Skip to main content
Harvard University Press - home
Trophies of War and Empire

Trophies of War and Empire

The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War II, and the International Politics of Restitution

Patricia Kennedy Grimsted

ISBN 9780916458768

Publication date: 09/30/2001

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II have brought attention to the displaced cultural and archival heritage of many nations. The situation of Ukraine provides a striking example of the many international problems involved in questions of restitution. Patricia Kennedy Grimsted considers (among many topics) the problems of defining the archival heritage of Ukraine vis-à-vis Russia; international precedents for post-imperial archival devolutions and postwar restitution; intentional Soviet archival destruction in 1941; the Ukrainian component of Soviet library and archival trophies in Moscow and Kyiv; Russia’s bitterly disputed 1998 law nationalizing cultural trophies; and post-1991 Ukrainian restitution policies.

Containing significant new revelations about cultural treasures previously thought lost, Trophies of War and Empire will be of interest to all those interested in the contemporary rebuilding of cultural and intellectual institutions in Eastern Europe.

Praise

  • Patricia Grimstead’s Trophies of War and Empire is a tour de force of scholarship… Her narrative is full of revelations about the unsolved mysteries of wartime looting and her exhaustive documentation, footnotes, and bibliography are an essential resource for all those with an interest in provenance research and restitution.

    —Lynn H. Nicholas, author of The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War

Authors

  • Patricia Kennedy Grimsted is a Senior Research Associate at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.
  • Dr. Charles Kecskeméti is Secretary-General Emeritus of the International Council on Archives.

Book Details

  • 800 pages
  • 6 x 9 inches
  • Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
  • Foreword by Dr. Charles Kecskeméti

Recommendations