Among other advantages of the monograph by Nikolashchenko, I would like to specifically mention the problem of sources touched upon by the author, which should be used, in his opinion, to build the historiography of the diamond market.
“Due to the lack of translations of the materials from foreign sources, the Russian reader is little aware of how the Diamond Monopoly was created and what it was. Only very simplified, even oversimplified interpretations are available. The rough diamond purchases by the monopoly from its suppliers under long-term agreements (including the rough diamond export from the USSR and the Russian Federation) and long-term trends in the rough diamond price behaviour were not covered in publicly available publications at all”8.
So, Nikolashchenko prefers foreign (mainly English-language) sources. And this is largely true since the diamond market researches made in English were carried out half a century earlier than the Russian-language ones, so, they significantly outstripped the latter in terms of volume, set of facts, insight into the topic. The problem, however, is that Nikolashchenko prefers to consider exclusively open access publications as the sources, and practically avoids using the documents. The reference base of the monograph by Nikolashchenko in the part of it devoted to the actual history of the diamond market is based on the books and articles that (with all their undoubted merits) are secondary and, in many ways, reflect their authors’ - inevitably subjective - views.
When creating a historical work - and such a large-scale one, the use of monographs, memoirs, articles published in scientific and popular journals as sources, is necessary, of course. But is it enough? On 700 pages, it is impossible to find a single correct quotation to archival documents or to primary sources. The quotation like “data from the foreign trade association Almazyuvelirexport’s archive” without specifying the fund, inventory list, case, and sheet sound the same as “from my aunt’s family archive” as it is impossible to verify the data. This, of course, is quite acceptable in publicistic genre, but the author positions his work as a full-fledged historical study covering more than a century and, moreover, as an exclusive one!
However, Nikolashchenko quoted one curious archival document and I will dwell on this point in more detail since it illustrates very vividly the difference in the approaches to historical sources used by “conspiracists” and by Nikolashchenko.
Nikolashchenko wrote in 2019, “The Report dated 13.02.1950 on the work of AMTORG in 1949” says, in particular, “In June 1949, AMTORG sold a polished diamonds parcel imported in 1948 and weighing 1,246 carats for $85,000 with payment in pounds. The price for this parcel was lower than the price that could have been paid at the end of 1948 when the market was better and the firms offered $90,000-$93,000 for this parcel. In mid-1949, the Medaiski & Neim company bought a large parcel of polished diamonds directly from the association. According to the company, it was able to make good money by reselling the specified parcel on the US market at the end of 1949 when the market improved.” Taking into account that the cutting and polishing industry in the USSR did not exist at that time, it is obvious that polished diamonds were exported abroad from the state repositories..., the supplier from the USSR was the foreign trade association Soyuzpromexport, which specialized in trading these precious stones long before the discovery of diamond deposits in Yakutia and the creation of the Soviet cutting and polishing industry”9.
And here is what the “conspiracist” Goryainov wrote in 2013, “Maybe the Ural diamonds were cut to make polished diamonds and were sold to the population? This hypothesis is rather cynical - in the late 1940s, early 1950s, the Soviet people did not think about buying polished diamonds, their purchasing power was, to put it mildly, low, and the first Soviet cutting and polishing factory (Smolensk “Kristall”) was launched in 1963... “In June 1949, AMTORG sold a polished diamonds parcel imported in 1948 and weighing 1,246 carats for $85,000 with payment in pounds. The price for this parcel was lower than the price that could have been paid at the end of 1948 when the market was better and the firms offered $90,000-$93,000 for this parcel. In mid-1949, the Medaiski & Neim company bought a large parcel of polished diamonds directly from the association. According to the company, it was able to make good money by reselling the specified parcel on the US market at the end of 1949 when the market improved.” This is a quotation from the AMTORG’s classified report dated 13.02.1950. The USSR Ministry of Foreign Trade’s secret report dated 14.12.1949 mentions the polished diamond parcel weighing 8,546 carats, also sold to the USA. There is also evidence that Soyuzpromexport was actively interested in the world polished diamond market in those years. In order to manufacture 8,546 carats of high-quality polished diamonds (you cannot sell lower-quality polished diamonds to the USA), it was necessary to cut and polish at least 20,000 carats of excellent-quality rough diamonds. It is quite obvious that Uralalmaz had nothing to do with this supply as by 1949, it had not produced even a third of this volume. Those polished diamonds were from those diamonds confiscated by the Bolsheviks from the population in the 1920s, from the Gokhran’s stocks”10.
Great! The “conspiracist” and the guru of the diamond market quote an excerpt from the same document and come to the same conclusions! However, the publications were six years apart... But their unanimity is amazing!
And now we will do a small experiment - we will put the first sentence from the quoted AMTORG report into the Google search engine. The search will give only three results: S. Goryainov’s article on Rough-Polished (2013), S. Goryainov’s book “Stalin’s Secret Diamonds” (2018), the archive of the “Democracy” Foundation named after A. N. Yakovlev (the organization was liquidated in 2018). Let’s check the page of the “Democracy” Foundation, which contains the AMTORG report, using the “Carbon Dating The Web” service and get the date of birth of the page: 2017-12-28. It should be added that Mr. Nikolashchenko did not think it necessary to indicate either the archival details of the quoted document or refer to the sources indicated above. And that’s true - there is no need to stand on ceremony with all sorts of “conspiracists”!
It should also be noted that in 2013 when the quoted fragment of the AMTORG’s report was first published, Foundation 413 had two small [Russian] letters “сч” (partially classified), and in 2018, when the book “Stalin’s Secret Diamonds” was published, these two letters were removed, which cost some “conspiracists” a lot of nerves and time. But as a result, a huge number of documents on the relations between the USSR, Great Britain, the USA and South Africa were declassified, but the guru of the diamond market Nikolashchenko is unaware of their existence, judging by the content of his milestone publication, which does not prevent him from continuing to shoot angry arrows at the “conspiracists”.
“In contrast to the assertions of the “conspiracists” who suspected De Beers of the relations with the highest levels of the Soviet elite of functionaries, it should be noted that the leaders of the USSR have never negotiated with the owners or top executives of De Beers”,11 he says.
Well, what can I, as a “conspiracist”, object to this? I can only refer to an interview with the representative of De Beers in the USSR and the Russian Federation in the 1980s to 1990s, Duke N. Lobanov-Rostovsky.
He tells, “I knew Galina Brezhneva and once I had a chance to render her a valuable service. I was friends with the Duke of Kent and his brother, Prince Michael. I was honoured with a conversation by Yuri Andropov who supervised my diamond business in the USSR (after all, this was a strategic direction for a billion dollars a year that the chairman of the KGB had to supervise personally). The conversations with him were exclusively businesslike. “Yes. No. Yes. Thank you. Goodbye” - within this framework. The chairman of the KGB of the USSR did not have idle conversations. He was rather distant with the people. Only once, after signing an especially large contract, Andropov invited me to a country party where only six people were present and where we casually discussed art, poetry and listened to Russian romances with a guitar accompaniment. Perhaps, this was an expression of gratitude for the economic assistance to the Soviets. After all, I arranged a secret meeting in London, which was attended by three persons only, namely, Leonid Zamyatin, USSR Ambassador to Great Britain, Sir Philip Oppenheimer, Head of Sales at the De Beers headquarters, and your humble narrator. What did we discuss at that meeting? Why do you need to know this?”12
But it’s time to summarize. The book by Nikolashchenko is excellent as a literary review of publicly available sources in English on this topic. At the same time, some extremely important aspects of the diamond market development are just overlooked by the author, since foreign sources diplomatically avoid mentioning them, and the author does not use documentary material outside of these sources. The book is absolutely helpless in terms of analyzing the development of the Soviet diamond industry and the USSR export-import operations in the 1920s to 1960s; the author basically repeats the industry legend “polished” by the Soviet censorship and tries to embellish it with made-up stories and often just ridiculous details. As for the closer events, in my opinion, the author expresses the position of a federal official and an average industry analyst in their assessment rather than that of a historian.
Without a doubt, the author is a proficient expert in the rough and polished diamond trade, but the diamond market has always been and remains something more than just a closed system of industrial and trade relations. And the real product on the diamond market is an information shell once ingeniously designed but, unfortunately, decaying every year, without which a polished diamond is just a piece of crystalline carbon. The author strongly rejects such a view of the market, recognizes this view as a “conspiracy” and the people who are not directly involved in the diamond trade must, in his opinion, “keep away from” the history of the diamond market. However, hardly anyone can deny that the copywriters of the advertising agency N. W. Ayer & Son were not able to correctly assess and sell a diamond parcel with a profit. But it was they who gave the market the impetus that continues to move the market up to now.
There is a saying in the Russian language suitable for this case - “You can’t see the forest for the trees” (perhaps Nikolashchenko, as an expert on the English-language sources, would prefer the saying – You can’t see the wood for the trees). It is not an uncommon situation, I must say, in any business. In the years of my already distant youth, I was fond of tennis, but there was a shortage of good tennis equipment in the USSR. However, there was a guy in Moscow, an expert in tennis rackets, known to all the tennis fans in the capital. He could estimate the weight and balance “by eye” with amazing accuracy, he skillfully pulled the strings, knew the merits and demerits of the leading brands and was able to talk about them for hours. Well, he was dealing, of course. And he himself and all his acquaintances considered him a great expert in tennis rackets (quite rightly). But he didn’t play tennis - at all.
Sergey Goryainov, Rough&Polished
8 A. V. Nikolashchenko. World diamond market. M., URSS. P. 11.
9 A. V. Nikolashchenko. World diamond market. M., URSS. P. 642.
10 S. Goryainov. Who did the diamond GULAG work for? https://www.rough-polished.com/ru/analytics/84742.html
11 A. V. Nikolashchenko. World diamond market. M., URSS. P. 645.
12
Nikita Lobanov-Rostovsky on the fate, art and the Soviet blockheads. Russian Reporter. 2018.
