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'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.'

We 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