NONFICTION - Sept. 10, 1995

BEAUTIFUL LOOT: The Soviet Plunder of Europe’s Art Treasures by Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorii Kozlov with Sylvia Hochfield (Random House: $25; 320 pp.). It was the expected result, indeed the aim of war, in Caesar’s time: To the victor went the spoils. But in this day and age, to appropriate more than 2 million cultural artifacts? That’s what the Soviets took from Germany at the end of World War II, and only in the last few years--thanks largely to the efforts of art historians Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorii Kozlov--has the extent of the plundering become public knowledge. In 1945, and for the next four decades and more, Soviet officials claimed to have “saved” the irreplaceable art collections of Germany, but “Beautiful Loot” shows that the U.S.S.R.’s intentions were far more piratical, political, and financial, with generals, NKVD agents, and organized “trophy brigades” hoping not only to improve Soviet art collections but line their own pockets, out-pillage the Americans and appease Stalin. (The plundering was accomplished, incidentally, through a department bearing a remarkably inharmonious name: the Extraordinary State Commission on the Registration and Investigation of the Crimes of the German-Fascist Occupiers and Their Accomplices and the Damage Done by Them to the Citizens, Collective Farms, Public Organizations, State Enterprises, and Institutions of the U.S.S.R.) As relatively lowly museum staffers, the authors of this volume followed old and long-forgotten paper trails that led to eyewitness interviews, private collections, and news stories forcing their employers to admit that Soviet museums did keep in storage thousands of important, war-booty artworks--including the Trojan Gold unearthed by Heinrich Schliemann--that many experts assumed were missing or destroyed. Russia’s major museums are now committed to exhibiting their plundered collections, but Akinsha and Kozlov hope their findings will eventually result in repatriation . . . a distant hope, it seems, for as the director of the Pushkin Museum told former employee Kozlov in 1991: “The Germans committed terrible crimes in our country, and the highest justice is on our side. We don’t need to justify ourselves; we can dictate our conditions.”