The Amber Room

by Adrian Levy

  The old man ruffles a small hand over his white hair. I am a patriot. And yet here I am considering talking to you. Pah.' He grinds a filtertipped cigarette into a viscous beaker of coffee and glowers out of the window at the blizzard that tears across the parkland of the tsars. His baggy face is a map of broken capillaries.

  The original design for the Amber Room, 1701

  The Catherine Palace estate. Here, Peter the Great, who battled Sweden in 1702 to capture the region, built a simple manor that he presented to his fiancee, Catherine, to mark their engagement in 1708. Fifteen miles further north, his new model European capital of St Petersburg was also rising out of the mosquito-ridden delta of the River Neva. Today every statue in the frozen garden, planted more than 220 years ago, wears a jacket of wood and wire as protection against the gales that roar down from the Gulf of Finland.

  Empress Elizabeth, Peter's daughter, inherited the manor in 1752, ordering her Italian architect, Bartolomeo Rastrelli, to transform it into a Baroque imperial summer residence. A 'wide, light-blue ribbon, a palace with snow-white columns', rose above the birch, maple and cherries.1 The exterior of the Catherine Palace was gilded with 220 pounds of gold and its interior was a jewelled chain of linked halls, salon opening into salon, white, then crimson, green and then amber, to create the golden enfilades.

  Soon other palaces sprang up around it and the suburb became known as Tsarskoye Selo, the Tsar's Village. In the 1770S, the new Empress, Catherine the Great, ordered her Scottish architect, Charles Cameron, to remodel the Catherine Palace in a Classical style. It was here that she entertained her legion of lovers, the last being twenty-five-year-old Count Platon Zubov, whose name still graces the ground floor of the southern wing.

  The adjacent hall, which we can see through the old comrade's window, became the Imperial Lyceum, a school that would in 1811 enrol the twelve-year-old Alexander Pushkin, who later immortalized the town: 'Whatever partings destiny may bring, whatever fortunes fate may have in hand, we're still the same; the world an alien thing, and Tsarskoye Selo our Fatherland.'2

  The Catherine Palace

  From the rooms of the Alexander Palace, behind us, Tsar Nicholas II unsuccessfully petitioned 'Cousin Bertie' in England for help before being taken to Ekaterinburg where his bloodline ended in a dank cellar. Below us, in the Great Courtyard, the Cossacks of Alexander Kerensky surrendered to the Russian people in October 1917 bringing down the Russian Provisional Government and handing power to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. At the first opportunity, the great-coated heroes of the Revolution flocked in to jockey for a peek at the decadent world of the aristocrats.

  And here too, in 1952, arrived the old comrade before us, Alexander Alexandrevich Kedrinsky: one of the Soviet Union's most feted architects; fellow of the hallowed Russian Academy of Arts; winner of the Lenin Prize; his life's work commended by LenGorSoviet (the former city council); his achievements recognized by general secretaries, premiers and presidents - Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Chernomyrdin, Yeltsin and Putin.

  But difficult as it has been to reach Kedrinsky (and there have been many meetings in London and St Petersburg since we began researching the Amber Room story in September 2001 and as many letters, faxes and phone calls to emigres and functionaries, distant voices lost in a storm of static), we have an even more delicate task ahead of us: telling Kedrinsky that it is not him we have come all this way to see.

  We are searching for another elderly Russian curator who once cared for his country's most loved treasure: Anatoly Kuchumov, the Amber Room's last guardian and one of Comrade Kedrinsky's oldest colleagues. The men had worked together for more than forty years. But Kuchumov's telephone is disconnected and there is no one who remembers him at the state retirement home on the outskirts of Tsarskoye Selo.

  Kedrinsky is distracted. 'There is a new order at the court, you know,' he says, rising to shut the door. 'Bardovskaya will cut off my head if I utter one word to you.' Bardovskaya? The name means nothing to us but we do not challenge him. Elderly cadre like Kedrinsky are sticklers for formality and instead we endure a long silence. It is stifling in his cavernous studio. The centralized heating system has yet to experience perestroika. Kedrinsky sharpens his pencil the old-fashioned way - with long assured strokes of a knife. Caviar tins of paint-wash that resemble various shades of snow-melt litter his desk, as do his holy triptych: a disposable lighter, an ashtray and a black and gold packet of Peter I, the city's newest cigarette brand.

  Alexander Kedrinsky (far right) with colleagues from Leningrad's palaces after winning the Lenin Prize in 1986

  'Blow Bardovskaya,' he suddenly announces. 'We shall proceed. I will tell you about the Great Task when you have learned something of me. My father. He was a real Russian hero - killed in the first war. My mother - she died too, shortly after I was born, in the year of the October Revolution. An extraordinary aunt raised me.'

  Comrade Kedrinsky enjoys the value everyone places on his knowledge. The sights he must have seen as the party's restorer, one of only a handful of people allowed into every locked store. And there is no interrupting. No chance to ask about Anatoly Kuchumov, the last guardian of the Amber Room.

  'My aunt had studied at the Sorbonne and spoke French. Met Toulouse-Lautrec and Modigliani. Arriving back in our city in 1919, she began teaching at the ballet school - just down the road. A strange time.'

  We have already noticed how Russians talk about terror. It crops up obliquely; most times indistinctly and often inaudibly and in the form of omission - what was permitted rather than what was forbidden. Here in St Petersburg, a living museum of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whose architecture was barely affected by the most momentous and bloodiest events of the twentieth century, long-suffering citizens are happy to dream that they too were untouched by it all.

  It is 1919 The height of the Red Terror. A city reduced from 2.3 million to 720,000 by disease, poverty, panic and the Cheka. 'He who seeks to protect poor people will harden his heart against pity and will become cruel' was the motto of the All Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter Revolution and Sabotage (Cheka), formed in December 1917 in a srnall office minutes away from the city's Winter Palace. Peter the Great's metropolis of canals, town houses and ornamental gardens, conceived as part Amsterdam, part London, part Paris and part Venice, soon appeared damned. A character in Alexei Tolstoy's The Road to Calvary claimed to see the Devil himself riding in a horse-drawn droshky to the city's Vasilevsky Island. 'Ranks, honours, pensions, officers' epaulettes, the thirtieth letter of the alphabet, God, private property, and the right to live as one wished all were being cancelled,' Tolstoy would write.3

  And what of Anatoly Kuchumov? Was Kuchumov also raised during the Red Terror?

  'Kuchumov was a liar. Took the glory for things he didn't do,' Kedrinsky spits, jabbing his pencil into the blotter on his desk.

  We are shocked. This is not what we expected to hear from a close colleague who had supposedly worked in Kuchumov's pocket for so many decades.

  Kedrinsky rails: 'Kuchumov spent his childhood trailing through the mud banks of the Volga in bark shoes. At thirteen I was painting portraits of Lenin. And by the time I was seventeen I was filled with a passion for my country. I worked hard and won a place at the Leningrad Institute of Engineering. I could continue to paint and learn to be an architect, acquire the skills I would need for the Great Task.' His words chug like old locomotives, each one capped in small puffs of smoke drawn from cigarettes that he strokes fondly before putting to the flame. I studied under marvellous professors, Eberling and Zedenberg. I loved their classes. But we Russians do not always get to keep what we love.'

  And Kuchumov? We are insistent. What of his education?

  'Pah. Kuchumov. He had no formal education. His good taste went only as far as the fat cherubs and roses he ordered to be painted on to palace ceilings when they were restored. And yet the staff had to bow and scrape before him. Kuchumov became the tsar of the museum stores.'

  W
e try another tack. What happened in the summer of 1941, we ask, when the Amber Room vanished from this palace?

  I was not in Leningrad. I was in the southern Urals. Building mills and military factories,' the old comrade says, looking out of the window at the troikas skimming children over the whitened lawns.

  We are beginning to wonder if we have made a mistake in coming to see this man.

  But Kedrinsky presses on: I am writing a book about the Great Task. The manuscript is top secret.' These words are whispered. 'How we rebuilt the Motherland, restored our bombed-out palaces. Bardovskaya says I cannot die until I complete it. And the work must be ready for publication in May 2003.'

  Bardovskaya. That name again. But before we can ask about her Comrade Kedrinsky produces from his schoolboy desk drawer a sheaf of Soviet-era paper, thin leaves that curl like ferns with the first touch of a warm hand.

  'All of my research,' he says. Some pages are typed and others are filled with meticulous and tiny handwritten Cyrillic letters. Outside, the snow is falling in great folds, the windows creaking as ice crystals blind them. Kedrinsky reads: '"22 June, 1941. Summer was coming into its own. The fresh green foliage of the old parks, gardens and squares perfumed the air. From early morning orchestras were playing, bold and happy songs, full of energy and joy. Through the streets streamed a variegated crowd."'

  But Kedrinsky said he wasn't in Leningrad in June 1941. Whose recollections are these, we ask?

  He pauses and looks up over the thick black frames of his glasses. 'Your friend Anatoly Kuchumov's. His memories. He was here in that summer of 1941.' Where did Kedrinsky get Kuchumov's diary from, we ask?

  'Pah. No matter,' he snaps. I must have access to everything for my book about the Great Task.' Kedrinsky pulls out dozens of papers: official Soviet reports, his own recollections and extracts from his colleagues' personal papers, material embossed with the stamp of the Catherine Palace archive. The pages in his hand are part memoir and part reference material.

  Kedrinsky goes back to Kuchumov's diary entry for 22 June 1941:

  In one flow the holiday crowd moved towards the palaces. There, old men rested on the lawn while young people danced to the music of the bayan. Others played volleyball and, in a constant stream, crowds flocked into the museum to see the work of those artists of genius - Rastrelli, Cameron. One group after another flowing as if on a conveyor belt through the golden enfilades.'

  How passionate Kuchumov seemed about his Russia. His words don't sound like those of an uneducated man. He seems a very different character from the one presented by the dogmatic old comrade sitting before us.

  Kedrinsky continues:

  'Everything was as it had always been, then Klava, the supervisor, rushed into my study with the breathless news that Comrade Molotov [Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin's Commissar of Foreign Affairs] was to go on air with an emergency announcement. I ran through the rooms to the palace colonnade, where there was a loudspeaker.

  'A large crowd was already gathering, listening to Molotov's gruff voice, full of emotion, uttering simple, terrible words: "Men and women, citizens of the Soviet Union, the Soviet government and its head, Comrade Stalin, have instructed me to make the following announcement. At 4 a.m., without any declaration of war and without any claims being made on the Soviet Union, German troops attacked our country..."'

  Zhitomir, Kaunas, Sevastopol and even Kiev, Mother of Rus, had been bombed in flagrant contravention of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact signed by Molotov and Hitler's Foreign Minister Joachim Ribbentrop on 23 August 1939. Now it fell to Molotov to rouse the Soviet people: '"The government calls upon you, men and women, citizens of the Soviet Union, to rally even more closely around the glorious Bolshevik Party, around the Soviet government and our leader, Comrade Stalin. Our cause is just. The enemy will be crushed. Victory will be ours."'

  In his diary, Kuchumov recalled how he stood motionless: '"War. New trials. New disasters. The whole happy new life of summer vanished and in its place there was only trouble and the premonition of terrible grief."'

  Kedrinsky straightens the research papers on his desk and turns to us: 'Kuchumov didn't have long to ponder the war, as within hours he had been ordered before Comrade Vladimir Ivanovich Ladukhin, the Director of the Catherine and Pavlovsk palaces, a party man. Instructions had come from Moscow. Everything of value in the city was to be evacuated: heavy machinery, factory equipment and the treasure of the tsars.'

  It was a daunting task. The State Hermitage had millions of exhibits and there were thousands more in the palaces ringing Leningrad: Catherine, Alexander, Pavlovsk, Peterhof, Oranienbaum and Gatchina.

  'There was not much time,' Kedrinsky says. 'Comrade Ladukhin assured Kuchumov that there was a plan and that he'd be all right if he stuck to it by the letter.' He sighs. 'Such a mistake. Kuchumov was just twenty-nine. The son of a carpenter, brought up in a log izba.'

  Only nine years before, Kuchumov had been a peasant without qualifications or money. Somehow he had won a post as junior inventory clerk at the Leningrad palaces and, in less than a decade, risen to being chief curator of the Alexander Palace. He had been in the job for only two years when Ladukhin singled him out, instructing him to coordinate evacuating all the palaces of Tsarskoye Selo.

  Why was such an important order from Moscow entrusted to a young and inexperienced curator, we ask?

  Kedrinsky frowns. He hands us a photograph of a group of four people standing outside the Catherine Palace. 'Kuchumov, taken just before the war,' he says, pointing to the man on the right.

  The young curator fits snugly into his double-breasted jacket, the broad white lapels of a weekend shirt spread carefully over it, hands clasped behind his back. A pair of circular rimmed glasses adorns his mousy, feminine features and an unruly forelock falls forward. A fountain pen is clipped in his breast pocket, signalling his recently acquired status as an intellectual. In the midst of the group is a woman. Who is she?

  Anatoly Kuchumov (right) with Anna Mikhailovna, his wife, and others shortly before the Second World War

  'The blue-eyed Anna Mikhailovna,' Kedrinsky says, wrinkling up his nose. He tells us that Anatoly Kuchumov and Anna Mikhailovna met at Leningrad Art Institute, where he attended night classes. She followed him to the Tsarskoye Selo to become a curator there, before they married in 1935.

  'May I read on?' Kedrinsky asks sarcastically. 'According to Kuchumov's diary, on 22 June 1941 Comrade Ladukhin handed him an envelope.'Across the front was typed: 'Acts and instructions, only to be opened if war is proclaimed'. The sealed envelope had been kept in a safe by the city's security chief and the evacuation plan it contained was similar to one devised over a century before. In 1812 Russian curators had packed up and shipped out thousands of exhibits from the museums of St Petersburg and Moscow to remote storage depots in the east as Napoleon headed for the Russian border with specially trained 'trophy brigades', whose job it was to hunt down suitable art works for Paris.

  Kedrinsky says 'But according to Kuchumov's diary, the list had been; drawn up in 1936 by two curators who had included only 2,076 treasures out of a possible 110,000 items from the Alexander Palace, the Catherine Palace and Pavlovsk. If Kuchumov were to follow these orders, then only 259 pieces would be saved from the Catherine Palace and only seven from his own museum. According to the papers before him, he was not to bother with the French furniture created by the famed Jacob brothers, the extraordinary clock collection, the tsar's famous arsenal of weapons. There was no mention of works by Fedot Shubin, the Russian sculptor, no examples of prized Chinese lacquerware, no paintings by Serov, Roerich or Markovsky, some of Russia's greatest artists. Incredibly, there was also no Amber Room. Instead, included were a plaster death mask of Voltaire, undated, unsigned paintings and an export-quality copy of an eighteenth-century Japanese dish.4

  'No Amber Room! Kuchumov made some discreet inquiries and was relieved to learn that the 1936 lists had been judged to be inadequate as far back as 1939. New lists
had been drawn up. But where were they? Kuchumov discovered that they had been lost by the Leningrad security chief himself. Who would dare challenge him?' Kuchumov would have to improvise. He would seek help from the senior staff, familiar with the collections. 'But by June 1941, many of the steadying hands, those with the old expertise, had vanished,' Kedrinsky says.

  The assassination of Sergei Kirov, head of the Leningrad Communist Party, in December 1934 had been used by Stalin as an excuse to purge the Leninist old guard. Show trials, mass executions, the exile of millions, the peeling back of layers of the party, followed. And down swooped the Black Crows, agents acting for Nikolai Yezhov, Russia's new General Commissar of State Security, a limping, diminutive figure who had become the head of the NKVD, the successor to the Cheka, and created a whole new genre of violence that would come to be known as Yezhovshchina.The people of Leningrad called him Karlik, the Dwarf. Paranoia leached into every tenement as heavy boots clumped up limestone stairwells in pursuit of careless words; neighbours were betrayed over the washing line, sisters and brothers collided over a rash phrase. Sometimes a failure to confess, even if it were a lie, would still bring Karlik down on your own head. After the secret police executed her husband, Anna Akhmatova, the city's favourite poet, wrote:

  In the west the earthly sun is still shining,

  And the roofs of the cities gleam in its rays,

  But here the white one already chalks crosses on the houses,