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A trove of historic archive documents dating from Catherine the Great that were stolen after the Soviet breakup were returned to Russia on Friday by the United States. The 21 documents include decrees issued by Czar Nicholas II and Marshal Georgy Zhukov, a top-secret paper on the reconstruction of Russian military airfields in the 1930s, and Catherine the Great's decree to divide command of forces in Poland during the 18th-century partitions of the country. Russian officials alerted Washington about the documents when they appeared on Web sites of American auction houses. United States officials seized them between April and November, but no one has been charged with the theft, a United States Immigration and Customs EnforcementImmigration official said. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A specialist at one of Britain's leading medical museums called them ''the teeth that saved the world,'' and a private British investor who bought a set of Winston Churchill's wartime dentures at auction on Thursday appeared to agree. The anonymous buyer paid the equivalent of $23,750, more than three times the pre-sale estimate, after bidding at an auction house in Aylsham that recently sold one of Churchill's half-smoked cigars for the equivalent of $6,130. The dentures were sold by the family of Derek Cudlipp, the dental technician commissioned by Churchill to make them, and had been kept for years in a drawer in the Cudlipp family home. Mr. Cudlipp's son Nigel told the BBC that his father had told him that Churchill would flick the dentures out and ''throw them across the room'' when he was angered by setbacks to the Allied cause, and that the prime minister tore up Mr. Cudlipp's enlistment papers at Downing Street, telling him ''he would be more important to the war effort if he stayed in London to repair his dentures.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After this year's roller coaster of antiques auctions, with hyped lots flopping and sleepers blowing past estimates, the fates of newsworthy objects can be hard to trace. Auction houses typically identify buyers with cryptic phrases like ''private European collector'' or ''American institution'' and are even cagier about the whereabouts of unsold material. Here are a few transactions that can be tracked (often thanks to diligent reporting from two trade papers, Maine Antique Digest, and Antiques and the Arts Weekly), and a survey of how owners are gearing up to share the acquisitions with the public or at least a few neighbors. OLD JAKE The mood darkened halfway through the Americana sale on Jan. 24 at Sotheby's New York, when Old Jake, an 1850s copper weathervane shaped like a trumpet-wielding fireman, went unsold. (Bids stopped at $2.1 million on the $3 to $5 million estimate, partly because the vane was coated in 20th-century silver paint.) A fire company in Winchester, Va., which had removed Old Jake from its firehouse turret to consign at Sotheby's, has put it on long-term loan at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester. Since July, Old Jake has been pinned on a gallery wall above re-creations of vintage kitchens. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reflects on the auction of newly discovered papers of the United States Presidents.

Focuses on an unknown Raphael red-chalk sketch on a scrap of paper, believed to date from 1505, which will be sold at Sotheby's in June 2004.

Focuses on the papers of Malcolm X that were to be sold at auction in March 2002, but are to be made available to scholars at the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center in Harlem, under an agreement between his family and the center. Background on the documents, which have yet to be assessed by scholars; Comments of the center's director, Howard Dodson; Sample items, including photographs and a diary; Significance of Malcolm X's diaries and drafts of speeches.

Reports that one of the largest collections of papers, books, and heirlooms of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, former United States president and first lady, will be auctioned off at Christie's in New York City, in February 2001. What is included in the collection; Reasons for the decision by Irene Roosevelt Aitken, the widow of Roosevelt's youngest child, John, to whom the collection belonged, to auction the collection; Expectations for the amount the auction is expected to draw.

Reports that the United States (U.S.) Department of Justice has won a court order postponing the taking of testimony in a civil suit against auction houses Christie's and Sotheby's. Reasons the U.S. government has called for the postponement; Request of the Justice Department regarding the papers it submitted with its arguments; Why Judge Lewis Kaplan granted the delay.