Researcher Jenna Nolt was one of those who took a look.
"The title page is completely hand drawn, and it's got this beautiful, elaborate design on it, and it has the date 1922," Nolt says. "When we translated the title, we found out that it was The Russian Diamond Fund."
The Diamond Fund is the name given to the imperial regalia of the Romanov family, the czars of Russia for more than 300 years, from 1613 to 1917.
[,,,] Regina says the fate of the crown jewels raised a furious debate among the Bolshevik leadership, which was badly in need of money.
Some of the revolutionaries saw the jewels as symbols of centuries of exploitation — gems that ought to be sold to benefit the workers.
Historian Igor Zimin says much of the collection was preserved by curators at the Kremlin in Moscow, who were able to convince the leaders that the gems had enormous historical significance.
[,,,] Zimin is skeptical, by the way, about the newly rediscovered book, because it's dated 1922, and an official photographic inventory of the crown jewels wasn't published until 1925.
The USGS has a copy of that book, too, and researcher Jenna Nolt has compared the two.
She found that the 1922 volume shows four pieces of jewelry that don't appear in the later official book.
The Mysterious Disappearance Of The Russian Crown Jewels : NPR
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