World War II Looms... In 1937 a drastic purge crippled the Red Army, reducing its morale and efficiency just before the world war. In June, Marshall Tukhachevsky, first deputy commissar of war ...

But at the end of the war, with Nazi Germany in ruins, expert teams from the Red Army seized more than two and a half million art objects, some 12 million books and miles of archives. Among them ...