It was astonishing to think of the worth housed in just that one building alone. But I swallowed the thought, curbing my desire to offer such an observation. “What is this?” I asked, pointing toward the nearest object, amazed that I would be able to reach out and touch it if I were so inclined.
Polina waved one of the workers over, and he offered his answer as he took it in his grimy fingers and handled it—too roughly, I noted—like a pound of meat for sale on the butcher’s block. Polina translated his disinterested answer to me: “An ashtray of diamond and lapis lazuli. It belonged to Prince Yusupov. He married a Romanov princess, and then he killed the charlatan Rasputin. Much to the dismay of the last tsarina, that…Alexandra.” Polina spat as she finished speaking, the names of a murdered cleric and queen too sour on her tongue.
A chill ran through my body. Of course we Americans knew of the lore of Rasputin, rumored sorcerer and healer, much-maligned adviser to the final tsarina who, desperate to keep her hemophiliac son and heir, Alexei, alive, had allowed the mystic complete run of the imperial court.
“And this?” I made my way slowly, reverently, toward the nearest aisle, noting that there were thousands of pieces to examine; had I weeks to study each object, I still don’t think I would have made it through the entire warehouse. And this was just one such building on the outskirts of Moscow.
“This was Catherine’s tea set,” Polina answered, referring to the revered Russian empress we in the West knew as Catherine the Great. “Ah, and this inkwell is made of diamond and amethyst. It was a gift from Catherine to one of her lovers, Grigory Potemkin. The woman was a notorious whore.”
I nearly grimaced at the irreverence, at all of it. The way Polina spoke about her former rulers, rulers who, just a couple of decades prior, had been considered God’s anointed vessels on earth.
“You want?” Polina asked, picking up one of the empress’s teacups in her bare hands.
My mouth fell open. “Are…are you serious?”
“Yes,” she answered, shrugging.
“How much?” I asked, still incredulous.
She handed the cup, once the personal possession of the world’s most powerful woman, to the worker with a hasty Russian order. He weighed the cup nearby on a rusty scale that looked like something we would have used in one of our warehouses back home to weigh our livestock feed.
“You pay per gram,” Polina told me. “One ruble, one gram.”
“That’s…that’s all there is to it?” I asked, my tone no longer casual or indifferent, in spite of my best efforts.
Polina eyed me with a quizzical expression, answering: “Of course. We weigh it, we get price. Why would it be otherwise?” she asked, her voice flat.
Because of the history. The artistic mastery. The imperial provenance. But apparently to Polina Molotova and those of her ruling party, onetime ownership by an empress did nothing to add value; if anything, it took away from an object.
“We Russians know that these baubles are useless,” Polina said, apparently guessing my thoughts. “The Romanovs were surrounded by jewels, and what good did it do them? Or any of us?” She looked around and shrugged again, as if to prove how little it all meant. “But if you think these things are impressive, we can look at more. The Kremlin has rooms and rooms filled. And all the old palaces now belong to the State. My Vyacheslav can get us in. We need to get rid of the stuff. I’ll take you.”
They needed our money, I realized. And they knew that these treasures would be impressive to us, seeing our sentimentalism, our capitalist inclination toward the unique and material, as a vein of weakness, one of the fatal flaws that would eventually bring about our undoing. But if they were willing to part with these treasures, then I was willing to buy them.
I blinked, stunned, as we stepped out of the dim warehouse and back into the mild sunshine. Clutching my set of priceless Romanov teacups in my hands, I walked with Polina toward the waiting car, feeling as though at any minute some guard would emerge from the warehouse and demand that I return these relics, insisting that there was no way I could simply pay a few dollars and take Catherine the Great’s personal treasure home with me. But no one did. No one stopped me. And so, I decided, I wanted more.
* * *
—
As punishing as the Russian winter had been, spring burst across the city in equal measure, the larch and willow trees erupting in leaf, the Moskva River rising as the final floes of ice melted, the red tulips and purple lilacs cheering the city with their perfume and vibrant color. As the days grew longer and milder, I settled into a pleasant enough rhythm. Every morning I would walk a route past the Kremlin and along the Moskva. The people, I noticed, looked different in the spring as well, thawing like the earth beneath the gentle sunshine. Children laughed, their pale cheeks turning rosy. Some pedestrians even greeted me with fleeting smiles.