Squirreled away in the secret vaults or ‘Спецхран’ of the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow are treasures and artefacts that have been lost to the public since 1945. They are works of art firstly looted by the Nazis and then by the Red Army—two…

In 1995 I was drawn to an article on the website of the Jamestown Foundation about the Feliks Group. Named after the founder of the Soviet secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, it was established just prior to the end of the Soviet Union and the disbanding of the KGB. There’s no…