaterinburg. We made a discovery. We got the first skull out, then the second, then the third. And I thought, we need to stop. This is enough. We were very moved and very excited. What were we supposed to do? My friend Ryabov said we would be famous. At the same time, it could have been our end. Where were we supposed to take this? First, we took everything home to me and drank vodka all evening. And we sang God Save the Tsar. Tsar Nicholas II, the Tsarina and the children. For decades, nobody knew what had become of them. Were these really their bones? I was very afraid. What were we supposed to do with them? How could we hide them? They decided to bury the skulls again in the same place, the birch wood outside Yekaterinburg. We kept silent for 12 years. Perestroika and glasnost changed things in Russia. Coming back the first time to Russia, there was nothing white and black. The prince travelled to Yekaterinburg. We drove from the centre. You could see the town becoming like a European town. And we make a U-turn there and park the car. A strange place. Empty. What is that? That is where the house where the Tsar was imprisoned with his family, which was destroyed. The prince prayed for his relatives and was recognised. Next to me was a woman, a typical Russian woman with a scarf like that, standing and praying. You know, she... See, even now I can't forget. She put her head here. Can you imagine what a miracle? I'm standing here praying for your family and you're with me. I can't forget it. She had no idea what my first name, second name was, just the fact that I was a member of the family of the murderer and pray with her. It's a kind of miracle for her but also inside for me. The past is still there. Especially when you have moments of disaster and murder. In 1991, 12 years after the first find, the skulls and bones were dug up again. With the help of genetic tests and Prince Dimitri's family, the Tsar's family was identified. In 1998, the remains were put to rest in a state burial in St. Petersburg's Peter and Paul Cathedral in the presence of the then Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Many pilgrims and Christians came to pray for the family because they felt guilty. They mourned the fate of the Tsarist family. In the meantime, the Kremlin had other, more worldly Tsars. It has to be said that there were a lot of discussions about the inheritance of the Tsarist family in the 1990s. A few scientists were of the opinion that huge possessions were abroad and that Russia should claim them back. The value was estimated at one billion dollars. The remains of the royal treasure are on display in the Kremlin's museum. At least the Soviet rulers didn't sell the Tsar's crown and scepter. The curator of the Kremlin museum travels tirelessly in the search for lost treasures. It's no secret that many masterpieces, for example by Fabergé, were sold to foreign nations by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s. Of the 50 Fabergé eggs the Tsar owned, only 10 have remained in the Kremlin museum. These days the Tsar's anniversary egg is proudly displayed. It was very important to put the pieces back together. It is part of our history with which we can look back at our national cultural heritage. Russia has changed. Outside the city boundaries, new developments with luxurious villas are being built. Their owners mostly use them as weekend dachas. This is where the super-rich live. Alexander Ivanov is one of them. Behind this fence you can see Khodorkovsky's dacha. Many politicians and businessmen live here. Nikolny Gory is one of the best areas. Alexander Ivanov made his money in computers. A long time ago, in the 90s, when I was still studying law at Moscow University, that's when I started. Gorbachev came to power and that was the start of Perestroika. Commercial activities were permitted, and I, a student in the 6th semester, was already earning millions. Only there was nothing to spend the money on, so that's when I started collecting Fabergé. Proudly, the oligarch shows us his collection. The pieces by Fabergé are in this case. This picture had an inscription saying it had been painted by Vermeer. I bought the picture at auction. Everyone knows that Vermeer painted very few pictures. There are no more than 10 in the world. There are several items in this case. A silver bear, some china, icons. That's for every day. What we like, we exhibit. Fabergé and Vermeer for everyday life. I have often experienced that if you buy a piece of art for a lot of money, then it increases in value, not the opposite. And you will have noticed expensive things are expensive, and artwork by Fabergé doesn't decrease in value. Nine Fabergé eggs from a deceased collector were to be sold. The collection of the famous Forbes. He collected the eggs his whole life. Everybody knew that. All art dealers worked for him. After his death, his collection was sold. Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg took the eggs home, for over 100 million dollars. In my opinion, that was one of the most important historical incidents of the last few years for Russia in the 21st century. Of course, we wanted to buy this collection. Unfortunately, he bought it. London, 2007. The next opportunity. A previously unknown Fabergé egg appears at Christie's from the collection of the Rothschild family. The bids quickly rose to more than 6 million pounds, or 10 million euros. And they kept on rising. 8 million pounds. A sensational result. Yes, that is a good and expensive piece. It is in the Guinness Book of Records. I have brought thousands of artworks to Russia in my life. I have a big collection. Only it is near impossible to open a museum there. There is so much bureaucracy and, importantly, a certain nervousness about what tomorrow may bring. It wasn't possible in Russia, but it was in Germany. Baden-Baden. This is where the Russian oligarch opened his museum in 2009. Baden-Baden was always an amazing centre for the Russian aristocracy. To this day, the majority of the villas in Baden-Baden belong to Russians, and that is no secret. The museum is a collection of splendid treasures from the Tsarist age. Much of it belonged to the Romanovs themselves. One of my favourite Fabergé exhibits in this collection is the Royal Easter Egg, made from Karelian birch. It was made for Tsar Nicholas's wife Tsarina Alexandra. The fate of the egg is tragic, just like Russia's fate. It is a shame that the egg's surprise got lost. That was a mechanical elephant, a charm. That is, of course, highly symbolic. As Russia's luck ran out in 1917. Today, Alexander Ivanov is considered one of the world's leading Fabergé experts. He collects Russian history. He doesn't want to give it back. An example is this Fabergé clock, a personal present from a relative to the penultimate Tsar for his silver wedding. This is a very expensive work by Fabergé. Its fate was tragic too, like so many Fabergé pieces. Twice, Christie's couldn't sell this piece at auction. Nobody wanted to buy it. I don't know why nobody wanted it. It is one of Fabergé's best pieces. It was embarrassing. I was embarrassed for Russia, for our president, our culture, and that our state couldn't find a paltry 6 to 7 million pounds to get one of Fabergé's best pieces back into the country. I can see in these items how serious, rich, and successful Russia used to be. Ivanov and other oligarchs have bought many treasures that can be admired publicly again today. But what happened to the Tsar and Serena's personal treasures? There is a book in Moscow's State Archive where the monarch's personal treasures are kept. I am 99.9% sure that there were some very big stones. The Tsarina had an unbelievable collection. I was meant to give these eggs here to the Museum of Russian Emigration in Kislovodsk. Really small ones with rubies. And then a red cross. In all likelihood, the Tsarina gave these eggs to a nurse called Hitrovo for her war service. She gave the eggs to Miss Hitrovo, who together with her daughter saved the wounded in the field hospitals. These are the eggs that have come down to us from the Tsarina's hands. You could even say that the warmth of her hands has remained on these things. In old documents, the prosecutor came upon witness statements by soldiers who were involved in a murder and in the treasure hunt. Since then, it has been known what happened to the imperial family in Yekaterinburg. The site of their murder is now marked with a church. The Tsar was killed first because several people shot at him at the same time. The Tsarina tried to cross herself and was also killed immediately. If you hear such a shooting, you would normally run away. But something surprising, mythical happened. The remaining members of the Tsarist family, the young girls gathered round the Tsarevich and tried to protect him with their bodies. They thought everything would go quietly. The leader, Yuovsky, commanded they aim for the heart so that there wouldn't be very much blood. But the princesses were wearing corsets, so they shot and shot and shot. The girls just didn't die. The girls were wearing specially tailored jackets. The bodices were sewn in with jewels. And then you heard a scream. The servant, Demidova, screamed, Dear God, you saved me. She had a small cushion and with that she tried to protect herself. There were jewels in the cushion too. Then Anastasia came round again and Alexei showed signs of life. They stabbed all those that still lived with bayonets. Diamonds came trickling out of the bloody clothes. All the treasures found in Tobolsk and on the corpses, I call them the bloody treasures, were taken to Moscow to a collection point for diamonds and jewellery. It was called Gotran. There they were dismantled. This is where the trail of the bloody diamonds goes cold. Something else was found at the grave of the Tsar's family. Little beads. These beads were called topaz. They aren't really topaz. They're quartz. They say that each princess had some. I think that regardless of the 100-carat brooches, the huge rubies and diamonds and all those different treasures, that these pearls, these teardrops the princesses wore when they were shot should be recognised as the most important national treasure. Almost every minute of the night of the murder could be reconstructed, but to this day the report may not be published in Russia. When the whole country understands how important this is, when the whole country shows empathy with the Tsarist family and condemns the brutality and ignominy of the fact that five children were shot in front of their parents without sentence, without a trial, when we can make a worthy point in history, then our lives will appear easier and we will treat each other better. We just have to respect the past, the good or the bad about some of the members of the family, the Tsars and all that, but try to do something that is positive to help. The centuries-old history of the Romanovs moves people to this day, and the search for the Tsar's treasure continues in Russia and in auction houses around the world. The myth of the lost treasure of a fallen dynasty lives on.