By Kelly Crow
The Wall Street Journal
July 30, 2020 Anno Domini

Two months after the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russian construction bil- lionaires Arkady and Boris Rotenberg in March 2014, the brothers sent their art adviser on a shopping spree, according to a Senate investigation report released Wednesday. At a Sotheby’s auction that month in New York, the Rotenbergs, who are life-long friends of Russian President Vladimir Putin, paid $6.8 million for 10 works of art, including a cubist still life by Georges Braque and a swirling tableau by Marc Chagall, the report said.

Days later, the Rotenbergs again added to their collection, paying a private U.S. dealer $7.5 million for “Chest,” René Magritte’s 1961 painting of a colorful pile of buildings, according to the report. When Senate investigators later asked the art dealer if she had vetted the buyers’ identities to make sure they weren’t blacklisted, she said she never asked. When it comes to due diligence, the report said, “She relies on her gut.”

Who is buying art these days? Such disclosure details in art deals like these are being scrutinized following a two-year investigation by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which alleges art is increasingly being used as a tool by blacklisted individuals to evade sanctions. The report directed sharp criticism at auction houses and art dealers for doing little to screen or stop sanctioned people from trading art in the U.S.

Companies based in the U.S. are forbidden by law from having any financial dealings with sanctioned individuals. Americans caught transacting with the Rotenbergs or any sanctioned individual can face steep fines or even jail terms. The seller of a painting isn’t required to ask or know the identity of the buyer to close a deal, though, because blue-chip art isn’t subject to the same anti-money-laundering disclosure laws that govern U.S. banks.

The art world has installed its own disclosure protocols, but has long struggled to enforce them. Collectors prize discretion and don’t always want their identities or income sources shared. Dealers likewise tend to be tight-lipped about their major clients, and no one wants to cede business to rivals willing to ask less and sell more. This helps explain why so many catalogs brim with works whose only ownership clue is “private collection.”

“I know the auction houses and dealers don’t always want to know who they’re selling to because they’re making significant money, but we also have a national-security interest in making sure sanctions work,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R., Ohio) who led the bipartisan report with Tom Carper (D., Del.). “Secrecy is the problem,” Sen. Portman added.

Even after meeting with Senate investigators in 2018, Sotheby’s and Christie’s competed last year for the chance to auction Lyonel Feininger’s “Bridge II,” a painting investigators said the Rotenbergs likely owned. Christie’s said later it didn’t know the work’s true seller at the time. When Sotheby’s won the consignment, it asked the Rotenbergs’ alleged adviser for the work’s owner and was told it belonged to a Marshall Islands company. The house gave the painting a $5 million estimate and included it in its February 2019 London sale. Just before the auction, the house pulled the work; Sotheby’s told investigators the work hadn’t elicited any potential bidders.

Altogether, the report alleges the Rotenbergs used U.S. dollars to spend or move around funds totaling $91 million, including $18.4 million in art and antiques, since sanctions were imposed.

Sen. Portman said he and Sen. Carper launched the investigation two years ago to research the efficacy of U.S. sanctions imposed on members of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle in March 2014, weeks after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula and launched a covert military operation in eastern Ukraine.

Arkaday Rotenberg, a St. Petersberg native and industrialist who befriended Mr. Putin when they joined the same judo club as children, was among those sanctioned. His brother Boris was added shortly thereafter. But after more sanctions were imposed on a wider circle of Russian oligarchs in 2018, Sen. Portman said he and other legislators “wanted to figure out why the sanctions didn’t appear to be working.”

Senate investigators who briefed The Wall Street Journal on the report’s findings said they started looking broadly at blacklisted Russians but soon focused on Arkady Rotenberg’s art-collecting activity. Eventually, they expanded their investigation to art bought by his brother and son, Igor, who is also sanctioned. Investigators said the family offers a case study in how some blacklisted Russians are using the opaque art market to circumvent financial restrictions.

Christie’s, Sotheby’s and the smaller London houses, Phillips and Bonhams, are all named in the report for doing business with the Rotenbergs. Spokespeople for each said they had zero tolerance for evasion of sanctions and were willing to work with the U.S. govern- ment on this issue. The houses also said they didn’t know the Rotenbergs were bidding through an alleged art adviser, Gregory Baltser, until investigators informed them of the connection. All said they stopped allowing him to bid after Senate investigators came asking questions.

“I was shocked when I found out,” Phillips’ Chief Executive Edward Dolman said.

Mr. Baltser, a naturalized U.S. citizen who lives in Russia, confirmed that his company, Baltzer LLP (the misspelling is intentional), has aided Russian collectors in the past but through his lawyer denied that he ever bid on behalf of the Rotenbergs. His lawyer, in a statement, said the investigation has “done substantial collateral damage to Baltzer and its employees, and has forced Baltzer to largely suspend operations.”

A representative for the Rotenbergs called the Senate allegations “totally absurd” and said they never used any tools, including art, to launder money or circumvent sanctions. “All transactions with works of art made by Rotenberg family members or on their behalf were made openly, strictly with lawful personal purposes and always on market terms,” the statement said.

In 2018, the European Union amended its anti-money-laundering regulations to require businesses to verify the identities of sellers and buyers of art valued over €10,000.

The Senate report recommended ways to alter U.S. laws to compel more disclosure in art sales, but so far two bills that could potentially address the issue are stalled.

Arkady Rotenberg, now 68 years old, built a nearly $3 billion fortune, according to Forbes, overseeing infrastructure companies. His brother Boris and son have made fortunes in industries like energy and real estate.

Until now, little was known about the composition or extent of the Rotenberg collection. The brothers have been seen at judo and ice hockey matches in Russia but seldom attend gallery dinners or make buzzy purchases. The report alleged that for at least a decade the brothers have been collecting modern art, particularly surrealists like Salvador Dalí and Giorgio de Chirico.

Unlike the Rotenbergs, Mr. Baltser appeared to seek the art spotlight, opening a Moscow hangout called the Baltzer Club where he invited Russia’s newly wealthy art lovers to watch global auctions and bid, ideally through him. His website offered to help collectors bid with “anonymity,” according to the report.

Investigators tracked payments in Russia to a company incorporated in Belize called Steamort that sent $9,500 monthly payments to Mr. Baltser for years, surpassing $1.1 million. The report said it couldn’t name the owner of this account. Mr. Baltser confirmed he had been paid by the account but said his contract forbade him from disclosing its clients’ identities.

In January, Mr. Baltser wrote a column for Forbes Russia where he said the art market should prepare to divulge more ownership details in art deals. “I would call these changes revolutionary,” he wrote.

By Robert H. Williams
June 12, 2020 Anno Domini

Part I | Part II | Part III

Excerpt from The Anti-Defamation League and its Use in the World Communist Offensive (1947), pgs. 25-32

THEY CAPTURED THE NKVD

Douglas Reed, in his Insanity Fair, published in 1938 in England, told of his official visit to Moscow accompanying Anthony Eden, and of finding the entire press censorship service in the hands of Jews. Other observers confirm his statements.

The terror, however, was more directly due, I think, to the fact that much of the NKVD was staffed by Bolshevik Jews—cruel to all religious peoples, anti-Communist Jews and Gentiles alike, but particularly bent on annihilation of Christians. The GPU (NKVD) and its successors have been virtually the government since the Revolution. This terroristic secret police throws fear into every man in Russia except possibly Stalin. It is now in command of an estimated 20,000,000 slaves in work and prison camps, and in recent years has developed all Russian heavy industry with slave labor. It apparently no longer waits for workers to commit offenses or even to be suspected of sabotage or anti-Semitism, but deliberately impresses workmen by the million. It is at last the full realization of Marx’s dream of complete enslavement of “enemy” peoples.

Henry Jagoda (or Yagoda), “merciless head of the NKVD,” as Kravchenko described him, was a Jew. Succeeding Jagoda, after he himself was liquidated in 1937 for reasons we may never know—but most likely jealousy—Yezhov took over. He, too, was Jewish. The head of this machine for annihilation would have to be a prime hater of Christians and of all anti-Communists, and above all of anyone accused of being anti-Semitic.

Beria, last head of the NKVD before its recent division into domestic and foreign branches of secret police, is reportedly an Armenian from Georgia; but his picture shows such pronounced Jewish features as to throw considerable doubt on his origin. The story that he is an Armenian or a Georgian may be a cover.

All through the great liquidation of the officers of the Red army, of the Old Bolsheviks (including the original, largely Jewish Politburo) and hundreds of thousands of others in Stalin’s domain in the middle and late 1930’s, we were mystified as to the reason for the purge. We have been told repeatedly that the accusations were false. Perhaps an anti-Semitic plot was suspected—though this reason would not answer for all cases, because many prominent Jews were liquidated too.

In the trials and brutal “investigations” as described by many a writer, seldom was it possible even for the accused to discover any cause for his persecution. Most often the charge was sabotage. It is clear, on reflection, that if the victim was suspected of being anti-Semitic, the NKVD could not afford to say so, because millions of liquidations on charges of anti-Semitism would breed more anti-Semitism. This is the only plausible explanation I have found. Our government could doubtless enlighten us on these facts of history. It is to its eternal discredit that it has not seen fit to do so; and for concealing a truth of such significance we may all suffer.

Some Jews have repudiated Marxism. The correspondent who got the first interview with Stalin, a second writer who was married to a lady assistant commissar, and a third who was pro-Communist and in Moscow during the Revolution, today are in the battle against Communism.

Here is what Dr. Oscar Levy wrote in 1920 in a letter used as the preface to a book, The World Significance of the Russian Revolution, by G. Pitt Rivers:

“Jewish elements provide the driving force for both Communism and Capitalism for the material as well as the spiritual ruin of this world . . . to the intense idealism of the Jew.” He pointed out, however, that not all Jews are financiers, Zionists, or Bolsheviks. He continued, “We who have promised to lead you to a new Heaven, we have finally succeeded in landing you in a new Hell. . . . I look at this world and I shudder all the more as I know the spiritual authors of all this ghastliness. . . . But its authors themselves are unconscious in this as in all they are doing.”

I do not have a copy of this book but believe it still available in big libraries.

I am sure that if the average idealistic young American of any race who has become innoculated with the hate hypnosis, and therefore has become a captive and tool of these rulers of the Marxist world, could open his eyes and accept the facts, he would abandon Communism. If he could look back into undeniable source books of facts and see that Communism from the very outset was invented as a vehicle to sell to gullible peoples, wrapped up in a package to appeal to both Jew and Gentile, for the one purpose of elevating the Marxist radicals to world power over their fellow men— nobody but the power seekers themselves would be Marxists.

But the pitiable, misled petty Communist soon becomes so intense in his hatred of all anti-Communists and is so thoroughly grounded and goaded, he rejects historical facts as propaganda.

WHAT IS COMMUNISM?

In the matter of the history of Marxism, all of us can learn a valuable lesson if we will. We should remember the story: Jews were at the head of the revolutionary groups leading up to and during the Communist Revolution of Germany of 1848. They were too conspicuous. The revolution largely failed—for this and other reasons. And the people of Germany and Austria never forgot or forgave the Jewish people; they held all Jews responsible for Communism. They seemed to believe that all Jews hated Christianity. Anti-Semitism never died in those countries thereafter. This fact should make American Jews repudiate the radicals who are trying to herd them into the Red camp.

No movement in history has been so successfully deceptive, so complete a fraud as Marxism. Americans do not understand it. I hear it said that not fifty of us really do understand it in its entirety. Marxist propaganda agents are well schooled and well financed; they create confusion; they deny all facts; and the average person will not think the movement through, even when equipped with a mass of factual information.

The principal reason for this failure to understand the core of the movement is that we look at the means rather than the end. We are thinking of business instead of people. We think and speak of Communism as state ownership of all capital wealth. That is only a device which helps the planners accomplish their purpose. Destroy private ownership of property and every man, woman, and child is at the mercy of the State by next meal time. The purpose for which Communism was perfected by Karl Marx and his associates, largely radical Jews, was to place world political power in their hands—to give people power over other people. If this sounds ridiculous, I agree with you; but I must remind you that Napoleon and Caesar and Alexander and Hitler and Stalin all have dreamed of world power—to the misery of mankind.

There is one history-making difference in the Marxist reach for world power and that of a Caesar. The men on horseback were individuals grasping for power. Marxism (or Communism) is ap rogram. It did not die with the power seekers who carried it to perfection. It was perfected by a small group of haters and it is the doctrine of hate. The greatest hater of all time was Marx. He was an atheist. He hated all religion, but above all, he hated Christianity. He even hated Judaism (the religion) as the parent of Christianity.

He and his circle believed they could elevate themselves to power principally by spreading hatred, and their main theme song, whispered among Jews ever since by Red agents, was to fan Jewish hatred of Christianity, and promise Jews that through Marxism they would triumph over their Biblical “enemies,” the Gentiles. From its outset, the movement was basically Marxism versus Christianity.

The Marx program was broader than may appear in the brief statement above. It would take a shelf of books to bring all its facets into focus. It offers the most beautiful idealism, such as world peace, but does not mention that the price of Communist peace is slavery. It is a case of the spider and the fly. Marx and his radicals thought they could rouse to class hatred, race hatred, religious hatred, against the existing order, enough workers and minority groups in one country to seize power, especially to seize all industry and productive wealth—not for themselves, mind you, but for the little clique of Marxist conspirators, who made them extravagant promises.

Meanwhile his agents would be organizing secret police and other suppressive squads and propaganda machines and sabotage cells in other countries, especially industrial countries. They would organize the workers into what they termed trade unions, under strict discipline by dictatorial leaders. Once a victory in one country, that nation’s men and machines would be hurled at other countries in combined operations with Fifth Columns. Soon the world would be a Marx apple.

The plan put Marx and his radical Jewish circle in command at the outset of the movement, and everywhere Communism has traveled, in Russia, in Poland, in the Baltics, the Balkans, France, Italy, England, the United States, Central and South America, Africa, and now into Japan, it has sought to deify the Jew.

Marx published his pamphlet, “Communist Manifesto,” in 1848. He thought his crowd would win that year in Germany; but the Communist revolution there virtually failed and he fled to England, where, abusing privileges of freedom, he plotted for many years to destroy freedom.

Next year will end a century of Marxist agitation, labor union organizing for political power and building of Fifth Columns. Thirty years ago, the Marxist crowd succeeded in seizing one potentially great military power. They can now hurl that against others. We shall soon see whether Communism will wipe out the age of freedom or shall be turned back.

Stalin is a Georgian, though some of our Jews have been made to believe him Jewish. He is, however, married to the sister of Kaganovich, Jewish commissar of heavy industry. Kaganovich long was considered Stalin’s closest friend and second in influence in all the Russias. He still is powerful. Molotov’s wife is Jewish, the sister of Samuel Carp of Bridgeport, Conn. Manuilsky, as Levine told us, was raised Jewish. Manuilsky is a power in the Soviet Union, often mentioned as a possible successor to Stalin. He is head of the government of the Ukraine and head of the Communist International.

Of Stalin, Louis Levine had this to say in his article in “Soviet Russia Today“:

“The Jewish people are unanimous in their love for Stalin. They regard him as the greatest friend of the Jewish people. They attribute to his understanding of national minorities and to his leadership the new, exalted status of the Soviet Jews.” (Emphasis is mine.)

Levine also tells us that Stalin’s daughter is to marry a Jew. “I need not add that the Soviet Jews greeted with joy the news that Stalin and the father of his prospective Jewish son-in-law drank ‘lachaim’ together in the Kremlin!”

Any supposition that Jews are fleeing from official Russian persecution should be quieted once and for all time by that single statement.

(The New York-Moscow Red Axis is moving Jews out of Eastern Europe into Palestine to increase the Communist-Zionist underground there, tightening the pressure on Britain.)

Elsewhere in the same article Levine said, “It is important to point out that the Soviet Jews, as the entire population, are one with the Soviet government. There is absolutely no distinction between themselves and the government, as some have tried to make out.”

“All believed that the final solution to the Jewish problem lies in the victory of full democracy throughout the world, in the struggle for the complete eradication of fascism whenever it threatens or wherever it exists.” To understand this statement you must use the word democracy as Levine and the Soviet Communists use it: meaning Communism; and you must translate the word fascism as meaning simply all forces opposed to Communism. This makes the statement mean, clearly, that the Jewish people of Russia told Levine the solution to the Jewish problem throughout the world lies in the world wide victory for Communism.

Rev. Denis Fahey of the Holy Ghost Missionary College, Dublin, Ireland, widely known historian, in his well documented booklet, “The Rulers of Russia,” printed in 1940, reproduces excerpts from a number of rare documents, naming the leaders of Russia at various periods since the Revolution, contending that there has been no diminution of Jewish power in the government. Some of the lists of leaders can be cross-checked by other documents, or methods. For instance, one document shows that fourteen out of seventeen Soviet ambassadors to foreign capitals in 1935-1936 were Jewish, two of the other three with Jewish staffs. Maisky, ambassador to Great Britain, headed the list. His real name is given in the International Who’s Who for 1943-1944 as I. M. Layakhovetsky. I am sure it would not be difficult to verify the racial origin of all on this list, since each was well known in the country where he was stationed.

As previously stated, it is of the greatest importance to the successful radical Jews to keep the Gentile world, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, in the dark about their power.

My information is lamentably limited, but I have evidence of the use of the following devices to conceal their strength:

1. Influence by Jewish organizations (The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, for example, mentioned by Levine, operating with greater influence, no doubt, than the Political Action Committee behind the New Deal).

2. Promotion to important posts of Russians married to Jews.

3. Changing of names of Jewish officials.

4. Placing in high position Jews who “do not look Jewish.”

5. The “hidden director” device whereby one who appears to be only a clerk or petty aide, occupying an inconspicuous office, is the real director of a bureau or commission (as, for instance, the Soviet Purchasing Com- mission to the United States at one time during the war. Kravchenko does not give any reason for the invention of this device, but he states that it is frequently used in the Soviet Union. Russia uses this device in directing the Communist Party of the U.S.A. Gerhardt Eisler, a German Jew, reportedly has been the invisible director—known to only the top Communists and therefore deceiving all the little Communist tools.)

6. Placing responsibility on men who were raised Jewish—as in the case of Manuilsky.

Kravchenko (I Chose Freedom) recorded that Mekhlis, the political commissar over all the Red armies, had to be removed because he was Jewish and the Nazi propaganda machine was striking telling blows at the morale of the Russian soldiers by capitalizing on this fact.

The position of political director over all the Red armies is one of the most powerful positions in the Soviet government.

To summarize briefly the power of Jews in Soviet Russia . . . such power no longer is absolute, as it once was, in the sense of holding all the top flight positions. But the entire Communist regime is theirs. It is their mental offspring. The thinking of Stalin, Molotov, and all Communists the world over is so conditioned as to exalt the Jew over the Gentile. If Stalin ordered the destruction of millions of hardy kulak land owners, 99 per cent of them Gentiles, and if he has destroyed millions of Christians, he is doing the bidding of Karl Marx and his heirs. The Communist administration, utterly unlike the non-conspiratorial Russian people, holds its strength largely from the mass of Jewish converts. Without them the Marxist regime would simply become another dictatorship, losing its racial ideology and its Internationalism. Communism has been a movement of the left wing of Jewry from its birth; it still is their instrument and their tool, in Russia as elsewhere.

Perhaps the secret is not too well kept. There are conflicting reports. Whereas Levine says there is no such thing as anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, Rabbi Benjamin Schultz, in the Detroit Times, August 4, 1946, declared that racial feeling was running high there. He says that those Polish Jews who cherish democracy fear the slave camps of Siberia; they will not go to Russia. Perhaps they sense the probability of a counter-revolution in the land of the Soviets. Little can be known, however, by asking what the Polish Jews want, because they today are mercilessly herded and propagandized and torn by Jewish organizations in the United States, England and Palestine, and Moscow.

If anti-Semitism is rising again, after 20,000,000 Russians have been killed or shipped off to slave labor camps (Kravchenko’s estimate)—the futility of the Revolution should speak eloquently to all peoples, including Jews, outside the blackout curtain.

The peoples of Eastern Europe all along have been better informed than we on the racial complexion of Communism. That’s one reason why they have resisted it so desperately. They knew it would completely devastate their civilization. Spokesmen of several of these countries, men of influence and integrity, from Poland and the Baltics, have told me that their people, living against the Iron Curtain, were able to “see through holes in the Curtain” and understood what was going on inside Russia. The people of Hungary have not forgotten that it was the Jewish terrorist, Bela Kun, Communist revolutionary leader, who right after the First World War wrote his name across Eastern Europe in the blood of hundreds of thousands of Christians. Our diplomatic staffs in Finland, Poland, the Baltic states, and Roumania likewise must have understood the racial theme. An official of the Swiss government has told me how much better informed are his people than we Americans on the Communist scourge.

There are several reasons why we have so little understood the basic principle behind the Red terror. Originally it was kindness on the part of our editors which deleted any reference to the fact that the conspirators in Russia were largely Jewish; it was kindness toward our own Jewish community. Who could foresee that such kindness would be so vastly taken advantage of by the Jewish wing of world Communism, propagandizing here among us to provide special immunities for the Jew in preparation for Jewish domination of the Revolution?

When, years ago, the Anti-Defamation League began working on our editors, including the wire services, it was only natural for the editors to yield as a matter of tolerance. As far back as the middle 1930s, the League was boasting, in confidential communications not meant for Gentile readers, that it had been successful in “securing co-operation of the Associated Press in eliminating the word ‘Jew’ in connection with one accused of crime.” (Photographic copy in my possession.) Under this agreement the Jewish origin of Louie (Lepke) Buchalter, genius behind Murder, Inc., was seldom if ever seen in the daily press. Under this agreement, the fact that nearly all the conspirators behind the Red throne in Moscow were Jewish rarely has been seen in print here in America.

We would all be happy to forget these ugly facts; but because of the manner in which Communist agents have been able to impose on tolerance, it is now of the greatest importance that we understand the true nature of the Communist organization and the true purpose of the movement.

One other condition has contributed widely to our ignorance of the racial involvement in the Soviet regime: the fact that since the first world war we have received most of our “news” from Northeastern Europe— along the path of Moscow—from correspondents who were almost universally pro-Communist Jews. They were not Americans. Few of them ever saw America. And seldom was there an American correspondent on the scene to verify or correct or deny the nature of the dispatches. The local correspondents sold their dispatches, often fabricated or colored, to London and New York for good pounds and dollars; while in Moscow, proper only pro-Communist dispatches were permitted.

Today, after this long blackout of truth and against the present power of intimidation of the Anti-Defamation League, it is difficult indeed to get the full facts before the American public. The writer or Intelligence officer who reports them immediately becomes the target of the smear fury. He is discredited so thoroughly that his neighbors may refuse to believe him.