Unnamed Smugglers

When telling his nephew about the Russian woman whom he knew in Paris after the First World War, Gavin Stevens refers, elliptically, to the way her escape from Moscow was arranged by "different collectors" whom she "paid by installments, over a long time" afterward (247). Many Russian aristocrats fled the country after the Russian Revolution in 1917, but there's no obvious way to know what Stevens means by calling the men who were paid to help this woman "collectors." We're calling them 'Smugglers' to describe what they do, but perhaps they are also 'collectors,' or at least involved in smuggling art for collectors out of revolutionary Russia.