The Second World War was over six decades ago, however the disputes concerning the property right on so-called «trophy art», the cultural values moved as a result of the Second World War, are still being hold. In 1945-1946 a significant amount of historical and cultural values from the won Germany was moved to the Soviet Union as an indemnification for the caused damage. They were taken out on the lawful bases according to the agreements between the countries-winners of the fascist Germany. At that time nobody challenged that Germany and its former allies should compensate partially an enormous damage which caused the cultural property of our country.

From 1955 to 1960 the Soviet Union transferred the most part of the values which were taken out to the first post-war years from the territory of Germany, in German Democratic, Polish National and Hungarian National republics. Totally more than 1,5 million museum subjects, including 1240 products of the Dresden gallery, 16 thousand sheets of a drawing, more than 100 thousand coins (from which 4187 gold), 18 388 monuments of ancient art were transferred only to GDR . The Pergamum altar, a treasury of the Saxon princes electos («the Green arch»), the Saxon ground library, the Berlin state library, the most part of Gothic library, 800 tons of archival documents returned to their places.

The rest part of the transferred cultural values (less than 10 percent from the total number) was placed in the store rooms of the State Hermitage, the State museum of the fine arts of the name of A.S. Pushkin, the State Historical museum, other museums, libraries and archives.

In 1998 «the Federal law concerning the cultural values, which has been moved to the USSR as the result of the Second World War and which now are situating in the territory of the Russian Federation» was passed. At that time, the active works on the inventory and definition of the former state accessory (the former owners) began in the establishments of the Russian culture storing the transferred cultural values. The works are being held now. The received results are fixed in an electronic database of all transferred cultural values of the Russian culture.

Since 1990th the information on the transferred cultural values is widely published in scientific and popular scientific editions.

Cultural values are shown at exhibitions and are included into the museum expositions. Thanks to this work thousand works of art, books, manuscripts and the archival documents which were earlier inaccessible to experts and wide public has been already attached into a scientific and cultural turn.