The inaugural event for the newly established University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst Center for Heritage & Society, entitled “Heritage in Conflict and Consensus: New Approaches to the Social, Political, and Religious Impact of Public Heritage in the 21st Century,” was held in November 2009 at three locations in the northeastern United States. Workshop attendees participated in several organized sessions, day trips, informal discussions, and five plenary sessions with accompanying working sessions focused on four themes in international heritage practice: community; faith; diaspora; and burial, ancestors, and human Remains. The event was co-organized by two members of the UMass Amherst Center for Heritage & Society, Director Elizabeth Chilton and Coordinator of Projects and Policy Initiatives Neil Silberman, whose main goal was to establish a permanent working group of international representatives engaging with issues of heritage in conflict charged with setting research and policy agendas for the field.

This article analyses the historical and political background of the Russian law on cultural property displaced to the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War (April 1998, with amendments in 2000). Following the 1990–1991 revelations about the extensive cultural treasures captured by Soviet authorities at the end of the Second World War, there was hope abroad for restitution, with a series of bilateral agreements with the countries of origin, but in spring 1994 the Duma blocked further restitution. We follow the fierce debates, the Constitutional Court ruling (1999), the amended law (July 2000), and its implementation under the Ministry of Culture.

We show the wide-scale Russian support of the law, with its concept of “compensatory restitution” that virtually nationalizes the spoils of war, with only scant provisions for restitution to those who fought against the Nazi regime and those victimized by it. What explanation emerges involves the manipulation of historical memory by the Stalinist regime, as the cultural trophies assume symbolic importance in the “myth and memory” of “victory” in the Great Patriotic War. Restitution to legal owners is to be considered only in exchange for equally substantial compensation for wartime loss and suffering of the population at large.

This article is dedicated to the collection from the Bremen Kunsthalle, comprising 1715 drawings, 50 paintings, and about 3000 prints found by Soviet troops in castle of Karnzow near Berlin in May 1945. The collection was not seized by Soviet trophy brigades but was looted by soldiers and officers of the 38th Field Engineers' Brigade of the Red Army.

After their return to the USSR and demobilization, some of the officers donated their loot to different museums around the Soviet Union. One of the most important parts of the collection, with 362 drawings and two paintings—among them works of Dürer, Rembrandt, Goya, and Van Gogh, was appropriated by Captain Viktor Baldin. In 1948 Baldin deposited his loot in the A. V. Shchusev State Research Museum of Architecture in Moscow. Later Baldin became the director of the museum and advocated return of the art to its rightful owners.

Since the days of Gorbachev's perestroika, these art works have frequently attracted public attention and provoked fierce debates. The Federal Law on Cultural Valuables adopted in 1998 did not cover art works looted by private individuals. Rather, such conflicts have to be solved within the framework of Russian criminal law.

In contrast, other works of art from the same Bremen Kunsthalle collection were restituted from the United States, Ukraine, and Estonia. Another 101 drawings and prints of the collection, seized by another member of Baldin's brigade, were returned from Russia to Bremen in 2000, but that was in “exchange” for an original mosaic from the legendary Amber Chamber. However, despite more than 20 years of efforts by German officials and endless negotiations, the Baldin Collection remains in the Russian Federation. The return of those stolen drawings any time soon now looks highly improbable. The case of the Baldin Collection became the most striking example of the Russian nonrestitution of cultural property looted during World War II.

Heritage 2010 was a state-of-the-art event regarding the relationship between forms of heritage and the conceptual framework for sustainable development. The four dimensions of sustainable development—environment, economics, society, and culture—were brought together in order to define a particular approach on how to deal with and go beyond the traditional aspects of heritage preservation and safeguarding. As heritage is no longer just a memory or a cultural reference, or even a place or an object, some deeper conceptualization is needed in order to place heritage in its present context. The concept of heritage is moving toward broader and wider scenarios, where it often becomes the driving force for commerce, business, leisure, and educational politics. Heritage is currently seen, or referred to, only through its cultural definition. However, sustainable development brings heritage concepts to another dimension, as it establishes profound relationships with economics, environment, and social aspects. Consequently, heritage preservation and safeguarding is facing new and complex problems. Degradation of heritage sites is not any more just a result of materials ageing or environmental actions. Factors such as global and local pollution, climate change, poverty, religion, tourism, commerce, ideologies, and war are now on the cutting edge for the emerging of new approaches, concerns, and visions on heritage. Thus, the “Heritage 2010: Heritage and Sustainable Development” conference was conceived to embrace a global view on how heritage is being contextualized with the four dimensions of sustainable development. Furthermore, heritage, governance, and education were brought into discussion as the key factors for enlightenment of future global strategies for heritage preservation and safeguarding.

Twenty-two members of the International Law Association's Committee on Cultural Heritage Law attended a working session in The Hague. The committee first reviewed the status of its past projects, focusing this time on the UNESCO Convention for the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, which resulted from the Committee's Buenos Aires Draft Convention on that subject. Now that the treaty is in force, the committee considered the actual and potential status of accession by maritime powers.

The return of captured French archives—not art—ignited debate in the Russian Duma in the spring of 1994, leading to the passage of the 1998 Federal Law “On Cultural Valuables Displaced to the USSR as a Result of the Second World War and Located on the Territory of the Russian Federation.” Yet, a decade since the law was signed, there have been five cases of captured archives from the Second World War returned to Western European countries, as explained in the recent book, Returned from Russia. The aim of this article is to examine major factors involved in the restitution of archives from Russia, and why amid the politics of restitution the return of archives has been more successful than art.

The article first successively examines the major factors involved, namely, foreign political pressure; the underlying support of international law, both in specific instruments and historical archival practice; the circumstances and Soviet aims of archival plunder; the present contrast with Soviet political ideology and alignments; the fact that Russian archivists were more willing to return their loot than museum directors; and that archival returns were easier to conform to the 1998 law, because the receiving countries were willing to offer the “compensation” Russian archivists were demanding. Country by country, first in Western Europe starting with France and now Austria and Greece, archives have been going home, but so far only a few symbolic files from Germany have been returned. A final section of the article briefly singles out the captured records from several other countries remaining in Moscow, including many Jewish records, even some representing Holocaust losses.

Some countries' laws favoring good-faith purchasers over the victims of theft make it difficult to recover stolen artworks. Nonetheless, the loan of such artworks for exhibition abroad may create opportunities to utilize the host country's legal system for recovery. This article examines representative cases illustrating legal options available to plaintiffs in the United States and the United Kingdom. In the United States, laws at the federal and state level may prevent the seizure of artworks loaned for temporary exhibition, but recent cases show that immunity is not absolute and that such artworks may be subject to suit in the United States. The United Kingdom recently enacted a similar law. That law, however, has been criticized, and future interpretations by U.K. courts will be needed before its true affect can be seen. The article also discusses the backgrounds against which the U.S. and U.K. laws were enacted, illustrating the link between the laws and Russian concerns about protecting cultural artifacts that were nationalized after the Russian Revolution or taken by Soviet troops during World War II.

Displaced and nationalized cultural property remains hidden in the vast holdings of museums, libraries, and archives around the world. Some governments holding these “trophies” of war and conquest refuse to return such cultural treasures to their rightful owners even when their provenance has been identified. They assert that the collections were obtained through expropriation and nationalization, and that divestiture of a museum, library, or archive would jeopardize the existence of these institutions and cause societal discord.

This article discusses the struggle of an orthodox Jewish organization to recover from the Russian Federation a collection of sacred, irreplaceable books and manuscripts seized in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution and during World War II. The story of Agudas Chasidei Chabad's efforts to recover these core religious texts of its spiritual leaders has involved appeals by U.S. presidents, congress, and the U.S. Helsinki Commission, as well as lawsuits in the Soviet Union/Russia and United States.

After prolonged litigation in the United States, a federal court of appeals in Washington DC ruled in 2008 that American courts have jurisdiction over Chabad's suit against the Russian Federation to recover its religious texts. This ruling may pave the way for the resolution of this dispute and also lead to the filing of other suits in American courts seeking to recover looted cultural property, even if that property is located outside U.S. borders.

This article provides brief coverage of the Russian-German dialogue since 1991 and the search for solutions about looted art of German ownership seized at the end of the Second World War and still held in Russia. So far, while Russia and Germany regard themselves as partners and friends in political and economic realms, they have been unable to find agreement about the looted art. Germany seems no longer to retain Russian cultural goods plundered during the war, whereas Russia still possesses a significant amount of German cultural assets. On the basis of existing treaties and international law, Germany demands its restitution. Russia, on the other hand, has nationalized the confiscated goods in 1998 as compensation for its own war losses. Nevertheless, not a few citizens of both countries have been returning artworks and books privately, in some cases supported by the governments. A convincing solution for the general problem can only be found if the treasures, which in the past have been understood as trophies, could be transformed into cultural ambassadors, while dialogue and the search for new ways continue within the framework of a policy of reconciliation. This approach also includes further research and analysis of the Russian cultural losses resulting from the war, a project undertaken in the 1990s at the Forschungsstelle Osteuropa (Research Center for Eastern Europe) of the University of Bremen, as briefly described in an appendix to the article.