THE SPOILS OF WAR

SHORTLY AFTER THE FALL OF NAZI Germany in May 1945, a young Russian field engineer named Victor Baldin was poking through the cellars of Karnzow Castle, just north of Berlin, where he and other Soviet Army officers were billeted. By the dim light of a candle, he found several bulging portfolios of drawings and watercolors. Their names leaped out at him: Durer, Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Gogh. Amazed at the discovery, Baldin begged his officers for transport space to carry this abandoned trove back to the Soviet Union-to no avail. There was no room on the trucks, and the brigade was pulling out in the morning.

Fearful that his find would be lost forever in the chaos of occupation, Baldin worked all night, removing 362 of the drawings from their mattes and packing them, as best he could, in a suitcase. They went with him, locked up, all the way out of Germany; finally, in January 1946, he turned them over to the state restoration workshops at Zagorsk (now Sergeyev Posad), near Moscow, and was able to take a long look at them. "I was surprised by what I saw," Baldin recalls a half-century later. "All the masters of Europe, from 14 different countries. They had to be saved, but I also knew they had to be returned. This collection wasn't mine; it belonged to the culture of humanity."

It belonged, in fact, to a German museum--the Kunsthalle in Bremen--and was part of a group of some 1,700 drawings, 50 paintings and 3,000 prints that had been squirreled away for safety in Schloss Karnzow. Baldin made a careful inventory of the drawings he had taken and arranged for their transfer to his future place of work, the Shusev State Scientific Research Museum of Architecture in Moscow. And there they remained, unseen, under wraps, for 45 years. When Baldin became director of the museum in 1963, he began to petition first Leonid Brezhnev and then Mikhail Gorbachev for permission to give the works back to Germany.

Baldin's trove--whose existence was first officially revealed in 1990 and exhibited in St. Petersburg in 1993--is among the mass of art stolen from German collections that has only recently come to light in Russia. Some of the most celebrated of these works, a collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, will go on display this week at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The exhibit comes on the heels of another display of looted art mounted a few weeks ago by the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. These exhibitions have renewed an emotional, historically charged debate over what should be done with art looted by Soviet troops from the former territory of Nazi Germany at the end of World War II.