The Amber Room

by Adrian Levy

  Although Brusov did not reveal it to Rohde, this statement tallied almost exactly with what he had discovered in the Knights' Hall: chair springs and iron locks of German design (the Keyserlingk collection); bronze Russian door hinges and cornice pieces (the Amber Room). The fact that Brusov had also found iron strips of the kind the Germans used to strengthen wooden crates bolstered Rohde's story.

  The Soviet team had run out of luck and time. Thankfully, it had not only discovered the depressing truth about the Amber Room but also recovered more than sixty crates of treasures. On the journey back to Moscow, Alexander Brusov prepared his report for SovNarKom.

  When TASS called, Brusov must have thought everything was well. The state news agency could not possibly have known about his secret mission, unless SovNarKom had informed them of it. So Brusov gave an erudite interview about his discoveries in Konigsberg in the belief that this was what was expected. The Amber Room had been stolen by the Nazis and transferred to Konigsberg, where it had been put on display in the castle. It had been taken down and packed into crates shortly before the British bombing raids of 1944 that had levelled much of the city. Dr Alfred Rohde, the director of the Konigsberg Castle Museum, had confessed that these crates were in Konigsberg Castle until 5 April 194 5. An eyewitness had corroborated this story, telling how, the day before, Rohde received a severe reprimand from Erich Koch, the Gauleiter of East Prussia, for having failed to evacuate the Amber Room. Soviet troops smashed the fascist defences two days later, making it impossible for the boxes containing the Amber Room to be moved without being spotted. So they remained in the north wing of the castle and there, in the hours after the German surrender, between 9 and 11 April, they had been destroyed in a terrible fire that gutted the Knights' Hall.

  Great discoveries had been made by Soviet investigators in Konigsberg, including thousands of Soviet treasures looted by the Nazis, but sadly Brusov had also discovered the hinges and mouldings from the Amber Room. No one knew who was responsible for its destruction. The Nazis, savage and barbaric, under siege? The victorious Red Army, which broke their will and fired the Knights' Hall? This was a war in which both sides had fought bestially, doggedly and unremittingly for a city that appeared as if it was at the heart of the Third Reich, the professor told the man from TASS.

  Brusov's TASS interview, published on 13 July 1945, was picked up by the British Ministry of Economic Warfare's Broadcast Unit at Heddon House, who translated it on 27 July:

  Confidential. Soviet scientists are carrying out excavations at Konigsberg Castle, in order to return the cultural treasures concealed there looted from USSR. In an interview with TASS, A. I. Brusov said that under rubble just over three feet deep they found an inventory of amber from Tsarskoye Selo... The amber panels themselves have not yet been discovered, although treasures from Kiev, Minsk and Kharkiv have been revealed .15

  But the Allies would overhear nothing more on the subject. Soviet newspapers didn't follow it up. Tatyana Beliaeva made no public comments on her mission's finding. Within days Brusov had withdrawn into the cloisters of Moscow's museum world, only ever making one more public comment about his mission to Konigsberg - but that would not be for another fourteen years. In the meantime his report was overturned and his diary was impounded by the NKVD and exiled to the Leninka. After all, there was no safer place for state secrets than a Soviet public library.

  4

  We slip-slide through the melting snow along the darkening Dvortsovaya Embankment that runs beside St Petersburg's River Neva. 'Our twentieth century was so ugly,' Our Friend the Professor from Leningrad University had repeatedly complained, as we forced her to revisit the Soviet Union so that we could investigate the Amber Room mystery. 'We had to live through the Stalin times and we now choose to forget them. Instead we study Russia's nineteenth century, an epoch of innovation and elegance, the time of our Grand Duke Vladimir. You must see this side of our history too. I promise it won't be a waste of your time.'

  She has been helping us for many weeks and so we are here for her tonight, outside No. 26, a Florentine-style palazzo built by Grand Duke Vladimir for 1 million roubles. He constructed it in 1865 on a site facing the Peter Paul Cathedral that was originally owned by the rear-admiral of Peter the Great's rowing fleet. The professor presents us with a book she has written about this palace. Later we will meet her publisher, she says.

  Grand Duke Vladimir, third son of Tsar Alexander II, was Commander of the City Guard and President of the Academy of Arts, the professor says, as she climbs the Italian marble staircase writhing with mermaids and cherubs, its handrail upholstered in purple velvet. 'Our great operatic bass Shaliapin and even Rachmaninov came here to dine,' she says, pulling open the door into a hall of oak panelling painted with Russian fairy tales. Leading us through the state rooms towards the boudoir of Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, she throws back another door to reveal a Moorish antechamber with an inlaid cupola.

  The professor guides us along a corridor. 'The Grand Duke's exiled son proclaimed himself Russian Emperor Cyril I in August 1924, having convinced himself that the stories of the execution of the Romanovs in Ekaterinburg were true,' she says. 'This vacated palace was handed over to Soviet researchers and thinkers on the request of Maxim Gorky, becoming our House of Scientists.'

  There is no time to linger. We are here to attend a meeting of the Club of Scholars of the Russian Academy of Science in honour of a curator from Pavlovsk Palace who died last year. Although we dare not say this to the professor, we hope it won't take too long. 'The people you will meet tonight live, like me, for Russian history. Come,' she says, opening a plain door to what must have been the staff quarters.

  Men and women, young and old, in pressed suits with frayed cuffs, their skin translucent, are crammed beside a grand piano that is not needed tonight but fits nowhere else. The room is filled with locksmiths, clock-smiths, painters and hangers, sculptors and carvers, gilders and seamstresses, specialists in Meissen, miniatures and Sevres, all of them earning no more than twenty dollars a month at Pavlovsk or the Catherine Palace, where they work as curators.

  The gathering is called to order and a sturdy woman stands and begins to speak. 'Albina Vasiliava,' the professor whispers. 'Bolshoi Albina we call her. Porcelain curator at Pavlovsk. Great friend of Anatoly Kuchumov.'

  Albina delivers a tribute to her recently deceased colleague, who worked for forty-six years in the sculpture department of Pavlovsk. The audience listens reverently to the story of how this curator in 1941 saved palace statues from the Nazis by burying them so deeply that, though the Germans dug, they never discovered them. And then, when the park was liberated in 1944, the curator came back and disinterred every one of them, even though the land was mined, recording the salvage operation in photographs.

  'Some sculptures were broken in more than seven places,' Bolshoi Albina says gravely. Heads nod. 'We don't have a projector or a photocopy machine. So I'll pass these things around while I talk.' A ribbon of documents wraps itself around the room, members of the audience lingering over every item. 'We have only these few things, thanks to the curator's daughter,' Bolshoi Albina says as a photograph comes towards us of a picnic in Pavlovsk park, men in black berets puffing on cigarettes. All of them are enjoying a joke, including the man to the left. We recognize him. Anatoly Mikhailovich Kuchumov. We in the West are so accustomed to photographs of Soviet citizens in fur hats and great coats that it is disconcerting to see these comrades in such relaxed poses. We have caught a glimpse of the private world inhabited by museum curators like Kuchumov and Brusov.

  Anatoly Kuchumov (left) and colleagues from the Leningrad palaces during the 1950s

  As the lecture comes to an end, the room breaks up into smaller memory floes. A waistcoated clock repairer glides past. 'Can I tell you something?' he asks. 'Do you know why we all cling on, even though we are barely paid and rarely respected? Do you know why we never left? Because of those who came before us. Every night I walk through the halls of Pavl
ovsk, winding up the clocks in the dark, and I feel the souls of my predecessors watching me.'

  We go from group to group, listening, introducing ourselves, meeting as many people as we can, explaining about our search for the Amber Room and how we were trying to find out why the story did not end in Konigsberg in 1945 with Professor Alexander Brusov's findings.

  Heads shake. Eyebrows are raised. And then a dark-eyed woman shyly introduces herself. Nadezda Voronova. She tells us that her father worked with Kuchumov for decades, helping to research his book on the history of the Amber Room. 'You know very little,' she says. I hope you don't mind me being so direct.' Voronova stares at her feet. 'The search didn't end in 1945. Anatoly Mikhailovich went to Konigsberg in 1946 to reopen the investigation into the Amber Room. My father told me.'

  But Professor Brusov's report had been emphatic: the Amber Room burned in the Knights' Hall between 9 and 11 April 194 5, we say. Voronova shrinks back: 'Sorry, I can't help you more. My father is dead. My mother is very old. Alone in our apartment in Tsarskoye Selo. I must leave. It's a long way. On the metro and then the bus.' She looks anxiously around the room and draws closer. 'Try the Pavlovsk library. Kuchumov's papers must be there. He was director of Pavlovsk for many years. Kuchumov knew the truth about the Amber Room.'

  Vica Plauda, Kuchumov's granddaughter, had given us the same advice and we had forgotten to follow it up as we had become gripped by Brusov's mission to Konigsberg.

  The next morning we head for Vitebsk Station and catch a train bound for the Catherine Palace's neighbour on the River Slavyanka, twenty miles south of the city, travelling the route taken by Vladimir Telemakov as he snatched interviews with Anatoly Kuchumov. It is early April and the rain has stopped so the train is crowded with families heading for their dachas.

  A thin line of country men and women bustle down the aisle with handfuls of chewing gum and sticking plasters for sale. A raucous band follows, serenading passengers. A ragged veteran of Chechnya rolls along, with an outstretched hand and a missing foot. Every woman slips him roubles. The man sitting next to us tries furiously to get our attention. He motions towards a large glass bottle poking from his khaki pack. He mimes drinking the aquavit with an empty hand, pinging the bottle with his fingernail. 'Going for some fun in the countryside, eh? Don't you know? You only take a whore on the electric train! A lady goes by taxi.'

  Half an hour later we are walking across the parkland, passing bronze figures cast after Bonaparte's return from Egypt with pharaonic trophies that started a craze for all things related to the Nile. Pavlovsk. A gift from Catherine the Great to Paul, her strange and ugly son, a boy with a bee-stung nose who managed to reduce Russia from imperial superpower to a vacillating state at war with France, in conflict with Britain, ignored by Austria and embarked upon a perilous expedition into the savage khanates of central Asia on the back of a foolish plan to mount a surprise attack on India. Paul would be assassinated in 18OL by courtiers wielding cushions. But visitors get no sense of this looking at the majestic Classical halls with their reserved beauty and elegant proportions.1

  We explain the purpose of our visit to the urbane palace director and he summons a sullen librarian, his frame long and thin, hanging beneath a hand-knitted yellow jumper. 'There is not much,' the librarian blurts out, loitering in the doorway but refusing to make eye contact. He produces four books from behind his back and tosses them on to the desk. 'There is nothing else here belonging to Kuchumov. That will interest you,' he says, turning his back and vanishing. Forty-five years employed at the Leningrad palaces, a multitude of postings and offices, a leading role played in the cultural life of the Soviet Union's second city and four second-hand books to his name?

  We leave, depressed, and a diminutive curator calls us over and leads us up the back stairs to her office, bursting with furniture that has just returned from an overseas exhibition. 'You are my guests, please.' She points shyly to two chairs labelled 'Tsar Paul I'. We sit and flick through Kuchumov's four books while she scrabbles around on her haunches, searching for the smallest fissure in the patina of a walnut writing desk. 'Put them away,' the curator advises. She stands and we at last recognize her from the meeting at the House of Scientists. She introduces herself as Malinki Albina (Small Albina, not to be confused with Bolshoi, her larger namesake, who also works here).

  'There's nothing in those books. I've read them.' She scrapes back her silken grey hair to reveal eyes brimming with stories. 'You know the librarian is writing a book - on Kuchumov. I bet he didn't tell you. But of course it will never see the light of day. No money for books in Russia.' We think of Telemakov. To return his generosity, we have passed his manuscript on to Our Friend the Professor's publisher, but even he doesn't hold out much hope that he can raise the cash to get it into print.

  'And because the librarian knows in his heart that his book is a pipe dream,' Malinki Albina continues, 'he will ensure that you don't get his information. He is young, he can wait.' As we gather our coats, Malinki Albina catches us by surprise, embracing us warmly. 'We are old. Not so beautiful as we were.' She stubs out a cigarette in an onyx Romanov ashtray. 'But we will help you to find Kuchumov's Amber Room files.'

  We make our way back into the city. The carbon-thin air smells of bonfires even though we can see none. The source is probably the hiccuping incinerators on the Neva, where the wide waters of the river are pearles-cent in the moonlight. A tall ship driven into a low bridge by a sozzled captain has spilt 875,000 gallons of fuel. The entrance to every metro is choked with citizens rushing to get out of the chill. A quick shot of Russki Standard and an ice cream (even in the coldest winter) and then away. The takeaway bottle shops, glazed in armoured Plexiglass, are mobbed by commuters and list under the weight of their security precautions. We are back in Sovetskaya 7.

  Midnight. The phone rings halfway down the hall. We sprint to reach it. A clicking and whirring. Then a voice. 'Try the Central State Archive of Literature and Arts.' It is Malinki Albina. 'Make for the Bolshoi Dom. I hear they might have Kuchumov's papers, though I can't get you in.'

  The landmark that locates the literature archive today is the nearby Bolshoi Dom, a huge white edifice whose stone walls are not its own. The masonry originates from a cathedral dedicated to sailors who died in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905. The story goes that Stalin had the cathedral demolished and gave the bronze plaque with the names of the drowned to a local butcher as a chopping block. The stone was wheeled in barrows to the builders of the Bolshoi Dom, the new KGB headquarters for Leningrad to where, citizens used to joke, people came from all over to see the view of the Siberian gulags from its windowless basement.

  The looming Bolshoi Dom is today the headquarters of St Petersburg's FSB (the successor to the KGB). But even after we find it, the literature archive is still difficult to locate. Concealed in an alleyway that runs off the broad Ulitsa Shpalernaia, its double front doors are obscured by a burnt-out Lada and the poorly laid tarmac path is sticky, trapping wouldbe researchers like flies. Although we have applied for a meeting with the director, we are a long way off from seeing any files. An assistant has refused to confirm whether any of Anatoly Kuchumov's papers are actually here. Even if they are, access to them might be restricted. We have been told that archivists require ten years to catalogue every new bequest before its contents can be made available to selected researchers. The director herself may be at her dacha and if so a deputy who has no executive powers will take her place.

  Many former Soviet institutions are caught between their desire to profit from the future while being wary of revealing their past. We have been in Russia for several frustrating months now and we need this meeting to work. So we have taken a precaution, bringing with us a letter of recommendation that we have been advised to use if we encounter any obfuscation. We present ourselves to a frothy blonde guard who spurts up from her desk like a bottle of warm Soviet champagne. She leads us up a broad staircase lined with heavily barred windows. In the stairwell, a
n ancient document lift rises, its file-filled car attached to a steel cable with a reef knot. The steps are bowed, worn down by legions of clerks employed to keep researchers out and their applications in limbo. We are following a vapour trail of raw alcohol that emanates from somewhere up above us, wafting past photographs of a city caught singing, writing and dreaming (despite the regular firestorms): dancer Natalia Makarova thrown bouquets for her performance in Giselle, author Daniil Granin lauded after publishing his recollections of the siege of Leningrad; painter Alexander Vokraniv in his studio.

  We are shown into an office. On the desk are half a dozen calendars and as many diaries. Another three calendars hang from the walls. Two clocks, three watches and a bedside alarm. A small, elderly woman with sculpted hair enters. Her nails, cardigan and blouse are all ribbons and rose pink, her tiny feet bunched into imposing heels. 'Dobroye Utro,' she demurs, slipping into her high-backed captain's chair, spinning it around in a ghostly hush. 'Alexandra Vasilevna Istomina, director of the Central State Archive of Literature and Art. Can I be of assistance?'