Let’s discover together the fascinating and tragic story of the Romanov jewels after the Russian Revolution and the assassination of the imperial family. Some of these jewels, witnesses to a bygone era, survived the revolutionary upheavals and the end of Imperial Russia. But what became of these priceless objects after the fall of the Romanovs? How were they dispersed?
The Tsar and his immense fortune have always fascinated, and are still the subject of much research and controversy. The Romanovs, the reigning family, possessed an extraordinary treasure that reflected their power and the influence of imperial Russia. As proof of this, in 1913 Nicholas II organized a grand celebration to mark the Romanovs’ 300th anniversary, an anniversary he celebrated with great pomp by commissioning 2,000 objects from Fabergé for his guests. It is estimated that the Romanov fortune was worth around 55 billion dollars today.
However, war and revolution destroyed the Tsarist empire, the Romanovs were overthrown and assassinated, and their property was confiscated.
A veritable fortune disappeared, including gold, jewels and precious stones. What really happened to these priceless objects ?
Son of Tsar Alexander III, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Romanov was born on May 6, 1868 in Pushkin, Russia. Nicholas II became Emperor of All Russia in 1894 at the age of 26. He married Alix de Hesse-Darmchtat, who became Alexandra Fedorovna the same month. The couple had 5 children: Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexis.
The Tsar developed an expansionist policy that led him to support the Franco-Russian alliance and engage in a war against Japan.
Its failure increased popular protests, culminating in the 1905 Revolution. Nicholas II was forced to accept a liberal breakthrough in the form of a representative assembly, the Duma. However, this opening soon came to an end, and the Tsar dissolved the Duma and crushed the revolts.
During the First World War, the Russian army suffered heavy defeats, while the country was still in crisis. Starving and exhausted by the war, Russians organized general strikes and demonstrations in all the country’s major cities. In Petrograd, the capital, workers demanded the formation of a new government. The movement led to the abdication of the Tsar on March 15, 1917.
This marked the beginning of the Romanov family’s period of imprisonment. First at the Alexander Palace, then in Tobolsk, Siberia, still spared by the Bolsheviks. On July 31, 1917, they boarded two trains and moved into a house in the city, where they were allowed to roam as they pleased.
The imperial family then took refuge in a convent, entrusting part of their treasure to a nun who hid it first in a well, then in a cemetery. Encumbered by this heavy burden and in search of a new hiding place, she decided to share her secret with a fisherman friend, who reported her to the KGB, who then took possession of the treasure hidden in fish tanks in 1933, where they found numerous jewels and precious stones, including a diamond weighing almost 100 carats.
In 1918, the situation deteriorated with Lenin’s seizure of power, who wanted to eradicate the Romanovs without trial. In April, they were sent to Yekaterinburg, where they took up residence in the Ipatiev house. Detention conditions were extremely harsh, and the guards were violent and abusive.
When the Bolsheviks came to power, they needed money, and when they discovered many of the jewels stored in the Kremlin, they decided to put them up for sale, dismantling most of them. KGB archives have been found, detailing the inventory of the jewels.
You can read an article I recently wrote about the Romanov tiaras.
In Yekaterinburg, the Romanov family’s situation is seriously complicated. White Army troops were at the city gates to liberate the Tsar. Lenin decided to have the captives secretly executed.
On the evening of July 16, they were rounded up and told that Moscow required a photograph to prove their good health. As they took their places on the chairs, armed guards entered the room and fired, while a truck outside covered the sound of gunfire.
The Romanovs are no more, their treasures largely seized and dispersed, but what has become of their personal jewels ? The jewels that accompanied the family, their most intimate and easily transportable pieces ?
A handwritten list of the tsarina’s jewels was drawn up during her captivity, including enormous diamonds that were to ensure the family’s financial survival in the event of exile from Russia. What became of them ?
The execution of the Romanovs took place in the greatest secrecy, with no one knowing about it and the affair being hushed up. However, there are testimonies from the soldiers in the firing squad. They reported that the bullets ricocheted off the Tsar’s daughters without wounding them, forcing them to be executed with knives. When they took a closer look, their corsets were filled with jewels and precious stones, as were the linings of their dresses. Huge diamonds were bathed in blood. However, the trace of these last is lost and their fate is unknown to this day.
But is it really the whole treasure ?
It’s highly unlikely …
One theory I find particularly interesting is that the Romanovs’ most precious possessions were actually in England, in the possession of the royal family.
In fact, Nicholas II was a cousin of King George V, to whom he was very close. They spent their childhood vacations together, and even nicknamed each other “Georgie and Nicky”. Not to mention that his wife Alix de Hesse-Darmstadt, better known as Alexandra Feodorovna, was Queen Victoria’s favorite granddaughter.
What could be more natural than to ask George V for help when they felt in mortal danger ? What could be more natural than to send one’s most prized possessions to safety in times of crisis ?
But the King, fearing that England’s reputation – then at war with Germany – would be tarnished, refused to help.
After the assassination of part of the Romanov family, a Royal Navy warship exiles the remaining members (including the Tsar’s mother) from Yalta. The vice-admiral remembers wooden crates being secretly loaded aboard the ship. The trail ends here.
There’s a very interesting book on the life of Daniel Wildenstein, one of the world’s leading art dealers. And it was after recently re-reading it that I decided to make this video.
Daniel Wildenstein, who was compiling the catalog raisonné of Jacques-Louis David, learned that a missing painting might be in the royal family’s collection. He enlisted the help of Prince Charles and set out to find the painting at Balmoral Castle, in the vast cellars.
During the search, the art dealer is struck by the presence of dozens of closed wooden crates marked with inscriptions in Russian.
When he asked about the origin and nature of the contents of the boxes, the prince told him only that they were the treasure of Nicholas II, with no further details…
Decades later, two Windsor Castle employees came forward to testify that they too had seen wooden crates stamped with the Russian imperial seal in the cellars. Crates that had apparently been moved from Balmoral Castle.
We’ll probably never know more about these famous crates, which will remain hidden for years to come…
As for the rest of the treasure, it’s like an immense jigsaw puzzle that has been assembled through auctions and inheritance.
Although a large part of the treasure seized in 1918 was sold by the Bolsheviks without any real inventory, the first catalogued auction took place in 1927 at Christie’s in London, where 124 pieces were offered for sale, including Maria Fiodorvna’s tiara designed by Carl Bolin, “The Beauty of Russia”, which sold for 6,000 pounds, or almost a million euros today, to the jeweller Holmes & Co. The jewels are scattered all over the world. For example, the tiara ended up in the Marcos family vaults in the Philippines.
Traces of the jewels can be found in the United States, for example, in the necklace of Empress Catherine the Great, which consisted of 389 natural pearls. After the Revolution, the necklace found its way to Cartier, who then sold it to American automobile magnate Horace Dodge. Horace’s five grandchildren then shared the inheritance, each receiving a strand of pearls. In 2018, three strands of pearls reunited with a Cartier diamond buckle were sold at auction in New York to a private owner for $1.1 million.
Or the incredible set of sapphires worn by Maria Feodorovna, the mother of Nicolas II. The largest of these, weighing over 200 carats, also found its way to the New York workshop of Maison Cartier in 1928, who then sold it to opera singer Ganna Walska. In 1971, the diva decided to sell her jewelry, and after a series of owners, the sapphire returned to Cartier. In 2015 the Maison decided to create a bracelet from this sapphire, which they called the Romanov bracelet.
There’s also the Vladimir tiara, commissioned for Maria Pavlovna in the 1870s by Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich. The diadem consists of 15 diamond rings with pearl pendants in the center of each. Maria Pavlovna, who managed to flee Russia, didn’t part with it until her death in 1920, bequeathing it to her daughter Hélène. The latter sold it only a year later to British queen Mary de Teck, to solve her financial problems.
You can read an article I recently wrote about the Romanov tiaras.
In 2004 in New York, an incredible collection of objects, including nine eggs all signed by Fabergé from the collection of Malcolm Forbes, appeared at the Sotheby’s auction and fetched almost $100 million.
Created in 1897, the Coronation Egg was made for Tsarina Alexandra Fedorovna. The egg is made of gold with a translucent yellow-green enamel, a reference to the gold dress worn by the Tsarina at her coronation. Inside is a replica of the carriage that drove Tsarina Alexandra to her coronation.
The lily of the valley egg was designed in 1898 and was also a gift from the Tsar to his wife. It is composed of fine pearls, rubies, diamonds, gold and enamel. It conceals a portrait of the Tsar and his two eldest daughters.
In London 2007, a Fabergé egg dated 1902 appeared at Christie’s from the Rotshild collection and sold for £9 million. This is a historic sum for a Fabergé egg acquired by Alexander Ivanov, a Russian businessman who is recognized as one of the world’s leading collectors of Fabergé objects. In 2013, he will open a museum dedicated to the jeweler in Baden Baden, bringing together almost 1,000 pieces.
In 2010 at Christie’s, this magnificent enamelled box with a miniature of Tsar Nicholas II in a diamond setting sold for almost a million pounds.
In 2019 at Christie’s, an impressive 75-carat re-cut emerald belonging to Empress Catherine II of Russia sold for 3.8 million euros.
But even if the majority of the pieces from the imperial treasure were dispersed by the Bolsheviks, some were miraculously spared and preserved by the country. Among the pieces in the Kremlin Diamond Fund are :
The Russian Imperial Crown, also known as the Great Imperial Crown, was the main symbol of power for Russian monarchs and the main imperial attribute between 1762 and 1917. It was worn by all the country’s sovereigns, from Catherine II to Nicholas II. Created by court jeweler George Friedrich Eckart and diamond artisan Jeremiah Posier, it is adorned with no fewer than 4,936 diamonds (a total of 2,858 carats), 75 large Indian matte pearls and a 398.72-carat spinel. Today, it is kept under lock and key in the Diamond Fund collection in the Moscow Kremlin, and is not accessible to the public, as its value is simply too high to risk. To showcase the splendor of this crown, however, a replica was made in 2012 for around a billion rubles (13.22 million euros) and has been exhibited throughout Russia and beyond.
The tiara (kokochnik) that belonged to Paul I’s wife, Empress Maria Fyodorovna. Probably the only original tiara in Russia, it survived the Revolution and is now an important piece in the Fund’s collection. It is set with diamonds, including a 13-carat pink diamond.
Catherine II’s “Caesar’s Ruby” pendant features a dark pink tourmaline, long mistaken for a ruby (the expertise was carried out in Soviet times). The stone was given as a gift to Catherine the Great (1729-1796) in 1777 by King Gustav III of Sweden in honor of the 15th anniversary of her reign, Gustav having told her the legend that Cleopatra had given it to Caesar. It was later revealed that the stone had arrived in Europe from Burma in the 16th century, and was still considered the largest ruby in Europe in Catherine II’s time. The empress didn’t want to damage it by cutting, so court jewelers simply polished it and decorated it with enamel leaves.
The Diamond Fund also houses a gold bracelet set with an Indian-cut diamond – the largest known. These diamonds are known as portrait diamonds, as colored miniatures were usually placed underneath – in this case, a portrait of Emperor Alexander I.
Another important piece is the imperial scepter made in the 18th century for Empress Catherine II, set with the Orlov diamond from the Golconde mines, weighing 189 carats.
The world's most famous diamonds
To this day, the Romanovs’ treasure remains a mystery. The puzzle remains partly unsolved, and many pieces have yet to be discovered.
