The Amber Room

by Adrian Levy

  Our Friend the Professor calls. The literature archive has found the missing Anatoly Kuchumov file we requested several weeks ago and we have been given permission to come and read it, as a special favour from the director. When we open it the next morning we find a report entitled 'Document Defending the Character of Mikryukov'. The document is stamped 31 October 1945 and was compiled by the colleagues of Ivan Mikryukov, director of Pavlovsk, who had been arrested on suspicion of being 'anti-political'.4

  It states, in his defence, that he led the packing of treasures at Pavlovsk Palace in the late summer of 1941, after the first shipments had left with Kuchumov for Novosibirsk. Like Kuchumov, Mikryukov had 'improvised wadding and containers, salvaging curtains and linen to bulk out cases that were sewn together from old sheets and carpets, saving 42,000 treasures valued at an estimated 1.5 billion roubles'. How could Mikryukov be anything other than a patriot? Many risked their liberty to sign this document, but on the reverse is stamped the verdict: attempted to 'pack too early', a defeatist. The sentence: 'komandirovat to Kazakhstan'. The official wording suggests a business trip to the Central Asian state, but Mikryukov never returned.

  Surprisingly, Kuchumov's name was not attached to this petition to save Mikryukov and yet he preserved the document for many decades. Within six months of the defence document being submitted to the Leningrad authorities, Kuchumov was on his way to Konigsberg, searching for the Amber Room. It seems certain, then, that on that long train journey to Konigsberg, Kuchumov would have been preoccupied with not only the letters that Alfred Rohde had tried to burn (given to him by Professor Brusov) but also the fate of his close colleague from Pavlovsk, whose actions had been condemned as unpatriotic.

  The second document in the file is a telegram dated October 1947. It is yet another komandirovat, a supposed business trip, this one to Moscow. Once again Kuchumov was to tell his colleagues that he was on holiday. In Moscow, he reported to the Committee for Cultural Institutions, a body that came under Zhdanov's empire and received instructions from Committee Chairman Comrade T. M. Zuyeva.5

  The next document is an account of the meeting, written by Kuchumov in purple ink on graph paper. Chairman Zuyeva introduced Kuchumov to Comrade Georgy Antipin of the State Historical Museum, who was attached to a 'special unit of the Military Department', and Comrade David Marchukov, representative of the Committee for Cultural Institutions. Kuchumov noted that Antipin was an intense, brooding man. All three were issued with special passports and permits to travel and were then driven to the Sheremetyevo military airstrip, where they boarded a DC3 bound for Kaliningrad.6 It seemed that Kuchumov was being sent back to reinvestigate the Amber Room again.

  The whole region was under the tightest security and at Kaliningrad airport the border guards inspected the three men's papers and luggage. According to Kuchumov's notes, he was held up for hours by security staff. He had packed 500 photographs of the pre-war palaces of Leningrad in his suitcase and was accused of being a spy. It was Marchukov who eventually persuaded the guards that Kuchumov was on a classified mission. Only then did the DC3 take off again, this time heading for Tempelhof airport. The final destination of the mission was not Kaliningrad but Berlin.

  Kuchumov wrote that his digs in that city were 'not far from the Gestapo headquarters' in Prince Albrecht Strasse and that he, Antipin and Marchukov 'rambled through the streets, eager to see what this capital of terror was really like, this city that gave birth to the Third Reich'.

  In Pravda Kuchumov had read how the Soviet Fifth Shock Army had been first into the city and by the morning of 25 April 1945, when US troops met with their Soviet counterparts on the River Elbe, the noose had been pulled tight, Berlin surrounded. Russians pressed on to the Brandenburg Gate, fighting house by house, using T-34 tanks and katyu-sha rockets, devastating firepower for such a close-quarters battle. The rows of bombed-out houses reminded Kuchumov 'of skulls with hollow eye sockets'.7

  When the mint at the National Bank of Prussia fell in April 1945, Soviet riflemen had forced their way into its vaults to find piles of banknotes as well as remarkable antiquities from Assyria and Persia that had once been displayed in the city's Pergamon Museum. By 27 April 1945 the Soviet Eighth Guard Army had reached the Zoological Gardens, in the western suburbs, where they pounded the Zoo Flakturm, an enormous concrete anti-aircraft tower with thick steel shutters, inside which more than 3,000 civilians cowered alongside paintings and collections (including a priceless golden hoard excavated from Anatolia that was said to have once been worn by Helen of Troy).8

  Allied air raids during the first three months of 1945 had levelled much of Berlin's historic Prussian centre and in 1947 Kuchumov was anxious to see what remained of Museum Insel, the small island on the River Spree, in which had been housed priceless treasures excavated by German archaeologists from Turkey in the 186OS and 1870S. Here should have been the legendary altar of Zeus from Pergamum with its delicately

  Victorious Soviet troops pose in front of the Berlin Reichstag, 194s

  carved frieze. But Kuchumov could find nothing. A British soldier who was there at the same time wrote of a 'shambles of crumbling rubble, with the great monuments from Mshatta and Miletus peering like ghosts over ruins, more sudden than those they had seen before in their two- or three-thousand-year history'.9

  Outside the Reichstag, where German troops had made a last stand on 30 April 1945, Kuchumov scooped up some charred masonry from the ground and could not help but smile: 'who could resist a small souvenir of the evil of fascism from this city broken into smithereens?'

  Kuchumov visited all four sectors of Berlin: American, British, French and Soviet. In the British-controlled Tiergarten, when the portly curator, still in his not-so-new black suit, witnessed the sprawling side-show of whores and touts, con men and fences, most of them wearing an array of military uniforms, he was filled with a deep sense of revulsion. 'It is enough for me to smell the rottenness of the bourgeoisie that is so foreign to the heart and soul of every Russian man,' he wrote. It was an aside that was surely written for any of those charged with implementing Comrade Zhdanov's new campaign, who might (accidentally) peruse this log.

  Exhausted, Kuchumov caught a lift to Berlin-Karlshorst through the khaki traffic jam of jeeps and trucks, to where the Soviet Military Administration was now based. 'It was the only place that seemed in any kind of order,' he wrote. Anyone reading Kuchumov's account would believe that he kept only Soviet company, shunning contamination by the West. The next day he moved into the Berlin-Karlshorst district and was immediately called to a meeting. This was to be the first time he saw the general.

  General Leonid Ivanovich Zorin, head of the Department of Reparations and Supplies, supervised the tracking and return of Soviet art works plundered by the Nazis. He had a small team of Soviet experts working for him, one of whom Kuchumov might have known by sight, Comrade Xenia Agarfornova, a curator from the Hermitage in Leningrad.

  General Zorin gave Kuchumov his orders. His report from Konigsberg had been received warmly. The evidence - that the Amber Room had survived the fall of Konigsberg and might be concealed elsewhere - was compelling. The Committee of Arts of the Council of Ministers of the USSR had been deluged with replies to Kuchumov's appeal for help published in Vo Slavu Rodini. So he was to continue with his Amber Room investigation as a matter of urgency, but as well as chasing down witnesses he was to scour a vast warehouse of looted Soviet art works that had been assembled by the Americans at the end of the war. Kuchumov warned the general that his komandirovat was for only one month since he was needed at the Central Stores in Leningrad, which was still receiving a constant flow of treasures. The general replied that a month was probably enough to trace the Amber Room.

  'Taken down to the banks of the Spree by the general,' wrote Kuchumov. 'In the east harbour was a long, grey building of sombre stone, at least a third of a mile of it.' The gigantic riverside property was the warehouse known as the Derutra building. The Deutsch-Russische Transpor
t-Aktiengesellschaft (German-Russian Storage and Transport Association) had been formed in the 1920S. The general, Kuchumov and Comrade Antipin unlocked the huge steel doors. 'Believe me, we could not trust our own thoughts,' Kuchumov wrote.

  Here the notes have been annotated at a later date. Kuchumov has copied down Comrade Antipin's first impressions of the warehouse:

  Enormous heaps of pictures in frames and rolled canvases. Can you imagine it? Icons, wood and marble sculpture, manuscripts and books, ceramics, tapestries and carpets, glass, porcelain, drawing and ancient arms, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of exhibits from museums in Kiev, Minsk, Pskov, Novgorod, Kirch, Pavlovsk and Pushkin. Dizzying all of it. Dizzying.10

  The building was filled with dismembered Soviet collections that had been stolen by the Nazis and hidden all over the Third Reich. Kuchumov was told that the majority of these works had been found by US troops and transferred to Berlin from US Army collection points in Munich and Wiesbaden, where they had been gathering over the past twenty-four months. But there was a problem. Many of the treasures had been stolen from the Soviet Union by roving units of Alfred Rosenberg's ERR, the Third Reich's art theft squad, whose knowledge of 'culture of the Russian and Soviet empires' was negligible. Original Soviet inventories had been destroyed and replaced with German index cards that were inaccurate. The Americans had relied on these indexes to determine the provenance of the stolen art. Kuchumov wrote: 'The crates had also been opened. Many of the pieces inside were missing.' The task of matching individual items to their original institutions was enormous. But not as large as opening every single box to check for traces of the Amber Room. Kuchumov would need staff, he told General Zorin. He would need transport. A lorry and a jeep were on call. He would need time.

  He hired ioo German workers from the labour exchange. Every box was opened and resealed with a Soviet official present as a witness. Kuchumov was so eager to work quickly and comprehensively that he roped in all able-bodied people, even his German housekeeper 'Paul', who was sent off to search an annexe at Derutra.

  And 'Paul' almost immediately came running back with news. Inside the annexe building, a former grain warehouse, he had found wooden-backed sheets poking out from beneath a tarpaulin. Having been told by Kuchumov that the panels of the Amber Room were backed with wooden boards, he was sure he had found it.

  Kuchumov wrote: 'We scrabbled around with our hands. But what we found was a parquet floor, inlaid with Australian mother-of-pearl and rare hard woods, rose and amarantus, that had once been in the Lyons Hall in the Catherine Palace.' It might not have been the treasure he was after, but it taught Kuchumov a lesson. The Lyons Hall had been dismantled by the Nazis, who had then scattered pieces of it across Europe, a plaster mould abandoned in a field outside Pushkin, the bronze locks and a door in Konigsberg, and here in Berlin the floor itself. Kuchumov noted in his diary that the fate of the Lyons Hall demonstrated a Nazi methodology that might also apply to the Amber Room - stolen, packed and then spread about.

  The Germans working in the Derutra warehouse went through tens of thousands of crates in the flickering paraffin lamplight, kneeling over artefacts long into the night. Kuchumov wrote: 'They brought with them food and thermoses, so there was no need to take breaks. They worked diligently and professionally. They are pedantic and tireless. Our relations were cordial.'

  For all the detailed description of his work at the Derutra warehouse, Kuchumov did not comment on the fact he never had time to leave Berlin, to travel to the castles of Saxony to where Alfred Rohde had planned to evacuate the Amber Room.

  What is palpable is Kuchumov's exhaustion. His writing began to deteriorate. The entries became breathless. The general forced him to take a few days off. Kuchumov heard a platform performance of Wagner's Gotterdammerung (the apocalyptic Twilight of the Gods) but he thought it sounded like the torching of Leningrad. Only when he found a Russian-run cinema screening Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin did he feel revitalized.

  November came and his time was up. Kuchumov was dispatched to Leningrad alongside 2,500 crates packed into eleven railway carriages. Six more carriages left for Kiev and another four to Minsk. He wrote: 'A special flat-backed carriage was also used in the procession leading back to Russia and on it the huge bronze statues of Hercules and Flora, sawn from their podiums near the Cameron Gallery at the Catherine Palace.' They had been found in a smelting yard in Dresden, barely recognizable, having been dragged all the way from Russia by German tanks. 'They can be mended. Of that there is no doubt.'11

  As he left the fallen capital, Kuchumov wrote: 'Here was the lifeblood flowing back to our cities.' But he must also have been conscious of what he was leaving behind, the unexplored lines of inquiry that had sped out of Konigsberg in the spring of 1945. He had not found a single trace of the Amber Room.

  The Soviet Union that Kuchumov returned to would soon become a quagmire. On 31 August 1948 Stalin's protege Zhdanov dropped dead, starting a ferocious three-way fight between Georgy Malenkov, Deputy Prime Minister, Lavrenty Beria, Minister for Internal Affairs, and Viktor Abakumov, the Minister for State Security and former head of SMERSH. The instability also consumed the cultural establishment.

  Sergei Eisenstein's rushes for Ivan the Terrible Part II (the Tsar was Stalin's role model) were denounced and his new work was suppressed. Shostakovich was banned from teaching at the Leningrad and Moscow conservatories. Prokofiev, who had willingly abandoned a life in America for Mother Russia, now hid in his dacha, destroying anything that he owned from those foreign times. Polina Molotov, the Jewish wife of Stalin's foreign minister, was accused of being a Zionist plotter who intended to establish 'California on the Crimea'. Her husband left her on Stalin's orders and the following year she was renamed Object No. 12 and exiled to Kustanai oblast in northern Kazakhstan.12

  The slightest hint of disloyalty could end one's career. In 1946 Leningrad writers Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova were both expelled from the Writer's Union. Zoshchenko's manuscripts and letters were later thrown into a rubbish skip by workmen clearing his apartment.13

  Those things that were deemed quintessentially Russian were feted and, although he had struggled to find time to search for the Amber Room in Berlin, Kuchumov could not afford to give up on it now. The final paper in the file before us reveals how the curator exploited his contacts in the Red Army to revive the search for the treasure. It is a letter from someone called Simeon Pavlovich Kazakhov, who wrote to the curator:

  Before my visit to Zorin, they had heard nothing from you. But they listened to me very well and the affair has now begun. Tomorrow I will go to the general commander with a report and inevitably they will send the doctor to Kaliningrad along with someone else to investigate this place, because either he really did forget or he is pretending he cannot remember.

  The future destiny of the Amber Room will proceed in ways that I just don't know. We will wait for the resolutions of the Lord God, but not the one in the heavens, the one who lives on earth. I am certain there will be good results to this affair. I long to return to my native Motherland. That is my only wish. I shake your hand, yours in solidarity, Comrade Kazakhov.

  The small blue envelope is postmarked '19 October 1949, Poland, Post Dept No. 40223' and the stationery is that which the Red Army issued to its soldiers in the field. There is a stamp from the military censor that confirms this letter came from an army camp. And there is a postscript. 'Don't write letters to me here. Send them to Leningrad.'14

  It is clear that Kuchumov was engaged in an ongoing correspondence with Soldier Kazakhov concerning the Amber Room, but frustratingly there are no other references to him in the literature archive index. We have no idea who 'the doctor' was or what 'place' in Kaliningrad they were referring to. Whatever the 'the doctor' claimed to know was obviously connected with the Amber Room and was of such significance that special arrangements were being made to send him to the Baltic city. Our translator notes that in 1949 the phrase 'Lord God on earth' could
only have been a reference to the Soviet secret services or Stalin himself. The Kremlin was closely connected with the whole enterprise.

  We make a copy of the letter.

  Alexandra Vasilevna, the literature archive director, has advised us that she intends to carry out an important audit of the Anatoly Kuchumov papers so they will not be made available to readers again for at least six months. We cannot afford to sit around in St Petersburg doing nothing. We have to find another route. We need to trace Kuchumov's contemporaries from 1949 or at least someone he confided in. But the women and men whom he employed as junior curators, like Bolshoi Albina, were not let into his private world. We need to find someone who was of equal or superior standing. We recall the fond cards sent to him and particularly one containing the question, 'Why, my brother, are you lying in bed?' written by Valeria Bilanina, vice-director of Pavlovsk Palace and Kuchumov's deputy. We call Our Friend the Professor and leave a message.

  Later that night, she rings back: 'Valeria Bilanina is alive! But she is a recluse.' Nothing in our Russian life is straightforward. 'And she is unwell, about to go into hospital for surgery. She has never allowed anyone into her apartment, but perhaps you can sip tea together in Tsarskoye Selo.'

  Curiosity gets the better of Valeria Bilanina. She agrees to meet at a bus stop on a small lane running through Tsarskoye Selo. When we arrive on a crowded marshrutki, the sun is shining but she does not show. We call and someone picks up straight away, as if they were sitting beside the phone. 'It is far too hot to be practising detente in the open air.' It is Bilanina. 'You had better come to the apartment.'