In addition to the Tretyakov, just two such institutions had certified Russian paintings: the Grabar Center and the Russian Museum, in St. Petersburg. To fill the void caused by the 2006 ban, two rival bodies, one state run and one private, want to create new authenticators. Rossvya­zokhrankultura has granted licenses to 400 spec­ialists, a move some fear is a recipe for further corruption, and this past April the Inter­national Confed­eration of Antique & Art Dealers (ICA&AD)—a domestic concern, despite its name—appointed 12 experts from its membership of 50, 5 of them in the field of 20th-century art, to certify works. “It is not for a state body to interfere in the market,” says the organization’s president, Vasily Bychkov.

But as forgers become more sophisticated, rooting out fakes is becoming increas­ingly difficult. “It’s a sort of arms race,” says Richard Ellis, a former head of Scotland Yard’s art and antiques squad.

Earlier this year, Elena Basner, a former curator at the Russian Museum, patented a detection method that involves searching for the isotopes that nuclear explosions release into the atmosphere and thus, she contends, are unavoidably present in the pigment- binding oils of all paintings executed since such explosions began, in 1945. Basner plans to use her technique to test Russian avant-garde paintings, which the KGB started forging in the late 1960s, when they wised up to the potential financial rewards, according to the Paris-based collector Pierre Moos. Since the USSR was a closed country, it was impossible for foreign buyers to confirm provenance, and because the security agency had access to the stores where old paint, paper and canvas were kept, its copies evaded scientific analysis, says Moos, who adds that the KGB’s handiwork initially reached the West via Germany, courtesy of a Cologne dealer who was reportedly the mistress of one of its agents.

The avant-garde artists most often imitated include Piotr Konchalovsky, Con­stan­tine Korovin, Aristarkh Lentulov, Philip Maliavin and Ilya Mashkov, along with the Suprematists Kasimir Malevich and El Lissitzky. In fact, two Lissitzky paintings shown at a Russian Museum exhibition in 2001 turned out to be fakes. An evermore potent magnet for forgers is the female painter Zinaida Serebriakova, whose 1929 Reclining Nude posted an artist record £1.1 million ($2.1 million) at Sotheby’s London this past June. Catherine Boncenne, a descendant of Serebriakova, says the market is now awash with fakes bearing her name.

Not even contemporary art is immune to counterfeits. Living artists are rarely affected, but works by the Nonconformists, who sprang to fame in the 1970s and command continually climbing prices, are often forged. The most common targets are those who are deceased, such as Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, Timur Novikov, Evgeny Rukhin and Vasily Sitnikov. Semyon Mikhailovsky, vice rector of the Fine Arts Academy in Novikov’s native St. Petersburg, says that the artist’s hallmark banners from the 1980s–’90s tended to be rough-and-ready, but these days they “often appear very nicely done.”

Because copying is a time-honored part of the academic system of teaching art that flourishes in Russia to this day, “pupils could do very good fakes,” notes Mikhail­ovsky. “The price is high, so for them it’s tempting. If a student is prepared to be Repin,” he says, referring to the realist painter Ilya Repin (1844–1930), “and millions think he’s Repin, then it’s not bad work.”

Although the bulk of fakes are sold in Moscow, several Western European galleries and auction houses are accomplices, witting or not. One of the biggest forgery scandals occurred in the early 1990s, when the now-defunct Paris auctioneer Arcole sold thousands of “Soviet Impres­­sion­ist” landscapes. It sub­se­quently transpired that the paintings had been churned out by a group of Eastern Euro­pean art students held under lock and key in the suburbs of the French capital. More recently, in August 2006, a Monaco-based firm called Russie Art staged a sale of 160 Russian paintings in Monte Carlo and promptly disappeared without a trace; no auction results were ever published.