ABSTRACT
Fourteen of the enamels in the Georgian State Museum of Fine Arts in Tbilisi were once in the collection of the wealthy St Petersburg artist Mikhail Petrovich Botkin (1839-1914). After his death and the October Revolution, the collection passed into the hands of the state, and, a few years later, most of the 160 or so enamels in it were sold abroad. A few, however, adjudged to be Georgian in origin, were restored to Tbilisi in 1923, it is said at the instigation of the General Secretary to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, a Georgian by the name of Iosif Vissarionovich Jugashvili (1879-1953), better known as Stalin.
