The Amber Room

by Adrian Levy

  The file goes back to the 1970S. A bundle of letters, all of them penned by a comrade, G. S. Fors, and sent to Kuchumov's home address. We recognize the name: G. S. Fors. He was the KGB chief at the Ministry of Culture in Moscow to whom Jelena Storozhenko was required to report her findings about the Amber Room.

  The earliest letter is dated 5 July 1970, one year after the Kaliningrad Geological-Archaeological Expedition (KGA) was established:

  Dorogoy Anatoly Mikhailovich. In Kaliningrad our affairs are multiplying and becoming more interesting. The investigation has developed its own technique and we are digging without any help. I write to you with the intention of knowing confidentially when you are coming to Kaliningrad. The affair demands your presence and it would be good if you could come for ten days in August. G. S. Fors.3

  The KGB was reporting to Kuchumov about the new Amber Room investigation, although it is not clear who was in charge.

  The next letter Kuchumov kept was sent eighteen months later, on 27 December 1971:

  Dorogoy Anatoly Mikhailovich! Heartfelt congratulations to you and your respected wife on the occasion of New Year's Eve. Long years of heart-beating to come, as there are many affairs to be done. I ask you to come to Kaliningrad at the start of 1972 for eight to ten days. We must discuss the state of affairs and manage the researches. We would like to scale down the digging... With a bow, I leave you, G. S. Fors.

  They had only been excavating for two years and already the KGB was keen to curtail the work. Perhaps Moscow was concerned that too much money was being spent in Kaliningrad. Maybe the KGA was getting dangerously close to that which the Ministry of Defence wanted to keep secret. Since there are no replies here, we do not know whether Kuchumov agreed.

  There is gap of three and a half years before the next letter:

  2 May 1975, Dorogoy Anatoly Mikhailovich! I am passing you letters (attached) that have been registered with my department. They might help your work [on the Amber Room]. But I must ask you, remember these are confidential documents. Keep them safe! Anything you glean from them must be held as a separate affair. And all of these letters must be returned to me before 1 July personally or via a trusted person. G. S. Fors.

  The documents Fors sent are no longer attached but what this letter tells us is that the KGB man trusted Kuchumov sufficiently to quietly share intelligence with him. We wonder if the letters concerned the activities of the Soviet trophy brigades or witness statements that Kuchumov was being asked to vet.

  The final letter Kuchumov kept was sent on 29 August 1978:

  Dorogoy Anatoly Mikhailovich! The Lord is my witness. I have received your letter and I am immediately answering. Our affair continues... in meetings with eyewitnesses from different periods of time... I feel uncomfortable because we are wasting state funds... I am on holiday until 4 October and after that we must think of a very good reason for calling you to Moscow. Think of a reason. I embrace you heartily. G. S. Fors.

  Whatever they were doing in the province, the KGB was conscious that it was not cost-efficient. One thing we can think of that would not be cost-efficient would be digging pointlessly for something that the KGB knew did not exist. But the letters do not confirm this.

  We have only a fragment of the correspondence, but from the tone and language of these letters Fors and Kuchumov enjoyed a close relationship at a time when most citizens lived in fear of the security services. 'Dorogoy Anatoly Mikhailovich!' each letter began - my dear Anatoly Mikhailovich. Kuchumov was always addressed with a warm-hearted greeting by the KGB official. Our Friend the Professor notes in the margin that she is surprised to see anything from the KGB in which the phraseology used was familiar rather than formal, the Russian equivalent to the French tu rather than vous.

  We have never even considered that Kuchumov might have had KGB connections until now, other than having to deal with the local KGB officials at the Pavlovsk and Catherine palaces, as every other curator did as a matter of course. There must have been a significant political dimension to the Amber Room search for the KGB to have become so closely involved, and whatever it was, Kuchumov was evidently up to his neck in it.

  Beneath the KGB letters are komandirovat passes, similar to the ones we have seen before that authorized a worker to be transferred to another town or city.4 They show that, while corresponding with the KGB, Kuchumov bobbed back and forth, at its behest, between Leningrad, Moscow and Kaliningrad throughout the 1970S, always telling his colleagues that he was on holiday - keeping in touch with KGB chief Fors about the failings of the Kaliningrad search team, sharing intelligence about the Amber Room that appears not to have been shown to chairman Jelena Storozhenko. It is beginning to look as if Kuchumov's loyalties lay more with the KGB than his fellow academics on the dig team in Kaliningrad. If there was a cover-up of any kind involving the Amber Room, Kuchumov must have been in on it, maybe while those physically searching were kept in the dark.

  The file goes back to the 1960S, a page ripped from a school exercise book, a diary jotted down by Kuchumov over three days in 1969:

  26 May: I came by plane to Kaliningrad at 9.40 a.m, settled in my hotel, got very comfortable and quiet suite No. 182. Meeting with G. S. Fors (KGB chief) and people from State Historical Museum, Moscow... Preparing documents and papers for the meeting of the State Commission that will take place tomorrow.

  27 May: LO a.m. meeting with Major Bogdanchikov. Also here are... military regiments and some from geophysics, some from local museums, some from Moscow. Evening: my birthday.

  28 May: went with specialists to see bunker. Looking at area near Steindamm Strasse. Trip to garden of Alfred Rohde's house on Bickstrasse and former estate of Erich Koch at Gross Friedrichsberg...5

  We recall a previous document stating that in May 1969 Deputy Culture Minister Vasily Striganov had ordered a major revamp of the Amber Room investigation, Moscow seizing control of the provincial search. And here was Kuchumov in Kaliningrad at that time advising, leading, coaching and preparing, guiding a string of dignitaries and security officials through the stage set of the last days of the Amber Room (and into a bunker).

  But frustratingly the information here provides only snapshots in time. The file flips back to 1967. A succession of orders and telegrams show how Kuchumov had come to Striganov's attention two years earlier.6 On 11 March 1967 Striganov called Kuchumov to address a committee in Moscow, comprising a phalanx of security and military officials: Comrade Z. V. Nordman, vice-director of the KGB; Comrade T. M. Shukayev, vice-directors of the MVD; M. G. Kokornikov, the chief of engineering regiments of the Red Army; Major Bogdanchikov of the Kaliningrad Communist Party. The committee asked Kuchumov to prepare a briefing for the Executive Committee of the Council of Ministers, the highest administrative organ of the Russian Federation.7

  Kuchumov presented his briefing on 21 March 1967 at 4 p.m. He was asked back two weeks later, on 5 April. The minutes of these meetings are not here. But the title of the topic of discussion is: 'A plan of practical affairs to organize the search [for the Amber Room]'. So the Soviet authorities were absolutely serious about the Amber Room and Kuchumov, the son of a carpenter, had become a driving force behind national policy on the matter.

  We rifle through the file. We find a letter that explains how Kuchumov's Amber Room plan came to the attention of the authorities in Moscow. In October 1963 he wrote to Mrs L. S. Karpekina, vice-director of the Committee of Culture of the Executive Committee of LenGorSoviet: I treat it as my debt to say to you the following. 1. The searching for the Amber Room in which I took part in 1946 and 1949 had mostly the character of observation or scouting, a preparation exercise for a wider-scale search with modern techniques.' Kuchumov confessed there were no special funds and that the investigations he conducted with Tronchinsky in 1946 and then Gerhard Strauss in 1949 were superficial.

  This is bizarre. Superficial? A scouting exercise? The 1946 mission was a watershed, the investigation that overturned Brusov's findings. We can only presume that Kuch
umov was downplaying his success in 1946 and 1949 to appeal for more resources.

  Kuchumov continued: '2. Having analysed the documents and witness statements, one can suppose that the Amber Room was not transferred from Kaliningrad and was hidden in a special bunker.'8

  Kuchumov appeared to have compelling new evidence. He claimed to have identified a specific bunker in which the Amber Room might have been concealed, a reason to resume the search.

  The file goes back to the winter 1949, revealing where the bunker story came from. We already know that in 1949 Kuchumov had quizzed GDR art historian Gerhard Strauss in the Hotel Moscow in Kaliningrad about the location of a bunker. But we did not realize how critical this bunker would be. In the report before us, Kuchumov revealed that when he failed to get results from Strauss, he summoned Professor Brusov from Moscow - someone we had assumed had dropped out of the picture in 1946.

  According to the file, Professor Brusov was sixty-four years old in 1949 and had been retired from his job at the State Historical Museum. He gave a new witness statement to Kuchumov, the one that had been cut out of Jelena Storozhenko's ready-reckoner. But it is here in the file from St Petersburg and it makes for startling reading. In it Brusov completely contradicted his conclusions of 194 5. Originally Brusov had written that the Amber Room had been destroyed. In 1949 he claimed: I think that the Amber Room exists because in the Knights' Hall, the place where Alfred Rohde said he had stored it, we found only the remains of burned doors. We did not find pieces of bronze or any other anti-inflammables [glass, mirrors, stone mosaics].'9

  It was an incredible about-face, and Kuchumov must have presented Brusov with incontrovertible new evidence to jog his memory but it has not been detailed here. What has been noted in this file was that once the professor had reviewed his main conclusion, he revisited all of his 1945 findings. On 29 December 1949 Brusov stated:

  When I was [in Kaliningrad] in 1945, Rohde suggested to me that I search a cellar on Steindamm Strasse. Rohde, who had a key to this cellar, went three floors underground and I found several museum items there. I was not looking for the Amber Room since I thought it had been burned. I only searched the rooms that Rohde showed me and did not pay attention to several others in this large bunker.

  Here was the root of Kuchumov's bunker theory. There were rooms in a bunker that had never been searched. It was the same bunker that Brusov had talked to Kuchumov about in L946. It was not a new story. But in L949, when Kuchumov asked to be taken to the bunker, Brusov was unable to find it again. 'My memory is not good,' he conceded. I could remember the street, Steindamm Strasse, but I could not exactly point out the building [beneath which the bunker lay].'

  Our file from St Petersburg shows that after Brusov was sent back to Moscow in 1949, Kuchumov sat as a special adviser to a Kaliningrad-based team that searched for this bunker from that year until 1960 and it was shortly after this date, having failed to find it, that Kuchumov contacted Mrs L. S. Karpekina in Leningrad, appealing for more backing.

  As we scan the members of the 1949-60 search team that hunted for the bunker, a piece of the puzzle slips into place. We see that the chairman was Comrade Veniamin Krolevsky, secretary of the Kaliningrad Communist Party, the man who wrote (under an alias) the Kaliningradskaya Pravda articles of 1958.10 This was the series which first revealed to the Soviet public that Professor Brusov's original findings were wrong, his powers of deduction at fault, and that the Amber Room had in fact survived the war and was being concealed in a secret bunker.

  So the Leningrad curator Kuchumov, Krolevsky's special adviser, had not stopped at disproving Brusov's 1945 findings. He had brought Brusov back to Kaliningrad in 1949 and made him recant. And then in 1958 a close colleague of Kuchumov's had launched a broadside against Professor Brusov in Kaliningradskaya Pravda, ridiculing his findings and his powers of recall. We can only conclude that Kuchumov had a hand in these articles. With the professor out of the way, Kuchumov was free to promote his bunker theory to Leningrad, pushing it ever higher until he and his plan reached the Executive Committee of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Federation. But what was it that made everyone so sure that Brusov had got it wrong in 1945?

  The file from the literature archive goes back to the 1940S. One year before Kuchumov's second visit to Kaliningrad, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, his card number 0874033 L.11 Kuchumov was now among the 7 per cent of Soviet citizens who chose to embrace the system.12 He began to write propaganda. Among the papers we have here is a draft of an article by him, entitled 'The Wonderful Palaces of Pushkin and Pavlovsk Rise out of the Ash and Rubble'.13 In it he praised the actions of the Red Army in Konigsberg during the summer of 1945:

  The Soviet army preserved cultural treasures, even those that belonged to the enemy. The soldiers of the Konigsberg regiments, when they learned that under the rubble was hidden the famous Amber Room, took part in the searching, within the ruins, cellars and bunkers... with an enthusiasm that never waned.

  Some were so industrious that Kuchumov gave them a special mention:

  A feat was achieved by Guard Major Rakitsin, who found gilded furniture stolen from the Catherine Palace in the rubble of Konigsberg. With the help of his men, he carried forty pieces through the city to an empty apartment where he was staying. They were damaged. The silk was ripped. The legs were broken and during the evenings, after serving his duty, the major glued back together every broken part.

  Kuchumov described:

  a Red Army recruit from Potava, Misha Kulot, who wrote to me in February 1947. '... I worked in the rubble and I found roog piece of beautiful amber. If you need it I can send it to you. This piece was with me everywhere. Even in Sakhalin Island. Now I have brought it home.' Kulot was an ordinary Russian soldier who carefully took with him an amber detail, believing it was part of the Amber Room that he wanted to give back to us. What a contrast to the behaviour of the Nazis in our Motherland.

  He concluded:

  At the end of the war it was impossible to say 'my story', only 'our story', about the preserving and returning of treasures from the palace museums. I have enough examples to prove to you [the reader]... the high-spirit and culture of all Soviet soldiers and officers who carefully guarded the peaceful works of our nation built on Communism.

  Colonel Avenir Ovsianov, director of the Kaliningrad Centre for Coordinating the Search for Cultural Relics, had told us a strikingly different version of events, one that raised questions about the discipline and motives of the Red Army in Konigsberg. If Ovsianov was right, then Kuchumov was blinkered by his patriotism. We will have to read everything else Kuchumov wrote with this in mind.

  The last report in the file was compiled by Kuchumov and takes us back to the critical year of 1946. 'Destiny of the Amber Room' is its title.14 There are no official stamps. It is full of crossings-out. As we begin to read, we see that in it Kuchumov rehearsed his argument for Moscow, preparing the conclusions that would eventually topple Professor Brusov and reinstate the search for the Amber Room. The document is vital. It should explain what evidence Kuchumov amassed, illuminating the critical new facts that the Leningrad curator had discovered, evidence that eventually persuaded Professor Brusov himself to reconsider his conclusions.

  Kuchumov began this draft (as he began his final report to Moscow) with his most important discovery of 1946: the remains of three stone mosaics in the Knights' Hall of Konigsberg Castle. '22 March 1946. Near the entrance to the Knights' Hall, beneath a staircase we found three totally burned and discoloured mosaic pictures from the Amber Room...only when touching them did they disintegrate into tiny pieces.' These stone mosaics had once hung from hooks on the large amber panels of the Amber Room and had been commissioned by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century.

  In his final report to Moscow, Kuchumov would argue: 'This [discovery of the stone mosaics] cannot serve as evidence that the Amber Room was lost in a fire.' He pointed out that only three out of four stone mosaics were to be
found in the Knights' Hall. This suggested that the Amber Room had been broken up and, wherever the fourth mosaic had been hidden, the amber panels would be there too.

  Kuchumov told Moscow that he was convinced of this theory because he had found no other charred pieces of the Amber Room in the Knights' Hall (amber and wooden backing boards). He advised Moscow that the space where the stone mosaics had been discovered, under the stairs beside the door, was far too small to have also accommodated the constituent parts of the Amber Room - a dozen large panels twelve feet high made of amber, ten amber panels just over three feet high and twenty-four sections of amber skirting board. 'This forces us to reject the loss of the amber panels in this room,' he concluded to Moscow.

  We had found this argument slightly difficult to follow the first time we had read it in papers from the literature archive. We could not understand why Kuchumov's discovery in the Knights' Hall of the charred stone mosaics in 1946 did not simply reinforce the evidence found by Professor Brusov in the Knights' Hall in 1945. The logical conclusion should have been that, as everyone was finding burned pieces of the Amber Room in the Knights' Hall, it had been incinerated there. But Kuchumov concluded the opposite and Moscow accepted his findings. Until now we had given Kuchumov the benefit of the doubt, presuming that he must have gathered additional evidence, complex technical details that he had decided not to burden the senior bureaucrats with. But where were they? Not in this report.