The Amber Room

by Adrian Levy

  Comrade Yermoliev [director of the Central Museum Committee of the Russian Federation] opened the meeting of the newly named Working Group on the Search for the Amber Room.

  COMRADE YERMOLIEV: 'Let me start [by saying] there have been many attempts to search for the Amber Room and the Kaliningrad authorities have played an important part. However, not enough has been done and the work has not been systematic, the analysis unscientific.

  A stinging attack on the Kaliningrad authorities and evidence that Moscow was intent on taking over the search.

  COMRADE JAKOBOVICH [chief of Kaliningrad air-raid defences]: How much time do we have for finding the Amber Room? Do we have to do it by the fiftieth jubilee of the Soviet Union [the founding of the Bolshevik state was only seven months away] ?

  COMRADE YERMOLIEV: Well, that would be very good, to make a gift to the Motherland for the jubilee. However, it would be very difficult to set a time limit.

  COMRADE GLUSHKOV [director of the Kaliningrad Cultural Department]: One of the most important questions we should put to Soviet ministries of the Russian Federation is about financing.

  MAJOR v. v. BOGDANCHIKOV [vice-chairman of the Kaliningrad Communist Party]: Our group should have its own car and we are bound to have a lot of material. So we need someone who can type up everything.

  COMRADE VASHNA [a senior official from Moscow]: I want to ask a question of Comrade Maximov. What hindered the previous searches and have there been any significant findings to date that need our attention? And if things have been found, where are they now?

  COMRADE MAXIMOV [civil engineer and a member of the old Krolevsky team]: There were no valuable findings.

  COMRADE JAKOBOVICH: Well, all valuable findings were sent to the KGB.

  Maximov and Jakobovich were tripping over each other. Here the minutes abruptly move on to a discussion about the previous search commissions' lack of equipment. We wonder what was found and spirited away by the KGB.

  COMRADE MAXIMOV: For example, we went into dark basements and we had no torches so we could see nothing.

  It seems almost unbelievable that the Kaliningrad KGB and MVD, which backed the searches, were not able to provide their teams with even the most basic equipment like torches. Unless, of course, there was nothing worth illuminating.

  Before the issue could be discussed further there was a suggestion from the floor. Why not round up everyone living in the oblast who had been a resident since 1945 and interrogate them about the Amber Room?

  According to Comrade Yermoliev: 'It is not a good idea. The bigger the circle of people knowing the problem the greater the problem. We need secrecy. Well comrades, today's meeting was a very useful one because we have all expressed our concerns and suggestions.' Secrecy was a strange notion to introduce after millions of newspaper readers of Pravda and Freie Welt had been alerted nine years earlier to the existence of a secret search for the Amber Room in Kaliningrad.

  Then, in March 1969, seventeen months after the fiftieth jubilee of the Soviet Union, with the search for the Amber Room still ongoing, Moscow took over completely. A telegram dated 15 April 1969 arrived for the investigation's new chairman, Comrade Jakobovich.5 In it the Deputy Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation, Comrade Vasily Striganov, instructed him on the theory he was to follow:

  Since the end of the war our stolen art collections that were stored in East Prussia haven't turned up. You might think that somebody is still hiding them. That seems unlikely, as not one jot of information over fifteen years has emerged...If the Germans had taken out the treasures, they were bound to turn up in Germany and yet nothing has. So what can we see from this?

  One can come to a conclusion that the Amber Room is still in Kaliningrad. I think that the Germans never thought East Prussia would remain within the USSR. They thought they would return to the province and we would leave.6

  This summary dismissal of the Stasi's theory, which held that the Amber Room had been taken to Germany, was written as Paul Enke was beginning his monumental trawl of archives in Potsdam. It seems bizarre that the KGB would let the Stasi run with this theory for so many years when even at this early stage no one in the Soviet Union believed it. Unless, of course, the entire Stasi investigation into the Amber Room was a lure of some sort, to distract public attention away from Kaliningrad. Or perhaps it was simply an elaborate ruse to weed out old Nazis.

  For Striganov, secrecy was a critical issue:

  Four days ago in Western Germany people were interested once again with a question of the Amber Room, trying to find out through our embassy whether there is progress, what is new. We should not give them a straight answer. [As Germany was the country that stole it,] they have too big an interest in this matter... The question is: how will our work continue to be secretive? What is going to be done to make sure of this?

  He offered some patrician advice: 'One has to think of a cover story, for example the examination of the soil, and this cover story we give to the press so all our real conclusions from the expedition can remain top secret.'

  Comrade Jakobovich, the mission chairman, worked on Striganov's idea. Why not say the investigation team was digging for oil and call it the Kaliningrad Geological Archaeological Expedition of the State Historical Museum for the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation (KGA), Comrade Jakobovich suggested?

  Striganov liked the title but in his subsequent reply pointed out an obvious flaw: 'There is no oil in Kaliningrad.'

  Within three months Jakobovich was replaced by his deputy and the KGA began its secret work. There are no reports here about what the KGA found in its early years, but there is something else, something unexpected, written many years later, that brings Anatoly Kuchumov, the Leningrad curator, back into the frame.

  It is a twenty-page statement dated 19 July 1986, by Comrade Jelena Storozhenko, a linguistics scholar and someone whose name we have read before. We go through an index of our characters and see that Storozhenko was one of those who regularly sent greetings cards to Kuchumov. Here we read that Storozhenko took over the chair of the KGA in 1974 and led it until it folded ten years later. Attached to Storozhenko's statement is a covering letter addressed to Anatoly Kuchumov, a person she evidently knew well and trusted. She wrote:

  Dear Anatoly Mikhailovich, I am giving you these notes in the hope that they would be printed for the world to see in memory of everyone who to the last of their days devoted their lives to searching for the Amber Room.7

  This is surprising. Storozhenko was attempting to publicize the sensitive findings of her mission, whatever they were. When the Russian authorities closed the KGA in 1984, no public statements were made. We already know that even the Stasi was kept in the dark for another two years about the closure of the mission. The KGA's findings were boxed up by the KGB and classified, locked away in the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow, where they remain to this day. And yet this bureaucrat wanted everything she knew out in the public domain.8

  Storozhenko explained her motivation to Kuchumov: 'On 1 January 1984 [the KGA] was wound up and we were asked to hand over all documents.' Her next statement comes as a great disappointment to us. 'We did not find the Amber Room.'

  Having concluded that the German episode was a red herring, we have come back to Russia only to discover that here too investigators failed to make any progress on the Amber Room. But Storozhenko was not happy. She wrote in her covering letter to Kuchumov:

  No one could doubt that the search should continue and we could offer proposals on how to conduct that search. However, for successful searches it is necessary to have the highest levels of control and organization, otherwise further searches are not worth conducting. It is in the stated interests of the Soviet people that the Amber Room should be found and given back. My heartfelt regards to your wife, be healthy, good luck and success, and I dream of seeing you again. My son, who is standing beside me, says, 'Send my best regards.' We embrace you, always yours, Jelena and Zhenik.

&n
bsp; The letter was very carefully worded but the message was clear. Storozhenko's search had failed because she had not been given 'the highest levels of control and organization' and she could see no reason for winding up the KGA. We wonder who was holding her back and turn to the twenty-page statement itself in which Storozhenko gave Kuchumov a frank and detailed explanation of her failed ten-year inquiry.

  She confirmed that her team was financed by Moscow and that she was required to make quarterly reports back to Deputy Culture Minister Striganov. However, it was the Culture Ministry's KGB chief, G. S. Fors, who supervised the day-to-day running of the KGA operation.

  Storozhenko wrote that her remit was to 're-examine all material connected directly or indirectly with the mystery of the Amber Room ...' as she had discovered that all previous searches 'have been unscientific and uncoordinated and that no digs were conducted at a depth greater than eight feet'. Storozhenko's statement reveals something significant. For fifteen years, Soviet Amber Room searchers had been sifting around only in the topsoil. If Storozhenko's predecessors had been genuinely looking for hidden cellars and bunkers, they would have had to dig far deeper. But the KGA chairman did not say whether she believed the decision not to was premeditated or simply incompetent.

  Storozhenko explained that 'it was important to have a scientific foundation to our work'. Her team was ordered to 'check and analyse all previous statements of citizens of the USSR, East and West Germany and Poland. These statements were filtered and those meriting further investigation set aside... and copied to Moscow.' Everything was submitted to the KGB and vetted by Fors.

  Witness accounts were checked against old maps and wartime literature, tested against other eyewitnesses and archive material. While we read in the Ministry of Truth in Berlin that the Stasi was repeatedly denied access to archive material in the Soviet Union, Storozhenko listed here more than twenty archives used by her team in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and provincial cities from the Ukraine to Estonia.

  But it is the section entitled 'Findings' that tells the real story of the KGA. Storozhenko revealed to Kuchumov that her ten-year expedition had discovered:

  Forty pieces of artillery, cannonballs, bullets and aerial bombs in the former Teutonic castle of Lochstadt, a private collection of amber (weighing nine pounds) in a blocked-up cellar. And under the floor of a private house in the centre of the city we found dead bodies, a coffin and a red flag on which was the hammer and sickle. Perhaps this flag dates from the Revolution period of 1918, when Soviet workers rose up for the first time against East Prussia. Maybe then this workers' flag flew over Konigsberg.

  Cannonballs and skeletons were not much to show for a scientific expedition and Storozhenko drew Kuchumov's attention to some critical factors:

  The expedition had some difficulties. We worked at a time when the city was being rebuilt very quickly and it was impossible to get admission to sites having no documents. We also had no opportunity to organize invitations for those people who had made previous statements to come over here. We also suffered from a lack of technical devices.

  Kuchumov had been permitted to fly witnesses to Kaliningrad and was empowered to search wherever he wanted. He even had a mechanical digger. Storozhenko advised him that a Kaliningrad Party directive supposedly backed the KGA. Issued in 1969, it ordered every administrative, military and utility office in the province to support the activities of the search.9 But the directive had not been adhered to. Something had gone wrong. Storozhenko thought she had been prevented from looking too hard for the Amber Room. The authorities must have feared what she would find.

  I am giving you these notes in the hope that they would be printed for the world to see,' Storozhenko had written to her friend Anatoly Kuchumov. She was relying on the famous curator to publicize her predicament, perhaps in the hope that a new and unfettered investigation into the Amber Room would find it. We wonder if Kuchumov, aged seventy-four when he received this statement, still had the energy to help.

  '238340 Svetly, Kaliningrad Region, Ulitsa Sovetskaya, House EL, Apartment Six, tel: 2-22-80': we copied Jelena Storozhenko's details from her letter but her telephone has been disconnected.

  Valery the taxi driver volunteers to take us to Svetly via a circuitous route. I want you to see our amber coast and then you can attend to your business,' he says.

  The city ends abruptly and Kaliningrad province sprawls across end-less marshy, wind-whipped fields, left lifeless and infertile by spray from the Baltic. Past the military listening station and abandoned fighter-jet hangars is Yantarny, the amber capital of the world. Boys sledge on gunnysacks down the blue-clay hillsides. Listless men in army coats and tracksuit bottoms drink silently on collapsing Prussian-built verandas. Enormous overground pipes carrying seawater, which is used to blast the mud and amber apart at the impoverished Yantarny Mining Combine No. 9, strangle the village.

  The amber coastline of the Samland Peninsula

  'Beautiful, isn't it?' Valery says.

  We follow the coastline of the Samland Peninsula south, towards the closed military city of Baltiysk (where security permits are still required), before turning sharply into Svetly. House 11, Apartment Six is boarded up, but from a neighbouring building that also looks abandoned emerges a babushka.

  'Storozhenko?' we ask. 'Jelena.'

  'Dead,' she snaps. 'Gone in 1994. Strange. There was a stepson. Zhenik. He's disappeared.' She scuttles back into the ruin.

  Valery is anxious to get home before dark and we clatter through yet more mournful villages that are slowly slipping into the Baltic.

  The next morning Colonel Avenir Ovsianov, director of the Kaliningrad Centre for Coordinating the Search for Cultural Relics, is waiting for us at the care-worn 193 os-style villa. 'Dobry,' he says, offering us a large, hard hand that feels as if it has spent a lifetime wielding the pick we can see propped behind his desk. 'Kaliningrad welcomes you.' He solemnly pours into our cupped hands lemony grains of amber fished from the beaches of Yantarny and we notice a picture on the wall of him as a younger man, with Red Army comrades in military uniform and armed with metal detectors.

  Today, the colonel looks every inch the grand old Soviet commissar: thick waves of silvery hair, gold teeth, unsmiling wintry face, piercing eyes peeping over Politburo glasses.

  Why was the Storozhenko inquiry shut down in 1984, we ask?

  The colonel draws breath. 'Everything here was secret. This was a secret place. You are only here on the invitation of our government. I report to the FSB [the successor to the KGB].' Surely the colonel isn't threatening us?

  Avenir Ovsianov (centre), digging for the Amber Room in Kaliningrad Province, 1970s

  'We are here on state salaries. Will you be paying?' the colonel asks, walking over to a cabinet and flashing us a view of hundreds of files, neatly stacked in rows. I managed to get these. From my military sources.'

  What are they, we ask?

  I have some of Jelena Storozhenko's papers in here.'

  We thought everything was locked up in Moscow.

  'There are always ways of getting information,' the colonel says. He is as hard to hook as a wily old pike, but when we hand over dollars he begins to open up.

  The colonel tells us that, as a military engineer in the Red Army, he had specialist knowledge of the subterranean infrastructure of Kaliningrad and in 1971 was called to assist the search for the Amber Room. 'That was the first time I met Jelena. And at that meeting I contracted an illness, searching for treasure. Jelena told me to keep absolutely silent about my involvement in the KGA and anything I learned. She told me her organization was secret. I said, "I am a soldier and not a journalist."'

  We try to speed things along. We need to know why Jelena Storozhenko's investigation was closed down. We show the colonel her report to Kuchumov of 1986. Perhaps it might jog his memory. Was Jelena Storozhenko correct in believing that her investigation had been hijacked, we ask?

  The colonel slips on his heavy glasses. He thumbs throu
gh our twenty-page statement. He makes appreciative grunts. 'It's interesting,' he says. 'But you do not have the full story.'

  Hel unlocks a cupboard and takes from it a small black-and-white photograph that shows ten people huddled in a group, standing inside an anonymous hall. Six men in black lace-up shoes. Four women in high-heeled leather boots. Smart shapkas on everyone's head and fur-trimmed coats wrapped tight against the Kaliningrad chill. The woman at the centre clutches a plastic bag that is stuffed with paperwork and a bunch of flowers.

  'Chairman Storozhenko,' the colonel says.

  Kaliningrad Geological Archaelogical Expedition team photograph with chairman Jelena Storozhenko at centre

  We look closer. Jelena Storozhenko is almost smiling, her lips parted as if she is joking with the photographer. How innocuous her KGA looks, like middle-aged teachers preparing for a union conference, not a top-secret investigation ordered by the Kremlin.

  The colonel leans over the desk. 'They operated out of the Church of the Holy Family, near the railway station. Called themselves "the Choral Society" to prevent any unwelcome inquiries.

  'After the KGA was closed down in 1984, the state too wanted to inhibit unwelcome inquiries and for several years denied it had any papers belonging to the KGA. But I knew Jelena had amassed a vast archive and I told the authorities I had seen it in her office. Eventually I got hold of some of her things, including this, her personal ready-reckoner, which she carried with her every day of her investigation. Would you like to see it?'