In 1918, decrees from the Soviet government declared the collections of Shchukin, Morozov, Stroganov, and Yusupov as "national heritage." Ten years later, this heritage was needed for industrialization. Through the Berlin auction house Lepke and closed deals, masterpieces were sent to the West, while their former owners, who found themselves in exile, recognized their belongings in auction catalogs.

The first lawsuits followed immediately. In 1928, émigrés sought to arrest lots at Berlin auctions, but the court refused: by that time, Germany had recognized the USSR. In London, Princess Olga Paley sued for furniture from her palace in Tsarskoye Selo. In 1929, the Court of Appeal ruled that the English court had no right to review acts of a recognized foreign government. This "doctrine of state act" became a wall against which all subsequent attempts crashed.
After 1991, the dispute resumed. Sergei Shchukin's grandson, Andre-Mark Delok-Furko, demanded the arrest of Matisse's paintings brought to an exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1993, and lost. Soon, France enacted a law on the inviolability of exhibition loans. Later, such guarantees appeared in Germany, Switzerland, and the UK: without them, Moscow refused to send paintings.

In the USA, Ivan Morozov's great-grandson, Pierre Konovalov, sued the Metropolitan Museum for "Madame Cézanne in the Greenhouse," and Yale University for Van Gogh's "Night Café." In 2017, the appellate court ultimately left the painting with Yale, recognizing the nationalization of 1918 as an act of a sovereign state.

The irony is that in 2016, Delok-Furko himself assisted with the Paris exhibition of the Shchukin collection at the Louis Vuitton Foundation. While the paintings could not be returned, the name was restored.