Whodunit? Possible explanations range from grand larceny to grand prevarication. Yavlinsky says most was sold off in the late 1980s, and an additional 500 to 600 tons were dumped recently to pay the bills. Others say the gold may never have existed in the first place, since those who estimated reserves–including the CIA–were using 50-year-old data and guesswork. “Like everything else about the Soviet Union, they may have overestimated gold output for many years,” says a U.S. Treasury official.
The juiciest theories involve greed in high places. Mountains of Soviet bullion could have been stolen or squirreled away by agencies like the Army and the KGB. The spy agency long supplied slave labor for mines, some of which it owned. A heist might even have been carried out from the top-by rulers such as Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev. Whatever the facts, the United States claims to believe Yavlinsky’s estimate. “I have no reason to question it,” Robert Zoellick, under secretary of state for economic affairs, informed Congress. The commodities markets only partly agreed: gold rose just 3 percent for the week despite the supposed drop in supply.
