The Amber Room

by Adrian Levy

  We plunge into Anatoly Mikhailovich Kuchumov. The director shakes her head, we slip our letter of reference across her desk. Alexandra Vasilevna's painted nail follows every word. It is from Our Friend the Professor's publisher, head of an important St Petersburg house. His company subsidizes the printing of Russian archive catalogues and he strongly recommends that we be allowed entry. A passionate man who had bowed deeply in his long coat when we had met, the publisher recalled Anatoly Kuchumov fondly and is also keen to know if the great curator's private files have survived.

  The archive director smiles broadly. She produces three cups of black tea and a box. Out of it tumbles glittering foil wrappers embossed with a Soviet pantheon: red stars, saluting heroes, fairy-tale cottages in the Karelian woods, fiery rockets scorching the firmament, chocolates produced by a company founded by Nadezda Krupskaya, the wife of Lenin.

  Alexandra Vasilevna sucks noisily on a Soyuz 10, making it soft and malleable. I joined the Leningrad archives in 1950,' she says. I have had no other job. I know it is not fashionable to talk about the Stalin times, but I will be honest with you. That time was good. We travelled everywhere in our USSR and we paid very little for everything.'

  She spins her chair round to watch the rain falling through a portholelike window. 'We still have to get used to letting people in. To this openness, as you would call it. You are the first Angliyski I have ever met. Do you know that the only time I talked with an American was last year? At a social function at his embassy. I watched and I listened. He told me we were soulful, long-suffering, our leaders corrupt.' She tuts and shakes her head. 'They come here like children, quoting Orwell: "Four legs good. Two legs bad."' The director is asking for our understanding before advising us of the archive fees. But is there anything worth buying?

  Alexandra Vasilevna begins to calculate, her pink nails tapping on a row of numbers she scribbles on a pad. 'All files will have to hurdle a vetting procedure'. Well, at least there are files. 'Their contents are to be assessed by a censor who will decide what is and is not pertinent. You may come in for one day next week,' the director rules cheerily. In Russia it is never today. And even though she has given us a day pass into the reading room, we are not sure what we have been granted access to.

  The St Petersburg Literature Archive reading room

  The following Wednesday the frothy guard barely fizzes as we enter. She knows we know the way. The reading room on the second floor is disappointing, in its ordinariness, with formica-topped tables and red kitchenette chairs. Unloved cheese plants clutter the windowsill. Infused with tobacco smoke, with gloss mocha walls, the room feels like we are in a railway waiting hall. The only other notable feature is Vitalia Petrovna, the buck-toothed superintendent, who is sporting a pair of mohair leg-warmers.

  But on our desk is a file wrapped in ribbon. The file contains a batch of Kuchumov's private papers. Our names are the only ones written in the readers' record that has been stuck inside the folder so recently that the spittle to moisten the glue is still damp. Not even Kedrinsky has seen these documents. We are consigned to a far corner with the virgin file. Our Friend the Professor has agreed to translate for us and we begin to read.

  A form printed on sugar paper:

  Order 88, 1 March 1946, Kuchumov, Anatoly Mikhailovich, former curator of Amber Room and Chief of Central Stores, Leningrad, is sent on komandirovat from 3 March to Moscow, for several questions in connection with searching for museum treasures. Expenses to be paid by GA [General Administration], State Historical Museum.

  The form is stamped: Staff Department, Catherine Palace. At the bottom someone has written, 'Kuchumov is to say he is on vacation.'2

  Komandirovat is 'to be sent on a business trip' and in Soviet times it was a regular feature of working life, but citizens sent on these routine exchanges were never normally instructed to assume a cover story, telling friends and colleagues they were on holiday. This first document seems to confirm what Voronova told us. Anatoly Kuchumov had embarked on a clandestine state-sanctioned mission in 1946.

  A letter is attached to the komandirovat form, written by the Soviet Ministry of Culture to the Leningrad authorities: 'L March 1946, ref 04-18, to LenGorlsPolKom. Kuchumov, Anatoly Mikhailovich, komandirovat to Moscow on orders of SovNarKom. Komandirovat also for Tronchinsky, Stanislav Valerianovich. Mission status: Secret.'3

  The document confirmed that SovNarKom, one of the highest authorities in the Russian Federation, ordered Kuchumov's mission. He was to be accompanied by Stanislav Tronchinsky, who, according to museum workers at the House of Scientists, was a senior cultural bureaucrat stationed in Leningrad. They had met during the evacuation of the palaces in the summer of 1941 and corresponded throughout the war: Kuchumov in Novosibirsk and Tronchinsky in Leninsk-Kuznetsky, in the foothills of the Alatay Mountains.

  The next documents are notes, an impromptu diary written in purple ink on graph paper, in a delicate hand that we recognize as Kuchumov's. We have seen his writing before in letters shown to us by his granddaughter.

  Kedrinsky has read diary extracts to us. Telemakov has transcribed sections too. But this is the first time we have seen an original part of Kuchumov's diary.

  Arriving in Moscow, Kuchumov wrote, he called at the State Historical Museum, looking for Alexander Brusov, the man who had led the previous year's unsuccessful search for the Amber Room. The museum told Kuchumov that the professor was working from home. When Kuchumov and Tronchinsky eventually found him, they revealed that this was not a courtesy call. They had been ordered to Konigsberg to reinvestigate the fate of the Amber Room. They wanted to debrief the professor about his findings. There is no explanation here of why Moscow was at this time questioning the professor's conclusions. But by going to the expense of sending a second mission in search of the Amber Room, the Soviet authorities demonstrated the significance they attached to it.

  From Brusov's interview with Kuchumov it is clear that he was nervous. Had Kuchumov and Tronchinsky read his report from July 1945, he asked them? Yes, they had, but was there anything else he would like to add for the record? Brusov thought. He did have something new that might assist them. The professor produced a translation of the correspondence that he had rescued from the bonfire set by Konigsberg Castle Museum director Alfred Rohde. The work had been done by V F. Rumiantseva, an expert in German paintings at Moscow's State Tretiakov Gallery, who had spent nine months reconstructing the charred documents.

  Brusov confided in Tronchinsky. There was one event from his 1945 trip that now unsettled him. Kuchumov made notes:

  It was the Hofbunker. In September 1944 Rohde reported in a letter to Berlin that he couldn't get into the Hofbunker because he had lost the key. But when we went with Rohde to find this bunker, he said he had a key. But there was no door to unlock. As soon as we got in we were excited and forgot all about Rohde. Suddenly, I realized he was not with us and he only reappeared when we all left. Where had Rohde been? We didn't search the whole bunker on that trip. Were we taken to the right bunker? Were there more rooms in this bunker that we were not shown? That is my regret.

  In Brusov's diary we had read a confident account of how he had thoroughly searched this Hofbunker and found nothing connected with the Amber Room, and yet this account was shot through with self-doubt. Brusov must have felt threatened by having his conclusions queried. Kuchumov and Tronchinsky did not commit their impressions to paper. Instead, they thanked the professor. They had to rush if they were to catch the train to Konigsberg.4

  March 1946 was an ominous month for a journey from east to west. On 5 March, Winston Churchill warned an audience in Fulton, Missouri, that 'from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent', while Stalin in Moscow responded by blaming the West for a war in which the USSR had lost more souls than anyone else. The General Secretary also warned that the 'Imperialist Camp' was planning to do it all over again.

  Kuchumov and Tronchinsky spent the journey t
o Konigsberg poring over the newly translated Rohde letters, several of which concerned the security of treasures for which Rohde was personally responsible.5 Brusov's latest statement implied that Rohde might have lied to his Soviet captors. The letters that he had tried to destroy might provide an explanation.

  The earliest was written by Rohde on 2 September 1944, the day after a second wave of British air raids on Konigsberg, and was addressed to Dr Gerhard Zimmerman at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin. 'In spite of the destruction of Konigsberg Castle with explosives and incendiary devices... the art collection up to now did not lose any important items,' Rohde wrote. 'Those items which we are keeping from your collections survived in the cellars without any damage.' Next he mentioned the Hofbunker, to which 'we have lost the keys to its iron door and so cannot get inside'. Brusov's story.

  Kuchumov underlined in red crayon this paragraph and the next, in which Rohde asked for an urgent message to be relayed to his superior, Dr Ernst Gall, Director of Administration for State Palaces and Gardens in Berlin. 'To Herr Dr Director: there is no damage to the Amber Room at all apart from to the sockel-platten." While the twenty-two large and medium-sized amber panels, the most important parts of the room, had survived the air raid intact, this letter confirmed that six of the twenty-four sections of sockel-platten or skirting board had been destroyed. The larger amber panels had obviously been kept separately, perhaps in the so-called Hofbunker, Kuchumov reasoned in his notes.

  The second category of correspondence was letters that Rohde had dashed off immediately after the Allied air raids. Believing that the city was now a target, he tried to find new storage facilities in the East Prussian countryside. He must have sat with a map of provincial castles, Kuchumov speculated in his notes, calculating which ones were furthest from the front as well as the most bomb-resistant.

  Rohde's first letter, written on 6 September 1944, was to Prince Alex Dohna-Schlobitten. Prince Alex's castle (Schlobitten is today Slobity, in Poland) was a Teutonic fortress fifty miles south-west of Konigsberg and at the time seemed far from advancing Red Army units. Rohde would have known that the prince was not only 'anti-Bolshevik' but a patriot and a veteran of Stalingrad, where he had served with the German 60th Mechanized Infantry Division. Rohde wrote, 'Art treasures and also the Amber Room should be moved to a less dangerous place, so I am asking you to give two to three rooms of your castle.' This letter confirmed that Rohde was looking to evacuate the Amber Room. Kuchumov underlined the passage in red and put a question mark against one word, 'moved'.

  Prince Alex Dohna-Schlobitten

  Rohde sent a second letter on 6 September 1944 to Countess von Schwerin, advising her that he had already dispatched a shipment of art works to Wildenhoff, her country house twenty-five miles south-west of Konigsberg. Kuchumov made a note. He needed to clarify what this shipment consisted of. There seemed to be a lot more possible hiding places emerging from the Rohde letters than Brusov had investigated in 1945-With the front advancing by the day and Konigsberg under threat of further raids, Rohde needed assistance quickly. But Prince Alex replied on 11 September: 'The cellar rooms are very wet so they can't be used for placing art treasures. One room that is more or less dry is not very big. I can give you this space but I am afraid that it will not do for the Amber Room.' The panels were unwieldy and required a sizeable hall to store them in. They had not gone to Schlobitten Castle.

  Countess von Schwerin's reply was not in the bundle that Brusov gave to Kuchumov, but from a second letter Rohde wrote to her on 17 October 1944 he noted that the unnamed art shipment arrived safely at Wildenhoff and that the German curator planned to inspect it in the last week of October. Maybe the Amber Room had gone there.

  But due to the fragmentary nature of the letters saved by Brusov from the fire, Kuchumov and Tronchinsky found Rohde's movements difficult to follow. What did this partial document, sent to 'Very Respectable Herr Lau' on 21 October, mean? I would be deeply grateful if you could give me notice if something changes in our plan and if the packed boxes have to be moved again. I have to tell my superiors. At the moment I don't know if I can go any further than Insterburg.' Kuchumov underlined the section in red. There was no address for Herr Lau and no other reference to him in the bundle. Kuchumov drew a circle around Insterburg, noting that it was fifty miles east of Konigsberg. He also knew that by January 1945, three months after Rohde had written to Herr Lau, the town fell to the Red Army. If the Amber Room had been evacuated there, then the Red Army would surely have found it.

  The Soviet team analysed travel permits made out in Rohde's name, from which they fished dates, times and places. On 18 October, the day after his second letter to Countess von Schwerin, Rohde received permission to travel to her castle, Wildenhoff. On 2 November he was issued with a permit to embark on a five-day trip to the home of Countess Sabina Keyserlingk in Rautenburg, fifty-five miles north-east of Konigsberg, near Tilsit (today Sovetsk in Kaliningrad Province). The outcome of this journey was confirmed in a letter to her, written by Rohde on LO November, three days after he returned, in which he advised the Countess that he had brought from her abandoned manor to Konigsberg 'two cars' of art works. Rohde's mission to find a new hiding place for the Amber Room, Kuchumov noted, was complicated by the need to evacuate art works from country estates belonging to aristocrats who had already fled East Prussia.

  Gauleiter Erich Koch, the highest authority in East Prussia, signed the next permit, issued on 8 November 1944. He gave Rohde a mandate 'to take any measures in guarding, moving and evacuating any pieces of art from Prussia'. Clearly the German curator was at the centre of the Nazi art establishment in East Prussia and treasures were being shipped in every direction.

  Rohde must have barely had time to catch his breath. On 15 November he wrote to the Ministry of Culture in Berlin about plans to evacuate Soviet art works from one East Prussian safe house to another. On 26 November he received orders to travel to Castle Binanen to transfer another art collection back to Konigsberg. But it was the permit issued on L December 1944 that caught Kuchumov's attention, authority to travel to Saxony, several hundred miles to the south-east, in the heart of the Reich. In the bundle was a report of this mission: 'My trip from 3 to LO December 1944 in Saxony'. Rohde had visited two castles, Wechselburg and Kriebstein, both west of Dresden, and concluded that they were secure and watertight hiding places, the perfect locations in which to secure 'irreplaceable treasure'.

  A picture was emerging. Here in Rohde's letters was clear evidence that art stored in East Prussia was evacuated further west by the Nazis before the Soviet advance. It was possible that Brusov had been too quick to conclude that the Amber Room had been destroyed in Konigsberg. The last letter in the bundle gave Kuchumov further hope. It was from Rohde to the Ministry of Culture in Berlin and was dated 12 January 1945: I have been packing the Amber Room into containers and they are being sealed. The moment is ready for these panels to be evacuated to Saxony and more correctly they can be sent to Wechselburg in Rochlitz.'6 The letter appeared to conflict with Rohde's statement to Brusov that the Amber Room had remained in Konigsberg Castle until 5 April 1945. Kuchumov concluded that Rohde had lied.

  Kuchumov and Tronchinsky began compiling a thirty-three-point list of questions for Alfred Rohde, comparing his statements to Brusov with his letters. Tronchinsky would begin the interrogation light-heartedly with information that was only really of interest to fellow academics: the arrival of the room at Konigsberg Castle and its display there. He would create the impression that he was an amiable party man marking time. Kuchumov calculated that if Tronchinsky could make himself small in the face of Rohde's arrogance, then the German would be unable to resist bragging to his poor Soviet cousin. The plump Russian figure in spectacles, Kuchumov, would remain in the background throughout the interrogation, a silent, brooding force who would conceal the fact that he was running the operation.

  On 19March 1946 their train pulled in. General Vasilev, one of Konigsberg's commanders,
met Kuchumov and Tronchinsky at the station and insisted on giving them a tour. 'The only buildings that were standing were single cottages at the end of streets, villas in the middle of the rubble that were now occupied by the Central Commandant and the Narkomats [representatives of the People's Commissariat],' Kuchumov wrote. 'One could only walk down certain streets at certain times, depending on the roster of demolition. There were about 25,000 German refugees that we could see living in cellars and ruined buildings in the suburbs.'7

  Kuchumov and Tronchinsky were so on edge on the first night that, rather than resting in the city's only hotel, they walked two miles in the freezing dark to the ruins of the castle. Early the next morning they were back again, taking photographs of locations and masonry, plotting their approach like detectives at the scene of a crime.

  They could not resist taking a few pictures for themselves, two men standing like mice before the forbidding hulk of the castle's blasted Albrecht Gate. Kuchumov pasted them into an album of black cartridge paper and wrote captions in chalk. This book, which has found its way into the literature archive, has been opened so infrequently that the tracing paper dividers are still pristine, as if the album had just been bought at the stationery counter of the Dom Knigi bookshop on Nevsky Prospekt. We gently turn the pages but we are not allowed to photograph it.8

  Two beaming men in heavy tweed trench coats and worn leather shoes, their socks rolled over their trousers, Tronchinsky in a black beret, Kuchumov wearing a pork pie hat, both of them overshadowed by the mountains of rubble that they would soon have to clear. In another frame they sit by the remains of the Knights' Hall, serious, composed, Kuchumov carrying a small leather attache case. And in a third and a fourth, both men pose awkwardly before unrecognizable heaps of bricks that rise up far above their heads. In all of the pictures the two men wear identical suits, given to them in Moscow to make them inconspicuous. Two grown men in a post-war hell-hole, walking everywhere like shelled peas, their unnaturally pressed suits and white shirts contrasting with their undertaker's ties.