An agreement to return to Austria a unique book collection that was put together by Austria's Esterhazy upper class family and was brought to the Soviet Union by the Red Army in 1945 has been submitted by the Russian government for ratification to the State Duma, according to the database of the lower house of Russia's parliament.
The 977-volume collection are books that were published between the 15th and 18th centuries and are works on theology, astronomy, history, philosophy, medicine, natural science, art, law, and linguistics in English, Aramaic, Latin, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Classical Greek, Hebrew and other languages.
The Rudomino All-Russia State Library of Foreign Literature stores 954 and the Russian State Public Historical Library 23 books of the collection.
In November, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff, Sergei Ivanov, said the books might go back to Austria very soon. “We have held difficult negotiations on this issue, those negotiations are over, and an agreement has been signed,” Ivanov told a news conference in Vienna.
After the collection arrived in the Soviet Union, eight of the books were handed over to the Library of Foreign Literature in 1949, and in 1952 the library received another 700 books from the Soviet Foreign Ministry and small amounts of books from the Foreign Relations Institute and the Central Naval Library.
The agreement awaiting ratification by the Duma is based on the Austrian State Treaty of May 15, 1955, in whose Article 27 the Soviet Union, Britain, the United States and France pledged to return to Austria property seized from it during World War II.
After the ratification of the agreement, it is the Austrian government that would deal with any grievances concerning Esterhazy books that may be brought against the Russian state or Russian individuals or entities by any third party, including the Esterhazy family, heirs to its members or its legal successors.
