The Amber Room

by Adrian Levy

  Telemakov walks off and returns with a blue file. From it he pulls a notebook. I was invited to Kuchumov's old apartment in Pavlovsk only once and when I went there I saw he had volumes of newspaper cuttings stretching back to the Great Patriotic War. They, like everything else, vanished after he died. But I copied down one or two articles.'

  Telemakov begins to read:

  'Pravda. 15 May 1945. Our Special Correspondent writes: Could we imagine that Konigsberg has fallen, the fortress of central eastern Prussia, the city that the Hitlerites named the springboard to the East? We could not imagine - because the Germans not only lost in Konigsberg a strategically important nerve centre but also the "crucible" of Nazism from where the citizens of the dark world rose. London radio has also confirmed our great Soviet success, saying that Konigsberg is the epicentre of Prussia and it was its capital even when Berlin was a swamp.'1

  Telemakov looks up. 'Be patient,' he says. 'There is a second article from Pravda on the same day. "Colonel D. D. Ivanyenko, Third Belorussian Front. 12 May 1945. By telegraph."' It had taken three days for the report to get into print.

  In the ruins of Konigsberg Castle, where the museum of Prussia was located, we have found nearly thirty armchairs from the Tsarskoye Selo palaces of Pushkin town. On them are labels written by Tsarskoye Selo officials and over the top are stuck labels written in German Gothic script. We have continued our searches and discovered [picture] frames from the Kiev Museum, a selection of catalogues and books, and a Gift Book consisting of an inventory of purchases and presents received by Hitlerite curators in Konigsberg.

  'The two hundredth item in this Nazi Gift Book, recorded, as received on 5 December 1941, is the Amber Room from Tsarskoye Selo, to which the whole page is devoted. In this inventory are listed 140 items [from the room]... and it is written that these items were gifted to the Konigsberg museum by the German authorities.'

  Telemakov fixes us in his gaze. 'The Amber Room had survived, you see? While Anatoly Mikhailovich was stuck in Siberia, worrying about its safety in the Catherine Palace, the Nazis dismantled the room and transported it to Konigsberg. The Amber Room arrived in East Prussia less than three months after the siege of Leningrad began. Even when Anatoly Mikhailovich told me this story, thirty-five years later, there were tears in his eyes.'

  On 16 May 1945 Anatoly Kuchumov sent three telegrams: one to LenGorlsPolKom, another to Nikolai Belokhov, the director of the Government Directorate of the Preservation of Monuments, and a third to Igor Grabar in Moscow. Grabar was director of the Committee on Architecture of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, a Titan of the Soviet art world, winner of the Stalin Prize, a man who had the General Secretary's ear.

  'Kuchumov was the obvious person to bring the Amber Room home. He wrote requesting funds and a travel permit. He packed a small bag and said goodbye to Anna Mikhailovna,' Telemakov says. 'A telegram from Moscow arrived. Yes, Comrade Kuchumov was correct, Moscow was running a rescue operation to bring home the Amber Room. And yes, Moscow needed an expert. But someone was already on the way. Professor A. I. Brusov, from Moscow.'

  Telemakov shrugs. 'Brusov! Anatoly Mikhailovich was shocked by the decision. Was he being punished? He wondered if the party blamed him for failing to take down the Amber Room while the Nazis seemingly managed it.' Telemakov sighs. I can't tell you more other than I heard that Brusov gave an interview to the Soviet press. Go and find it. I hope my little bits and pieces help you.' And, as the spruce front door closes, 'Please don't forget me. Your promise to help. Do come back.'

  The National Library of Russia, set back from a statue of Catherine the Great dominating her circle of advisers and lovers (Suvorov, Orlov, Potemkin), is a sprawling citadel of books. One of the largest libraries in the world, it houses more than 32 million volumes. In Soviet times, the books' spines were turned away from the reader, its catalogue room planted in a maze of corridors, patrolled by the KGB.

  The Soviet reader could not be trusted with potentially contagious thoughts, such as Andrei Sakharov's calculations of what would happen if Khrushchev had gone ahead and test-blasted in the Soviet atmosphere a Loo-megaton hydrogen bomb. Such ideas had to be quarantined. All library research was chaperoned, readers standing in line waiting for the patrician 'inquiry apparatchiki', who flicked up and down unseen stacks like beads of an abacus, sorting and sifting. And even though the system had prominent critics, among them Maxim Gorky, who boldly advised Stalin, 'the one-sidedness of our treatment of reality - created by us - exerts an extremely unhealthy influence on our young people', still it prevailed.2

  Nowadays anyone can roam the corridors, but in New Russia the profit-driven state barely pays library staff and, flat broke, they are elusive. We eventually find a woman sitting at a rucked baize desk littered with dribbling glue pots and official stamps. To her left is a mechanical crank-driven calendar, embossed 'Leningrad'. Grudgingly, she admits to having been a member of the old 'inquiry apparatchiki'. Now she is responsible for issuing temporary readers' tickets and she sends us down into the basement.

  One, two, three corridors along, an old red rug and portraits of Lenin, new busts of Catherine, Peter and Paul, hundreds of people scurrying in different directions, gaunt men with Gogol hair, old women wrapped in girlish polka dots pinging down corridors steeped in naphthalene. Up to a fourth-floor office in a lift, along and down to the third by the stairs, until, after three hours in the building, we find ourselves breathless in a windowless hexagonal basement room filled by silent figures absorbed in their research, hunched against great tiers of drawers that line this catalogue room.

  K is for Konigsberg: 'see Kaliningrad'. Between articles on 'Modern Dance for Balls' and 'How to Make Better Work in Cultural Area with People from the North' there is a reference to a Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) story: 'Successful return of Professor Alexander Brusov and Tatyana Beliaeva from Konigsberg, 13 July 1945.'

  Brusov. However, a librarian informs us that the article has gone missing. We return to the catalogue room, waiting for the Bs to become free.

  B is for Beliaeva and Brusov - nothing listed. But in a decrepit almanac of Soviet museums, we find: 'Brusov, Alexander Ivanovich, Professor of Archaeology, State Historical Museum, Moscow'. And a telephone number.

  The man Moscow sent to Konigsberg in search of the Amber Room held a prestigious post in an institution at the heart of the Soviet Union, housed in a red-brick Gothic-style building at the western end of Red Square. We call the State Historical Museum from the library payphone. 'Brusov. Brusov? Nyet, the switchboard operators says, hanging up.

  We try Our Friend the Professor. Can she extract some information from the tight-lipped Moscow museum world? She'll see what can be done. 'Everything is forbidden but all things are possible,' the professor choruses. 'Wait by the phone.'

  Twenty minutes later, she calls. 'Alexander Brusov is dead. In 1965,' she says. Nothing is ever straightforward in our Russian lives. 'But I gather there are some papers of his. Classified. In the Leninka. The Lenin Library in Moscow. I might be able to get you copies.' The chances of us getting classified files opened are slim. Copies are fine, we say. I have a colleague in the Leninka and she will try and send the papers to you in the National Library of Russia,' the professor says. 'Please be patient. Do nothing.'

  We wait, on tenterhooks, like Kuchumov. However, while Anatoly Mikhailovich waited for the return of his Amber Room, he began some new research into Konigsberg. And while we wait for news from the Leninka, we go in search of a book from which, according to Kuchumov's diary, he took notes in May 1945. 'Study P. J. Hartmann,' the curator wrote, as Brusov set off for the Baltic, taking the place Kuchumov believed should have been his. We are not good at doing nothing.

  Succini Prussia, physica et civilis historia was published in Frankfurt in 1677 by Philipp Jacob Hartmann, a 'professore medicine extraordinario'. The book's patrons spared no expense in binding the text in caramel-coloured calf hide, in commissioning engravings for the fron
tispiece and bookends. It was an exposition on the origins of amber and Hartmann concluded that it was 'undoubtedly petrified vegetable juice'. His book became a bestseller, one that generated such interest in the year it was published that the celebrated British physicist Dr Robert Hooke, who would discover the laws of elasticity and energy conservation, led a series of discourses on Hartmann's theories at the Royal Society in London.3

  The debate about amber's genesis was still raging at the time Tsar Peter I became entranced by the Gold of the North and bought a copy of Philipp Hartmann's book when he travelled to Konigsberg in 1696. The book's appendix reproduced the earliest eyewitness account of the amber trade in East Prussia, written by Simonis Grunovii, a Dominican monk who arrived in 1519 in an area that was then known as the Samland Peninsula.

  Grunovii wrote that he wished to buy a perfect nugget of amber to give his Pope, from whom he hoped to buy salvation. Leo X, the Church's most extravagant patron of the arts, had recently begun one of the most ambitious civil engineering projects in Christendom, the construction of St Peter's Basilica in Rome. It was being financed in a unique way, by the sale of original sin - treasures and cash given in exchange for Papal Indulgences.

  To reach Samland, Grunovii would have followed one of three ancient Amber Routes that had linked the Classical world and northern Europe since before the time of Herodotus. Ancient thinkers held in great fear those who lived beyond the 'tired world' that stopped abruptly at the line of the Alps.4 In the north was ultima Thule, the furthest region of the world. Until the early sixteenth century many people still believed the stories of Adam of Bremen, an eleventh-century chronicler who claimed, in his Descriptions of the Islands of the North, that here lived a race of Amazonians who gave birth to male children with the heads of dogs.

  Recent archaeological studies have revealed that the three Amber Routes were twenty-foot-wide log roads constructed on beds of branches, fastened together with pegs and topped off with sand and sod. Grunovii would almost certainly have followed the eastern Amber Route. This would have involved boarding a ship in the Gulf of Venice and crossing the Adriatic bound for Trieste, where he would have ridden with traders' caravans heading over the Alps for the Danube. Continuing to the River Oder, Grunovii would have gone north, eventually reaching the eastern Baltic.5

  Olaus Magnus, Archbishop of Uppsala, was among the first to illustrate Grunovii's destination in a hide-bound Encyclopaedia of Natural Products published in Rome in 1555. Across one page was a crude map of Samland, a clearly recognizable peninsula reaching out into the Baltic. Along the coastline were dotted ominous-looking watchtowers and beside one was the figure of a man dressed in cap and pantaloons, whose foot rested on a shovel, his finger pointing to a barrel at his feet from which exploded a fountain of light. Beside him was printed the word succinu (succinum, the Latin for 'juice', also meant sap, and then later amber). The Samland Peninsula was the source of the Gold of the North.6

  Simonis Grunovii described what he saw: 'When there is a northerly gale all the peasants in the vicinity must come to the beach and run with nets into the sea to fish for the floating amber... but many will drown.7 When the sea roiled and the wind rose in November and December, amber resin was shaken loose from the seabed and could be scooped into nets. The men who fished for it wore leather 'cuirasses with deep pockets' and became 'frozen in icy waters and have to be thawed before they can be taken to their huts or put out again to work and for this reason big fires are kept upon the shore'. Men were roped together to battle the treacherous undertow and carried twenty-foot poles up which they clambered when the highest waves crashed down.

  Grunovii wrote that these amber 'fishermen' were slaves, bonded by the Teutonic Knights, a German religious army that seized control of the region and grew rich by monopolizing the amber. 'The High Master of Prussia profits greatly... because he is paid approximately eighty marks for a ton.' It was a monopoly enforced by terror. An edict published by one of the order's judges 'prohibited the free collection of amber by hanging from the nearest tree... his henchmen applying instant justice, these servants having the right to kill anyone committing the deed without interrogation'. And riding to the coast, through Elbing, Pillau, Fischhausen and Gross Dirschkeim, the Dominican monk glimpsed carcasses swinging from the gallows.

  Olaus Magnus's sixteenth-century map of the Samland Peninsula, showing the amber fishing grounds and burning barrels beside which fishermen thawed out after wading through the freezing Baltic Sea

  Frontispiece depicting amber fishermen from P.]. Hartmann's book, published in 1677

  Grunovii was directed to the main city on the Samland Peninsula, from where the Teutonic Knights, who had taken control of the peninsula in 1254, administrated the amber trade. The Knights had purged the land of non-believers and, to commemorate the battle, built in 1255 an enormous castle on the banks of the River Pregel 'whose roots and cellars were thrust as far below the surface of the earth as its pinnacles scaled the heavens'.8 It would become known as Konigsberg Castle and its Knights' Hall, crowned with a tower, rose above a flagged limestone dungeon lit by burning torches where prisoners were suspended from iron trapezes. This was the castle where, 691 years later, Colonel Ivanyenko, of the Third Belorussian front, would find a Nazi Gift Book containing a reference to the arrival of the Amber Room.

  Pre-war photograph of Konigsberg Castle

  The Dominican Grunovii paid the Knight's Grand Master Albrecht, ten vierdings - equivalent to a small bag of gold pieces - for a 'gleaming amber - a half finger's length'. It took a team of men from the nearby Danzig Guild, working in shifts, six weeks to 'carve from it an image of John the Baptist as a child'. (In 1707 the same guild would send carvers to Berlin to assist architect Eosander in trying to assemble the original amber chamber.)

  Grunovii rode home with the icon in his saddlebag, arriving at the Vatican only to find Rome preoccupied with Martin Luther, who attacked, among other things, the practice of Papal Indulgences. Grunovii sought out 'Cardinal John N', the Pope's private secretary, and showed him the amber carving. 'It was surely worth more than 2,000 florins [over fifteen pounds of gold] to Rome,' the Cardinal said, but he had bad news for Grunovii: Leo X was now gravely ill. In December 1521 the Pope died, along with the Dominican's bid for salvation.

  The Protestant Reformation rapidly reached across the Baltic and in 1525 the Teutonic Knights' Grand Master Albrecht also converted to Lutheranism, detaching the religious order from Rome. This transformed the region into a ducal state, which it would remain until Frederick I was crowned 'King in Prussia' in Konigsberg Castle on 18 January 170L (a celebration that spurred Andreas Schliiter to begin building the original amber chamber).

  We can see that P. J. Hartmann's book would have taught Kuchumov how the Amber Room captured the Nazis' ethos. Its transportation to Konigsberg was far from coincidental and its preservation in the ancient Teutonic castle would have been of paramount importance to German curators.

  On the fifth morning in the National Library of Russia a packet from Moscow arrives for us. We are directed to the Bolshoi Reading Hall, where a waddling librarian escorts us to one of hundreds of identical worn wooden desks. We eagerly pull apart the bundle from the Leninka. Inside are photocopied pages and a small photograph of a melancholic figure with ice-white hair and jet-black eyebrows whose dark eye-sockets recede like metro tunnels. His serge suit is crumpled. His tie looks to be strangling him. His features are more Semitic than Slavic. The caption says that this is Professor Alexander Ivanovich Brusov and the picture was taken around the time of his mission to Konigsberg. We wonder why he looks so tired of life.

  We leaf through the photocopies. They are extracts from Brusov's desk diary, seven days to a double page.9 We had not been sure what we would be sent from Moscow but this is better than we could have hoped for.

  The desk diary began on 25 May 1945. It reveals that only a fortnight after the German surrender, while Europe was still in chaos, SovNarKom (the Council of People's
Commissars), the highest authority in the Soviet Union, ordered Professor Alexander Brusov to find and bring back the Amber Room. It must have been of tremendous significance for the Soviet leadership for it to have acted so quickly.

  Brusov was to be assisted by Ivan Pozharsky from the Moscow Theatre Library. The expedition leader was Comrade Tatyana Beliaeva of the Lenin Library. According to Leninka records, Comrade Beliaeva was chief of the 'inquiry apparatchiki'. All three were to leave for Konigsberg the next day, 26 May.

  Professor Alexander Brusov of the State Historical Museum, Moscow, and his diary

  It would take Beliaeva, Brusov and Pozharsky five days to complete the L,ooo-mile journey, squeezed into a military van that looped around the chaos of surrender. Brusov wrote: Tnsterburg, spent the night. Gerdawyen, stayed in a hotel. And Villan...' The professor could not remember what they did in Villan.

  'Konigsberg: city in ruins,' Brusov wrote on their arrival on 31 May. 'Conditions very hard, no cooperation from anyone - the army or the people.' The place was still on fire, the stench of decomposing flesh hanging in the air. The Red Army had reduced the medieval city to a pile of rubble fogged by acrid smoke. Surviving citizens wandered past jeering Soviet soldiers. Covered in soot and ash with shredded clothes, the Germans were unable to comprehend the savagery of the assault or the suddenness with which defeat had overcome them.

  But despite the top-level orders they were acting upon, Brusov's team was forced to wait by the Soviet Military Administration, which warned them the area was still not secure. It was barely two months since a Soviet artillery bombardment had smashed Konigsberg's last defences. On 2 April 1945 Red Army officers had recalled seeing the buildings 'crumble into piles of stone', leaving thousands buried alive.10 On 6 April, the Soviet's LLth Guards Army and 43rd Army had fought their way into the city, flame-throwers scorching the buildings, rousting residents hiding in cellars, while citizens hung sheets from their windows, desperately signalling surrender. Hundreds attempted a futile breakout on 8 April, only to be spotted by Red Army artillery units that cut them to pieces.