After nearly eight decades, Harvard University is returning a set of 18 bells to a Russian monastery. The bells, which came from Danilovsky monastery outside Moscow, were purchased from the Soviet state in 1930 by Charles Crane, a US industrialist and diplomat, who donated them to Harvard. Many other bells were sold for scrap under Stalin's industrialisation drive of the 1930s. Harvard has had replacement bells made, and last week they were consecrated by the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church at the Danilovsky monastery. The original bells will be returned to Russia within a year.