OREANDA-NEWS  Russian President Vladimir Putin has instructed to allocate money to search for state property of Russia, the former Russian Empire and the former USSR abroad. Possible objects falling under his decree were named by experts interviewed by RBC.

According to Alexander Krushelnitsky, Candidate of Historical Sciences, the imperial family in the XIX-XX centuries owned a significant part of the coast of French Nice. "This real estate consisted not only of mansions, castles and land plots directly adjacent to them. Forest hunting grounds, areas with particularly beautiful panoramic views and even, in an isolated case, but in Paris, a city square were also purchased," he said. In addition to them, production facilities, including mines, factories, factories, workshops, shipyards, were partially or entirely purchased. Finally, banks in Switzerland, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary housed quite large and numerous accounts opened by subjects of the Russian Empire, including representatives of the imperial family and the richest families of aristocrats and industrialists. Krushelnitsky stressed that the fate of most of the above-mentioned property in the post-revolutionary era from a legal point of view "turned out to be very doubtful."

In turn, Alexander Dyukov, a researcher at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Director General of the Historical Memory Foundation, said that part of the property of the Russian Empire and the USSR turned out to be untranslated into the property of the Russian Federation, while cultural heritage sites are of the greatest interest to the Russian side in this context. As for the Soviet-era property, we are talking about apartments that were purchased for business trips by various departments, and after their abolition were "actually taken away." He also noted that there are a large number of buildings in Jerusalem that can become objects of state property of Russia, and recalled that the country managed to return to state ownership some foreign property from the times of the Russian Empire and the USSR — for example, St. Nicholas Cathedral in Nice in the Byzantine style, erected in honor of the heir of Emperor Alexander II.

Earlier in January, it became known that the Latvian Seimas approved the confiscation of the Moscow House in Riga in the final reading.