HERMITAGE CURATOR’S HUSBAND TO STAND TRIAL

The husband of a curator who supervised five million dollars in art at the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia, is to stand trial on charges that he and his wife stole work from its collection, reports the New York Times‘ Lawrence Van Gelder. The defendant, Nikolai Zavadsky, is accused of the theft of seventy-seven objects from the museum’s department of Russian cultural history. In August Zavadsky’s lawyer quoted him as saying that he had stolen the artifacts because he needed money to buy insulin for his wife, Larisa Zavadskaya, a diabetic who died suddenly at the start of an inventory that revealed that five million dollars in objects in her charge were missing. No date was given for the start of the trial.