Europe continues to try to confiscate frozen Russian assets in order to use them to support Ukraine. A hundred years ago, Europeans were already taking away from Soviet Russia the tsarist gold that remained in the West. RTVI tells how it happened and what it led to.
What does $300 billion in cash look like? In standard bank packages of $100, such a mass of money weighs 3 thousand tons. Alexey Ulyukaev, as Minister of Economic Development, received a bribe of $2 million in 2016, which, albeit with difficulty, fit into a large sports bag.
And 300 billion dollars is a cargo ship already filled to the brim with banknotes. If we convert this amount into gold, which has risen in price greatly over the year, it will be approximately 190 thousand standard 12-kilogram bars or two full shipping containers.
We are talking about frozen Russian assets worth $300 billion, which the European Commission has been trying to “seize” since 2022. And on November 26, the head of the commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said that the EC had already prepared a “legal text” on their use. The day before, all EU countries except Hungary, as well as members of the “coalition of the willing” – Great Britain, Norway, Turkey, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan – spoke in favor of the withdrawal.
Ursula von der Leyen
European Union
Von der Leyen did not hide her ultimate goal – to “fully use” frozen assets to support Ukraine. It would seem that this is a gross violation of international law and an unprecedented world-class crime – even the new Russian history textbooks for 11th grades talk about this.
The same textbooks mention how Europe already seized Russian assets a century ago. After the October Revolution of 1917, Western countries, taking advantage of the Bolsheviks’ refusal to pay tsarist debts, actually nationalized the huge financial assets of the Russian Empire and the Provisional Government located in Europe and America, including hundreds of tons of Russian gold.
Britannia. Alien Treasure Island
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In the autumn of 1914, two British ships set out from Arkhangelsk for Liverpool under cover of darkness. Russian gold was sailing to England: the first voyage – almost 60 tons. At modern exchange rates, this is about 644 billion rubles.
It is symbolic that the cruiser that accompanied ships with such valuable cargo bore the name of the most famous pirate in British history – Francis Drake. True, this “drake” produced much more gold in just one trip than a real pirate in all the years of serving the crown.
And there will be four more golden flights. As a result, by 1917 the Bank of England would have more than 500 tons of Russian gold. At today’s exchange rate, this is more than 5.3 trillion rubles.
At that time, the First World War was going on, which broke out back in 1914. Almost immediately after the outbreak of hostilities, a shell famine broke out in Russia; the industry could not cope with military orders; it was necessary to seek help in matters of supplying weapons and ammunition. Russia was then a member of the Entente (L’entante cordiale translated from French as “cordial agreement”) – an alliance with France and England against Germany and Austria.
The Allies, of course, agreed. And help, and make decent money from it. In particular, Britain issued loans to Russia for British-made weapons. That is, the British paid themselves for conventional rifles, which they would then send to the Russians. London demanded Russian gold as collateral for future repayment of these war loans. So gold reserves with the royal eagle on bars flowed first to Britain, and then to the USA and Japan.
Lenin’s arrival at the Finlyandsky Station in St. Petersburg, March, 1917
TASS
In October 1917, the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, came to power in Russia. One of the first decrees of the new government canceled all royal debts to the allies. Then the “offended” British kept the pledged gold for themselves.
There’s just one nuance: Britain then didn’t fulfill even 5% of the entire military order, and kept everything of the pledged gold. Russian assets were frozen: the British government simply refused to return the gold to the “illegitimate”, in their opinion, Bolsheviks. The precious metal was melted down and integrated into the British stockpile.
Then, after the final victory of the Reds in Russia in 1920, former allies – England and France – tried to use Russian gold as a lever of pressure and blackmail on the young Soviet Republic. But even after Britain officially recognized the USSR, the situation with gold was not resolved for a very long time, until in July 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher documented the settlement of Russia’s old tsarist debts to England.
The conditions were as follows: 498 tons of gold exported to Britain before 1917 were officially left to London. In response, the British withdrew claims on loans to the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, issued during industrialization before January 1, 1939.
However, in addition to 500 tons of gold from the Russian state budget, after 1917, England still had 5.5 tons of personal gold of Nicholas II and some “other valuables.” These funds – under the same agreement between Gorbachev and Thatcher – also remained in Britain. They decided to spend them on “repaying debts to British citizens who suffered financial losses as a result of the events of 1917.”
There were about 36 thousand such victims, and the total amount of claims was more than $800 billion. For example, royal gold was used to pay for the luggage of a certain Englishman, which contained four boxes of sardines, 3 unused concert tickets and an opera subscription. The largest payment was £900,000, and the smallest was £3.63. This modest amount was compensation for a deposit of 127 royal rubles lost in one of the banks in Petrograd.
True, who should pay for the damage caused by the British invaders in 1918-1919 to Soviet Russia is still an open question.
France. Golden baguette of reparations
The French at the beginning of the 20th century did much the same as the British. If in 1914 they begged the Russians to save Paris from the advancing Germans, and then tearfully thanked them for this, then in 1917 their rhetoric changed dramatically
Firstly, the entire economy of France before the First World War was essentially supported by credit from Russia. Paris borrowed from ordinary Frenchmen at a low interest rate and gave all this money to St. Petersburg at a higher interest rate, making money on the difference.
Moreover, French banks (including the Banque de France) stored gold from the Russian Empire worth 3.573 billion francs. And according to the British scheme, after the October Revolution in Russia, France froze all these funds.
And secondly, Paris took for itself not only imperial, but also Soviet gold. In the spring and summer of 1918, Soviet Russia, which emerged from the First World War and signed a separate peace with the Germans, sent about 93 tons of gold to Germany as reparations. At today’s exchange rate, this is about 998 billion rubles.
But in November 18, the Germans lost the war, and the Soviet gold that arrived in Germany was taken from the Germans by the French as reparations. Moreover, knowing full well whose gold it was originally.
In the end, approximately 6.2 tons were sent under the treaty of alliance from Paris to London, while the remaining 87 tons remained in France. Moreover, 80 years later, in 1996, Russia paid France $400 million on pre-revolutionary bond debts. And the French side, in turn, did not take into account in these payments the cost of that very gold, which at that time was estimated at more than 1.1 billion dollars – that is, almost 3 times more than the amount of the debt paid.
USA. 50 tons of pure theft
Alexander Manzyuk / Kommersant
America also had a hand in the confiscation of Russian gold. True, as in the case of modern reserves of the Russian Federation, then the United States received only a small part.
In March 1917, the tsar signed an abdication, and Russia began to be ruled (though not for long) by the liberal Provisional Government. And if the United States did not want to have anything to do with the Tsar (public opinion in America was against the Russian autocracy) and did not provide loans for weapons, then after the victory of the February Revolution, Washington decided to make up for lost time.
In the summer of the same year, 50.7 tons of Russian gold sailed from already democratic Petrograd along the Trans-Siberian Railway, and then through Vladivostok, Japan and the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco. Again, as a guarantee of future military supplies.
And it all happened again. After the October Revolution, America, like Britain and France, froze Russian gold as the property of the “legitimate Russian government” – that is, the Provisional Government, recognized by the United States (by the way, America was the first country to recognize it in March 1917). This status of Russian gold in the States remained for 16 years until 1933, when the United States finally recognized Soviet power as legitimate and the USSR as a state.
But the gold was still not returned. As part of the settlement of US claims in the same 1933, these 50 tons were counted against the debts of the Provisional Government and compensation to American companies nationalized by the Bolsheviks.
Japan. Expropriation Samurai Style
“We have all the necessary documents to demand the return of our gold from Japan!” — exactly 30 years ago, in 1996, these words were spoken from the rostrum of the State Duma of the Russian Federation.
We are talking about two financial agreements signed a hundred years ago, in October 1919. According to them, Japan provided the white government of Alexander Kolchak with a loan for the purchase of weapons secured by approximately 60 tons of gold – as the first royal tranche to Britain. In modern terms, this is more than 644 billion rubles.
Kolchak, based in Omsk, needed military supplies, since all military factories were located on Red territory. Japan, as the closest – at least territorially – ally, became the main partner of the Supreme Ruler of Russia (this was the title the admiral bore).
Both Nicholas II in London and Kolchak in Tokyo sent collateral gold to obtain a loan for the supply of weapons. The main channel was Yokohama Specie Bank, the only Japanese bank at that time that had the right to operate in foreign currency.
But, although Japan took the gold, it was in no hurry to deliver the promised rifles. As a result, by February 1920, when Kolchak was shot, the Whites had not received a single rifle from Japan. However, Tokyo kept all the gold for itself. And not only the already mentioned 60 tons.
So on the night of January 29-30, 1920, a week before Kolchak’s death, Lieutenant General of his army Sergei Rozanov and his detachment took 55 tons of gold from the Vladivostok branch of the State Bank to load them onto the cruiser Hizen and deliver them to Japan. On February 13, 1920, Colonel Savitsky handed over more than 600 kg of gold against receipt to the Japanese Colonel Suga. A couple of weeks later, Ataman Semenov handed over 143 boxes of gold to Japanese Colonel Kurosawa.
At the end of the same 1920, the former chief of logistics of Kolchak’s army, General Petrov, gave another 22 boxes of gold “for temporary storage” to the head of the Japanese secret service agency in Transbaikalia, Colonel Isoome.
General Podtyagin gave the Japanese another one and a half million rubles in gold, and Karl Miller, an agent of the Tsarist Ministry of Finance, 10 million. All Russian precious metal in Japan was melted down and integrated into the reserves of the Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi, the successor of the above-mentioned Yokohama Specie Bank. Soviet Russia tried to return the gold in the 1920s, but Japan denied its presence.
After Japan’s defeat in World War II, only 50 tons remained of Japan’s 600 tons of gold reserves (which included at least 10% Russian gold). The rest was spent on fighting the war and purchasing oil, and the Americans took the rest for themselves.
Yu_photo / Adobe Stock
In 2004, the Russian Foreign Ministry officially requested 22 boxes (minimum 15 tons) of gold from the Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi. Japan recognized the storage, but still refused to return the funds
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The historical parallel of the situation with “nationalized” gold and other assets of the Russian Empire and the current attempt to “withdraw” the reserves of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation frozen in the EU and the USA demonstrate a universal truth: in moments of crisis, the rule of the strong and “political expediency” take precedence over international law.
But there is a fundamental difference. A century ago, the West was dealing with a country devastated by the First World War and the Civil War without a normal army, and today the Russian Federation is a nuclear power with one of the most powerful armed forces in the world. And the consequences of a full-scale confiscation of Russian ones today will be incomparably more destructive for Europe than a century ago.
