The Amber Room

by Adrian Levy

  We try not to grab at the small exercise book with a hard cover that the colonel has taken from his grey briefcase. A label on it states: 'Not to be removed from the State Archive of the Russian Federation, Moscow.'

  We scan the contents page. A list of possible locations and witnesses. Transcripts of statements by Ernst Schaumann (friend of Alfred Rohde), Paul Feyerabend (director of the Blood Court restaurant at Konigsberg Castle) and Otto Smakka (another contemporary of Rohde's). Nothing new here. We have seen all of this before in Kuchumov's private papers.

  There follows a short history of previous Amber Room searches and an essay, 'On Hunting for Cultural Treasures', by Comrade Jakobovich, the first head of the KGA. There is a translation of Alfred Rohde's Pantheon article, the piece in which he announced the public display of the treasure in Konigsberg Castle in 1942, then a review of Soviet searches 1945-67 and a plan of work for the future.

  We see that Storozhenko has a copy of Kuchumov's conclusion of 1946, in which the curator stated that the room survived the war and remained concealed in the city. It was obviously a critical document for her too. Finally there are three statements from Professor Alexander Brusov: his original findings of 12 June 1945, a statement made in December 1949 and another on 29 July 1954. This is interesting. We have only ever seen the statements made by Brusov in 1945 ajfter his trip to Konigsberg and in 1946, when Kuchumov and Tronchinsky quizzed him in Moscow. We turn to look at the 1949 and 19 54 statements, but see that both have been cut out of the binding.

  'State censors. They went through everything before I saw it,' the colonel says, watching us.

  A long pause. He fiddles with some Nazi dog-tags that he found in a local ruin, then says: 'There was very strong centralization in Jelena's day and without permission from Moscow nothing could happen. It would take months for a request from the KGA to be answered. Can we dig? Can we have some shovels? But the problem she faced went beyond bureaucracy and inefficiency. I think that Storozhenko's expedition was deliberately hampered. The Ministry of Defence intervened.'

  He looks down the pages of our Storozhenko statement and taps on the line where she complained that she was hindered by the rebuilding of the city. 'She was being euphemistic. It was worse than that. In 1947 the Council of Ministers of the Russian Federation passed an order handing over all areas of the oblast that were in any way connected to the amber industry to the Ministry of Defence.10 Amber was a lucrative asset, after all. Beaches, villages, forests, marshes and factories all went under the control of the military. Anywhere Jelena wished to dig, she had to seek permission from them. And they seldom gave her that permission. Why would they do that when they were also supposed to have been part of the effort to find the Amber Room?'

  We have no idea. Maybe the Ministry of Defence was simply trying to protect its assets, we suggest. The Baltic coast was a strategic area.

  The colonel sips from a glass of water. 'You misunderstand the Soviet Union. Obstacles were placed in Jelena's way. Let me give you another example. In your document Jelena writes of the twenty archives she visited, but she does not mention the others that were out-of-bounds. Brezhnev once declared: "We should make access to special military archives more restrictive to make sure that filthy people will not use them for their own dirty purposes." And they did.'11 He drains his glass.

  But for what reason, we ask? What was there to hide?

  'Jelena was pursuing her own theory. Something that Professor Brusov had subtly alluded to in 1945. Our Red Army was heroic and long-suffering. But this was not the only truth. There was also theft and terrible destruction of treasures by our side.'

  Is the colonel suggesting that the Red Army stole or destroyed the Amber Room, we ask, our hearts in our mouths?

  He ignores the question and carries on: 'Jelena had stumbled over a few Ministry of Defence papers that had been misfiled. One from 15 June 1945 referred to a [Soviet] trophy brigade opening and emptying a safe in the Konigsberg Volksbank. I have the document.' He reads aloud from it: '"What we recovered: eighty kilos of cultural treasures, including a huge amount of platinum, gold and silver, among them one kilo of gold chains, rings, medallions and watches, silver coins, medals and 353 silver soup spoons, 244 forks, 107 knives. Report of Major Germani of the 5th Trophy Department [sic], assisted by Major Makarov, head of the travelling department of the State Bank 168, and Lt Suzlova, representative of Konigsberg Military HQ."'12 The colonel looks up: 'Later this Volksbank haul disappeared. And this was just one example. When Jelena attempted to trace what had happened to these treasures and the people who found them, Moscow informed her that there was no surviving archive material. Why would they do that? Why cover up the disappearances and the work of these so-called trophy brigades? Unless they wanted to preserve intact the image of the heroic Red Army fighting the Great Patriotic War.'

  The colonel launches into a crisp lesson in Soviet military history.

  In 1942 reports about the Nazi pillaging of the Leningrad palaces in 1941 and 1942 prompted officials in Moscow to propose that the Soviet Union was entitled to compensation, he says. An Extraordinary Soviet State Commission to investigate German war crimes was established in November that year and sanctioned the idea of taking 'Replacement Treasures', art works gathered from German territory to replace those that had been lost in the USSR.

  On 25 February 1945, two weeks after Stalin returned from the Yalta conference (where compensation for Soviet losses had been set by the Allies at LO billion dollars), a new body was established in Moscow to realize the sum. The Special Committee on Germany was staffed by Nikolai Bulganin, the deputy head of defence, Georgy Malenkov, a member of Stalin's war cabinet, and Nikolai Voznesensky, the powerful head of Gosplan, the organization responsible for implementing the planned economy. The colonel says that the Special Committee sanctioned the gathering of L,745 specific works of art chosen from German museum catalogues.13

  Soldiers could not do such a specialized job and so conscription orders were sent to industrialists, artists, curators, writers and scientists. They were invested with military ranks and uniforms so that the Red Army would respect them. Armed with lists, targets and Baedeker guides to Germany, they would be known as the 'trophy brigades' and dispatched to the front.

  The colonel looks at us over his glasses. I began to investigate the behaviour of these brigades and our regular troops in East Prussia. Among the Soviet forces storming Konigsberg in April 1945 were the LLth Guards Army, the 50th Army and the 43 rd Army. Each of these armies had trophy brigades attached to them and these experts hit the ground running as soon as the city fell on 9 April. When the 50th and 43rd armies were dispatched to the Far East, the i Lth Army under General Galitsky was left behind and its trophy brigades carried on with their work.'

  We know that Professor Alexander Brusov, who led the first official search for the Amber Room, only reached Konigsberg sixty-one days after the city fell. According to Colonel Ovsianov's research, this meant that there were sixty-one days during which the city was crawling with regular troops and trophy brigades whose actions were not always coordinated or accountable.

  'Even after Brusov arrived, his was not the only team in town,' the colonel says. 'Several units of the trophy brigades were still operating. Colonel D. D. Ivanyenko, the man who found the Castle Gift Book, recording the arrival of the Amber Room in December 1941, was not a real army officer. He was conscripted from Moscow State University to a trophy brigade and remained in the city until August, accompanied by political commissar Major Krolic and translator Lieutenant Malakov.

  'In June 1945, the Brigade of the Committee of Arts Affairs, led by N. U. Sergeiyevskaya, Secretary of Moscow's Purchasing Committee of the Commission of Cultural Affairs, arrived with First Lieutenant 1.1. Tsirlin from the Pushkin Museum. The same month, another brigade, headed by Comrade S. D. Skazkin and Comrade Turok of the Academy of Science in Moscow, arrived. And then a fourth search team came from the Voronezh Museum, under the chairmanship of Professor I.
A. Petrusov. All of these teams had overlapping responsibilities for recovering loot and all of their findings came under the Ministry of Defence.

  'No one was to supposed to know of the existence of these brigades. Certainly not the Allies. Secrecy was understandable at that time. And during the Cold War, when you and I were enemies. But now we are at peace, I cannot understand the behaviour of our officials, who still block access to the trophy brigade archives.'

  Is the colonel saying that the Gauleiter of East Prussia, Erich Koch, was right, we ask? He had told Gerhard Strauss at the special interrogation in the GDR's embassy in Warsaw in 1959 that he believed the Red Army had stolen the Amber Room.

  I am not saying that,' the colonel replies. I am saying that by keeping the trophy brigade files closed, the Ministry of Defence is obstructing investigators and creating suspicion. It cannot sanction a probe into the Amber Room and then remove from it one of the most vital sources of reference material.'

  He bangs his fist on the desk. 'For thirty years I served in the military and even I cannot get certain files out of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defence that relate to the trophy brigades. I have come up against very thick walls of Soviet bureaucracy.'

  In June 1996 Colonel Ovsianov learned from a colleague in Moscow that files concerning the activities of the trophy brigades attached to the LLth, 50th and 43rd armies of the Third Belorussian front (those active in East Prussia) did exist and were kept in a closed section of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defence (TsAMO). He applied for a permit to the repository, which is tucked away in Podolsk, a hard-nosed industrial city south-west of Moscow.

  'On 17 July 1996 I received a reply from Colonel Vimuchkin. "In your letter you petitioned to get various documents. After our analysis we have ascertained that the material that is interesting to you is not to be found anywhere in our archive. There is no reason for you to research this any further." I wrote back, this time with names and titles of documents, to the chief of the unit.'14 The colonel pulls another letter from his grey case. 'Then I received this. "At the moment in the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defence we have special works which are connected to a new law about restoration of art treasures and due to this reason the access to these documents is restricted."'

  In May 1997 the law was passed and on 16 October the colonel reapplied to Podolsk for the papers. 'This time an answer came from a Colonel Dorothiayev.' Another letter emerges from the grey case. '"We have received your petition... and we are trying to extract the following documents and will let you know in due course."

  I am still waiting to hear from the archive,' the colonel says. 'Is the truth still so powerful and strange that no one can be allowed to see it?'

  13

  Colonel Ovsianov is a watchful man. He believes that there was some kind of Soviet cover-up concerning the Amber Room. But he won't be drawn until he gets into the military archive in Podolsk.

  He might be waiting a long time. However, there are strong indications about what this cover-up involves: the Red Army doing the unthinkable, destroying the Soviet treasure or stealing it in the last days of the battle for East Prussia. This is the last thing we expected to discover when we began our search. But now Ovsianov has raised it, the story begins to make sense for the first time.

  Professor Alexander Brusov voiced similar concerns in 1945, killing off all hope about the Amber Room just weeks after he had been sent to Konigsberg to find it, concluding that it was burned in the Knights' Hall by troops as the city fell.

  The point at which the Amber Room story changed forever was when the Soviets ordered a reinvestigation in 1946. Then Anatoly Kuchumov returned to the scene of the crime and forensically analysed the castle ruins, finding new evidence that led him to conclude that Brusov was wrong, febrile and misinformed. And since then there have been many searches for the Amber Room - in the GDR and Soviet Union - based on Kuchumov's hypothesis. Ridiculous amounts of money have been thrown at recovering the missing treasure from its Nazi hiding place. Politicians and security officials from both countries have urged on the investigations. Yet nothing has been found and the possibility that the culprits might have been Soviet was never even considered.

  At the Kaliningrad Hotel reception, squeezed between counters selling garish amber jewellery and German posters advertising nostalgia tours for old East Prussians, a package is waiting. A parting gift from the literature archive in St Petersburg, a miscellany of biographical and research information connected to Anatoly Kuchumov. This will be our last foray into the curator's private papers.

  Anatoly Mikhailovich Kuchumov, the man who had panicked and left the Amber Room in the Catherine Palace in 1941, had leapt at the chance of reinvestigating its fate in Konigsberg in 1946. Having knocked out Brusov's evidence, he had pursued his own theory to Berlin in 1947 and the new Kaliningrad in 1949 and again to that city in 1959. The story keeps coming back to the man who resurrected the Amber Room.

  We take the file up to the third floor and close the curtains in our room. We cannot bear looking at the 'Monster'. In the packet is a small hard-backed volume with a grey and beige cover, The Amber Room by Anatoly Kuchumov and M. G. Voronov.

  The book was published in 1989, as the Soviet Union staggered to its end, forty-eight years after Kuchumov had begun to research in frozen Novosibirsk. The Amber Room came out when Kuchumov was seventy-seven years old, twelve years after he officially retired from the Leningrad palaces with a serious heart complaint.1

  It began with Kuchumov in a reflective mood: the court of the tsars; Peter the Great's dreams of owning the Amber Room; Peter's frustration at his experts' inability to reconstruct it in his Summer Palace; the triumph of empresses Elizabeth and Catherine in resurrecting the treasure in the Catherine Palace; its emergence as the 'Eighth Wonder of the World'.

  But when Kuchumov addressed the fate of the Amber Room in the final pages, his tone changed:

  The failure of the searches for the Amber Room should not be an embarrassment for the Soviet people, particularly museum workers. The Amber Room did not die. This masterpiece could not have been deliberately destroyed. There are many secret places that we still have not discovered left by the Nazis in the territories of Germany, Austria and other countries. It is only a question of time before it is found, by chance or the continuation of searching. Lovers of beauty, you must not reject the continuation of the search.

  We are struck by Kuchumov's choice of words, 'embarrassment', 'the Amber Room did not die', 'deliberately destroyed'. It is as if he was defending himself, and yet as far as we know, he faced no accusers in 1989.

  What is also striking is that Kuchumov's book failed to reveal any of the sentiments expressed by Jelena Storozhenko in her twenty-page statement to Kuchumov in 1986. The Amber Room made no mention of Storozhenko's paltry finds or her fears of official obfuscation. For some reason, Kuchumov decided that, even though the Soviet Union had embraced glasnost and perestroika, Storozhenko's allegations were not 'for the world to see'.

  We close his book and turn to a file of papers from the literature archive with a growing feeling that Kuchumov was struggling at the end of his life to deal with the consequences of his actions in 1941. Perhaps he was trying to keep something alive that he knew had in reality died.

  The documents are in reverse order, the most contemporaneous, a newspaper cutting from 1986, at the top. Leningradskaya Pravda reported on 22 April 1986: 'Mikhail Gorbachev, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and Nikolai Richkov, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, announce... recipients of the Lenin Prize.'2

  Among the handful of those chosen to receive the Soviet Union's highest civilian honour in 1986 we spot the name 'A. M. Kuchumov (art historian)', awarded in recognition of 'outstanding achievements' and 'the solution of tasks vital to the state'.

  A telegram sent to Kuchumov from Minister of Culture Comrade Dermichev read: 'Honoured Anatoly Mikhailovich! Heartfelt congratulation
s. your many years and creative labours have returned to life that destroyed by the Hitlerite occupants...'

  We recall the man in the photographs: Kuchumov portly in his tatty suit, a provincial curator who rolled up his shirtsleeves to help track down and recover art stolen by the Nazis. Self-taught, as blind as a mole, Kuchumov appeared to live a commonplace existence with his wife, Anna Mikhailovna, in their threadbare Pavlovsk apartment. But here, we see that the party's Central Committee and the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR had plucked Kuchumov out as an exemplary comrade. Many curators we met at the St Petersburg House of Scientists had also struggled with virtually no resources to rebuild Russia's cultural heritage, yet who among them had been recognized? Kuchumov must have done something special, and yet in his book, the epitaph on his career, he was regretful.

  Anatoly Kuchumov reading in the mauve boudoir of Empress Alexandra, Alexander Palace, Pushkin, 1940

  Dozens of telegrams arrived after news of the 19 8 6 award was published. From First Secretary Comrade Solavyiov of the Leningrad Communist Party. From the Supreme Architect of Leningrad, Comrade Bulkdakov ('we are proud'). From Dushanbe in Tajikistan ('your old friend Vsevolod...I heard it on the radio!').

  And lastly, from unprepossessing Svetly in Kaliningrad Province: 'Dear Anatoly Mikhailovich, heartfelt congratulations. So glad to hear your success. Kiss you always. Jelena Storozhenko.'

  So glad. However, according to the correspondence that comes next, the man Storozhenko perceived as a friend and a servant of the state was already its agent.