by Adrian Levy
We climb to the second floor of a post-war red-brick block. 'Come in. Very slowly,' Valeria Bilanina rattles, pushing and pulling us along her small hallway. 'Do. Not. Destroy. Deface. Crumple. Scrumple. Anything. Sit. Stand. I don't care.'
The first thing that strikes us about her apartment is that it is so cluttered no one else can sit or stand. Towers of boxes fill every space. We ask her if she knew Kuchumov back in 1949?
'Of course not,' Valeria Bilanina snorts, flinging open a door and diving into a kitchen, from where drifts the smell of browning butter. On the wall is her graduation portrait from fifty years before, and in it she is slim, studious and beautiful. Either side of the photograph are propped drawings of Landseer lions.
Ten minutes later, Valeria Bilanina reappears to brush the living-room table clean. A bust of Catherine the Great sits on the mantelpiece, along with a collection of broken teapots. Glass flowers are propped into jars surrounded by a forest of ribbon and satin roses, every piece of gift-wrap that she has ever received. The apartment block in which she lives was built for the workers of Pushkin to commemorate the centenary of Lenin's birth and Valeria Bilanina arrived in 1970. Before then, she had shared a room in the Catherine Palace's Central Store. I am still waiting for the memorial plaque to go up,' she says only half jokingly. Now, having retired from Pavlovsk, Valeria Bilanina is busy curating her own lengthy life in this small flat. 'My arkhiv. Every one of these' - she sweeps a hand over the cardboard metropolis - 'has a different theme. This, for example.' She hauls out a bundle of yellowed cards. 'These are the evacuation indexes from 1812 and there are twelve books of them.' We wonder why these things are not in a museum. 'And this painting.' We look up at the wall. 'This was a gift from Anatoly Kuchumov. It is by Ivan Bilibin. He found it under a hedgerow and gave it to me. "Keep it," he said. "To remind you.'" Obviously not everything that was recovered after the war went to the Central Stores. 'And this watercolour of Empress Anna Ivanovna was another gift from Kuchumov.'
Valeria Bilanina produces plates of hard-boiled eggs, hanks of fleshy sausage and a pot of steaming kasha, kernels of steeped buckwheat. Even as she eats she talks. How can she help us if she didn't know Kuchumov back in 1949, we ask? Valeria Bilanina seems stunned. Beads of sweat glisten on her darkening face like bubbles breaking on the surface of a steaming bowl of borscht. Her great frame shivers and twitches and we wonder whether to fetch her some water. I got my job the day I left Leningrad University in 1952. But I knew Kuchumov better than anyone. When I first met him he was still wearing the suit given to him by the commission in Moscow in 1946. He was so embarrassed when he realized that he and Tronchinsky were issued identical clothes: tie, shoes, shirt.'
So Bilanina doesn't know what Kuchumov was doing in 1949, we ask again? She shoots out of her seat and begins tearing through boxes. Finally, she retrieves four letters from a pile. 'Kuchumov received many letters and cards from this man, a German. He was connected to what happened in 1949.' She looks triumphant. 'There are things we were not meant to know and Kuchumov knew how to keep a secret, but as he became older he was careless.'
She thrusts into our hands four envelopes that are now pockmarked with grease spots. 'How can you Angliyski understand? Even Kuchumov did not understand everything. I should know, I wrote his obituary.' She is quivering again. 'You see the kind of woman you're dealing with now? And all this trouble the day before I go under the knife.'
Four empty envelopes. We lay them on the pine table at our apartment in Sovetskaya 7. They bear the postmark of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) and are addressed to 'Pawlowsk, Leningrad Schloss Museum, A. Kugumow'. They are all dated after 1949 and we wonder if Valeria Bilanina misunderstood our questions. One is from 3 January 1951, another from 1 January 1970, the third from 4 January 1973 and the last from 25 December 1976. Quite possibly they contained seasonal greetings. Each one bears the stamp of the Soviet censor.
But we notice that the envelope dated 4 January 1973 is slightly plumper than the others. We hold it up to the light. An opaque, oblong shadow runs across the envelope like a tumour on an X-ray. We slice the lining of the envelope open with a razor blade and a piece of tracing paper falls out. We open up the fragile square. It is a letter written in German with an extremely light hand in pencil, so that no discernible indentations could be felt if the envelope was patted down.
The writing is formal and outmoded. The author of this letter had so much to say that, having filled the paper his words then run vertically up one side of the page:
Dear Mr Kugumow, a long time has passed, in my opinion almost twenty-four years, since we worked together on the mystery of the Amber Room. I congratulate you from the bottom of my heart for the New Year and I wish you all the best and great successes in this year's work. You will probably not remember me after so long. On 3 October 1970 I visited Leningrad with a tour party. I wanted to very much meet you again but I couldn't remember your surname correctly and nobody could help me when I asked about the great art historian who searched for the Amber Room.
The writer was forgetful and possibly old. He also had a confession:
Very often I blame myself that I did not insist in Kaliningrad on systematic searching. This feeling was especially alive when I saw a Soviet movie last year about the Amber Room when my name was mentioned and again recently when Mr Seydervitz, the former general director of the Dresden Gallery, wrote about the destiny of the Amber Room. Not everything he wrote is quite right, but he shows well how cruelly and without responsibility the Nazis behaved towards your great monuments of art.
Then there was a request: I would very much like to come to Leningrad again. Could you give me in Pavlovsk somewhere to stay, since without it I am not allowed to go to the Soviet Union?' He envisaged an exchange of favours. 'Maybe you would like to visit our Republic too? I invite you as my guest and you can stay at my home. The wife of my son is a student of Slavonic studies and she can translate for us.'
Since it remained concealed until we sliced it free from the envelope's lining, Kuchumov never read this secret letter. We can only presume that what the great curator took out of the envelope and what the Soviet censor also saw was an innocuous New Year's greetings card. The tracing paper square with its mention of the Amber Room and a secret trip to Kaliningrad was presumably concealed to keep the subject matter private. And yet from what we have learned so far it is clear that every detail of the operation to find the Amber Room was planned, funded and supervised by Moscow. Perhaps the paranoid German writer was trying to conceal his thoughts from prying eyes at home.
Finally, it is signed: 'Comradely Greetings, Yours, Dr G. Strauss, in Berlin, Heinrich-Mann-Platz 4, GDR'.15
We go back to our notes. We compare this letter to the one sent in October 1949 to Kuchumov by Soldier Kazakhov. 'Tomorrow I will go to the general commander with a report and inevitably they will send the doctor to Kaliningrad... because either he really did forget or he is pretending he cannot remember,' Kazakhov advised Kuchumov.
Before us is a letter from a forgetful doctor who is writing in 1973 and referring to a trip to Kaliningrad made by him twenty-four years earlier. There is only one way to establish if Dr G. Strauss is the same doctor Kazakhov referred to. We cannot get back into Kuchumov's private papers for another five months. But we can go to Berlin and check out Dr G. Strauss. When the Stasi, the East German secret police, was disbanded in March 1990 it left behind comprehensive files on one in every three German citizens. An East German who corresponded with a Soviet official about the search for the Amber Room must have come to the attention of the authorities in East Berlin. We call the Federal Authority for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), the bureaucratic structure that is responsible for sifting and disseminating what was left behind by the Stasi. Yes, they say that there is material concerning Dr G. Strauss and the Amber Room. But, they add, it may take several months to process our application.
Once again our
research is put on hold.
6
Berlin is clear and white. Even though it is two days after Christmas 2002 the city is still festively optimistic. But beneath the iced pavements we are rolling back in time. The U2 subway revives feelings from an age when West Berliners boarded city-bound trains at the comfortable shopping and residential quarters of Zoologischer Garten and Sophie-Charlotte-Platz while their compatriots in East Berlin stepped on at tense Pankow or at functional Schonhauser Allee. But the shoppers and workers never saw each other, riding instead within their separate political systems. When the westbound and eastbound trains were forced to converge at Potsdamer Platz, each would wiggle around and retreat back along the darkened tracks. Now, thirteen years after die Wende (or 'the turning point', as Germans describe the process of reunification), it is still something of a novelty to travel the entire length of the U2 and see incredulous faces crease up with surprise as a brightly lit carriage rattles past their train window, in the opposite direction.
Six months after leaving Russia we are still waiting to hear if our application to see the Stasi files has been approved, and in frustration we have come to Pankow to search for Dr G. Strauss ourselves.
Outside the station, the easternmost stop on the U2, fierce winds from the Baltic slice between the cement towers, whipping woollen scarves from red-raw necks and thieving hats. We cross the street, looking for the address recorded in Gothic capitals: 'EEL Berlin, Heinrich-Mann-Platz 4'. We make our way down the slippery path.
The supermarkets are prefabricated, the houses muddled with concrete and pebble dash. In the 1960S and 1970S, the red brick and carved masonry of Pankow were replaced by a bloc utilitarianism that was deemed more suitable to the hard-wearing society that was being raised there. Today its residents are not so durable and beneath the ripped steel awnings are greasy drunks and fumbling dealers, elderly junkies and wrinkled skinheads, all of them more than likely former servicemen who now have no one to serve.
It has not always been so deadbeat. Pankow was once a gentile retreat for prosperous nineteenth-century Berliners and in the 1940S it became the favoured suburb of Walter Ulbricht and his clique. Within a year of the collapse of the Third Reich, in February 1946, Ulbricht, the leader of the German Communist Party (KPD), signed a pact with Stalin that tethered the East German state to the USSR. Three years on, Ulbricht, 'a scoundrel capable of killing his father and his mother' (according to Lavrenty Beria, the NKVD chief), founded the German Democratic Republic, which was to be governed by his new Socialist Unity Party (SED), and one of its first acts was to commandeer Pankow's nineteenth-century mansions as homes for its Politburo.1 Niederschonhausen Castle, where Queen Christine, the wife of Frederick the Great, was reputed to have died of boredom and the Nazis stored 'degenerative art', was also seized and transformed into a state guesthouse, later used by Fidel Castro and Mikhail Gorbachev.
By 1950, when the Stasi was formed, the sedate suburb of Pankow was completely encircled by its agents. Only the most trusted were permitted to enter, let alone live within the security perimeter of what was now a water-tight enclave. Dr G. Strauss was one of them.
In St Petersburg, the Kuchumov papers are still officially closed. But Our Friend the Professor has used her connections to help us once again and has secured a few documents from a correspondence file of Kuchumov's, stored in the literature archive, concerning contacts in East Berlin.
She has sent us a batch of notes she has taken and written a covering letter. She recalls we were looking for a source known as 'the Doctor'. She is excited, she writes, having come across an intelligence briefing and interrogation report of a former German internee who, in 1949, claimed to know the location of the Amber Room. His name was Dr G. Strauss and his file bears the stamp of the Soviet Ministry of State Security, Comrade Viktor Abakumov's MGB (the former Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence agency that was a forerunner to the KGB).2
Abakumov, Beria's pupil, had become the Soviet's spymaster and chief of the new MGB in 1946, inheriting the old NKVD's extensive network of interrogation and holding centres that had been set up at the end of the war to imprison Nazis, collaborators and anyone else whom the system deemed objectionable. Abakumov's agents stalked the Baltic and Eastern Europe, seeking out opposition and arresting saboteurs and dissidents. Abakumov also fostered the growth of like-minded security organizations within the Soviet's new partner nations, including the Stasi.3
We see that the MGB file Our Friend the Professor has sent to us was prepared for Anatoly Kuchumov and it is dated October 1949, a briefing prepared for his meeting with Dr G. Strauss in Kaliningrad that December. Attached to it is a komandirovat for Kuchumov to travel to Kaliningrad. It stated that General Zorin, in Berlin, had finalized the arrangements for transporting Dr G. Strauss. We are now certain that Soldier Kazakhov's source, 'the Doctor' and this former German internee are one and the same.
In the MGB briefing, Strauss was described as 'an art historian' with long-established links to East Prussia. He was born there in 1908 in Mohrungen (today Morag in Poland), a market town founded by the Teutonic Knights, not far from Prince Alex's castle at Schlobitten. Dr G. Strauss studied art history at Konigsberg University and on graduation was recruited by East Prussia's Provincial Memorials Office. In 1939, he was appointed as an assistant to the city's director of art collections. This makes it likely that he was a contemporary of Alfred Rohde, Konigsberg Castle Museum's director.
There is more. In 1934 Strauss became a brown-shirted street fighter, joining the Sturmabteilung and three years later, while many others chose not to, he joined the Nazi Party. His service record shows that during the war he was a Wehrmacht officer, stationed in East Prussia, and for the last two years of the war he was assigned to protecting the state and its treasures from Allied air raids, a job of great importance considering the value the Third Reich placed on the haul of artefacts stashed in the region. It was a posting that also revealed a degree of political favour, as Strauss could have been ordered to the front, where so many Germans perished.
The file shows that these classified briefing papers originate from a Major Kunyn at MGB headquarters in Berlin-Lichtenberg and state that immediately after the war Strauss was interned by the Soviets at Bornholm Camp in Rossenthin, south-east of Berlin, in the verdant Brandenburg Spreewald. The vast majority of detained Germans spent years waiting to get out and another decade coming to terms with the collapse of their splintered nation. Strauss, however, was released after only four months at Bornholm and was then allotted a villa at Pankow. This is the villa in Heinrich-Mann-Platz that we are heading towards.
Many Germans secured their freedom by declaring allegiance to the Communist Party. The MGB briefing paper stated that Strauss told his Soviet interrogators that he had been a Communist since 193 2. He claimed only to have joined the Brown Shirts and the NSDAP on the orders of the Communist Party that instructed him to go to any lengths to conceal his real political affiliations.4 What should we believe? We do not know.
We enter Pankow's Gothic-style Rathaus, with its gargoyles and faded yellow Bayreuth sandstone, practically the only thing that evokes the kind of Germany to which this suburb once belonged. 'Heinrich-Mann-Platz 4,' the counter clerk says, running a finger down the electoral role. 'Professor Dr Gerhard Strauss, this is the person now living at Heinrich-Mann-Platz 4. Here is a telephone number. I'll call it right away.' The old man is still alive. We have not contemplated this eventuality. We have hoped at best for relatives or a forwarding address, perhaps a quick glimpse of the house in which he lived. No, we say, no thanks, and walk back on to the street.
We try to settle ourselves. We want to be as natural as we can when we knock on the door. Around us through the snow we can see the outlines of large, foreboding chalets, each in its own mute private grounds, the low-slung roofs insulated by thick ice. We stand before No. 4. The gate is locked, although through a downstairs window we can see the lights of a Christmas tree. We gently rub the froste
d brass plate: 'STRAUSS'. What shall we say? Something low-key and neutral. We are researching a Russian curator's life and have discovered that he had a pen pal in East Germany. We press the buzzer.
A face appears at an upstairs window. Possibly a man. 'Dr Strauss?' we call. 'Sprechen sie Englisch, bitte?' The front door rattles. Chains are unwound. A bolt is drawn back and it opens to an archer's slit. 'Dr Strauss?' we ask.
A dark-haired man dressed in black jeans and a sweater makes his way cautiously to the gate, slipping along the frosted path, inspecting us with eyes like iced water. We shout an explanation in German so broken that we can only be English. This man is about fifty. He cannot possibly have met Anatoly Kuchumov in Kaliningrad in 1949. And yet he is opening the gate and we are following him back to the house.
Inside, there is not a mark on the new stripped-pine floors except for the large black prints left by our slush-filled boots. On the whitewashed walls are moody oils and organ pipes, pieces that give the space a chaste air. The man motions us to sit beside the tree whose hand-carved ornaments are volkisch. We try and clarify who he is and what we are doing in his living room. But he will not hear it. Not just yet. We must wait. A woman's voice floats through from the hall, 'KaffeeV she calls. After ten silent minutes, listening to the percolator bubble on the hob, amaretti biscuits placed on a tray, the woman has joined the man in their living room. They serve us even though none of us know who the other is.
'Zo?' the woman says, as we drain our cups.
'So,' we say. 'Do you know Dr G. Strauss?'
