Fresh attempts are to be made to find the 'missing' gold of the last Tsar of Russia - worth 'up to £50 billion' at today's prices - which is believed to be stashed or lost in Siberia.
Some 95 years after Nicholas the Second and his family were shot by a firing squad loyal to Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, six sites have been identified where the royal treasure may be located.
Two of them are in the world's deepest lake and another is in a region notorious for its gulag prison camps during the Stalin era.
Gold from the Russian Imperial state was moved eastward during the First World War and initially held in Kazan on the Volga River.
'One of Britain's most legendary spies, Sidney Reilly, and the colourful, womanising diplomat, Robert Bruce Lockhart, who with his lover Baroness Moura Budberg, Russia's 'Mata Hari', was accused of plotting to assassinate Lenin, were directly involved in this operation to prevent the gold falling into Communist hands,' said the Siberian Times.
The bed-hopping baroness - who also slept with writers HG Wells and Maxim Gorky - was the great great aunt of deputy prime minister Nick Clegg.
After the Reds seized power in the capital, Petrograd, now St Petersburg, the anti-Communists moved it by train into Siberia.
Here it was under the control of Admiral Alexander Kolchak, who led the White Russian forces loyal to the royal family during the civil war which engulfed the country from 1918-20.
Certainly some of the treasure was used to buy arms to use against Lenin's forces, but historians are divided over how much was later grabbed by the Communists. Doubts also remain on the quantity of Tsarist gold sneaked abroad or hidden or lost in Siberia.
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