The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [12]
It was a daunting task. The State Hermitage had millions of exhibits and there were thousands more in the palaces ringing Leningrad: Catherine, Alexander, Pavlovsk, Peterhof, Oranienbaum and Gatchina.
'There was not much time,' Kedrinsky says. 'Comrade Ladukhin assured Kuchumov that there was a plan and that he'd be all right if he stuck to it by the letter.' He sighs. 'Such a mistake. Kuchumov was just twenty-nine. The son of a carpenter, brought up in a log izba.'
Only nine years before, Kuchumov had been a peasant without qualifications or money. Somehow he had won a post as junior inventory clerk at the Leningrad palaces and, in less than a decade, risen to being chief curator of the Alexander Palace. He had been in the job for only two years when Ladukhin singled him out, instructing him to coordinate evacuating all the palaces of Tsarskoye Selo.
Why was such an important order from Moscow entrusted to a young and inexperienced curator, we ask?
Kedrinsky frowns. He hands us a photograph of a group of four people standing outside the Catherine Palace. 'Kuchumov, taken just before the war,' he says, pointing to the man on the right.
The young curator fits snugly into his double-breasted jacket, the broad white lapels of a weekend shirt spread carefully over it, hands clasped behind his back. A pair of circular rimmed glasses adorns his mousy, feminine features and an unruly forelock falls forward. A fountain pen is clipped in his breast pocket, signalling his recently acquired status as an intellectual. In the midst of the group is a woman. Who is she?
Anatoly Kuchumov (right) with Anna Mikhailovna, his wife, and others shortly before the Second World War
'The blue-eyed Anna Mikhailovna,' Kedrinsky says, wrinkling up his nose. He tells us that Anatoly Kuchumov and Anna Mikhailovna met at Leningrad Art Institute, where he attended night classes. She followed him to the Tsarskoye Selo to become a curator there, before they married in 1935.
'May I read on?' Kedrinsky asks sarcastically. 'According to Kuchumov's diary, on 22 June 1941 Comrade Ladukhin handed him an envelope.'Across the front was typed: 'Acts and instructions, only to be opened if war is proclaimed'. The sealed envelope had been kept in a safe by the city's security chief and the evacuation plan it contained was similar to one devised over a century before. In 1812 Russian curators had packed up and shipped out thousands of exhibits from the museums of St Petersburg and Moscow to remote storage depots in the east as Napoleon headed for the Russian border with specially trained 'trophy brigades', whose job it was to hunt down suitable art works for Paris.
Kedrinsky says 'But according to Kuchumov's diary, the list had been; drawn up in 1936 by two curators who had included only 2,076 treasures out of a possible 110,000 items from the Alexander Palace, the Catherine Palace and Pavlovsk. If Kuchumov were to follow these orders, then only 259 pieces would be saved from the Catherine Palace and only seven from his own museum. According to the papers before him, he was not to bother with the French furniture created by the famed Jacob brothers, the extraordinary clock collection, the tsar's famous arsenal of weapons. There was no mention of works by Fedot Shubin, the Russian sculptor, no examples of prized Chinese lacquerware, no paintings by Serov, Roerich or Markovsky, some of Russia's greatest artists. Incredibly, there was also no Amber Room. Instead, included were a plaster death mask of Voltaire, undated, unsigned paintings and an export-quality copy of an eighteenth-century Japanese dish.4
'No Amber Room! Kuchumov made some discreet inquiries and was relieved to learn that the 1936 lists had been judged to be inadequate as far back as 1939. New lists had been drawn up. But where were they? Kuchumov discovered that