The Amber Room

by Adrian Levy

  Almost a century later, the crowning glory of the Catherine Palace had become legendary throughout Europe. 'We have now reached one of the most remarkable rarities - I want to tell you about the Amber Room,' the poet Theophile Gautier wrote in his Voyage en Russie in 1866.

  Only in The Thousand and One Nights and in magic fairy tales, where the architecture of palaces is trusted to magicians, spirits and genies, one can read about rooms made of diamonds, rubies, jacinth and other jewels Here the expression 'the Amber Room' is not just a poetic hyperbole but exact reality, and it is not, as you could believe, a small boudoir or study. On the contrary, the room is rather large, with... walls wholly adorned with amber mosaic from top to bottom, including a frieze. The eye, which has not adapted to seeing this material applied in such scale, is amazed and is blinded by the wealth and warmth of tints, representing all colours of the spectrum of yellow - from smoky topaz up to a light lemon. The gold of carvings seems dim and false in this neighbourhood, especially when the sun falls on the walls and runs through transparent veins as those sliding on them.21

  Working on his book about the Amber Room can have done little to alleviate the isolation that Kuchumov must have felt, entombed in Novosibirsk. Occasional copies of Pravda still reached Siberia, brought by couriers, but his sense of foreboding would have only mounted as he scoured the Soviet newspapers for news. Among Kuchumov's documents transcribed by Telemakov was a newspaper article, saved by the great curator during his Siberian days.

  On I7 November 1942 Pravda carried a front-page confession from a Nazi officer, Norman Forster, who had been captured in Mosdok, in the northern Caucasus. Forster, an Obersturmbannfuhrer (lieutenant-colonel) in the Waffen SS, had told his NKVD interrogators an intriguing story, one that in less than two years would be cited at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. Forster had bumped into an old schoolfriend while in Berlin in August 1941, a 'Dr Focke', who was a fellow graduate of Berlin's Friedrich Wilhelm University, and was currently working for Ribbentrop, Hitler's Reichsaussenminister (Foreign Minister) as a press officer. Focke offered to get Forster assigned to a new and prestigious job with the 4th Company of a secretive Special Task Battalion.

  The Sonderkommando Ribbentrop, as it was known, was headquartered at 6 Herman Goring Strasse in Berlin and staffed by 800 members of the SS. In August 1941 three of its four companies were placed on active service on the Eastern front, attached to troops who were converging on the Soviet Union. According to Pravda, Dr Forster's company was to follow Army Group South, led by Field Marshal von Runstedt. Forster told his Soviet interrogators, 'Prior to leaving, we were instructed that when we arrived on enemy territory in Russia we were to comb thoroughly all scientific establishments, institutions and libraries and all the palaces; search all the archives and to lay our hands on every cultural treasure, sending everything to Germany.'

  Forster's troop set out across the Ukraine, but he learned that the 2nd Company of the Sonderkommando Ribbentrop, attached to Army Group North, had headed straight for the palaces of Pushkin. 'There they captured and removed property from the Catherine Palace museum. Chinese silks and carved decor were taken from the walls. The parquet floor was even removed,' Pravda reported Dr Forster as stating.22 It looked as if the 2nd Company of the Sonderkommando Ribbentrop might have also removed the Amber Room.

  Telemakov's manuscript peters out at this point and at the bottom he has scrawled, 'Please call me.' But his phone is out of order. An operator says that it has been this way for a year or more. We will have to return to Ozerki. It is too late to make the journey tonight. The phone is ringing. We dash down the hallway and snatch up the handset. For once we are on time. But someone is trying to send us a fax.

  Slowly the message unfurls.

  Thank you so much for your interest in the Catherine Palace. It was good to meet the other day. All the materials we have are the result of our staff's work that has taken years and years to pick up, crumbs of information, and we intend to publish this material in a book currently being written by our curators, headed by Alexander Kedrinsky, whom you met some days ago. I find it beyond our physical powers to answer your questions or meet the scheme suggested by you. I find it just the same as to write another book. With respect.. ,23

  What can we do? It took us five months to secure a meeting with Director Sautov and three weeks for him to reject us. Maybe we should have done nothing after all. We recall that some of the Catherine Palace archive was uploaded in Russian on to the Internet. We log on to the official Catherine Palace website (www.Tzar.ru) and a message pops up where once there were essays and articles. 'Under Construction. Thank you for your interest. Please return later.' The next morning the local television news carries a report that the replica Amber Room being constructed in the Catherine Palace has now been closed to visitors and will not reopen until May 2003. Months after beginning our investigation into the fate of the Amber Room, we have still not seen any original documents. Now we face another 15 months of official obfuscation, until the reconstructed room is unveiled.

  We are back out in the cold. We remind ourselves of the city's favourite saying and catch a marshrutki to Pushkin. We will find Alexander Kedrinsky and explain the situation to him. He was more helpful than Sautov. We punch the code into the inconspicuous side door, guarded by the hissing babushka. At least no one has thought to change it. 'Kedrinsky,' we say, brushing past her and up the flights of cast-iron stairs. But the door to the old architect's studio is locked, even though he has told us that he works every day.

  We hear a noise from above and gingerly climb the last flight. A tiny door is ajar and we push it open. We are in the first of three low-ceilinged rooms. Every inch of every wall is plastered with black-and-white photographs of the Catherine Palace, some of which show goose-stepping Nazis parading across the Great Courtyard. A young woman emerges, ashen-faced, huddled in sweaters, her neck wrapped in scarves and, around the acrylic swathes, an enormous red cardigan. 'Yes?' she asks abruptly. 'And you are?' We say nothing. She reaches for the phone. She is dialling for the guards. Two of her colleagues, whose socks spill over their calf-length plastic boots, pop their heads up over the partition, pointing and gawping. Foreigners are in the private archive of the Catherine Palace.

  Like phosphorus dropped in water, the more we speak the more our English words transform the room into a hubbub of spinning and whirling, gesticulating arms and raised voices. We throw in Alexander Kedrinsky's name. We are friends from London, researching the lives of Catherine Palace curators. The women relax. The handset is replaced. Tidying away the wisps of hair that fly around her button-round face, the woman in the red cardigan asks: 'Who? Anyone in particular?'

  Kuchumov, we say. Anatoly Mikhailovich.

  She smiles, introducing herself as Vica Plauda, head of the Photographic Section. I am his granddaughter,' she says. I am his only living relative.' Kuchumov's wife had died before him, his brother after him. His children had recently passed away. Finding Kuchumov's granddaughter, here in the Catherine Palace, is a stroke of luck that could happen only somewhere like Russia, where families follow each other through the same institutions. I grew up with my grandfather's stories on the rebuilding of these palaces, and here I am working in them and here you are looking for him.'

  We tell her about our meeting with Kedrinsky and our falling out with Director Sautov. She nods, her eyes lifted to the heavens. We tell her that although Kuchumov's friends and colleagues have obtained extracts from his diaries and correspondence, the bulk of her grandfather's papers are proving impossible to locate.

  I too have virtually nothing to remind me of him,' Vica Plauda says. 'When he died, in 1993, there were boxes and boxes of material. But I live in a communal apartment, one room only. I loaned the papers to the library at Pavlovsk Palace. He was the director there for years. I haven't seen them since.' We make a note of a name and number in the library at Pavlovsk. I kept only a couple of things, including a painting. It hangs here,' she say
s, pointing to an oil of roses in a vase, a gift to Kuchumov from Anatoly Treskin, one of the most prolific palace restorers: a bouquet from the artist to his patron.

  Vica Plauda is silent, thinking. And then, 'Maybe these will interest you.' She produces some papers. In the soft light of the snow-covered window we can now see her likeness to Kuchumov. 'They are copies of letters to and from my grandfather. I had never seen them until I was sent them from New York last year. I have no idea how they got there. Or who has the top copies.'

  Is there anything else? Vica Plauda leaves the room. She returns with a tattered folder and slides out a postcard-sized glass plate that she holds with care between thumb and index finger up to the window. The light transforms the dark rectangle into a golden glowing portal. Here is the heart of the Catherine Palace, lit with 565 candles, their flames glancing off prehistoric air bubbles and fish scales trapped in the viscous resin, illuminating the faces of carved cherubs that balance on cornices and flocks of amber parrots and eagles that fly across antique friezes. In our hands is the only surviving colour record of the 'Eighth Wonder of the World', a photographic colour positive of the original Amber Room, made in 1917 by a Russian officer who fled with it to Paris. Vica says, 'The Catherine Palace had bought it back from his relatives two decades ago and now it must be priceless.' We photograph it.

  Vica Plauda, granddaughter of Anatoly Kuchumov, holding the only surviving colour plate of the original Amber Room

  The Amber Room

  The telephone in the next room rings. Vica comes back shaking her head. 'It's for you,' she says. Dr Sautov's assistant is on the line. He has enjoyed watching our covert operation, dressed in black coats and hats, stalking like ravens across the snow-whitened courtyard, the assistant says sternly. And Director Sautov has charted our progress into the staff quarters. Security has been called. We are advised to wait.

  We run. Down the back staircase with the documents Vica has given us, out of the palace and to the bus stop where we throw ourselves to the head of the queue, pushing our way into seats.

  That evening, behind our locked doors, we pore over the paperwork.

  On 24 January 1944 the museum workers in Novosibirsk, enduring one of the harshest winters in living memory, gathered around the radio to listen to an announcement. The Red Army had launched a counter-attack on the German forces besieging Leningrad and was now approaching Pushkin and Pavlovsk. Three days later, 872 days after the siege began, Leningrad was liberated. It was, according to the recollections of siege survivors, as if an enormous boulder had been lifted from the grass, everything beneath it flattened, sour smelling and anaemic.

  'We could not sleep for two days, listening and waiting for every scrap of news,' Kuchumov wrote in one of the letters given to us by his granddaughter.24 He found a 'cherished bottle of wine' and produced some goblets that had belonged to the tsars. 'People drank for the success of the Red Army. They were inspired and agitated, hopeful too. From this day on the packing begins. Everyone has the same objective - to return the treasures.'

  In February 1944 Kuchumov boarded a train in Novosibirsk, summoned back home by a telegram from the Leningrad IsPolKom, 'travelling in a lettered train carriage, on a seat as if I was a foreign diplomat'. It was March before he arrived in 'our favourite beautiful Leningrad that still looks the same, but advanced in age, as a man after a wasting disease'. But before he had time to dwell on the terrible scenes of death and destruction that greeted him, the authorities promoted him to Chief of the Department of Museums and Memorials and head of Leningrad's Central Stores. Kuchumov was placed in charge of returning all evacuated treasures to their original palace locations.

  Soviet troops re-entering the Catherine Palace, 1944

  He immediately asked for permission to visit the Catherine Palace. 'The situation in the suburbs, I hear, is much worse, but I have not seen it for myself yet. The permit to the suburbs is in the process of validation and I will get it in two or three days. I hear that quite a few items have been found in the fields around Gatchina, pieces of furniture from Nicholas I,' Kuchumov wrote.

  On 27 April 1944 the permit arrived and, accompanied by photographer Mikhail Velichko, Kuchumov 'took a tram to the outpost of the Four Hands, near the Middle Turnpike, and waited till a passing car bound for Pushkin came'. It was 'impossible to recognize the land, the traces of bitter battles are to be seen everywhere... pillboxes, obstacles, shell-holes, barbed wire and signs for mines are all about. Bodies in the road,' he wrote.

  Kuchumov recorded practically every footstep and sent these accounts to his colleagues in Novosibirsk - letters that Vica Plauda now cherishes.

  I will describe every unit as I see it with my own eyes,' Kuchumov wrote.

  The parkland was 'ten stems without branches', a 'fountain's cup lies on the pitted ground, high burdocks and goosefeet grow on the places of former houses'. Along the way where once there were villages were only 'empty boxes, burnt from inside. Nuovo Suzi gone. Rekholovo demolished.'

  Kuchumov glimpsed Pushkin in the distance across 'ditches, trenches, numerous rows of barbed wire, minefields'. There were mountains of abandoned helmets, great pyramids of German gas masks. 'A hurricane has swept over the park.' Along the roadside was a 'garbage heap of palatial doors, frames and even pieces of furniture'. He recognized a broken chair from the Silver Dining Room. What had happened to the Amber Room, the thing he had decided to disguise rather than evacuate?

  Kuchumov and Velichko reached the Lyceum. 'Rejoice! The Pushkin statue is undamaged! My dream has come true: I am in Pushkin, I am home.' Then Kuchumov noticed 'five thick ropes hanging from the branches of the old birch before the church'. Here was the gallows used by the Gestapo: 'dreadful pictures were to be seen here... Oh, if only the walls could talk'. Despite his 'pain and fear', the curator made his way to the blue-and-gold-painted gates of the Catherine Palace, determined to complete the task he had set out to accomplish. 'I enter the Great Courtyard through the bright opened gates. I feel pain and fear while looking at the destroyed palace, empty and burnt. The sky is to be seen through the windows. The mighty statues of athletes are broken. Charred beams, broken things lie around.'

  Strewn across the Great Courtyard was 'garbage, iron beds, broken furniture, scrap, dung, boxes from mines and shells and unbelievable variety of dirty clothes, a queasy, filthy stench'. Stepping gingerly through the mess, Kuchumov neared his goal, the first-floor rooms of the Catherine Palace, the golden enfilades. And he felt sick with every step.

  He climbed up, although not by the Monighetti marble staircase, as that had been destroyed, but by the administration staircase used by staff. I enter the administration quarters and there is no single wooden partition left, everything is broken off, the rooms are empty. On some of the doors we can still see the pre-war doorplates, People's Commissar and Director's Assistant. It seems that the palace is still living like before the war.' But the roof had collapsed and shell-holes pitted the walls. 'A carbonized plafond [ceiling painting] is hanging... like a black mourning banner.'

  Kuchumov moved slowly through each chamber, absorbing the scale of destruction. 'Everything from the doors is hacked off with axes. The sculptures are without heads. The bas-reliefs are hardly damaged but the parquet and fireplaces are smashed and broken.' And then, 'climbing over heaps of burnt beams, bricks and iron', Kuchumov held his breath.

  The Oval Anteroom was as far as he could get. 'The whole room was covered with soot from when the suite of rooms had burned. This is the last room left in the whole suite. Next we see a terrible site of fire. Naked brick walls covered with soot. Neither floors nor ceilings have survived. Nothing but a huge collapse through all three floors.' Nothing stood where once had been the thing that he had painstakingly concealed with gauze and wadding from the Pushkin sewing factory. The Amber Room had been destroyed.

  'Every step kills me,' Kuchumov wrote. 'These beasts made stables of the palace-museum, of our pride. But even the animals couldn't have soiled the rooms worse t
han the beasts with two legs have done. We have to begin again.'

  The ruined Catherine Palace after Nazi occupation

  3

  At a small apartment in Ozerki, we press the doorbell that tolls 'The Volga Boatmen'. We have come to return Vladimir Telemakov's manuscript and we need his help again. He was not expecting visitors, Telemakov says. But still he wears his smart jacket and trousers. 'Welcome. Welcome. Please come in.' He glances at our bag and smiles at his green document file poking out. 'Did my manuscript help? The diary extracts and letters. All those intricate details. It was difficult for me to gather. The material is extremely rare.'

  It is fantastic, we say, a work of great dedication. But we are confused. If Kuchumov found evidence in 1944 that the Amber Room had burned when the Catherine Palace was partially destroyed (whether by German troops in retreat or the Soviet blitzkrieg), why are people still searching for it today?