This war isn’t about the future. It’s about the past—and a fictional one, at that.
In September, as Kyiv braced for another winter of Russian attacks and the West scoured the world for fighter jets, air defenses, and, most importantly, money to finance Ukraine’s existential battle, an unusual weapons transfer took place in D.C.
In a modest ceremony at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, D.C., the U.S. Customs and Border Protection transferred three swords and a stone axe of Ukrainian origin—some believed to be more than 3,000 years old—that it confiscated at J.F.K. Airport, in New York, last year.
Most of these items came from Russia, but the size of the shipment indicated a private initiative: possibly, the result of a Russian soldier taking things from a Ukrainian museum and selling them to a buyer in Russia who, in turn, tried to export the items to the U.S.
These weapons represented a tiny part of what’s been called the greatest museum heist so far in the 21st century—Moscow’s plunder of Ukrainian museums, art collections, and archaeological sites. A soldier might have taken a sword, but someone else had to have taken the rest of an exhibition. Predictably, the people at the core of Moscow’s effort to rob Ukraine of its heritage have never held a gun.
When I studied history at St. Petersburg State University, a Russian institution of higher learning whose alumni include, among others, Vladimir Putin and Ayn Rand, there were two types of students: those who survived on a couple of hundred dollars a month and those who managed to turn history into profit. The latter, utilizing their excellent knowledge of the many battles of the Second World War that took place in the region, scoured forests, fields, and lakes for weapons and military insignia to sell on the black market. They were known as dark archaeologists. There was always a buyer for W.W. II artifacts: guns—restored to working order and impossible to trace—went to the Mob, while military insignia, especially that of elite SS divisions, was prized by collectors.
Dark archaeology was such a widespread phenomenon that one of Putin’s first W.W. II-propaganda films, We Are from the Future, was about a fictional group of dark archaeologists from my alma mater—two neo-Nazis, a rapper, and a pothead—who dig up the wrong trench and get transported straight into the Battle of Leningrad.
These weapons represented a tiny part of what’s been called the greatest museum heist in the 21st century.
There, they fight alongside the very Soviet troops whose skeletons they were sifting through in the future and realize that dying in the name of the motherland outweighs hip-hop, neo-Nazism, and weed—the holy trinity of Russian teens in the 2000s. When the group travels back from Stalin’s time to Putin’s, they sand off their swastika tattoos and promise to give up grave-digging for good. In real life, however, dark archaeology became a policy of the Russian state and one of the pillars of “Russian world”—the country’s Fascist ideology. At the heart of that ideology were relics of Scythian gold.
Russia has been obsessed with Scythians, a nomadic group that roamed the Eurasian steppes thousands of years ago, ever since Catherine the Great annexed Crimea, in the late 18th century, and entertained the idea that the Russian people might be descendants of an ancient civilization. Imperial archaeologists sent their Crimean finds to St. Petersburg, where they were put on display at the State Hermitage Museum, while Kyiv was denied even a national museum of its own.
Scythian weapons and intricate jewelry, the best examples of which came from archaeological sites in Ukraine, became some of the Russian Empire’s most prized possessions and remained as such during the Soviet era. In fact, the Soviet Union’s first museum exhibition in the U.S.—part of a cultural exchange during a brief détente—was named “From the Land of the Scythians.” The 1975 show, at the Met, was the result of a grueling, five-year back-and-forth between the two superpowers.
In its review of the exhibition, The New York Times wrote that “physically, and in every other imaginable way, it makes a dazzling effect. Never was money better spent in the museum field than the grant of over $300,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities.” The Communists wanted to show their Cold War adversary that the Soviet empire had its roots in antiquity, and the Scythian gold was the best way to get their point across. “Gold grabs people, as we all know,” wrote the Times. “They can’t get enough of it.”
After annexing Crimea, in 2014, Moscow immediately laid claim to the region’s museums, artifacts, and historical sites. The occupied peninsula was flooded with Russian historians, curators, and archaeologists whose goal was to establish Moscow’s “cultural” presence in the region through new museums, exhibitions, and archaeological finds. To understand what the Scythian gold means for the Russian state, consider that Moscow issued a decree that ordered all construction on the peninsula—including that of strategic military bases—to be put on hold so the sites could first be inspected by archaeologists.
This diktat, it should be noted, didn’t stop Russian military and civil engineers from destroying more than 1,000 archaeological sites to build one highway alone.
Still, Putin’s diggers had to prove that Crimea was an integral part of Russia hundreds (if not thousands) of years before the first wooden hut was built in Moscow. To formalize the effort, and taking a strong cue from the Nazis and their search for Aryan roots, a number of pseudo-scientific institutions were set up to re-write history in Moscow’s favor. An organization, aptly named the Thousand-Year Heritage Foundation, was tasked with sending archaeologists to Crimea in search of a glorious Russian past.
After annexing Crimea, in 2014, Moscow immediately laid claim to the region’s museums, artifacts, and historical sites.
Metropolitan Tikhon, known as Putin’s “spiritual confessor,” received $332 million from the Kremlin to fund, among other things, the Russia: My History foundation and the establishment of the Taurida Central Museum, in Crimea’s ancient city of Chersonese. The 60-acre “historical & spiritual” complex, whose tagline is “Remember where it all began,” features numerous propaganda exhibits filled with artifacts that used to belong to Ukraine. A quote from Putin on the museum’s Web site reads: “In Crimea, literally everything is permeated with our shared history and pride.”
In a painful blow to Moscow, a collection of Scythian gold from a Crimean museum—then still in Ukrainian hands— was on display at the Allard Pierson Museum, in Amsterdam, when Russia annexed the peninsula. Lawsuits soon followed, with Moscow arguing that the antiquities belonged to Crimea and should be returned to the annexed territory. When a Dutch court ruled that the gold belongs to Ukraine, a Russian M.P. was quoted in Izvestia, a Kremlin-approved newspaper, as saying that “Russia will use all means, including military ones, to return its property, including Scythian gold.”
Two weeks ago, the collection was returned to Ukraine. In an interview for the state news agency RIA, Mikhail Sheremet, a Russian M.P. from occupied Crimea, was quoted as saying, “I call on the authorities in Kyiv not to hide the Scythian gold too far and to take good care of it, as the collection will have to be returned to Crimea. We will definitely come for it, and Russia’s cultural heritage will return once again to Crimean museums.”
The Russians put a lot of effort into obfuscating the artifacts’ history: “I’m afraid that even the inventory books were taken from museums by the Russians,” says Ukrainian art historian and author of Beautiful Loot: The Soviet Plunder of Europe’s Art Treasures, Konstantin Akinsha. “There’s no published catalogue, no Ukrainian national catalogue. We’re replaying the Second World War here, when commissions in Moscow discovered that there were no catalogues in Nazi-occupied museums. You didn’t know what you lost,” he adds.
Russians knew what they “found”: some items were listed with a “place of discovery” in their attribution; others were left with a blank space. The State Hermitage Museum, in St. Petersburg, published its catalogue of antiquities, including the Scythian gold, with a number of discrepancies. For example, a number of the artifacts’ places of origin were modern-day locations, while others were simply labeled as “the Golden Horde”—lands of a medieval empire that stretched from modern-day Hungary to Siberia and included Ukraine.
When Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine in 2022, Crimea became a laundering hub for stolen art and antiques. “Construction works in Crimea are progressing actively, so archaeological work is being carried out actively,” says Andrei Malgin, director of Russia’s Taurida Central Museum, in occupied Crimea. This “construction work,” aside from turning the sunny region into a fortress, affords Russia plausible deniability when it comes to antiquities. Was it an artifact excavated during Russia’s occupation of Crimea? Maybe it came from the Soviet times and got “lost” for decades in the Hermitage’s three-million-strong collection arts and antiquities? Or was it stolen from a Ukrainian museum after the start of the full-scale invasion? Sadly, we may never know.
“We have no idea what was removed [from Ukrainian museums] in an orderly fashion, and what fell off a truck, so to speak,” says Akinsha.“Who are we dealing with? Is it the army? The Russian Ministry of Culture? Do they have trophy brigades? There’s no information on how the Russian operation goes.”
To answer that question, one would either have to receive top-secret clearance from Russia or have top-secret access to a NATO intelligence brief. All I had was my classmate’s number. Both of us saw We Are from the Future when it came out, but our careers took different paths, as he rose steadily in the world of Putin’s dark archaeology and became a modern-day Indiana Jones.
A number of pseudo-scientific institutions were set up to re-write history in Moscow’s favor.
While I’m not authorized to mention his name, I can say that this art historian’s job now consists of roaming the occupied territories in an armored vehicle with a heavily armed escort, “saving Ukrainian works of art from the horrors of war.” My classmate vehemently denied that a work of art could ever “fall off a truck” and end up in the hands of a soldier. That is a lie; there’s a well-known photograph of a Russian serviceman who is leaving a Ukrainian museum with a sack of objects. Ironically, that photo came not from a press agency but from Russian soldiers themselves.
But before sending me a dozen photos of strange-looking, Nazi-esque flags that were supposed to be proof of Ukrainian Nazism (my classmate is also into organizing propaganda exhibitions full of such “memorabilia”), he did let me in on the process: “Look, it’s absurd to think that anything would ever fall off a truck, it’s impossible. This isn’t Baghdad [during the U.S. occupation]. The unsealing of museums is done by a special commission, where we have representatives of Russia’s Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Defense, and the local [occupational] government.”
The reality of the Russian “unsealing” process is bloody and grim. While some artworks were saved by the sheer heroism and self-sacrifice of Ukrainian museum workers, the Russians, sadly, knew exactly what they were looking for—and stopped at nothing to get it. Museum curators were tortured and disappeared, their houses searched, and their life’s work looted in a matter of hours. Now that collection of Scythian gold is in Moscow’s hands, soon to be displayed across Russia.
Mere days before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Sergei Karaganov, one of Russia’s most influential political scientists and head of the country’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, published an article in which he argued for the necessity of “uniting Russian lands.” When discussing Russia’s new policy toward the West, Karaganov quoted a verse from “The Scythians,” by Russian poet Alexander Blok:
Come join us, then! Leave war and war’s alarms,
And grasp the hand of peace and amity.
While still there’s time, Comrades, lay down your arms!
Let us unite in true fraternity!
For Ukrainians, this “fraternity” means the death of their state, an appropriation of their culture, and a violent dissolution of their national identity. So even amid a failed summer counter-offensive and calls to cede territory, Ukraine can’t give up. As for Russia, from a historian’s point of view, the Scythian gold can’t prove the Soviet Union or even the Russian Empire is an ancient civilization. But Russia’s willingness to sacrifice countless lives, steal lands, and go to war over intricate pieces of gold shows that it certainly behaves like one.
Andrew Ryvkin is a screenwriter, journalist, and Russian-affairs specialist