Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In the late 1920s, the Soviet government urgently needed foreign currency to finance the rapid industrialization of Russia ordered in the first Five Year Plan. The government had already sold off collections of jewelry, furniture and icons seized from the Russian nobility, wealthy classes, and the church. In February 1928, the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, along with the Russian Museum, was ordered to make a list of art works worth at least two million rubles, for export. A special agency called 'Antiquariat' was created under the "Narkompros" (the People's Commisariat of Enlightenment)
Egyptian Collection of the Hermitage Museum at that time. Vladimir Golenishchev became the first Russian egyptologist and started to work in the Hermitage in the 1870s. At the insistence of Golenishchev in 1881 the remainder of the Egyptian museum of the Kunstkamera was moved to the Hermitage. The Hermitage collection continued to grow in the 1880s, when Coptic written monuments and two fragments of Egyptian water clocks were acquired. In 1891 Golenishchev published the first complete inventory of the collection. Since the 1870s Golenishchev had collected an impressive private Egyptian collection, which was sold to the Pushkin Museum in Moscow in 1909, shortly before he emigrated.