Last year, an 1887 imperial egg valued at an estimated $33m was found in a Midwest antique shop, while in October, the British Royal Collection Trust announced that it had found the missing surprise from the Diamond Trellis Egg of 1892. The hunt for the remaining Easter eggs continues, and the surprises keep coming. In 1951, Rubin agreed to pay the Fabergé family to use the name, but not, as history shows, to protect it.
While Fabergé’s son, Alexander, and his half-brother Eugène set up a new luxury goods company in Paris in 1924, the famous family name was appropriated, and registered, in the United States in 1937 by Samuel Rubin to sell perfume.
In later years, Stalin sold 14 Fabergé eggs overseas to raise foreign currency as part of the ‘Treasures into Tractors’ directive, just as Lenin had traded Russian furs and caviar for American wheat. No order was given for the mass production of cheap red wooden Easter eggs for the heroic Soviet proletariat instead, the company vanished, while, on Lenin’s orders, stolen and requisitioned Fabergé eggs were packed off along with other Romanov treasures to the secure confines of the Kremlin Armoury. While the nationalisation of utilities like gas or electricity might have made sense, state ownership of the House of Fabergé was an absurdity.
