The Amber Room

by Adrian Levy

  Only one man, Alfred Rohde, knew the truth and he could no longer speak for himself. Kuchumov began to analyse the character of the German curator. He considered the letter sent by General Kuchler, the commander of Army Group North. Had Rohde actually sought out the Amber Room, requesting troops stationed beside it to transport the treasure to Konigsberg? Then there was Rohde's text book, Bernstein, published seven years before Operation Barbarossa began, and the scholarly article he wrote for Pantheon, apparently celebrating the arrival of the room in Konigsberg. Kuchumov wrote: 'Rohde dreamed for a long time of having the Amber Room in his collection. He expressed more than once his regret that it had left Prussia, that the Prussian King had made a great mistake in giving it to Russian barbarians.' Why would such a man leave his greatest treasure to the mercy of an army besieging the city, Kuchumov reasoned?

  He concluded: 'The described circumstances force us to reject the claim of Dr Rohde that was treated as the truth by Professor Brusov about the destruction of the Amber Room in the fire in the Knights' Hall of the Castle.' Kuchumov was convinced that the answers lay outside Konigsberg.

  He began to research the four months leading up to the fall of the city:

  By mid-January the railway connections between Konigsberg and the rest of Germany had been cut off. So if they had used the road rather than the sea, they could only have taken the clumsy and heavy crates as far as some location within East Prussia. Moving the Amber Room to Germany by air or sea could have been done later, until mid-March, but these were the most dangerous ways possible, taking into account the proximity of the front and the domination of our air forces.

  Kuchumov compiled a wish-list of Rohde's former friends and colleagues to interrogate. Where was Oberburgermeister Helmut Will? The NKVD reported that he had disappeared. Konigsberg Schlossoberinspektor Friedrich Henkensiefken? He was said to have fled to Germany. A 'Dr Gert', known to have been close to Rohde? No one even knew his full name. Erich Koch, the Gauleiter of East Prussia? There had been no confirmed sightings of him since March 1945. Jurgen Sprecht, the restorer and amber craftsman? Sprecht did eventually turn up. He had been held in a Soviet detention camp but was discovered hanged in circumstances that were still under investigation. It was a criminal inquiry. 'Bodies, bodies,' Kuchumov wrote gloomily. 'Dead and missing.'

  It would be virtually impossible for the two men to find these witnesses without outside help, since millions of Germans, soldiers and civilians, were in flight - a mass migration of half of Europe. Kuchumov wrote to Moscow for permission to place a letter in Vo Slavu Rodini (For the Glory of the Motherland), a journal read by Soviet soldiers in the field. 'Help Us Restore the Museums of Leningrad', the letter was entitled, and it contained Kuchumov's exhortation for 'soldiers, sergeants and officers to advise us through the editors of locations where valuables of historical and artistic significance might be found so that they can take their place again in our museum'.18

  'We shall go to Moscow on 10 or 12 April,' Tronchinsky wrote to his wife, and he and Kuchumov caught a train to the capital. They went back to Professor Brusov, who was still working from home. They discussed the chaos of Konigsberg: how there were only potatoes to eat; the depravity of the fascists. And then Kuchumov began to probe. He was confused, he said. Witnesses claimed that the Amber Room had been removed from the castle in July or August 1944, while Rohde had told Brusov that the room was concealed in the south wing. Kuchumov handed Brusov the statements by Feyerabend and Schaumann. The professor read in silence before defending himself.

  Schaumann had got it wrong. When Rohde had talked about 'the amber and picture collections' being evacuated he was not referring to the Amber Room but to the Albertus-University's scientific amber collection. It was the most famous in the world. Brusov had located part of it, tens of thousands of pieces, and, judging by the communique he had sent to Moscow, he regarded it as the crowning achievement of his mission. 'Claims he found nearly all of the amber collection. Catalogued it. Sent everything to Moscow. Has witnesses,' Kuchumov wrote. 'Why, then, did this collection never turn up in Moscow?'

  Brusov became agitated. Why was he being criticized given that he had found so much while enduring such appalling conditions? Was he being accused of theft, or lying, or treason? What had they found, the professor demanded, of Tronchinsky and Kuchumov? Nothing, they said, as they left.

  This is what they wrote to SovNarKom in Moscow:

  The conclusion is self-evident. The Amber Room was kept and hidden in safety in a place that was without doubt familiar to Rohde and the version he told [Brusov] about the destruction of the Amber Room in the fire in the Knights' Hall distracted the attention of the Beliaeva/Brusov commission from future searches.

  The mistake of Professor Brusov was that he believed easily the words of Rohde, taking as truth the words of this museum co-worker, forgetting that he was dealing with a Nazi fanatic. Brusov didn't know the Amber Room or details of its decoration, so he couldn't check the veracity of Rohde's words by digging in the area where the fire occurred and so he couldn't tell truth from fiction. The most direct and best way to know the location of the Amber Room has been lost to us - Dr Alfred Rohde - but we now have the opportunity to gather additional information from former workers of the Konigsberg Castle Museum.19

  Kuchumov submitted a list of names of those he wished to interrogate to SovNarKom and applied for a special permit to travel to Berlin.

  5

  After lunch at Kolobok restaurant, another file is waiting for us at the literature archive, an enticing box three times the size of the previous file. No one looks up as we scrape our chairs across the parquet floor, even though the reading room is bustling with men and women in white dustcoats. All of them are preoccupied, armed with small pencil erasers, which they feverishly apply to sections of files, as if rubbing out entire episodes from history.

  We spring open the box and pick through the contents, but there is no response from Moscow to Kuchumov's list of German eyewitnesses to interrogate or a reaction to his taking apart of Brusov. No instructions or orders. Only greetings cards.1

  We double-check the readers' record slip. Our names are freshly inked on it. But when we examine the file number, we see that it is not the one we have requested. The only sign of Vitalia Petrovna, the reading-room supervisor, is a lukewarm cup of tea and a trail of biscuit crumbs across her desk. So we walk down past the photographs of Makarova, Granin and Vokraniv to the director's office, where we find Alexandra Vasilevna Istomina studying the rain falling outside her window.

  'We must assess what is pertinent to your research. We have decided that certain files are extraneous.' Alexandra Vasilevna smiles weakly. 'Well, of course you may resubmit your application. Errors are sometimes made. Decisions faulty. I can't vouch for all of my staff. We are dreadfully overworked,.' We nod and she fumbles under the desk. A bell rings in the corridor. Vitalia Petrovna, pops her head around the door, wiping her mouth, only to be hit by a raging gust of Russian invective.

  Alexandra Vasilevna spins back to us on her chair's silky castors: 'It takes two days to locate a new file normally. The archive for which I am responsible is vast. There are several million files to pick through.' She motions up to the rafters and we nod appreciatively. 'But if you pay double rate, yes, pay a double rate, you can make an emergency submission. If I recall, an emergency submission comes back in only twenty-four hours. Is that right, Vitalia Petrovna? Come back tomorrow. I will extend your readers' tickets for three hours in the morning.' Everything is forbidden but all things are possible. We have no choice but to wait another night.

  The next morning, the same file of greetings cards is waiting for us on the table and the director is not expected back for several days. We might as well read what we have.

  'In celebration of your eighteenth anniversary as a Leningrad Museum Worker, from your friends and collaborators': this first greetings card is illustrated with a sketch of a scene in a library; rows of desks, and sitting at one a bespe
ctacled researcher, sandwiched between two great towers of files. It looks like the Bolshoi Reading Hall in the National Library of Russia. The next card shows the same man in a black suit, pushing a weighty wooden wheelbarrow of books, a pork-pie hat balancing on top of them, their spines embossed with the words 'Archives', 'Extracts', 'Documents'.

  Caricature of Anatoly Kuchumov at his desk researching the fate of missing Leningrad palace treasures

  Caricature of Anatoly Kuchumov with a wheelbarrow of books marked 'archives, extracts, documents' in which he researched the reconstruction of missing treasures from the Leningrad palaces

  'Upon your 47th birthday': a card edged in red from 27 May 1959. Here is another ink drawing of a plump man in a black suit striding purposefully across the page, a scholar with a forelock and little round glasses struggling with a tome under each arm inscribed 'arkivie Falling all around him, against a backdrop of the Leningrad palaces, are multicoloured parachutes that, on closer inspection, cradle pianos, chairs and candelabras, the returning treasures of the tsars. Inside is written: 'To Anatoly Mikhailovich from your grateful comrades at the Pavlovsk and Catherine palaces.'

  1962: 'On the occasion of your 50th birthday, 27 May.' A lilac card with gold trim. Inside is a watercolour of a figure swathed in a blue toga, riding a chariot accompanied by a phalanx of maidens in lilac robes. Small photographs of faces have been pasted on to all of the torsos. The charioteer is Anatoly Kuchumov, his sylphs curators at the Leningrad palaces, including several faces that we recognize from the House of Scientists.

  That year Kuchumov also celebrated his thirtieth anniversary as a Leningrad Museum Worker, and greetings were more formal: 'From the Workers of the Western European Art Department at the State Hermitage; heartfelt congratulations to you. We fully appreciate your great knowledge and Soviet patriotism, your acute taste and good eye that is so important.' Eight members of staff from the Alexander Palace also sent salutations: 'Many people died and were scattered to the winds by war. But we were all joined by former times to the Alexander Palace, where you were once director. We thank you, Anatoly Mikhailovich.'

  The pile is several inches deep and it takes us all morning to pick through to the bottom of the box. One card catches our attention. It is from Kaliningrad, the Soviet name for Konigsberg, given to the city in October 1947 following the death of Mikhail Kalinin, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Sent on 27 October 1975, the card is decorated with a bouquet of blue irises and contains the dedication: 'Dear Anatoly Mikhailovich, from our hearts congratulations on your honourable notation. We wish you health, creativity and success and we invite you as our guest, members of the Expedition, Chairman Storozhenko.' An expedition in Konigsberg. It may have been connected to the Amber Room. We note the name of the chairman, Storozhenko.

  There follows a dedication written by Valeria Bilanina, the vice-director of Pavlovsk Palace, on 27 November 1977:

  Why, my brother, are you lying in bed?

  You have left us in trouble and now this year is nearly finished.

  I can hardly carry my burden alone.

  When it is all over we will all lie in rows.

  Kuchumov, Kuchumov, Kuchumov!

  Take notice, you must have more courage and instead of medicine you must have good health and return to our circle.

  Through tears, Valeria Bilanina.

  The box finishes with a gift from Albina Vasiliava, porcelain expert at Pavlovsk, surely the same Bolshoi Albina who gave the lecture at the House of Scientists: a hand-painted silk pennant.

  Plaudits, caricatures, tears and a pennant. None of them can help us resolve what became of Anotoly Kuchumov's Amber Room investigation. We wonder if any of Kuchumov's adoring colleagues knew about his other life, the secret investigations into the Amber Room that we have only just begun to uncover in these papers that the literature archive has sat on for so many years. The orders from SovNarKom. The furtive komandirovats business trips to Moscow and Konigsberg. A request to the highest Soviet authorities to be allowed to pursue suspects to Berlin. Kuchumov's growing obsession with the Amber Room.

  Our Friend the Professor says that she will speak to the archive director about the Kuchumov file we had actually requested, but in the meantime we contact Bolshoi Albina and tell her we have found her silk pennant. We hope her curiosity will get the better of her shyness.

  Bolshoi Albina laughs when we call and agrees to meet. Two weeks later, sitting with her at a dinner table in the new suburbs, warmed by crimson Georgian wine, she is unstoppable, in the way that elastic unravels from a split golf ball.

  'We all adored Anatoly Mikhailovich. And I remember painting the pennant for his birthday. How embarrassing it ended up in an archive,' she says, tucking a stray wisp of hair back into her bun. She is blushing. 'He fired us all with his enthusiasm. He said we should never give up the search for Prussian things stolen from us by the fascists.' She takes another sip of wine.. I had heard so much about him even before I started work. I thought that he would be tall and handsome, but actually he was quite small, with a thick neck, like a bullfrog. Quite clumsy.'

  Bolshoi Albina pulls some photographs out of the pocket of her tweed skirt. 'Anatoly Mikhailovich was a man of simple origins. He didn't act like a director. He had only one suit and all of us used to dust him down when the high officials came.' In the first picture two young women are dressed up in imperial gowns, one of them sitting crossed-legged, her stilettos peeking out from beneath a long lace petticoat. 'That's me,' she says. 'Wearing the dress of Maria Fedorovna, the wife of Alexander III. In another picture a male curator sits on a throne wearing the gold crown of Paul I, laughing colleagues crowded around him, including a familiar figure, Kuchumov. Albina explains: 'Capusnik, we called it. It means chopping cabbage for winter. But it came to mean a staff party. Letting your hair down. Relieving the tension.'

  Anatoly Kuchumov (left) and colleagues at Pavlovsk Palace; the crown was once worn by Tsar Paul I

  We try to steer the conversation back to the private Kuchumov. Did he talk about the Amber Room?

  'Not publicly. He would go off on komandirovat, certainly. He said he was going to conferences. About restoration work. Or he would tell us he was on holiday and leave us in chaos for a couple of weeks.'

  All of the komandirovat forms we have seen so far suggest that when Kuchumov said he was on holiday or a work trip he was actually on Amber Room business.

  Albina shrugs. 'When he returned all he wanted to know was what we had been doing. He had important friends with high ranks as party leaders. We were lowly. It was a difficult time. Perhaps the most difficult. He brought us together. You have no idea, I think, about what we had all gone through during the war.'

  Albina smooths the creases in her skirt. 'On 2 October 1941 German soldiers running a slave caravan abducted me from my village near Smolensk. I was only five. We were stripped naked, disinfected and loaded into vans.' Her cheeks burn. 'We were bundled into Poland,' she says, fixing her memory on a harrowing journey to an unknown place. 'All the time the convoy was bombed by Soviet planes. Children are so simple. We used to try and hide in the craters as we thought that a bomb could not land in the same place twice. A German farmer bought us.

  'When we were liberated the Red Army came to escort us back. Our brave soldiers. We walked or sat on carts pulled by heavy horses. The road was wide and deep with mud. We went through a big German city. I think it was Konigsberg. We were then in Smolensk and my mother said "This is your city," although I could see no city. But even then we were elated. Eventually we arrived at the village and saw that it too had gone. Still we got down on to our hands and knees and dug in the mud, proud of the Motherland, happy as we excavated holes. Over them we threw tin and wood, pits that became our temporary homes. But then the NKVD came.'

  In the post-war Soviet Union there would be no room for anyone exposed to a foreign ideology that could unsettle the programme. By the summer of 1945 Stalin had rounded up Soviet citizens who had
been prisoners of war in Germany, 126,000 of them, like those in Albina's village, who were now damned as 'capitulators'.2

  Bolshoi Albina says, 'When we thought we could be no happier, living deep inside the Soviet earth, our friends and neighbours began to disappear. "Don't say you were captured," the whisper went. "Don't ever let the NKVD know that you were a prisoner of the Germans."'

  Despite the purges, at the end of the war the vast majority of Soviet citizens felt deeply patriotic, and this sense of nationhood would become a valuable tool. In 1946 Andrei Zhdanov, leader of the Leningrad Communist Party, proposed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) a new theme, 'no servility before the West'.3 Emancipation meant recouping everything Soviet. Victory over the Hitlerites was now the Great Patriotic War, in which Soviet losses and the ability to endure were brought to the fore: the battle of Stalingrad, the 900 days of siege, the desecration and rebuilding of the Leningrad palaces. All that was Russian had to be found, brought back, reconstructed and celebrated. Every treasure looted had to be tracked down and returned to its rightful place, and the world was to be advised of these Soviet losses and triumphs through the new Communist Information Bureau (CominformJ, established by Zhdanov in 1947.

  We walk to the metro and Bolshoi Albina links arms with us as we dodge between speeding marshrutkis. 'It was when I began working at the palaces that I learned how to be proud of my country. Anatoly Mikhailovich, with his ceaseless searching for looted treasure, made sure of that.'