The inside job at Russia's Hermitage

Aug. 20--ST. PETERSBURG, Russia -- The annals of art heists brim with tales ready-made for a potboiler novel. In 2004, masked men brandishing .357 Magnums swiped Edvard Munch's "The Scream" as stunned museum patrons in Oslo looked on. The gang that pilfered nearly $1 million in paintings from a Paraguay museum four years ago dug an 80-foot tunnel to reach their quarry.

But here in Russia's cultural capital, the story of the largest theft ever to strike the famed State Hermitage Museum appears to be the stuff of Franz Kafka, not Raymond Chandler.

A sickly, cherub-faced museum curator sneaks out silver chalices and gem-festooned icons year after year in her tote bag, unnoticed by a security regimen that still relies on bound ledgers to track artifacts. When an audit in October 2005 finally reveals something is amiss, she keels over and dies at her desk.

After authorities announce the thefts, buyers of the loot treat the items like briquettes of uranium, leaving them in train station lockers and trash bins.

The dead curator, 52-year-old Larisa Zavadskaya, her husband, her son and another man are at the heart of an investigation into the theft of 221 art treasures valued at $5 million from Zavadskaya's storeroom during a span of up to eight years.

St. Petersburg police remain tight-lipped about the case. But according to a version of events that the husband, Nikolai Zavadsky, gave his attorney, Larisa Zavadskaya only needed to stuff the pieces into her bag and walk out the door.

"There was security at museum entrances, but when curators left the building they were never checked," said Zavadsky's attorney, Ludmilla Mikhailova. "It was quite easy to take these things."

Zavadsky's version has not been confirmed by Russian authorities, who have arrested him along with the couple's 25-year-old son, a St. Petersburg antiques dealer, and another man who may have organized the plot. Museum authorities want to know what role was played by the son, who worked as a courier at the Hermitage.

Zavadsky admits pawning some of the stolen items at St. Petersburg antiques shops, Mikhailova said. His wife also tried selling some of the artifacts to a St. Petersburg antiques dealer, police said.

The scale of the thefts and the relative ease with which they were carried out have triggered a torrent of criticism about lax security at Russian museums. Only a week after the Hermitage case was made public July 31, Russian authorities announced that drawings worth $1.3 million by Soviet Constructivist architect Yakov Chernikhov were missing from Moscow's State Archive of Literature and Art.

The crimes also reflect the culture of corruption that has seeped into every nook and cranny of post-Soviet Russian society, even the hallowed Hermitage.

"The climate today is one of money and temptation," Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the Hermitage, said in an interview. "People are now open to this kind of temptation, now that we live in a capitalistic society."

Every year, as many as 100 artifacts are stolen from Russian museums, mostly the result of insider theft, said Boris Boyarskov, chief of Rosokhrankultura, the agency responsible for safeguarding cultural heritage.

Early this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered top security officials to carry out an inventory of the 50 million artifacts and works of art at Russian museums.

Record-keeping poor

Antiquated record-keeping adds to the vulnerability of collections at museums, Boyarskov said. While museums around the world log artifacts on computer databases, none of the 58 museums under the jurisdiction of Russia's Culture Ministry has completed the transition to computerized inventory.

At the Hermitage, the move to computerized inventories began seven years ago, but only 153,000 of the museum's 2.8 million pieces have been logged, Boyarskov said. The rest are logged in handwriting in large, cumbersome ledgers. At the current rate, it would take the Hermitage 70 years to finish the transition to computers, Mikhail Shvydkoi, chief of Russia's federal cultural agency, said at a recent news conference.

Just as problematic is the lack of supervision over Russian museum curators, a job that garners great respect and trust in Russian society even if it doesn't yield a big paycheck. At the Hermitage, curators were given wide latitude. Zavadskaya was one of only four people who had access to the room where the stolen items were stored.

"When access is that tight, the curators rule. They can do whatever they want," Piotrovsky said. "We have always regarded the curator as a kind of holy person. Now we know that some of them are not so holy, so we'll have to control them."

Authorities say thefts of items from Zavadskaya's storeroom began as long ago as 1997, after Zavadskaya became a curator at the Hermitage.

Described by acquaintances as quiet and devoted to her work, Zavadskaya earned roughly $500 a month as a curator responsible for safeguarding 6,000 Hermitage pieces. She shared two rooms of a three-room communal apartment with her 54-year-old husband, who taught at a city university, their son, and her husband's parents, Mikhailova said.

The lawyer says Zavadskaya's husband said the thefts were motivated by the family's money troubles, which partly derived from bills for drugs Zavadskaya needed to treat diabetes and heart troubles. Russian media have also quoted unnamed police sources as saying that a former academic colleague of Zavadsky's now under arrest, Ivan Sobolev, 38, helped organize the thefts.

According to Mikhailova, Zavadsky took at least 50 of the pieces that his wife brought home and sold them at antiques shops in St. Petersburg, accepting $200 to $4,000 as payment. He never divulged their origin, telling shop owners that his wife had friends who wanted to sell the items. Zavadsky has confessed to his role in the thefts and is cooperating with investigators, Mikhailova said.

Authorities say it is difficult to imagine that the items did not raise eyebrows at St. Petersburg pawnshops and antiques dealers: a silver chalice rimmed with amethysts, a Russian Orthodox icon with aquamarines and pearls, a brown agate vase atop a silver stem in the shape of a tree trunk. The pieces date from the late 1600s to the 20th Century.

In October, as museum officials began a routine audit of the pieces under Zavadskaya's care, Zavadskaya came home from work in a panic, Mikhailova said. The next day at work, she collapsed at her desk and died of a heart attack.

Afterward, museum officials spent months scouring other storerooms and offices for the missing items. On July 31 they announced the disappearance of the 221 pieces and posted a list on the Hermitage's Web site.

A break in the case came Aug. 5, when a Moscow antiques dealer called police and said she had in her possession Item No. 60 on the list, a gilded silver chalice adorned with six-winged seraphs and enamel depictions of Christ, John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary. Russian newspapers reported that the information the dealer gave led to the Zavadskys and a St. Petersburg antiques dealer initially detained for questioning. That dealer was released from custody Tuesday.

Dumping the evidence

With the Hermitage case dominating headlines across Russia, some people in possession of stolen pieces appear eager to dump the items as quickly as possible.

The most valuable piece, a $200,000 icon known as the Assembly of All Saints, was found Aug. 3 in a trash bin near a St. Petersburg police station. The next week a 19th Century silver ladle and a silver Russian Orthodox cross were recovered near the entrance of the St. Petersburg branch of the Federal Security Service, Russia's successor agency to the KGB. Other pieces have been recovered from lockers at a St. Petersburg train station. In all, at least 24 items have been recovered.

Piotrovsky says there are facets to the case that still mystify him. Why steal 221 items when taking the most valuable pieces can fetch up to $200,000? Though Zavadskaya was a familiar face to Hermitage security guards, how could she get away with walking past them with a stashed chalice or icon for so many years?

And perhaps the most vexing question on Piotrovsky's mind: How could someone entrusted with Russia's cultural treasures commit such a flagrant act of betrayal?

"I can't understand," Piotrovsky said, "how a person who is a curator, a specialist in this kind of work, could do these kinds of things to a museum."

ajrodriguez@tribune.com

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Copyright (c) 2006, Chicago Tribune

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