Russian Legislators Vote to Keep Looted German Treasures

Possession may be nine-tenths of the law, but that proved too little for Russian legislators on Friday when they voted to prohibit the return of cultural treasures looted from the vanquished Germans at the end of World War II.

The state Duma’s 308-15 vote to override President Boris N. Yeltsin’s veto of an earlier measure to keep the works could sour the atmosphere during his social summit with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl later this month and is expected to cast Russia into further disrepute among the European institutions it has been lobbying to join.

Yeltsin’s liaison with the Duma, Alexander Kotenkov, told journalists after the vote that the president will appeal to the Constitutional Court to strike down the decision.

“The Duma had the opportunity to find legal solutions to the restitution problem but preferred a more simplistic, political and emotional way,” Yeltsin’s spokesman, Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky, told journalists after the vote, which he said Yeltsin “regretted.”

The upper house of parliament, the Federation Council, still has to pass judgment on the legislation. But few familiar with the long-running debate believe that body, which has already endorsed the measure once, will reverse itself on an issue so bound up in patriotic and nationalist feelings.

Keeping the treasures taken as trophies by Red Army soldiers from the homes and museums of vanquished Germany is widely considered here to be just repayment and long overdue.

“The moral right of the Soviet Union to a compensation of that sort has never been called into doubt by anyone,” the Itar-Tass news agency bluntly stated.

Russia suffered as much looting and damage to its cultural heritage during World War II as did the Germans later. Once-lavish palaces, like those at Peterhof, Pavlovsk and Tsarskoye Selo, were stripped of their priceless paintings, statues and artifacts after the June 1941 German invasion.

To the public’s delight, Russia’s most renowned museums have boldly displayed their war booty in recent years, from the “Hidden Treasures” exhibit at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg to the glittering coins, bracelets and diadems of the “Trojan Gold” collection at Moscow’s Pushkin Museum.

Yeltsin’s veto last month of an earlier Duma declaration that the art is Russian property stirred nationalist outcries that he was caving in to pressure from Western governments at the expense of his own people’s cultural wealth.

The 66-year-old president’s resistance to the bill that prohibits return of any cultural valuables acquired during World War II may be strategic: He is unlikely to prevail in getting the Constitutional Court to declare the law invalid but appears to the international community to be fighting for a more equitable resolution.

Kohl has invited Yeltsin to visit the spa town of Baden-Baden on April 15-17 for political talks and a little leader-to-leader relaxation.

German government spokesman Herbert Schmuelling said that Bonn will urge the Federation Council not to endorse the measure. He predicted that the sensitive subject will be taken up by Kohl and Yeltsin when they meet.