The Quest of The Romanoff Treasure

Octavo. 21.5cm. Publisher's heavy grain pale grey cloth titled and decorated in gilt to spine and front board. Dustjacket. [xi]; 241pp. Some wear and discoloration to extremities, very light, it's a very solidly produced book, so wear and tear is represented by darkening of the cloth at the edges and some softening of the spine ends rather than anything more drastic; internally clean, ownership to front pastedown, author's signature to front flyleaf; in a handsome example of the gold and black dustjacket with some chipping and shallow loss to the spine ends, scuffing and rubbing to the gilt paper coating, and some marginal creasing and soiling. A very good, solid copy. Illustrated throughout with full page plates. For a man named by his father after the logo of the American Socialist Labor Party, after slipping out of Odessa in the 1870's, Armand Hammer's journey to become one of the world's most influential businessmen and "Lenin's Favorite Capitalist" must have been a dramatic one. His father Julius, had spent much of the early 20th century consolidating his role at Allied Drug and Chemical, which was essentially at times a smuggling front, shipping embargoed goods to Russia during the US trade sanctions. After Julius was sentenced to 3 years in Sing Sing, allegedly for a botched abortion that resulted in the death of a Russian woman from subsequent pneumonia (although modern research suggests that Armand, a medical student, might have been the one who performed the abortion, and Julius took responsibility as the qualified senior medical professional present), Armand took over Allied Drug and Chemical and raised it to new heights of corporate success. During Prohibition, Allied's largest seller was a essentially alcoholic ginger ale, sold as a medicinal tonic to great profit. Acting under the instructions of his imprisoned father, Armand began taking numerous business trips to the Soviet Union. A young J. Edgar Hoover, at that point basically an analyst at the Justice Department, very strongly believed that the equally youthful Hammer was a COMINTERN courier, and essentially placed him under surveillance for the rest of his life. Hammer's trips to Russia were ostensibly to recoup bad debts, but this quickly developed into a number of lucrative business deals, not least of which was selling cheap wheat to starving, famine hit areas of Russia. Hammer developed a close co-operative (no pun intended) relationship with Lenin, which resulted in a number of very high status business contracts and deals ranging from medical import contracts, to 25 year's worth of asbestos mining in the Urals; one of Hammer's greatest coups was arranging payment for various services in furs, caviar, jewellery and antiquities seized by the Party from its long tail of enemies, making him essentially a conduit for looted and otherwise dubious art, jewels, and antiques. At the height of Lenin's New Economic Policy, Armand Hammer was the sole trade liason between the enormity of Soviet Russia, and 38 major US corporations seeking to build trade deals through him. His grasp of the downrange necessities of dealing with the Soviets; graft, bribery, corruption, and palm greasing, was legendary, and by the 1970's when his methods were starting to be inspected more closely there was no doubt that Hammer's understanding of legitimate business was secondary to his instinctive abilities in the fields of corporate and beaurocratic bribery and manipulation. This book is one, personal perspective on the empire of treasure that Hammer accumulated; there are others, and the entangled ephemeral traces of looted artworks, forged and unfinished Fabergé eggs, specially manufactured jeweller's tools designed to copy Fabergé's style exactly, and a wealth of other foggy rumors and suspicions ranging from Armand the KGB stooge, to Armand the James Bond Villain bent on Soviet domination through capitalism, will continue to follow in his wake, whether he be considered a legitima. …