The international art world has watched in awe as the burgeoning class of billionaire collectors in Russia has fueled demand and boosted prices for works from that country. These avid buyers also seem to have inadvertently driven up supply—but not as they might have wished. “The problem of fakes has reached enormous proportions,” says Alexander Tikhonov, author of the first Russian-language guide to the art market, Russian Art in the West. And, he adds, “there’s no mechanism for dealing with it.”

That’s changing. The government national heritage and media watchdog Rossvya­zokhran­kultura, under Viktor Petrakov, its head of cultural preservation, has partnered with the publisher Vladimir Roschin to produce the Cata­logue of Fraudulent Art­works, a project apparently sparked by the foisting of a fake on the former Rus­sian president Vladimir Putin. Roschin claims that hundreds, if not thousands, of works are at issue, most of which are in private collections in Russia.

Four volumes of the catalogue, each displaying 150 counterfeit objects, have already been published, and the fifth will be available later this year. After that, any newly discovered fakes will be posted on the Web at www.rsoc.ru. Meanwhile, says Rossvyazo­­kh­rankultura’s deputy head, Anatoly Vilkov, new legislation will make it easier to prosecute dealers for selling counterfeits, although details have yet to be released.

In the current heated market for Russian art, says Roschin, fakes can sell for between $100,000 and $3 million. Many of the fraudulent works are authentic 19th-century paintings by minor Western artists that have been doctored to look Russian, thus making them more appealing to the new collectors. Forgers comb European salesrooms for cheap but passable canvases to transform. “Buy an old Dutch painting, add a birch tree, take a cow off, and you have a Shishkin and a 1,000 percent profit,” jokes the Guggenheim’s Europe-based consultant, Nic Iljine.

Ivan Shishkin, Ivan Aiva­zovsky and other 19th-century landscape and seascape painters are currently the most forged, but the problem also exists for contemp­orary and early 20th-century avant-garde artists, especially Nat­alia Goncha­rova. Heritage Auction Galleries, in Dallas, withdrew Rabbi with Hen, supposedly painted by her in 1910, from its first sale of Russian art this past June because “we didn’t have time to examine it properly,” says Douglass Brown, the firm’s consignment director for Rus­sian art, adding, “We turned away many pictures, almost all brought to us by people who had no idea. There was a wide range—Aivazovsky, 19th-century landscapes, avant-garde.”

The most famous 19th-century forgery is Landscape with Brook. The painting started life as Landscape with Figures and Cattle by the Dutch artist Marinus Koekkoek, under whose name it sold in May 2003 at Bukowskis, in Stockholm, for 540,000 Swedish kronor ($66,000). A year later, the picture resurfaced at Sotheby’s London with the new title, scenic changes, Shishkin’s signature, a certificate of authenticity from Moscow’s premier art museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, and an estimate of £550,000 to £700,000 ($978,000–1.2 million). It was withdrawn after Moscow’s Grabar Art Conservation Center identified it as counterfeit. Sotheby’s claims it checked the signature under ultraviolet light, but with forging techniques constantly evolving, such methods are no longer foolproof.

Many fraudulent works, like the “Shishkin,” have been “authenticated” by ex­perts at the Tretyakov. The institution has admitted 96 wrong attributions, but the real number is doubtless far greater: Starting in the early 1990s, it was common knowledge among market insiders that some Tretyakov staff members were certifying works for payoffs of $1,000 and up. In October 2006 state museums were banned from issuing authentications, but many of their ex­perts still offer them privately.