I had no time to set the price. I could feel Chief Curator Gapanyuk pulling me by the sleeve as he spoke with total candor: “Just take a look at this platinum rose! It was created in 1970 by our jeweler Viktor Nikolayev. He was assisted by Gennady Aleksakhin. The flower is mounted on a spring. It goes into a flap at the slightest whiff. However, there’s no wind in the museum. So the rose sits here motionlessly. The decoration is bedecked with 1,466 diamonds,” Gapanyuk said.
 |
|
|
 |
| The largest gold nugget ever found (Photo by Komsomolskaya Pravda) |
|
|
|
|
 BREAKING NEWS |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Rybkin put on white gloves (he is no exception to the rule which requires that all personnel wear gloves when touching exhibits) and picked up a bar of gold. The bar seemed smaller than a loaf of bread. But it weighed 12 kilograms. Rybkin could hardly hold the ingot in has hands. “The specific gravity of gold is quite high,” said he.
The ingot has the year of manufacture imprinted on the side: 1937. It is one of the ingots of gold shipped by the Soviet Union to the Allies for war materiel and services supplied under the Lend-Lease Act. In 1942, the HMS Edinburgh was loaded with 471 ingots of the Soviet gold. However, the British cruiser was sunk by the Nazis in the Barents Sea. In the 1980s, 431 ingots were recovered from the seabed. One of the recovered ingots is now stored at the Russian Diamond Fund.
The staff of the Fund also showed us 100 gold nuggets, including the Big Triangle, which is the largest gold nugget ever found on the planet. It weighs 36 kilos. Chief Curator Gapanyuk specified that the nugget had been found by one Nikofor Syutkin, a prospector. The nugget was found in 1842 at Tsarevo-Alexandrovsky placer in the Urals. We could also have a look around 20 platinum ingots.
The ownership of the giant President emerald was in dispute for 10 years
It is a pity that the staff plainly refused to issue those white gloves to us. We felt a strong desire of touching the President emerald the very moment we saw it in a secret storage room.
“The emerald was found in one of the mines of the Sverdlovsk region in 1992. As you can see, it’s quite large, its weight exceeds one kilogram (1,170 grams, to be precise). Therefore, we laid claim to the find,” Rybkin said.
Pravda.ru forum. The place where truth hurts
Russia To Build Civil Nuclear Plant in India
Forum
Source: 
