The Soviet Union sold the sacred bells from Moscow's oldest monastery as scrap and they ended up in the United States. Seventy-seven years later, Russia is bringing them home, drawing a new line under its communist past.

|PIC1|Charles Crane, a U.S. industrialist and diplomat with a passion for Russian art and culture, bought the Danilovsky monastery's 18 bells from Joseph Stalin's atheist government in 1930 and gave them to Harvard University.

Danilovsky's bells avoided the fate of thousands of others from Russian churches that were seized as scrap metal and melted in Stalin's industrialisation drive in the 1930s when thousands of priests were executed or sent to Gulag camps.

President Vladimir Putin's government, the Russian Orthodox Church and business leaders, mounted a successful drive for the bells -- some up to 400 years old -- to be returned to the monastery, near central Moscow, in the coming months.

At Harvard, they will be replaced with new similar bells.

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexiy II sprinkled the new bells with holy water on Tuesday at a ceremony at the monastery attended by government ministers and businessmen. Rain fell during the blessing but the sun shone as the prayers finished.

"After all the desolation and destruction ... sacred objects return, including the chime of the Danilovsky monastery, and in this we see the great interconnection of generations and a great sequence of historic epochs," said Alexiy II.

With state support and Putin's personal backing, there has been a huge revival of religion in Russia and thousands of churches have been built across the vast nation.

"I want to believe the carillon of these bells in America ... will become yet another symbol of our countries' friendship and unity," said Russian billionaire tycoon Viktor Vekselberg, who helped secure the return of the bells.

"Of course, when those bells go we'll all weep because we love them," said Diana Eck, master of Harvard University's Lowell House that has been home to the Russian bells.

"But we will also rejoice because these (new) bells are wonderful. They've also become part of our history. We've seen them from birth, from when they were just a design to now, the reality. And now they've been baptised as well."