Fabergé Revisited: The Tsar’s Easter Eggs in the Age of the Oligarchs

Pippa Crawford examines the history of extreme wealth in Russia through the lens of its most famous trinkets

The First Hen Egg (1885.) House of Fabergé. Enamel, gold and rubies. The hen itself originally contained a gold and diamond Imperial crown, with a ruby necklace suspended within. Both are now lost. I spent some time trying to find out which was made first — Fabergé’s chicken or Fabergé’s egg; sadly this information continues to evade me.

(c) Forbes Collection

One rainy Sunday in St. Petersburg, I went to Shuvalov Palace and finally saw the Fabergé eggs for myself. The sprawling neoclassical museum on the banks of the Fontanka now houses one of the world’s finest collections of Tsarist treasures, including the Imperial Easter eggs I’d heard so many stories about. Here’s what happened.

In 1885, Tsar Alexander III commissioned the jeweller Peter Carl Fabergé to make a Easter egg from gold and precious stones as a gift for his wife, Maria Feodorovna. Delighted with it, she requested another the following year, and the next, and the next. After her husband’s death, Maria was given an annual egg by her son, Tsar Nicholas II, whose own wife also liked the look of them. Nicholas instructed Fabergé to start making two eggs a year. Every Easter the eggs grew increasingly elaborate, and the Romanov dynasty grew increasingly unpopular. On Bloody Sunday in 1905, troops opened fire upon hundreds of unarmed protesters.

A decade later, the First World War cast the Tsar’s big spending into even sharper relief. Efforts to improve his image - the 1916 ‘austerity’ egg shows the Romanov princesses in Red Cross nurse’s uniforms - were in vain. In 1918, Nicholas and his family were murdered as the Revolution swept across Russia. Their treasures were looted and scattered. The once-mighty House of Fabergé fell to ruin. The master jeweller himself fled to Switzerland, but never quite recovered from the shock. He died in 1920, his four sons always maintained, from a broken heart.

Rooster coffee pot (1883) Sazikov firm. Silver; casting, embossing, engraving, shotting.

As I explored the museum, the thing that most struck me was its sheer scale. The rooms of the Shuvalov palace overflow with snuff-boxes, samovars and knick-knacks of all descriptions. ‘Bezdelushki,’ the Russians call them, a word which translates, tellingly, as ‘without purpose; useless.’ Each object is fashioned to a near-transcendent level of kitsch. The jewellers of the late nineteenth century seemed to take every bare half-inch of gold as a personal affront, never leaving anything blank which could be feasibly filled by a minute rhinoceros stuffed with rubies. I particularly appreciated the silver armoured-cockerel coffee-pot, squatting inside its cabinet with a stoic jauntiness that beggars belief. (See right.) 

Given that famine was rife at the time many of these pieces were commissioned, such decadence comes across as obscene. Yet there is a jarring innocence to the designs, as well as a delight in surprises and misdirection. For all their foibles, one gains a sense of the Romanovs as a family like any other, with in-jokes and loyalties and unwritten codes. The princesses were close, signing letters with their collective initials ‘OTMA,’ and doting on their little brother, Alexei, who suffered from haemophilia. Tsar Nicholas gave total artistic control to Fabergé and his assistants, not wishing to set eyes on the eggs or their blueprints until the moment they were brought to the table on Easter morning and unwrapped by his wife.

The craftsmen — and two notable craftswomen — at the House of Fabergé spent at least a year on each design. Working against each other and against the clock, they sought to achieve the impossible – technical and aesthetic perfection. Fabergé’s pride in his careful artistry shines from every piece here. However, the jeweller was, like his patrons, a member of an old ancestral house, operating from within a closed circle at great removes from wider society. One of the elite. He is said to have travelled without any luggage at all, buying all his possessions from scratch at his destination. 

In Russia today, questions of inequality are as pressing as in the Imperial era. The 2018 Forbes index reported that the combined wealth of fewer that a hundred Russian billionaires exceeds the bank savings of the rest of the entire population. This means that 90% of Russia’s wealth remains in the possession of the top 3%. Russia’s oligarchs profited greatly from the collapse of the Soviet Union, yet thirty years on, subsistence poverty amongst ordinary citizens continues to rise. The rouble is falling, and crippling pension reforms are expected to draw retirement age and male life-expectancy to within six years of each other.

 

Vekselberg with Vladimir Putin, at a 2017 Renova conference. (c) Sputnik/Aleksey Nikolskyi/Kremlin

 

The Bay Tree Egg (1911) House of Fabergé. Nephrite, enamel, gold and feathers. A lever within one of the diamond fruits opens the egg to reveal a tiny jewelled songbird. (c) Wikimedia Commons/Ninara

And what does all this have to do with Fabergé? The connection is not a merely symbolic one. Over the past century, the forty-six surviving Imperial eggs have been fought over by royalty and private collectors alike in auction houses across the globe. Nineteen of them are now back in Russia, and here their histories and those of the country’s twenty-first century tycoons become neatly inter-contained. 

In 2004, Viktor Vekselberg, president of the oil and telecommunications conglomerate Renova, bought nine Fabergé eggs in a single lot. The eggs formed the core of the collection I enjoyed visiting at the Shuvalov palace, and Vekselberg remains their owner. The oligarch, who is currently under investigation over payments he made to Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, claims he founded his museum purely to showcase ‘the finest examples of jewellery art in the world,’ and to continue his mission to repatriate Russia’s scattered cultural artefacts. He may be speaking the truth.

But internationally, and in contemporary Russia particularly, ‘high culture’ often maintains a protected status, aloof from politics. As such it remains a popular method of legitimising income, as the gangster capitalists of the nineties reinvent themselves as philanthropists and renaissance men. Roman Abramovich, for instance, owns the Moscow art gallery ‘Garage,’ as well as Chelsea football club. The former plastic-bag tycoon Alisher Usmanov, suspected of removing references to his fraud convictions from his own Wikipedia page, donated $400 million’s worth of porcelain and paintings to St. Petersburg’s Konstantinovsky Palace in 2007. Thus, and not forgetting the loaded history of many cultural artefacts, the line separating art from politics grows increasingly blurred. The creators of the Fabergé eggs disguised their inextricability from a mistrusted elite – stressing their devotion to beauty and heritage over money or power – and it is this troubled legacy that Vekselberg and his associates have inherited along with the treasures themselves. 

September 2019 was a turbulent month for Russia, with accusations of vote-fixing leading to an unusual public outcry. The streets of Petersburg seemed quiet as I made my way back from the museum. It was election day, but police suppression of protests at the corresponding elections in Moscow meant that the response here was rather more muted. I stopped at my local produkty store to buy as much bottled water as I could carry up the stairs; our building is supplied by an intricate pipe system of Soviet design, and we’ve been warned to watch out for the lead. Inside, I watched the TV coverage as pro-Kremlin candidate Alexander Beglov was re-elected as Governor of St. Petersburg. (Majority: 64%; voter turn-out: 30%) Outside my window, six men continued work on the roofs of the neighbouring church. They were repairing them carefully, covering every dome with tiny pieces of gold leaf.

Pippa Crawford (@crawfordpippa) is studying Russian at UCL, and is currently based in St Petersburg. She looks forward to getting deeper into the literature and theatre scene there this year.

Rafy Hay