page_title: Moscow gold (Spain)
section_title: The travel and its reception in Moscow
hierarchical_section_title: Moscow gold (Spain) / From Madrid to Moscow / The travel and its reception in Moscow
caption_attribution_description: English: Australia 1857 Sovereign (proof)
context_page_description: The Moscow Gold, or alternatively Gold of the Republic, was 510 tonnes of gold, corresponding to 72.6% of the total gold reserves of the Bank of Spain, that were transferred from their original location in Madrid to the Soviet Union a few months after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. This transfer was made by order of the government of the Second Spanish Republic, presided over by Francisco Largo Caballero, through the initiative of his Minister of Finance, Juan Negrín. The term also encompasses the subsequent issues relating with the gold's sale to the USSR and the use of the funds obtained. The remaining fourth of the Bank's gold reserves, 193 tonnes, was transported and exchanged into currency in France, an operation which is also known by analogy as the "Paris Gold".
  Since the world now was aware of the existence of a large mass of gold in Moscow, the term "Moscow Gold" would eventually be popularized for any Russian funding worldwide.
  Since the 1970s the specific episode in Spanish history has been the focus of many essays and works of literature, many relying on information from official documents and records of the time.
context_section_description: The convoy set sail for the USSR, arriving at the port of Odessa on November 2 — the Kursk, however, would arrive several days later because of technical problems. One of Walter Krivitsky's collaborators, General of the State Political Directorate, described the scene at the Soviet port as follows:
  The gold, protected by the 173rd regiment of the NKVD, was immediately moved to the State Depository for Valuables (Goskhran), in Moscow, where it was received as a deposit according to a protocol, dated November 5, by which a reception commission was established. The gold arrived at the Soviet capital a day before the 19th anniversary of the October Revolution. According to Orlov, Joseph Stalin celebrated the arrival of the gold with a banquet attended by members of the politburo, in which he was famously quoted as saying, "The Spaniards will never see their gold again, just as they don't see their ears," an expression based on a Russian proverb.
  The gold was stored in the Goskhran under military vigilance, and the remaining boxes of gold carried by the Kursk arrived between November 9 and 10. Shortly after, a recount on the total deposits was carried out; initial estimates suggested that the recount would take a year to complete, and despite it having been done with the utmost care, the recount was finalized in less than two months, having begun on December 5, 1936, and completed on January 24, 1937. 15,571 sacks of gold were opened, and 16 different types of gold coins were found inside: pounds sterling (sovereigns or half sovereigns) (70% of the total), Spanish pesetas, French francs, Louis, German marks, Belgian francs, Italian lire, Portuguese escudos, Russian rubles, Austrian schillings, Dutch guilders, Swiss francs, Mexican pesos, Argentine pesos, Chilean pesos, and an extraordinary amount of U.S. dollars. The total deposit was constituted of 509,287.183 kilograms of gold coins and 792.346 kilograms of gold in the form of ingots: thus, a total of 510,079,529.30 grams of crude gold, which at an average of .900 millesimal fineness, was equivalent to 460,568,245.59 grams of fine gold (approximately 14,807,363.8 troy ounces). This amount of gold was valued at 1,592,851,910 gold-pesetas (518 million U.S. dollars). Additionally, the numismatic value of the coins was much higher than the amount of gold they contained, but the Soviets disregarded this when calculating its value. The Soviets did, however, scrupulously examine all coins to identify those that were fake, defective, or did not contain enough gold. The Soviets never explained what was done with the rare or antique coins, but it is doubtful that they were melted. Burnett Bolloten suggests that it is possible that all coins with numismatic value were separated with the intention of gradually selling them on the international market.
  On February 5, 1937 the Spanish ambassador and the Soviet representatives G. F. Grinko, Commissar of Finance, and N. N. Krestinsky, Commissar of Foreign Affairs, signed the final reception act on the deposit of Spanish gold, a document written in French and Russian. Paragraph 2, section 4 of the document stipulated that the Spanish government retained the right of re-exporting or utilizing the gold, and the last clause of the document indicated that the Soviet Union would not be held responsible for the utilization of the gold by Spanish authorities. Said clause established that "if the Government of the Republic ordered the exportation of the gold received as a deposit by the USSR, or utilized said gold in any other way, the responsibility assumed by the People's Commissariat of Finance would automatically be reduced, in whole or in part in proportion to the actions taken by the Government of the Spanish Republic". It was thus clear that the gold reserves deposited in Moscow could be freely employed by the Republic, exporting it or alienating it, and Soviet authorities assumed no responsibility. It is worth noting that the USSR granted the ownership of the gold to the Government of the Republic, instead of to the Bank of Spain, its legal
caption: Coins made 99.8% of Bank of Spain transferred gold, 70% of which sovereigns (pictured) and half-sovereigns.
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