To Russia With Love (Update)

It appears that the Russian government was more instrumental in the sale of the Rostropovich-Vishnevskaya Collection than was first evident.

On Monday, Sotheby's announced that it was canceling the auction, set to begin on Tuesday, because Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov had bought all 450 lots and planned to return them to Russia from the London and Paris apartments in which the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife lived after fleeing their native land in 1974.

The AP via the Washington Post quotes Mikhail Shvydkoi, head of the Russian Federal Agency of Culture and Cinematography, as saying that he and the Culture Ministry personally appealed to "business representatives" to empty their pockets for the whole collection because they wanted it but didn't have the money for it.

Usmanov said:

"Such a collection of Russian art can't be in the possession of one person even if he has a hypertrophied sense of narcissism. This must belong to the state."

We doubt there's a hedge fund manager who'd buy this much art and give it to the U.S. government straightaway. (Usmanov bought the collection for an undisclosed some that was reported to be well above its $40 million high estimate.) Have these Russians heard about all the flashy museums being built by private collectors?

Admirable generosity on Usmanov's part. We just hope the Russian government figures out how to fix the problem of disappearing museum objects sooner rather than later.