Spotlight on an impressive diamond ornament and its imperial legacy | Part I

In 1719 Peter the Great (1672-1725) established the Diamond Fund, in order to organise the riches accumulated by the Romanov dynasty. An inventory was created and detailed procedures were set out for storing the treasures behind three locks, with three officials each having a key to a single lock. Jewels could only be removed by an order from the Tsar himself and were stored in the Diamond Room of the Winter Palace, St. Petersburg, under the care of an appointed keeper.

Over the centuries the Tsars amassed an enormous quantity of personal jewellery and precious objects. Outwardly Peter the Great espoused austerity, but his own purchases of jewellery for his wife, Catherine, and their daughter Elizabeth, equal around a fifth of the total of the Diamond Fund. Catherine II (1729-1796) acquired jewels which account for two-fifths of the Fund, however, she lived at a time when jewellery was being made to a very high standard and she would certainly have had access to the most skilled of makers. About a quarter of the Fund’s inventory is accounted for jointly by Alexander I (1777-1825) and Nicholas I (1796-1855) with the balance acquired by later Tsars.

At the outbreak of the First World War the contents of the Diamond Fund were moved for safekeeping from the battle zone to the Kremlin Armoury in Moscow. Agathon Fabergé (1876-1951), the second son of Peter Carl Fabergé, had worked as a gem specialist at the Diamond Room since 1898 and he was tasked with organising the transportation of the Fund, the timeframe was extremely tight and an inventory could not be prepared before the departure of the treasures from St. Petersburg.

The transfer of Russia’s patrimony into the hands of revolutionaries took place almost immediately after the February 1917 revolution in St. Petersburg where the long-standing discontent with the monarchy turned into mass protests against food rationing. This revolutionary activity lasted about 8 days, and took the form of demonstrations and violent clashes with the police and gendarmes – the last loyal forces of the Russian monarchy. A week into the disruptions the capital’s garrison mutinied precipitating a full-scale revolution as the tsarist authorities were deprived of their military power, and the alignment of soldiers with the crowds brought rigour and direction to the protests.

Tsar Nicholas II renounced the throne on behalf of himself and his heir, Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich, on March 15 1917 and with this Romanov rule came to an end. Alexander Kerensky, a lawyer and revolutionary, led the Russian Provisional Government from July–November 1917, before the Bolsheviks, under Vladimir Lenin, replaced him and his government. At the start of his tenure Kerensky had installed himself in the Winter Palace, one of many of Nicholas II’s requisitioned palaces, where his bedroom was that previously used by Tsar Alexander III. Nicholas II’s abdication of power effectively meant that he also relinquished title to the Romanov family assets, likewise, wealthy merchants, foreign businessmen and aristocrats also forfeited enforceable claims on their Russian properties as soon as they fled the country (or were unable to return, in the case of those who has already left).

The two revolutions of 1917 profoundly affected Russia’s economy – in the two years to 1919 output per head halved. Large scale industry and transport, sectors which had previously benefitted from Russia’s participation in the war, collapsed and by 1919 Russia had no factory industry, no building work and no railway system. Only farming and industry conducted on a small scale kept going. A run of terrible harvests led to widespread famine conditions in the summer of 1920. In the Spring of 1919 in St. Petersburg an average worker’s daily intake of food was below 1,600 calories, roughly half that consumed before the War. Hunger amongst the population coincided with deaths from typhus, dysentery, typhoid and cholera, and it is estimated that approximately 5m people may have died at the time through hunger and disease.

The new Bolshevik regime had no conventional means of paying the costs of either the on-going War or the food supply, tax revenues had fallen away and it had no credit on which to call – inflation and confiscation were their only remedies. On taking power in late 1917, the Bolsheviks did not immediately seek to centralise the economy, but they did look at the system of property ownership. Their first targets included the landed estates of the aristocracy and the land and treasures of the church, through legislation the Bolsheviks transferred these assets to the state but in practice much of this ended up in private hands.