In the town of Odessa a man was arrested for embezzlement. During a search of his apartment items of pornography were also discovered. Charges were immediately proffered against him under two articles of the Criminal Code. While confessing to the embezzlement offence he nonetheless denied the charge of possessing pornography, for which he stood to receive an additional sentence of between three and eight years in a concentration camp.

The local investigators were unable to deal with the case and sent the evidence to Moscow for examination by a commission of experts. The commission included specialists from the Pushkin Museum of the Arts and from the Tretyakov Gallery, who established that these were ordinary lithographs of pictures by Rubens, Titian and Giorgione. The second charge against the swindler was dropped.

From A. Anatoli’s (Kuznetsov) Foreword to Petr Sadecky’s Octobriana and the Russian Underground, New York: Harper & Row, 1971, p. 7.