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Harried businessmen would rush in off the streets to his gallery here, Bogema, and think nothing of spending tens of thousands of dollars for the right item to delight the powerful, whether a set of dueling pistols, a suit of armor, antique Rolex watches or a $2 million seascape by the Russian artist Ivan Aivazovsky.
Mr. Khochinsky prided himself on his talent for finding the perfect gift. “Tell me only a few details about the man,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “Is he a hunter, a fisherman, does he chase women? I can find a gift.”
Normally, the world Mr. Khochinsky navigated so successfully is hidden from view. But now, after a very delicate transaction that he says went horribly wrong and left him accused of blackmail by a powerful figure, he has decided to lift the veil on the cozy world he knows so well.
There is little chance that the dispute that has embroiled him and forced him to leave the country will be resolved; in Russia, high-level spats like this seldom are. But the deal, as described by Mr. Khochinsky, illuminates an aspect of life here for people at the intersection of business and politics at the highest levels, including the most powerful politician of them all: Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin.
The current entanglement began with the purchase, in 2006 at a Sotheby’s auction in Paris, of 26 letters written by Voltaire to Catherine the Great, dating from 1768 to 1777. Mr. Khochinsky said he bought them for $869,000 — a world record for 18th-century handwritten texts, according to Sotheby’s — for a Russian billionaire who had made his money in banking and real estate.
Handing a little something to a bureaucrat is an old tradition in Russia — popularly known as giving “greyhound puppies,” a reference to a Nikolai Gogol character who accepted only puppies as gifts.
Sergei V. Bobovnikov, a dealer in late imperial and Soviet-era decorative art, says artwork and antiquities make fine gifts for bureaucrats today, either to keep or to donate to museums. Bureaucrats, he said, “are buried in these gifts on their birthdays, anniversaries and so on.”
Mr. Khochinsky’s client wanted to give the letters to Mr. Putin, who was then president, with the idea that he could then donate them to a Russian library. In this, the billionaire was following a more recent tradition of currying favor with the Kremlin by returning cultural and historic artifacts to Russia. In the most prominent instance, Viktor F. Vekselberg, an oil and aluminum magnate, returned the Forbes family collection of Faberg? Imperial Easter eggs to Russia in 2004, at a cost of $100 million.
Mr. Khochinsky said he saw special value in the letters as a gift to Mr. Putin. Voltaire, though critical of the 18th-century French monarchy, had famously praised Catherine the Great as an enlightened despot.
In the letters Mr. Khochinsky purchased, Voltaire also wrote in support of Russian military campaigns in what is now Ukraine and Poland. In essence, here was a pre-eminent European philosopher supporting a leadership role for Russia in eastern Europe, an idea back in vogue in Moscow these days.
But now, Mr. Khochinsky says, the letters have vanished and he is out the $869,000 purchase price because the gift was not delivered. He says the letters disappeared sometime after he gave them to Russia’s Channel One, a state television outlet, to arrange a televised transfer of the documents to Mr. Putin.
A spokesman for Mr. Putin said that the prime minister “never saw these letters, and nobody ever gave him anything like this, or will give it to him. I don’t know who bought these letters, but they don’t have anything to do with Putin.”
Mr. Khochinsky said he filed a complaint against the station and asked the police for help in finding the letters, despite the authorities’ notoriously poor record in solving high-level disputes. In their report, the police say Channel One’s director, Konstantin Ernst, denied that the station had ever received the letters, and accused Mr. Khochinsky of trying to blackmail him by trying to tie him to their theft. Mr. Khochinsky has denied that allegation.
While it is doubtful anyone will ever know what happened to the letters, one thing seems certain: Mr. Khochinsky’s line of work, if not Mr. Khochinsky himself, will continue to play an important role in Russia. And that is not entirely a bad thing, says Mr. Bobovnikov.
“Galleries don’t survive on collectors,” he said. “The sweetest scheme is when you have businessmen who need items for gifts. Not for collections. But for gifts. The antiquarian should know what to give. He should understand.”
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