The Amber Room

by Adrian Levy

  One of them? Before we can ask what he means, Telemakov reaches into the green file before him and produces a thick bundle of paper. 'I wanted to publish this as a book, a tribute to Anatoly Mikhailovich. But for three decades I have been unable to.' He opens the folder hesitantly. 'Some of it is in English,' he says. 'The kind of English spoken by spies. The only people who could speak your language were the KGB. Its office at the car factory was curious about my endeavours concerning one of the city's most famous curators. So I took the manuscript to them.' He pushes the papers back into the file.

  Can we see it?

  Telemakov rises shakily from his seat and begins to pack up. 'It's my work. I want to publish it.' He sees the look of disappointment on our faces. 'But then again you are fellow journalists. Maybe. Can you help me? If you can, I will help you. Take these papers. Go. But come round again when you have got to the end. Please come. And help me.'

  We take Telemakov's pages and head for Sovetskaya 7. Doing as the Russians do, we shunt everyone out the way in the scrum that greets the opening metro door, and dash for a space on the turquoise plastic benches. Up the escalator at Ploshchad Vosstania, plucking the elastic binding. Down Grechesky Prospekt and towards the Baltic hot bread shop in the right-angled speed-skating posture that all citizens assume to avoid being upended on the iced pavement.

  At last we are at our pine breakfast table, reading. The manuscript begins with a dedication to Telemakov written by Professor Boris Piotrovsky, the director of St Petersburg's State Hermitage museum and today the most powerful cultural figure in Russia. I am sure that anyone taking this manuscript in their hands will read from the beginning to the end with great interest... [Telemakov] uses archives, literature and Kuchumov's own words and truthful diary records to tell a brilliant story about the self-sacrifice of our museum workers who risked their lives to save our treasures.'3

  We turn a page and before us is an extract from the great curator's diary that picks up where Alexander Kedrinsky left off: 30 June 1941 - Anatoly Kuchumov is on the treasure train from Leningrad.

  We have come to a halt. Hours of waiting in the snow. Exposed to attack from above and each side. But nothing can be done until the Red Army has cleared the track.

  I ran along the track and saw two women in another carriage washing each other's faces with snow. Then I saw a big bronze bust of Marie Antoinette. The haughty face of this Queen seemed out of place here. I glanced inside the carriage and there were dozens of paintings, none of them were even covered, thrown on to the benches. I was furious at the lack of care.

  But Kuchumov learned that the women were curators who had fled from Smolensk, where they had been given even less time than he had to evacuate their city's museums. He wrote: 'They told me that the bombing of Smolensk was devastating. The fascists just descended. Some were disguised as Soviet militiamen and Red Army soldiers. The trucks carrying these museum treasures had departed the ruins of the Smolensk as the Nazis poured into the streets. What is happening back in Leningrad?'

  Kuchumov was fearful not only for his own comrades but also for the Amber Room that he had left behind. I thought of the Catherine Palace and those things I failed to pack and then I imagined vividly the tragedy of many Soviet towns, falling victim to the Nazis,' he wrote.

  It still seemed surreal to Kuchumov as he had not yet seen any evidence of war. Passing through the heart of the Motherland, the curator watched Vladimir-on-the-Klyazma slip by, founded by the Grand Prince of Kiev, twice sacked by the Mongols although its citizens, famously, were never crushed. According to Kuchumov's diary, its golden domes were untouched: 'It smelled like something native. Something very Russian. Eight hundred years of our great history rushed involuntarily into my head.'

  Then, on 5 July 1941, Kuchumov's train pulled up in the forested plains of the Volga basin, 550 miles south-east of St Petersburg, and there it was ordered to wait. Over three weeks later, Kuchumov at last gleaned some news from back home when a letter arrived by courier: '1 August, from Elena Nikolaievna Beliaeva, curator and party organizer, Leningrad, to Comrade Kuchumov.' Telemakov had copied this letter to the great curator. Airdrops and couriered mail would continue to reach pockets of Russia throughout the war and Kuchumov was the kind of man who threw nothing away. Beliaeva wrote: 'Everyone is now on trench duty. No families are left in the park. We are leaving treats behind for the fascists. Everybody is trying to be of good cheer.'

  Within two weeks of writing this, the people of Leningrad would have dug 16,000 miles of trenches and 340 anti-tank ditches.

  24 August, from Elena Nikolaievna Beliaeva, curator and party organizer, Leningrad, to Comrade Kuchumov. We are still evacuating Pushkin town [Tsarskoye Selo] and the palaces. Thousands of objects have now been saved. Now all walls are bare in the palaces. Yesterday in the Alexander Palace, I removed the last picture - The Kazaki of Nicholas I by Kruger [sic], which is rolled up. The situation is very hard for us. We carry out the work of guards, office workers, cleaners but nothing works.

  Three days after this letter was written a night-time curfew was imposed as Leningrad became saturated by paranoia. Men with unkempt beards or unusual clothes were shot on sight or thrown into jail. Plots by saboteurs were randomly unearthed and spies were found everywhere. Fear strengthened the grip of the NKVD. And as Leningrad braced itself, Kuchumov's train was finally allowed to move on, edging another LOO miles east to Gorky. The curator found a radio and tuned into the news.

  On I September, Hitler issued orders that Leningrad and its palaces be pounded. German bombers and artillery manoeuvred into place. Seven days later, parts of the city were engulfed in flames as the Luftwaffe levelled the Badaev food warehouse with napalm and phosphorus, incinerating all supplies in an inferno that burnt for three days, fuelled by reservoirs of fat and sugar. Huge grey plumes rose high above the Gulf of Finland, filling every nose in Leningrad with the smell of toffee apples, while heads and hearts faced up to imminent starvation. No rail, air or road links. The last reserves gone. A Nazi perimeter bristling with munitions fenced in Leningrad.

  In the Enigma files in London, scattered among the 2,000 signals intercepted every day by the Bletchley Park decoding station, where the British eavesdropped on German communications, are fragments of intelligence describing the encircling of Kuchumov's city: '9 September. Most Secret. XVI Panzer Korps, tank division, is moving to Leningrad.. .'4

  The following day the Germans began to move on Pushkin and its palaces:

  10 September, 03.28 hours, railway line to Krasnoye Selo (K.S.) has been cut. On road between K.S. and Detskoye Selo [an old name for Pushkin] are fifteen [Soviet] horse-drawn vehicles.

  04.56 hours: motorized column moving on Detskoye Selo. Enemy column is motorized and horse-drawn, all in about 150 vehicles.5

  The Nazi communiques make no mention of the load being carried by the Soviets but what the Germans had spotted was the ongoing evacuation of treasures from Leningrad's suburban palaces.

  On 13 September the attack began. 'Most Secret: Koluft Panzer Group Four now in Detskoye Selo, reports Hauptmann Falk.' The following day, the Nazis came from above. 'Fliegerkorps have landed. Attack on Pushkin has been carried out. All bombs have landed in the target area.'

  Inside the Catherine Palace a handful of curators who had chosen to remain continued to evacuate treasures. One of them, Comrade Sophia Popova, reported: 'i6 September, 20.00 hours, the situation has become treacherous.' Popova's bulletins from the front line would be combined into a longer report submitted to the Leningrad authorities in November 1941. Four decades later journalist Vladimir Telemakov would find it.6

  Popova wrote:

  Enemy is coming closer to Pushkin from the Strelna side [south-west of St Petersburg] and has begun shooting with machine guns at the cottage in the direction of the garage where Nicholas II kept his cars. It is almost impossible to move right now. Park and town are under hard artillery fire and bombing every night. We are surely going deaf. But what is deafness compa
red to death!

  Still the museum workers crept out, throwing camouflage netting around the palaces. Late on the night of 16 September, Comrade Popova wrote: 'Firemen and military have set up posts.' Families were evacuated to shelters. 'We are told to keep in touch with commanders from regular units for when it will be time to abandon the palaces.' A German regiment broke through and moved towards the Alexander Palace, only a block away from the Catherine Palace's golden enfilades. 'We are watching the fascists. The Red Army is on Anrov Street,' Comrade Popova wrote.

  A directive arrived from the chairman of IsPolKom, (the executive committee of the Leningrad Soviet): 'Comrade Pavlov [Dmitry Pavlov, Leningrad's Chief of Food Supply] has ordered work to stop in all factories ready for the evacuation of our palaces. All documents must be burned.'

  On 17 September a fire-fight illuminated a grey dawn over Pushkin. '5 a.m.: the park and north of the town are battling hard. Everyone is moving to the west,' Comrade Popova wrote. Staff tried to hide in Oranienbaum, the former estate of Alexander Menshikov. 'We have even taken the typewriters. We will leave nothing for them.' Pushkin was overrun.

  Stuck in his freezing cellar in Gorky, Kuchumov could only wonder at the fate of his friends and of the palaces.7 He would not have known that on a hill overlooking Leningrad, General Wilhelm von Leeb, the commander of Army Group North, was dug in and advised Hitler on 21 September that this position in the suburb of Pushkin was to be the forward station for the final assault on the city. There was to be no infantry invasion, just remote obliteration. Relaying instructions from the Fiihrer on 21 September, the chief of naval staff described Kuchumov's city as one of 'no further interest after Soviet Russia is destroyed'.8

  All the while Leningrad radio played rousing messages. From her bomb shelter, the poet Anna Akhmatova recited inspirational verses, exhorting the women trapped alongside her to be brave.9

  The war also edged towards the Volga basin. The chairman of Gorky IsPolKom ordered Kuchumov and the palace collections deeper into the Russian interior, towards the place that the Tatars call their Sleeping Land. The treasure train steamed from the west into the east, leaving Europe for Siberia and the frozen tundra of Tomsk. Four weeks later it arrived at the confluence of the Tom and Ob rivers. But it would still go 190 miles further into the blinding whiteness of the snow-fields. Leningrad to Gorky, Gorky to Tomsk, Tomsk to no one knew where, five months on the tracks, L,6ookm traversed, until Kuchumov arrived in Novosibirsk, a 'town covered in hoar frost, minus 55°C on the thermometer', at the end of November 1941.10 To the east lay the ferocious republic of Sakha, the old Cossack outpost of Yakutsk. And still further east were all that was left of the 10-40 million disappeared, who had been exiled by Stalin to the gulags of Magadan and Komsomolsk, the City of Youth.

  In Novosibirsk the treasure train was finally unloaded, its precious cargo checked and aired. The theatre was chosen as a temporary store. Kuchumov wrote in his diary on 20 December 1941: 'This brightly lit town, with its white puffs of smoke, its wooden houses and churches, was delighted to receive us. We lay on tapestries in our makeshift quarters and clutched our bread ration cards.'

  Back in Leningrad, Food Supply Chief Pavlov estimated that 6,000 people a day were dying from starvation. Those who were still alive were freezing to death, shredding their books and furniture for kindling. 'We've never been as remote from one another as now,' wrote the Soviet chemist Elena Kochina of her husband in her siege memoirs. 'There is no way we can help one another. We realize now that a person must be able to struggle alone with life and death.'11

  Citizens crept out through the German lines at Pushkin, hunger overcoming their fear, to forage for root vegetables in abandoned allotments and dachas. Pavlov's team experimented with melting lipstick, smearing its fat on the hard bread ration. Leather machine belts were stewed to extract gelatine. The Badaev food factory crater was still being crawled over by a team of scientists, engaging desperately in alchemical experiments to transform the ruins into something edible.

  In Novosibirsk, there was food but little else. 'We sit in the cellars watching our priceless charges. Sometimes we even hold small exhibitions. But there is nothing that can lift our mood, the frustration of not knowing what is happening to the things we were forced to leave behind,' Kuchumov wrote.

  The Amber Room weighed heavily on his mind as he shivered in Maxim Gorky's 'land of chains and ice', surrounded by evacuated treasures from the Leningrad.12 Time stood still and, in order to fill the hours of not knowing what had happened to the Amber Room, Kuchumov began to write a book about its history.

  On 29 January 1743 Empress Elizabeth, who had ascended to the Russian throne one year before, issued a decree: 'Take this Amber Room to decorate the chambers under your command and you can use the Italian Martelli...'13

  We found a copy of this decree in the Hermitage library, following footnotes made by Kuchumov while stranded in Siberia. The journalist Telemakov transcribed all of them for us.

  What Kuchumov had discovered was that one of Elizabeth's first acts as Empress was to take the Amber Room from its store in Peter the Great's Summer Palace and move it to her new Winter Palace on the River Neva. Her father had died without ever seeing it assembled and she was determined to complete the task. Her favourite sculptor, Alexander Martelli, was placed in charge.

  Using Kuchumov's microscopic footnotes we located Martelli's contract (signed by the sculptor), dated 11 February 1743: 'You promise to fix the [Amber] Room, sort all the pieces you have and find out what is missing and for them make replacement parts and erect the Room.' Martelli would be paid 600 roubles to do what Peter the Great's craftsmen could not.14

  All Empress Elizabeth had to decide was where her Amber Room should go. Initially, she ordered that it be installed in a small room in the new Winter Palace, only to change her mind and have it moved to a large hall. But there wasn't enough Prussian amber. Martelli decided to fill in the gaps between the amber panels (that had come from Berlin) with fifty-two gilt-edged mirrored pillars. The Russian court made a set but they were the wrong size; orders were sent to Britain but they were never honoured. Only on 16 September 1745 was the enlarged Amber Room completed, using mirrors that came from France.

  But Elizabeth was still unhappy and ordered the Amber Room be moved three more times, into ever-larger rooms, forcing Martelli to fill more gaps with mirrors and foil-backed glass. In 1745 the new King of Prussia, Frederick the Great, heard about the travails of the Amber Room and decided to combine diplomacy with a gift. Three ornate mirror frames, also made from amber, had been designed as centrepieces for the walls of the Amber Room, but Empress Elizabeth needed four frames to complete the set. Frederick II ordered his craftsmen in Konigsberg to manufacture this fourth frame for 2,000 talers.15 It was sent to St Petersburg along with a poem, The Allegory of the Victories and Heroic Deeds of the Empress.

  But after the four amber mirror frames had been hung, the Empress ordered that the Amber Room be moved again, to outside her bedroom. She then decided that such an innovative and luxurious curio should be used to impress foreign embassies. The roving Amber Room was taken down and reassembled again as a reception hall for ambassadors.16

  No one was surprised when it began to fall to pieces. Kuchumov found this report dated 1746: 'Because of the changes in temperature sections [of the Amber Room] have been damaged. One post is warped. It has been repaired by Master Enger. Also rather a lot of pieces of [amber] have detached themselves from the walls and have gone missing.'17 Rather than restore it, in July 1755 the Empress ordered V. Fermor, head of the Chancellery of the Imperial Study, to remove the Amber Room from the Winter Palace altogether and transport it, each panel and frame taken by hand, to the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoye Selo.

  Here it was to be reconstructed in an even larger chamber. Bartolomeo Rastrelli, an Italian architect, was ordered to supervise the project and Martelli was once again hired to install the room. But there was no money for more amber. Instead, fake panels, gl
ass backed with golden foil, and gilded mirrors were employed. At the centre of the golden enfilades the Amber Room was erected, between the Portrait Hall and Picture Hall, where it would be maintained by Friedrich Roggenbuch, an amber specialist brought from Prussia.

  The Amber Room would not remain in its patchwork state for much longer. When Catherine, an ingenue from Germany, was crowned Empress of All Russia on 22 September 1762 (dressed in what Lord Buckingham described as 4,000 ermine pelts embroidered with thousands of precious stones, her crown smelted from a pound of gold and twenty pounds of silver), she decided that the palaces of the Tsarskoye Selo would be overhauled.18

  Catherine II commissioned John Bush, her British horticulturist, to lay out new gardens with busts of Cicero, Demosthenes and Junius Brutus. Beyond them was erected La Pyramide Egyptienne, a necropolis for the royal greyhounds, and UArc Triomphal de Prince Orloff a tribute to one of her many lovers, Gregory Orlov (who had helped bring her to power by overthrowing her husband, Tsar Peter III). 'There is going to be terrible upheaval in the domestic arrangements at Tsarskoye Selo,' Catherine II warned in a letter of 13 April 1778. 'The Empress will have ten rooms and will ransack all the books in her library for designs for their decoration and her imagination will have free reign.'19

  Born in Stettin, a German town close to the Baltic coast (now Szczecin in north-western Poland), Catherine II must have appreciated the value of amber. We know from the court order books that one of the ten rooms she selected for renovation was the Amber Room. Over the next four years, the Empress ordered an enormous amount - more than 900 pounds - of prohibitively expensive amber that had to be shipped from the Samland Peninsula in East Prussia. She hired four carvers from the Konigsberg Guild to carry out the work, replacing all of the fake sections that bulked out Elizabeth's room with real amber. Catherine II also commissioned Giuseppe Dzokki, an Italian craftsman, to create four Florentine stone mosaics depicting the senses to hang in the room. 'Sight', 'Taste', 'Hearing' and 'Touch and Smell' were all to be stimulated in a chamber that, when lit by candles, exuded a languorous glow, the colour of autumn and a sunset over Stettin.20