The Bolsheviks sold the tsars' Fabergé eggs abroad, and one sold in New York in 1964 as a gold watch turned up with a man who had bought it for scrap

At Easter 1887 Alexander III gave his wife, Maria Feodorovna, a gold egg made in Fabergé's workshop by August Holmström. Inside was a lady's watch by Vacheron Constantin. In the revolution the Bolsheviks confiscated it. It was last recorded in Moscow in 1922, when the Soviet government decided to sell it. From about 1927 the London firm Wartski bought treasures from the USSR People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade, including a dozen Imperial Easter eggs. On 22 November 1927 Emanuel Snowman of Wartski showed some of them to King George V and Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace. Wartski sold the Winter Egg in 1934. The 1887 egg dropped out of sight. On 7 March 1964 Parke-Bernet in New York sold it from the property of a Mrs Rena Clarke, or her estate, as a "gold watch in egg form case" for $2,450. Decades later a man bought it at a bric-a-brac market in the American Midwest, intending to sell it for its scrap gold. He could not sell it. He later found a Telegraph article on the missing egg and contacted Wartski. Kieran McCarthy of Wartski identified it, and Wartski bought it for a private collector. In April 2014 it went on public display in London for the first time since 1902, and the V&A showed it from November 2021 to May 2022. On 2 December 2025 Wartski bought the Winter Egg back at auction for £22,900,000.