Latest News

The judge, Royce C. Lamberth of United States District Court, imposed the fines on Wednesday, saying the Russian government had done nothing to comply with a judgment that he issued in 2010 ordering it to return the texts, more than 12,000 books and 50,000 religious papers known as the Schneerson Collection.

It was not immediately clear what form the Kremlin's threatened retaliation would take. In an earlier reaction to the dispute over the collection, which has now lasted decades, it forbade its state-run museums, including the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, to lend works to American museums. That highly unusual ban, instituted in February 2011, has left gaps in some major exhibitions.

The Kremlin said it feared that those works would be seized and held as ransom in the dispute, even though American officials have insisted that such seizures are prohibited by law.

The levying of the fines, potentially totaling more than $18 million a year but unlikely to be paid, added tension to Russian-American relations, which have become strained over the past year. Most recently, the countries have been at bitter odds over a Russian law banning adoptions of Russian children by American families, which itself was retaliation for an American law punishing Russians accused of violating human rights.

"The Russian Foreign Ministry regards as absolutely unlawful and provocative the decision of the federal court in Washington," the government said in a statement on Thursday. "We have repeatedly stated that this verdict is extraterritorial in character, contradicts international law and is legally void."

The government called the Schneerson Collection, which is held partly in the Russian State Library and partly in the Russian Military Archives, a "national treasure of the Russian people." It added, "U.S. officials are hopefully aware that if Russian state property, not protected by diplomatic immunity, is seized in the United States, as Chabad is demanding as an injunctive measure, we will have to take a tough response."

At a hearing this month, the Obama administration urged Judge Lamberth not to impose the fines, saying that they would further sour relations with Russia and imperil diplomatic efforts to resolve the dispute. But in his decision, Judge Lamberth rejected those arguments and said he saw no reason to expect diplomacy to succeed.

In 1991, a court in Moscow ordered that the collection be turned over to the Chabad organization, but the Soviet Union soon collapsed, and the judgment was set aside by the Russian authorities. The Chabad group filed a lawsuit in the United States in 2004, but in 2009, after Russia failed in an effort to have the case thrown out, the Kremlin withdrew its lawyers and declared that the court had no authority to adjudicate the matter.

"Defendants have steadily resisted all legal and diplomatic efforts to compel them to return the collection for at least two decades," Judge Lamberth wrote in his ruling. He added, "The United States' claim that sanctions would 'risk damage to significant foreign policy interests' is similarly unconvincing."

In other respects, damage from the dispute, at least from a cultural perspective, has already been severe. The world's most prestigious museums rely heavily on international loans to put together large and lucrative shows, and such lending was common between the United States and Russia until Russia imposed its moratorium.

Although Chabad now has a large presence in Russia, particularly in Moscow, where it helped build a huge Jewish history museum that opened late last year, Lubavitch officials here said they had no official role in the dispute.