"Nina Mikhailovna Moleva - a writer, an outstanding scholar of history and art, a journalist and a war veteran - passed away on February 11," Interfax news agency quoted the Russian Ministry of Culture as saying on February 14.
Moleva is said to have a collection of more than 1,000 paintings, sculptures and other works of art, including works by masters such as da Vinci, Rembrandt, Titian and Michelangelo, according to The Moscow Times .
Mrs. Nina Moleva
SCREENSHOT THE MOSCOW TIMES
The works are kept in a three-room apartment in the center of the Russian capital Moscow with 24-hour security.
Ms Moleva has said that Paris-based auction house Hotel Drouot has valued her collection at a starting price of $400 million and an estimated real value of up to $2 billion.
Fellow journalists and art critics doubted Moleva's claims, and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow once refused to accept the collection when she expressed her intention to donate it.
According to the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper, Ms. Moleva intended to leave the collection to the state, but she wrote down Russian President Vladimir Putin's name in her will after her lawyer said she needed to name a specific individual to inherit the works.
“I left (the collection) to the President (Putin)… I have nothing more to say,” Moleva told The Moscow Times by phone in 2015.
The Kremlin did not immediately comment on the report.
One of many theories about the collection suggests that Moleva and her late husband, the renowned avant-garde artist Ely Belyutin, may have collected and traded art for Soviet leaders.
Another theory suggests that Mr. Belyutin, who is rumored to have been a Soviet military intelligence officer, may have smuggled works from Europe during the war.
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The couple claim that Mr. Belyutin's grandfather, Ivan Grinyov, a stage artist at the imperial theaters in Moscow, was the one who laid the foundation for the collection.
In 1968, Ms Moleva and Mr Belyutin won the right to return to reside in three of the rooms in the original 12-room apartment, where they claimed to have found artworks hidden in a false attic.
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