Under a 1997 Russian law on valuable items displaced in WWII, everything taken out of Germany and other countries during the war and shortly afterward is viewed as legal compensation for the cultural losses the Soviet Union suffered from the Nazis. But some European nations, including Germany, said the treasures were war trophies and had to be returned.
"There will be no restitution as such," Culture Minister Alexander Sokolov said. "We are talking about so-called compensatory restitution."
Sokolov said restitution had already taken place, when cultural artifacts transported from Soviet museums in the war years to Germany were returned immediately after 1945. He added that the two countries were discussing compensatory restitution, which meant compensating for valuables lost in Germany with German cultural items equal in value.
In June 2005, Anatoly Vilkov, deputy director of the Federal Cultural Heritage Service, said the overwhelming majority of earlier "displaced valuables" - 1,830,000 works of art, archives and books - had been taken back to eastern Germany in the 1950s.
Vilkov said 247,000 artworks, 255,000 archives and more than a million books remained in Russia's federal property.
In summer 2002, Russia returned 111 stained glass windows from the 14th century Church of St. Mary (Marienkirche) in eastern Germany, and Russian officials said in April that another six windows discovered in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow would also be given back to Germany.
Another valuable, the Baldin collection, seized by the Soviet Union at the end of WWII, has provoked more controversy in relations between Russia and Germany in recent years.
The collection - taken by Captain Viktor Baldin from the basement of a German castle and brought to the Soviet Union - includes 364 works from the 16th-20th centuries by artists including Titian, Rembrandt, Durer, Rubens, Delacroix, Boucher, Corot, Manet, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec.
In 1991, the collection was transferred to the Soviet Culture Ministry, then headed by Nikolai Gubenko, who was against returning any cultural treasures. The collection was given to St. Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum, which put it on display and published a catalogue.
A year later the state commission on restitution of cultural treasures decided to return the Baldin part of the Bremen Kunsthalle's collection to the German government.
Then-culture minister Mikhail Shvydkoi set a deadline of March 29, 2003, for returning the collection. However, a group of self-styled "patriots" led by Gubenko managed to block the deal.
Vilkov said that Russia had no right to keep the collection because Baldin, did not own the collection under the law when he donated it.
Minister Sokolov said in May that negotiations with his German counterpart in Tomsk in April had brought no result, and added that experts were now handling the matter.
In July, Sokolov said there would be no massive return of "displaced valuables" to Germany.
