The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [13]
The assassination of Sergei Kirov, head of the Leningrad Communist Party, in December 1934 had been used by Stalin as an excuse to purge the Leninist old guard. Show trials, mass executions, the exile of millions, the peeling back of layers of the party, followed. And down swooped the Black Crows, agents acting for Nikolai Yezhov, Russia's new General Commissar of State Security, a limping, diminutive figure who had become the head of the NKVD, the successor to the Cheka, and created a whole new genre of violence that would come to be known as Yezhovshchina.The people of Leningrad called him Karlik, the Dwarf. Paranoia leached into every tenement as heavy boots clumped up limestone stairwells in pursuit of careless words; neighbours were betrayed over the washing line, sisters and brothers collided over a rash phrase. Sometimes a failure to confess, even if it were a lie, would still bring Karlik down on your own head. After the secret police executed her husband, Anna Akhmatova, the city's favourite poet, wrote:
In the west the earthly sun is still shining,
And the roofs of the cities gleam in its rays,
But here the white one already chalks crosses on the houses,
And summons the crows, and the crows come flying.5
Many of those who worked in Leningrad's cultural institutions were descended from the nobility (as they were the only ones who had had access to further education and travel) and they also came under scrutiny. The Black Crows flew through Leningrad's museums, whisking away so many curators that the NKVD holding centre spilled out into the corridors. 'It was very, very full and people were sleeping on the mattresses on the floor. I couldn't guess what I had been arrested for,' wrote curator Boris Piotrovksy, a future director of the Hermitage. I had to occupy a place under someone's bed.'6 Piotrovsky was released but twelve others were shot: Orientalists (possible double agents and/or Armenian nationalists), coin collectors (a Germanic passion), armament historians (obviously capable of rallying a mob) and anyone who had ever published abroad (disloyal/spy/saboteur).7
It was in the wake of Karlik's purges that relatively inexperienced curators like Kuchumov, young men from the working and peasant classes, rose quickly. But who from the old school was left to assist the country boy in June 1941?
Kedrinsky rustles in his desk. 'My manuscript,' he declares, slapping down a pile of papers. He reaches for a cigarette and pushes his fishbowl glasses back up the greasy bridge of his nose. '"All of the palace workers had been dismissed on 22 June apart from the most trusted, and that evening, after the crowds had departed, Kuchumov went with his team to the reserve halls of the Catherine Palace,"' Kedrinsky reads aloud. '"As he had been instructed, Kuchumov ripped the seals from the doors, placed there by the Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Inside he found piles of boxes and wadding, waterproof canvas and sawdust, with which to begin to pack the palace treasures."'
However, none of the boxes fitted the exhibits they were supposed to house and too few of them had been set aside. Just like the lists drawn up in 1936, this task had also been poorly carried out.
Kedrinsky sets aside his manuscript and shows us a party report written in 1941. 'It is necessary to make hundreds of new boxes,' an unnamed official stated. 'There is insufficient wadding. No packing materials. And the storeroom chosen for the sealed crates is flooded and too narrow.' And time spent remaking boxes and worrying over packing material would lead to rash decisions later.8
Kedrinsky begins to read another extract from Kuchumov's diary:
'June 22. Flown through the halls this evening, packing what we can.
'June 23. After