Romania demands the return its gold reserves transferred to Russia in 1916

Gennady Charodeyev

Russian Ambassador to Romania Valery Kuzmin was summoned to the country's Foreign Ministry after his statement that the problem of the Romanian "gold reserve" transferred to Moscow during the First World War was removed from the agenda. The Romanians were outraged. They explained to the ambassador that the joint Romanian-Russian public commission continues to work, dealing, among other things, with the issue of the return of gold. Valery Kuzmin, in turn, promised to bring the information to official Moscow.

On Smolenskaya Square, NI was confidently stated that such a problem does not exist.

The Spaniards never remembered their gold

Historian, Ph.D. Boris Ovsyannikov told NI that Russia has enough unsettled "golden" problems inherited from the Bolsheviks even without Romania. For example, the fate of about a third of the “gold reserve” of the Russian Empire, the so-called “Kolchak’s” gold, exported to Japan and Manchuria after the defeat of Kolchak’s army in 1919, has not yet been clarified.

Warsaw claims that in the 1940s, about a third of the stock of the "yellow" metal of pre-war Poland went to Moscow after the annexation of Western Ukraine, Western Belarus and the Vilnius region to the USSR.

Serb monarchists made big claims after the capture of Yugoslavia by Germany and Italy. In particular, they claimed that a week before the fascist aggression in the spring of 1941, the then leader of the country, General Dušan Simović , allegedly handed over to Stalin about 70% of the Yugoslav "gold reserve" for storage.

It was rumored that Khrushchev in the early 1960s paid off in full with the then leader of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito.

There is also a story with the "gold reserves" of Spain (about 40 tons), which in 1936 was taken to Moscow and, by order of Stalin, "frozen" on the eve of the capture of Madrid by the Francoists. Thus, Spain was forced to pay for the generous Soviet military assistance. One of the initiators of the evacuation of gold was Dolores Ibarruri , who led the Spanish Communist Party.

According to the historian Ovsyannikov, over the past 80 years, the Spaniards have never thought about their gold. Even General Franco did not raise this topic, apparently, the dictator did not like and was afraid of the Communists to such an extent.

Trotsky wanted to give gold to the Romanian proletariat

In the summer of 1916, Romania entered World War I on the side of the Entente. But the events of the following months showed that this decision was, to put it mildly, reckless. Being geographically "sandwiched" between opponents - Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria - Romania had no chance to hold the front.

In the autumn of 1916, the main part of the country - Wallachia was occupied by the Germans and their allies. Only the historical region of Moldova in the north-east of the country remained under the control of the authorities.

The king, parliament and government, writes Golden Front, fled to the city of Iasi. To save the remnants of the Romanian statehood, Nicholas II sent half a million troops to the Danube.

The risk of a German invasion of Iasi forced the National Bank of Romania to think about the safety of the "gold reserve" of the country. The first train loaded with gold was sent to Moscow in December 1916.

After the February Revolution, confusion and vacillation set in at the front, so the Romanians accelerated the evacuation of valuables. The second echelon set off on July 27, 1917. Through the whole of Russia, engulfed in unrest, 93.5 tons of gold bars were miraculously transported. According to the documents, this property belonged to the royal family, the Romanian Jewish community, and Marmorosh Bank.

“In addition to gold, jewelry, paintings, ancient icons and books, archives of the Romanian Academy and the royal family, deposits of the National Bank, as well as property of monasteries and some private individuals were sent to Moscow”, - historian and writer Tatyana Pokivailova told reporters.

According to experts, the cost of the second tier amounted to a total of about 6 billion dollars. It is possible that some of the valuables "disappeared" along the way. But the bulk of the cargo reached Moscow on August 3, 1917. The gold was immediately placed in the storerooms of the Kremlin's Diamond Fund.

After the Bolsheviks, headed by Lenin and Trotsky, came to power in Russia, relations between Petrograd and Bucharest deteriorated sharply. On December 7, 1917, Romanian troops illegally entered Bessarabia. And on January 13, 1918, the Council of People's Commissars issued a decree on breaking off diplomatic relations with Romania.

Lenin and his associates declared the Kingdom's gold fund "inviolable for the Romanian oligarchy" and promised to transfer it to the Romanian people.

According to Leon Trotsky, the Romanian proletariat and army had to throw off the yoke of the oligarchs. But these hopes of the Communists did not come true. The "Romanian-Bessarabian socialist government of the Soviets", to which the Bolsheviks Chicherin and Ornatsky proposed to give gold, did not last long.

The further fate of the gold reserves of Romania has not really been clarified.

Gold Can Evaporate Too

In 1923-1924, an inventory was carried out in the Kremlin for the first time, during which an amazing fact was revealed. The locks of the vaults were not broken, no one damaged the seals. But Romanian gold has definitely evaporated, according to Golden Front. Instead, a lot of frank trash was found - moth-eaten fur coats, paper blanks for banknotes and even aluminum spoons.

According to another version, the Romanian ambassador Constantin Diamandi turned to British agents Joseph Boyle and George Hill for help. In December 1917, they allegedly managed to take the gold back to Iasi. But Romanian historians believe that in the summer of 1918 the Bolsheviks sent valuables to Kazan. Having fallen into the hands of the Supreme Ruler of Russia, Admiral Kolchak, the gold was “lost” in the fire of the Civil War.

In addition, the amount of 10 million rubles taken from the funds could be spent on “financing the Romanian revolution” - there is a corresponding decree of the Council of People's Commissars of January 19, 1918. Moscow was reimbursed for expenses from the "Romanian wallet".

Stalin returned to the Romanians some of the values?

The Romanians never forgot about the property taken to Moscow. Some of the art treasures and papers from the archives were returned by the Stalinist regime to Bucharest in 1934-1935. But the "golden question" was not touched upon then. It was raised after the Second World War by the government of socialist Romania. Bucharest's argument was "indestructible" - since the Romanian people overthrew the "oligarchs", they received the right to the gold fund promised by Lenin.

Moscow was not particularly eager to pay off its ally. But in 1956, the USSR, by order of Nikita Khrushchev, handed over to Romania a collection of paintings and only 33 kg of gold.

The Secretary General of the Romanian Communist Party, Nicolae Ceausescu , was well acquainted with the history of the disappearance of the “gold reserve” no. Every now and then he pestered Leonid Brezhnev with the question: when will you return? Instead, Soviet diplomats reminded the Romanians of their debts accumulated during the First World War. Property claims were proposed to be settled in the manner of mutual settlements.

After the collapse of the USSR, Romania again demanded the transfer of gold. But in 2008, Bucharest received a purely symbolic amount from Moscow - 12 gold coins with a total weight of 77 grams.

The presidents want to figure it out

The last meeting of the bilateral commission, created by the decision of the two presidents - Vladimir Putin and Ion Iliescu, was held in Moscow in 2019, it was devoted to studying the mechanism and procedure for the return of valuables to Romania in 1936 and 1956. But the Romanians demand their own.

“When we talk about our gold, we are talking mainly about the gold of the Romanian National Bank. There are all the documents on this score, they were handed over to the Russian side, and the Russians, as far as I know, agreed that these documents are originals. The purpose of the commission is to follow the fate of gold according to documents. The main thing is the fact that the "gold reserve" was transferred to Moscow. This refers not only to the metal part, which totals about 90 tons, but also to other cultural and property assets”, - said a member of the commission from the Romanian side, historian Vasile Buga.

According to the expert community, the Kremlin's intransigence can be easily explained: Romanian gold has long since disappeared from the Diamond Fund. It is quite possible that it was plundered during the Civil War, or Stalin allowed it to rise in the Soviet military industry, and, perhaps, Khrushchev - for collective farms or corn.