In November 1928 Stalin ordered the curators of the Leningrad Hermitage (the old tsarist collection) to sell part of its contents immediately to millionaires all over the world. The largest sales went to Andrew W. Mellon, who bought twenty-one paintings, including a Van Eyck, a Rubens, five Rembrandts, four Van Dycks, two Raphaels, a Titian, a Velázquez, and a Botticelli, plus others, for a total of $6,654,053 in cash, a third of all Soviet exports to the USA in the year.
