Talk:Imperial crown of Russia

Deletion of last paragraphs
I have deleted the last two paragraphs of this article for the followfing reasons:
 * They were clearly a direct copy from this website: http://www.fabergetheperfectgift.com/catalog/impcrown.html
 * Both paragraphs were of little use:
 * The first repeated an earlier part of the article
 * The second was no more than an advertisement for a replica of the crown sold at the website above

Vneiomazza 8 July 2005 20:04 (UTC)

Imperial Crown of the Empress Anna
The imperial crown depicted in this article is that made for the Empress Anna, not the final imperial crown made for Catherine the Great and used by all her successors until Nicholas II. I believe it was Lord Twining who stated that the imperial crown of the Empress Anna was later used by Nicholas I in his coronation as king of Poland. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.239.152.174 (talk) 05:36, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

"Time in Ireland"
The Imperial Crown and other pieces of the State Regalia were never removed from Russia or the Soviet Union. The pieces were sent in 1914 from St. Petersburg to Moscow for safekeeping during the first world war, and were only rediscovered in the 1920's, when they were catalogued by A. Faberge in 1921 before his release by the soviets (op cit http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:FlYEZhKQO9UJ:www.mieks.com/Faberge/Faberge-New.htm+agathon+faberge&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a). A selection of the pieces were offered for sale in London at Christie's in 1927. (op cit. http://www.alexanderpalace.org/palace/JewelsAuction.html). It is possible that some remaining selections from this sale were sent to Ireland as a loan,or that other pieces of jewelery from the state were use as colateral, but since this article is about the Imperial Crown, and not about ancillary state pieces, this is misleading.

The Imperial Crown itself has never left Russia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nick Nicholson (talk • contribs) 14:11, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

What is the source for the section about the crown spending time in Ireland? --Ryano 16:37, 24 April 2006 (UTC)


 * The "Russian Crown Jewels" were sent to Ireland as collateral for a loan. As far as I can tell, this is true. I don't know if the Crown itself was specifically sent to Ireland. The Wikipedia article on the Irish Crown Jewels has more information on these transactions. OlYeller 17:46, 5 January 2007 (UTC)


 * As noted before by others, even if the general story of the Irish loan have sufficient weight to be reported, it is certainly NOT clear from anything I have seen that the collateral was any specifically identified set of jewels. Juan Riley (talk) 16:47, 1 June 2014 (UTC)


 * It would appear from the following (p7) that the collateral amounted to four jewels of no particular importance. http://www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie/reels/bmh/BMH.WS0372.pdf 92.1.248.253 (talk) 08:59, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

It's surprising to see such an obvious error lasting on wikipedia for at least a decade. The Imperial Crown has never left Russia, and certainly was not used as collateral for an Irish loan. Confusion over what is meant by Russian jewels, and even "Russian Crown Jewels" has I think led an editor to do a bit of WP:OR, believing that the Russian crown jewels had gone to Ireland, and believing that the Imperial Crown must logically be part of the crown jewels, ergo the Imperial Crown had gone to Ireland.
 * For a start, sources just use "jewels" or "Russian crown jewels" or something similar (Matt Treacy, The Communist Party of Ireland 1921 - 2011, p. 206; Richard Bennett, The Black and Tans, p. 155; Dermot Keogh, Twentieth-Century Ireland, etc) with no mention of the Imperial Crown. Incidentally Keogh is the only mention of the loan being $25,000. The vast majority of sources, including some with much more rigorous scholarship than Keogh, have it as $20,000, but that's another story.
 * There was an Irish loan, with Russian jewels as security. These jewels were certainly not the crown jewels (definition of what constitutes a crown jewel is a bit loose here, but Regalia of the Russian tsars is a not unreasonable list. Indeed they probably had nothing to do with the imperial family at all. Anne Chambers in T. K. Whitaker: Portrait of a Patriot, p. 68 notes that they were "thought to have been appropriated from a Russian noble." Confirmation that they were not the crown jewels, much less the Imperial Crown comes from David Fitzpatrick's Harry Boland's Irish Revolution, p. 139, where he writes "The 'security' was a selection of four 'Crown Jewels' that were only identified as paste some three decades later, when the Soviet government grudgingly repaid the loan (without any interest) in exchange for the worthless treasure." (Quotation marks in original). Chambers adds confirmation on p. 69 when discussing the repatriation of the jewels. "'Ken was summoned by J.J. McElligott to his office to witness the formal removal of the jewels from the safe. 'I expected to be blinded by the sparkle of diamonds on beautiful tiaras, but was disappointed to find a rather lack-lustre clump of objects which I recall as being mostly brooches, chains and crystal pendants, no gold, the silver blackened.' On his recommendation, the cache was sent for valuation to Weir's jewellers on Grafton Street. 'We were not surprised to find that their intrinsic value was below the $20,000 owed: so the jewels were dispatched to Dulanty; no claim was made for interest and the Russian cheque was lodged to the exchequer.'"
 * What had happened to the crown in this time? William Clarke's The Lost Fortune of the Tsars records that the crown, orb, sceptre and other regalia were being catalogued and overhauled by House Fabergé from 1913. The orb and sceptre had been finished, but the outbreak of the First World War prevented work from starting on the crowns. They were boxed up and dispatched from St Petersburg to Moscow in nine strong-boxes in 1914, and stored in the Kremlin Armoury. They were still there in April 1920 when the security for the Irish loan was put up. They were re-catalogued in 1922 and transferred to the State Treasury, along with other jewels, pieces of art and valuable plate that had been left behind by the Imperial Family (pp.151-2).
 * Large quantities of treasure were being disposed of by the Soviets in the early 1920s, either as collateral for debts, or being sold outright. The 1920 trade mission to London, headed by Kamenev and Krasin disposed of jewellery worth tens of thousands of pounds, and were forced to admit that the sales were authorised by Moscow, but that the crown jewels were as yet not on the market. The crown jewels ended up in what later became the Diamond Fund, and there were discussions about selling off parts of it for more currency. Experts advised selling the most important parts of the regalia, including the crown, orb and sceptre, arguing that they were unlikely to attract their historic worth. But other tsarist treasures, including a number of the Fabergé eggs, were sold abroad at this time. The crown and the other regalia popped up again in Moscow at a showing for two American reporters, one of whom was invited to try on the crown, later valued at $52 million (substantially more than the Irish loan). A number of tsarist treasures, including Catherine the Great's nuptial crown, Paul I's diamond-studded sword, a diamond necklace and gold watch belonging to the Empress Alexandra, and some of the imperial Fabergé eggs were sold off in various international auctions between 1927 and 1934. The crown and most of the other official regalia escaped this fate, and remained in the Diamond Fund to this day.

I hope that this lays to rest the myth of the Imperial Crown in Ireland. The story of the Irish loan is an interesting footnote to history, it probably belongs somewhere on wikipedia, but not here. At the moment we are grossly misleading readers by claiming the crown was in Ireland. 10 years of scepticism and the claim is still here. Being WP:BOLD I will remove reference to it, otherwise it might still be here in another 10 years time, but put it here, in case someone finds a place for the story of the loan. But certainly it should not be readded here without an explicit reference that the crown was part of the security. As shown, that ought to be impossible in a reliable source, since it never was. 92.18.158.185 (talk) 16:06, 19 July 2016 (UTC)


 * As above, adding the section I removed: ==Time in Ireland==

Following the October Revolution the new Russian Republic, which was seriously low on funds, sought a loan from the Irish Republican revolutionary government, whose finance minister, Michael Collins, had become internationally famous for his fundraising for the unofficial Irish state. The Imperial Crown of Russia was not among the jewels used as collateral for this loan. The Crown and most of the official regalia of the State were photographed in Moscow in 1922 and included in a 1925 publication, documenting the Russian Crown jewels. The jewellery used for the Irish loan were described by the press simply as being "pieces set with sapphires, rubies, and diamonds."

The Crown Jewels were used as collateral by the Soviet Republic for a loan of $25,000 from the Irish Republic. The transfer was made in New York City between the head of the Soviet Bureau, the de facto Soviet Ambassador to the United States Ludwig Martens, and the Irish envoy in the United States, Teachta Dála Harry Boland. When Boland returned to Ireland the jewels were kept in the house of his mother, Catherine Boland, in Dublin City during the Irish War of Independence. Before Boland died, during the Battle of Dublin, he instructed his mother to keep the jewels hidden from the Free State until the Irish Republicans returned to power. Mrs Boland returned the jewels to the Irish Government under Éamon de Valera in 1938. The jewels were placed in a safe in Government Buildings and were forgotten about.

On their discovery in 1948, by the new government led by John A. Costello, it was originally intended that the set of Crown Jewels would be sold by public auction in London. However, after consultations as to their legal status, and negotiations with the Soviet ambassador, it was arranged for them to be returned to the Soviet Union in exchange for repayment of the $25,000 originally borrowed in 1920. The jewels would ultimately return to Moscow in 1950.

A definitive account of the loan, collateral, and its eventual return to Russia can be found here: https://issuu.com/scolairestaire/docs/vol3iss1print (go to page 24) This is as complete and academically rigorous an account of what happened as can be found and many aspects can be confirmed against primary source material.De bhal (talk) 23:02, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

This is probably wrong
"The crown is based upon an ancient Byzantine design - two half spheres representing the eastern and western empires of Rome, connected by a full arch in the form of a garland of oak leaves and acorns which represent the temporal power of the monarchy, surmounted by a large spinel." First, it does not match what the — rather plentiful — pictures of Imperial Roman crowns. Second, there is a very interesting digression in a charming book on the royal Hungarian regalia that includes a very complete discussion of what such crowns were — not, in short, closed crowns like this. More likely, the Russians copied the crowns of the Holy Roman Empire. The Imperial crown itself had only the one hoop, because tradition required a German king being crowned emperor (by the pope or his representative) to be given a gift of episcopal vestments; the miter was worn as the cap within the crown, in the old way, with the stiff sides on right and left. An emperor's personal crown, at later times, was fashioned with an imitation of this episcopal — priestly — add-in, as can be seen in the crown of — Ferdinand? one of those Habsburg chaps — later used as the Austrian imperial crown after the formal dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. The Russian crown looks like a stylization of the older Holy Roman Imperial crown, flattened and rounded to look like the miter adopted latterly by Eastern Orthodox clergy. djenner 00:50, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

External links modified
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“Silk imperial crown”?
The added section on a “silk imperial crown” substantially copies http://silkimperialcrown.com but I can find nowhere a reliable reference to this object beyond this site and its various clones on Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. In fact, the only photographic depictions are of a box that purportedly contained the object; photos of the object itself cannot be found, nor can a reliable description of exactly what it is.

If there is no substantial response to this discussion, I propose removal of this section of the article Hipgnostic (talk) 23:21, 20 September 2018 (UTC)

Silk imperial crown.
This is not a legitimate piece of the regalia. RomanetNYC (talk) 16:19, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

Silk imperial crown
Someone else with higher privileges is going to have to delete this section. My edits are being marked as 'vandalism', and a revert was marked as an 'edit war'. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:281:8200:11E6:A91F:C4EF:401B:B321 (talk) 05:49, 4 November 2019 (UTC)

This section should be deleted. My changes were reverted by: "Please refrain from making unconstructive edits to Wikipedia. Your edits appear to constitute vandalism and have been reverted. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. Repeated vandalism may result in the loss of editing privileges. Thank you. 數神 (talk) 05:37, 4 November 2019 (UTC)"

There is no independent reference that substantiates a 'silk imperial crown'... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:281:8200:11E6:A91F:C4EF:401B:B321 (talk) 05:44, 4 November 2019 (UTC)

"Last worn"
The introduction says


 * …it was last worn at the coronation of Nicholas II.

But further down the page there's a quote from a New York Times journalist who claims to have worn it. Marnanel (talk) 22:02, 28 March 2023 (UTC)


 * I think it means the last monarch from the context, but maybe it can be clarified. Mellk (talk) 22:30, 29 March 2023 (UTC)