Nostalgic for the Soviet era, fans of James Bond or just lovers of history or pop culture, don’t miss the next Julien’s Auctions auction in Beverly Hills which will be broadcast live and online on February 13th. This special auction will feature the world’s largest collection of KGB-specific spy equipment and the rarest and most important wartime artifacts from the United States, the Soviet Union and Cuba. cold.
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Objects from the KGB Museum in Manhattan.
Opened in January 2020, shortly before confinement, the Covid19 pandemic will have got the better of the precious objects exhibited until recently in a closed museum. It had been created by the historian, collector and museum curator, Julius Urbaitis, who worked as a consultant for the series “Chernobyl The objects were in the hands of real secret agents and reached the United States after the fall of the Soviet bloc in the early 1990s.
“Many want to acquire unique pieces, from a period when digital did not exist. The people who created these objects were really pioneers of miniaturization”, tell the sales manager, Kody Fredérik at “Morning” and he compares the “giant mobile phone” present in the sale, “as big as six bricks” and intended to stay in a car, to our current smartphones “
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Make James Bond lovers dream.
Miniature cameras were all the rage among kgb spies during the cold war. They will nestle in every item of clothing and objects imaginable: elegant woman’s handbag, belt buckles, shoe brush, birdhouse, signet ring and even a tie. Another great classic of the secret agent panoply, the microphones, which could hide in ashtrays, pens or porcelain plates. We will be able to find for sale a replica of umbrella with poisoned tip used to murder the Bulgarian perpetrator Georgi Markov (estimate: $ 2,000 to $ 3,000), a purse containing hidden camera (estimate $ 2,500 to $ 3,500), or false tooth containing cyanide which allowed captured agents to end their own lives if necessary to avoid being tortured and delivering compromising information.
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More than 400 lots offered online.
We discover on the site of Julien’s Auction these objects used by Soviet intelligence during the Cold War: clandestine operating cameras, counter-espionage detectors, Morse code machines, aircraft radars or voice recorders for example. More surprisingly, we can also acquire a steel door of an old KGB prison hospital (estimate $ 500-700), a railway warning sign “Infected Zone”, or a lenin sculpture of 450 kg from the KGB headquarters in Kaliningrad (estimate: $ 5,000 to $ 7,000)
Other Cold War memorabilia will also be on sale, such as the Che Guevara school report card dating from 1942, or a 1958 letter signed Fidel Castro presenting his plans to infiltrate Havana, both estimated between $ 1,000 and $ 1,500.
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