Putin opposes restitution of Soviet confiscated property

File Photo of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin

(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Aleksandras Budrys – February 20, 2013)

Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the country should not return cultural property confiscated by Bolshevik and Soviet authorities after the 1917 revolution to its previous owners.

“If we now agree that such property of the Russian state will be transferred to someone, we will open a Pandora’s box. I’m not saying now whether the Soviet government was right or wrong after the revolution of 1917 when it nationalized huge amounts of property, but nearly 100 years has passed, and we live taking this reality into account,” he said late on Tuesday.

Putin chaired a meeting of the Presidential Council for Interethnic Relations held in Moscow’s Jewish Museum.

Putin said that if Russia were to begin satisfying such claims to confiscated property, they could prove endless and where they would lead is unclear.

“Maybe, someday, we will be able to do this, but now, in my view, we are absolutely unprepared for it. It’s impossible,” he said.

Putin also suggested moving a collection of Jewish religious texts from the archive of Moscow’s Lenin Library to the building of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow.

Since 1991, leaders of a Brooklyn-based Orthodox Jewish movement have been trying to regain possession of the so-called Schneerson Library, one of the main Jewish religious relics.

A member of the Jewish center’s board of trustees, tycoon Viktor Vekselberg, said the center was ready to accept and house the collection.

The Schneerson Library is a collection of books and religious manuscripts assembled by the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement in Belarus over two centuries prior to World War II.

Putin said that, according to the law, the library does not belong to any religious group and is property of the Russian state. From the legal point of view, the library consists of two parts. The first part was nationalized by the Soviet government after the 1917 revolution, while the second, containing about 25,000 pages of manuscripts, was taken out of the Soviet Union by its owner, fell into the hands of the Nazis and was later seized by the Red Army as a war trophy.

In January, a US court imposed a $50,000 a day fine on Russia for failing to comply with an earlier order to hand over religious texts from the Schneerson collection to the US Hasidic community.

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