The Ransom of Russian Art

In the 1960s and '70s, an American professor of Soviet economics forayed on his own in the Soviet Union, bought the work of underground "unofficial" artists, and smuggled it out himself or arranged to have it illegally shipped to the United States. Norton Dodge visited the apartments of unofficial artists in at least a dozen geographically scattered cities. By 1977, he had amassed a thousand works of modern or contemporary Russian art, but at that point, after the mysterious death of leading dissident artist Evgeny Rukhin, and with a sense that he had flouted the Soviets perhaps more than too much, Dodge made only one more trip to the Soviet Union. Thereafter, he continued to acquire works through his established contacts. Dodge eventually secured another eight thousand works—by far the largest collection of its kind.

In this keen and engrossing exposition on the history, politics, and culture of dissident Soviet art, McPhee investigates Dodge’s clandestine activities—as well as the motives for his collecting and the fates of several of the artists whose lives he touched. The Ransom of Russian Art is a suspenseful and fascinating report on a covert operation like no other. It also offers unprecedented insights into Soviet culture at the brink of the Union’s collapse.