The Hunt for the Romanovs’ Lost Crown Jewels.

A scrap gold dealer in the American Midwest paid $14,000 for an ornament at a bric-a-brac market, and it was a jeweled egg that Alexander III had given his empress at Easter in 1887. It stood just over eight centimeters tall, gold and gems on a bejeweled base, with a watch by Vacheron Constantin inside. The man who bought it, around 2004, wanted only to sell it on, and for years he could not make a profit. Then, in April 2014, the egg was set out in a showroom in Mayfair, in London, for four days. Hold that picture for a moment. A gift from a czar to his wife, found on a market table where nobody was looking for it. It raises a question far bigger than one egg. When the Romanovs fell, where did their jewels actually go? There is no single tidy answer, because there are several different stories, and they have to be kept apart. There is what was sewn into the clothes of the Tsar's daughters and carried out of a pit in the Urals. There is what a Soviet vault held when its boxes were opened in March 1922. There is what was sold abroad for hard currency. There is what left Russia before any vault existed. And there is what simply vanished. So think of it as an inventory, worked through item by item, the way the Soviet jewelers themselves once worked through it. The list runs from the diamonds that took bullets, to a crown worn at a wedding in 1894 and sold in London, to department store sales in New York, to a tiara that a British queen wore, and finally to the imperial Easter eggs, where the biggest open case waits at the very end. Two questions will stay open along the way. Who ended up with the Tsarina's wedding crown, and why do two tellings of its path disagree? And can any stone from the place of the killing be traced to a piece sold later? One thing needs saying now, because it changes the shape of everything that follows. The heart of the Imperial Regalia did not disappear. The Diamond Fund in the Kremlin still holds it. This is a story of dispersal, not of total loss. The list opens on the 8th of March, 1922, in Moscow, with sealed boxes and a commission about to cut them open. But to understand what those boxes held and what they did not, you first have to go back four years, to a summer night in Yekaterinburg. In the small hours of the 17th of July, 1918, the last Tsar and his family were killed in the cellar of a house in Yekaterinburg by a Bolshevik guard commanded by Yakov Yurovsky. That tragedy has its own telling. What matters for the list is what the family was wearing. The daughters, Tatiana, Anastasia, and Maria, carried over 1.3 kilograms of diamonds sewn into their clothing. That is a little under three pounds, hidden in the seams of three young women's dresses, and it is said to have given them a degree of protection. Alexei had jewels sewn into an undergarment and into a forage cap, and the maid Anna Demidova was holding a small pillow, one described as filled with precious gems and jewels. Yurovsky had already seized some of the family's jewelry earlier and suspected that more was hidden in their clothes. At the disposal site in the forest, men of the detail began to search the bodies for valuables. Yurovsky stopped them and ordered them to hand over whatever they had taken or be shot. Then Yurovsky took an inventory of the jewelry on the spot. The commander left with a bag of diamonds. The weight given for it is 8.2 kilograms, and Yurovsky reported to two leading Bolsheviks of the Euros, Beloborodov and Goloshchiokin. Notice the gap. 8.2 kilograms is far more than the 1.3 sewn into the daughter's clothing, and the two figures have never been reconciled. They measure different things. Popular retellings speak of 18 pounds of diamonds sewn into the clothes, but no solid document stands behind that. Eighteen pounds is simply 8.2 kilograms in pounds, so it looks like the weight of the bag has been attached to the dresses. The first men did not find everything. In 1919, with the Civil War still raging, the investigator Sokolov sifted the mine site and found what Yurovsky's men had overlooked. Pearls, diamonds, and topazes, along with corset stays, buckles, and keys. Small, ordinary things lay beside gems. Sokolov's findings were published in French and in Russian, and in English in 1925. A box of relics that Sokolov carried to Brussels is kept to this day at the Church of St. Job in Yuko, now the part that matters most for what comes next. No document ties any of these stones to a specific piece sold later. Not the ones sewn into the sisters' clothes, not the ones in Urofsky's bag, not the ones sifted from the earth. The thread is lost in Moscow. Anyone who points to a famous diamond and says it came from that cellar is guessing. Hold on to that gap. It is the first of the open questions, and it will be waiting at the end. A bag of diamonds goes to Moscow, and then the trail goes quiet until a commission opens a row of sealed boxes in the Kremlin. The 8th of March, 1922. 1922 In Moscow, the boxes holding the treasure of the Kremlin armory are opened and a commission begins to sort what lies inside. Among its members sits Alexander Fersman, an academician and one of the country's leading mineralogists. Fersman later recalled what met the commission when the lids came off. Jewels, in enormous quantity, and no inventories, no lists of what had been gathered, from whom or where it belonged. Crowns, necklaces, loose stones and ornaments, all of it in heaps. So here is the question. How do you sort and value a mountain of jewels when nothing tells you what you are holding? The place for the work already existed. Gokran, the state depository for valuables, had been created in February 1920 to centralize the valuables the new state had confiscated. Its building stood on Nastasinsky Lane in Moscow, and the treasure was sorted there. And the people who sorted it came from the trade that had once served the court. Former Fabergé jewelers, among them Franz, Kotler, and Bach, worked for Gokran. That is the answer. With no inventories to lean on, experts valued the treasure item by item, piece by piece, the way jewelers always have. The craftsmen who had made luxury for the empire were now pricing it for the Soviet state. Their totals were staggering. Kotler and Franz valued the jewels at 458,700,000 gold rubles. Other experts, reckoning what the stones would bring if they were sold separately, arrived at a much lower figure, about 162 million. The difference is easy to understand. A crown is worth more whole, as a historic object, than as a heap of loose stones. Which way a piece was valued mattered a great deal for what happened to it. Then came the division that mattered most. The jewelers set apart what was called the inviolable fund, 366 items, valued at roughly 655 million rubles. The regalia alone was valued at 375 million. Beyond it came a second category, valued at a little over 7 million rubles. The word inviolable was a statement of intent. The Diamond Fund itself was established officially that same year, 1922. Look at what that first list really was. It was an inventory, but it was also a price list. Every piece was being sorted into one of two futures, kept as the symbol of a state or priced to be sold. Everything points to that simple logic. What could stand for the state stayed on the shelf, and the rest could be turned into hard currency. The jewelers had finished the list, but a list is only useful if someone outside Russia can read it, and a book was already being prepared. The book was Fersman's illustrated catalog, Russia's treasure of diamonds and precious stones. The inventory began in 1922, and the catalog followed in the middle of the decade, in four parts, in 1925 and 1926. The dates attached to it run anywhere from 1924 to 1926, and the exact year is given differently depending on who is counting. It describes 406 pieces, and look at the languages. It was issued in Russian, in French, and in English. A treasure inventory meant only for Soviet clerks would never need three languages. This one doubled as a sales document, a shop window, so that foreign buyers could pick out the pieces they wanted. Some descriptions of the book say only 350 copies were printed, a small run, which fits a book written for a few buyers rather than for the public. The sales themselves had started before the book appeared. In 1922, emeralds from Gokran were sold in London and Amsterdam, presented as stones mined in the Urals. In 1923, pearls and diamonds were taken to Amsterdam. Later sales followed in Paris. The state that had taken over the empire's jewels was now turning them into foreign currency, one consignment at a time. Not every transfer was a sale. Under the Riga Treaty debt settlement, Poland received gold and stones worth about 2,700,000 rubles. That was a payment between governments, not a deal with a dealer. Yet through all of this, the heart of the collection stayed. In the diamond fund sits the Orlov diamond, nearly 190 carats. Beside it is the Shah diamond, nearly 89 carats, a gift from Persia in 1829, after the Russian envoy in Tehran was killed. There is the spinel from the Great Imperial Crown, close to 400 carats. And there is the Imperial Crown made for Catherine the Great in 1762. For decades, these pieces were out of public view. The Diamond Fund was first shown to the public in November 1967 and became a permanent exhibition in 1968. Today, it is exhibited in the Kremlin Armory as part of Gokran under the Ministry of Finance. The institution that opened the boxes in 1922 still looks after what was kept. Keep that picture in mind, because it is the other half of the story. While the regalia was set apart, a great deal around it was being sold. A consignment of Gochran stones passes into the hands of a London dealer, and 124 lots are about to go on view in King Street. A syndicate led by the Hungarian-born London dealer Norman Weiss, a name also spelled Weiss, bought a consignment from Gokran, 9.6 kilograms of jewels, for a reported 50,000 pounds. The syndicate then put 124 lots into Christie's for Wednesday, the 16th of March, 1927. The sale was held to close a partnership account. A few weeks earlier, on the 26th of February, the Illustrated London News told its readers what to expect. Russian state jewels, it said, mostly 18th century pieces from the reigns of Empress Elizabeth and Catherine the Great. And it made a point of saying that the sale excluded the personal treasures of the late imperial family. Keep that in mind. The paper called the sale of great historic interest. One lot, a brilliant brooch of more than 40 carats, was described as formerly valued at 115,000 rubles. The words alone tell you what kind of room this was. But the lot people remember is number 62, the diamond nuptial crown, set with about 1,500 old mine-cut diamonds. The crown Alexandra wore at her wedding in 1894. It sold for 6,100 pounds to a dealer named Funes. Where did it go from there? According to a Cartier reference work, the dealer Pierre Cartier later acquired it. But the publication Russia Beyond tells it differently. Gochran sold the crown to Norman Weiss in 1926, and it later reached Marjorie Post, the American collector, and the Hillwood Collection in Washington. Two paths, and they do not match. Both circle the same group of dealers, but they disagree on who held the crown after the sale and where it went. Nothing published settles it. So that is the answer to the open question. Who ended up with Alexandra's wedding crown? The chain is disputed. The sale did not pass without a challenge. In 1929, Princess Olga Paley, who had married into the Romanov family, sued Wise, arguing that the lots were stolen property. The suit failed. The court rejected the claim. Now zoom out, and the scale becomes clear. Of 773 items that belonged to the Diamond Fund, 569 were sold in the 1920s and 30s, about three quarters. Those were Soviet state and Gokran sales, and they are documented as such. Nothing ties a specific personal jewel of the last imperial family to any of them. If the way a dynasty's treasure was scattered holds you, this is a good moment to like the video and subscribe to Fallen Thrones, because more chapters of the Fall are coming. London was only one sale room. The jewels were crossing the Atlantic, too, and the buyers there were not just collectors. Some were shoppers walking into a department store. The name that comes up again and again in those sales is Armand Hammer. According to the historian Natalia Semyonova, he arranged sales of Russian antiques on a 10% commission, and he organized what were billed as Romanov Treasures sales at Lord & Taylor, the department store in New York. Picture a shopper in the middle of the Depression, walking past the ordinary counters of a department store and stopping at a case of Russian gold and enamel that once belonged to an empire. That shopper is invented, but the setting is real, and so is at least one buyer. On the 25th of January, 1933, Lillian Thomas Pratt bought her first Russian object at a Hammer exhibit at Lord & Taylor. She went on collecting, and in 1947, she bequeathed her collection to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. By the end of the decade, the business had grown. The Hammer Gallery's exhibition in New York ran from the 22nd of November to the 22nd of December, 1937. Its catalog listed 11 imperial eggs. And four of them were still owned by Hammer. Some pieces left by other doors. The Kremlin armory itself sold the Imperial Coronation Egg to Wartsky in London in 1927. And jewels were not the only treasure going west. The Soviet government sold major paintings, too. In 1931, Raphael's Madonna Alba went to Andrew Mellon for almost $1.2 million. Hammer divides opinion, and what exactly was said about him matters. Writing in the London Review of Books in 2009, the author Clancy Martin called him the man who single-handedly revived Fabergé. In the same essay, Martin also called him an incorrigible shyster and a shameless counterfeiter. Martin wrote that some of what was sold as Romanov treasure was ordinary goods and that some reproductions were stamped with real Fabergé marks. That is one published critic's judgment. It is not a court ruling, and it does not make any particular egg a fake or every item sold a fake. Still, look at the contrast. On one side stands a name that sounded like an empire. On the other, a shop floor in Manhattan, a commission rate, and a label that could be attached to almost anything. It looks like the grander the name on the card, the less a shopper could check what stood behind it. Not every treasure waited for a Soviet vault. Some left in luggage years before. And the story of one palace ends with a tiara on the head of a British queen. None of this was ever on the Moscow list. In 1917, a man named Albert Stopford carried 244 items out of the Vladimir Palace in Petrograd in two Gladstone bags. He traveled by way of Sweden and Aberdeen, and according to one biography, he did it together with Grand Duke Boris. The removal was made at the request of the Grand Duchess who lived in that palace. Who exactly was Stopford? Writers describe him variously, as a diplomat, as an art dealer, even as an intelligence officer. A tale is told that jewels were hidden inside an old newspaper, but it has never been confirmed. What is documented is the journey, the two bags, and the number. What is documented is the journey, the two bags, and the number. Now the tiara. The Vladimir tiara was made around 1874 by the court jeweler Bohlen for Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, the wife of Grand Duke Vladimir. It is a circle of diamond arches, and in photographs it has become one of the most recognized pieces of jewelry in Britain. The Royal Collection Trust gives its path in plain steps. Maria Pavlovna's daughter, Princess Nicholas of Greece, sold the tiara to Queen Mary in 1921. In 1953, it passed from Queen Mary to Queen Elizabeth II. A daughter sold it, a queen bought it, and a granddaughter later received it. Nothing in that chain suggests anything improper. And then comes a surprise from a very different kind of hiding place. In 1918, about 60 items, among them Fabergé cigarette cases, were left in pillowcases at the Swedish Mission in Petrograd. They stayed in the archive of the Swedish Foreign Ministry until they were found there in 2009. Ninety-one years in a pillowcase, then back into the light. So here is a question for you. If 60 pieces could sit in a ministry archive for nearly a century, how many other caches like it might still be waiting? In a cellar, a bank vault, an attic, nothing proves there are any. But it is hard not to wonder. Of everything on the inventory, one family of objects has a trail that runs from a palace to a scrap dealer's counter. And it is still not finished. Last on the list, the biggest open case. Between 1885 and 1917, the House of Fabergé delivered 50 imperial Easter eggs. Two more were designed and never delivered. Thirty were made for Maria Fyodorovna, twenty for Alexandra. Follow just one of them. The third imperial egg was given by Alexander III to Maria Fyodorovna at Easter in 1887. Inside it sits a watch by Vacheron Constantin. It was last shown to the public in March 1902 at the Von Dervis Mansion in St. Petersburg. Then the Bolsheviks confiscated it, and it was last recorded in Moscow in 1922, slated for sale. After that, the egg turns up in a New York auction room. On the 7th of March, 1964, Parc Bernay sold it as a gold watch in egg form case for $2,450. The buyer was not recorded. Look at that description. Nobody in the room was told it was an imperial egg. That is how a treasure can disappear without anyone hiding it. The label changes and the name falls away. So how does a Serena's Easter egg end up on a Midwestern dealer's table for $14,000? The answer is that roughly four decades of its life have no recorded owner. The next scene is a bric-a-brac market where a scrap gold dealer, whose name was never made public, paid that sum for it around 2004. He scratched it and tested it for gold. He found no one willing to pay more, and he could not resell it at a profit. Then, in 2012, he searched online for the words Egg and Vacheron Constantin and found a Telegraph article quoting Kieran McCarthy, a director at the London dealers Wartsky. McCarthy confirmed the piece was genuine and later flew out to see it. Wartsky bought it for a private collector who has not been named. In April 2014, it went on show in London from the 14th to the 17th. A price of about $33 million has circulated in the press, but neither the buyer nor the price was officially published. Now the count that everyone asks about. How many imperial eggs are still missing? It depends on the date and on who is counting. Faberge's own announcement in 2014 said 43 were known, which left seven missing. Press coverage of the find said eight had been missing before it. A count in wide use today says 44 survive, and six are missing. Every one of them made for Maria Fyodorovna. And only three of the missing are believed to have survived the revolution at all. Set that beside what is known. The Kremlin armory holds ten imperial eggs. Victor Vexelberg bought the whole Forbes collection, nine imperial eggs among it, just before the heirs of Malcolm Forbes could send it to auction at Sotheby's in February 2004. He said in a 2013 BBC4 documentary that he spent just over $100 million on the nine eggs. His Fabergé Museum in St. Petersburg opened on the 19th of November, 2013. And in November 2007, the Rothschild egg fetched 8.9 million pounds at Christie's, a record for a Fabergé object. Six eggs, seven, eight. Nobody is certain. So tell us in the comments, do you think the missing ones are sitting quietly in private collections, or were they lost for good? The eggs are only half of the question the whole list leaves open, and the oldest piece of that question starts in a pit in the Euros. Go back now to the beginning and read the list as a ledger, what survived. The regalia, kept together in the diamond fund, shown to the public in November 1967 and as a permanent exhibition from 1968. The Orlov diamond is there, and the shah, and the crown made for Catherine the Great. What was sold? Gochran's consignments to Amsterdam, London, and Paris, 124 lots at Christie's in King Street. Roughly three quarters of the Diamond Fund items, 569 of 773, and the department store cases of New York, where a grand name met a price tag. What left early? Two Gladstone bags carried out of the Vladimir Palace in 1917, and a tiara that a daughter sold to a queen. What was found late? Sixty items in pillowcases in a Swedish archive, and an egg on a market table in the Midwest. And what is still open? The missing eggs, counted as six, seven, or eight, depending on the date and on who is counting. Which leaves the question that was planted at the start. Can any of the diamonds sewn into the Grand Duchess's clothes, or any stone from the bag Urofsky carried away, be traced to a single piece sold afterwards? No. No document ties them to any one piece. The trail between the pit and the vault was never written down, and anyone who names a particular stone is guessing. What remains are pictures that can be seen, a crown in a Kremlin case, a tiara on a queen, an egg that sat on a stall, waiting for someone to look at it twice. If the trail of a fallen dynasty holds you, subscribe to Fallen Thrones, because more of these endings are coming. And if you want to follow what became of the family itself, watch what happened to the Romanovs who survived the revolution next.