Art critic Nina Moleva, who bequeathed a collection of paintings to Putin, has died

Art critic, professor Nina Moleva died at the age of 99. In 2013, she bequeathed a family collection of paintings to the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin. It is claimed that the paintings can be valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. This was not confirmed independently.

Moleva is the author of monographs on Russian painters and studies of art history. She is the widow of the artist Eliy Belyutyn. She inherited a collection of paintings from her husband. It is claimed that the collection contains works by Renaissance artists, Flemish masters, and representatives of classicism.

In particular, it was stated that the collection contains works by Leonardo, Michelangelo and Donatello, van Dyck, Jordans, Rembrandt and Poussin. It was claimed that the artist’s family had been collecting it since the end of the 19th century. How the works were bought and how they managed to be preserved after the revolution was plausibly not explained.

In April 2013, Moleva announced that she bequeathed the collection as a gift to the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin. She valued her paintings at 2 billion dollars. The Art Newspaper Russia wrote that experts who saw the collection said that it contained “several interesting works.” The Kremlin did not comment on the will in the name of Putin, nor did it confirm the very fact of its existence.

The obituaries of Moleva, published by the Russian press, contain a number of assertions about her biography, recorded mainly in her own words. It is claimed that she was familiar with Stalin, represented Soviet schoolchildren at the 18th Congress of the Communist Party of Ukraine (B), addressed children with a speech on the All-Union Radio after the German invasion of the USSR in 1941, was awarded combat awards for participation in the Second World War, conducted Kremlin concerts and was a member of the Maly Theater troupe. None of this is confirmed by independent sources.