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Commission Can’t Find Museum Pieces
After spending two years inspecting museums, a government commission has announced that 50,000 cultural valuables are missing, Interfax reports, citing Interior Ministry criminal investigation department spokesman Ilya Ryasny. Ryasny said the commission has inspected about 80 percent of Russia’s 2000 museums. The process is continuing in large federal museums, the State Historical Museum and the Hermitage, which have about 7 million pieces on exhibit or in storage. Ryasny said some of the missing pieces were lost during moves or given to other museums without proper recordkeeping.
The government commission will complete its work this year. Ryasny says that the quality of recordkeeping at the museums is poor. There are photographs of less than 2 million of the 80 million objects in Russian museums and descriptions of the objects are often limited to a single word. That significantly complicates the recovery and identification of stolen or lost items.
The Interior Ministry has record of 60,000 historical items stolen in the last 18 years. They include 40,000 icons, 3500 paintings, 4700 coins, 3200 medals, 2100 religious objects, 1600 rare books and 326 unique pieces of jewelry. Some of the items discovered to be missing by the government commission have already been added to that database. The commission began its work in August 2006 after the discovery of massive stealing from Hermitage storage areas.
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