The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [14]
'June 24. Not stopped for forty-eight hours. Comrades having nosebleeds from leaning over the packing crates. Run out of boxes and paper. Cutting grass and using the fresh hay. Had to use the tsarinas' dress trunks and their clothes to wrap up our treasures.'
Curators pack up Leningrad's palaces after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941
Kedrinsky hands us a summary report submitted by Kuchumov to the NKVD:
'Vice-director (science), the directors of the palaces, and three museum workers, including a wallpaper hanger and two carpenters, have supervised the first stage of the evacuation. Miniatures, Gobelins, Sevres, Meissen, gold and silver, paintings and books, ivory. Passports have been made for every crate - inventories written up by palace scholars. To date more than 900 items are now in fifty-two boxes, each one sealed with black canvas.'
All were secretly taken to the Armoury, where each box was logged in by a member of the People's Commissar of Internal Acts. The entrance was sealed and a sentry posted.9
Kedrinsky lights another cigarette, lingering over the smoke. 'Listen to this, from Kuchumov's diary: "What should we do with Amber Room? What can we do? I sent for Comrade V. A. Alspector, the specialist from the palace restoration department, and gave him instructions to prepare the Amber Room for evacuation."' Kedrinsky savours the moment before reading on. '"Amber panels are to be tightly fastened with cigarette papers on a special glue solution."'
Since the eighteenth century the amber panels had been attached on to wooden backing boards and now would have to be pasted over with cigarette rolling papers to prevent the brittle resin from splintering when Kuchumov attempted to prise the amber free from the boards.
Kedrinsky hesitates and then continues: '"A trial moving of one of the panels has resulted in disaster. The amber facing has come off the mount and shattered completely. We cannot move the Amber Room. We dare not move it. What are we to do?"'
The old comrade rises from his desk, rifling through pages: 'References, references, archival references, all recorded by Anatoly Mikhailovich Kuchumov. That's all that's left - nothing more, nothing less - in this report.'
The Prussian sculptor Andreas Schliiter waited almost a lifetime to achieve greatness.10 He underwent years of training with some of the most distinguished master craftsmen of his time. Guild records show that he was apprenticed in Warsaw and in Danzig (now Gdansk) to amber and ivory cutters. But it was not until 1694, when he was over fifty years old, that Schliiter received a summons from the Hohenzollerns in Berlin to work at the court of Prussian Elector Frederick III.11
Schliiter's first creations were accomplished, formal pieces: a bronze of the Elector himself and a statue of the Elector's late father, Frederick William, sitting astride his horse. Frederick William had overhauled Prussia's financial systems, uniting fractious ducal states as part of his campaign to transform Prussia into a fully fledged kingdom. His son was now attempting to finish the job and to be recognized by European powers as a monarch in his own right.
Then in 1695 Andreas Schliiter had some luck. Arnold Nering, the Elector's Superintendent of Building, died unexpectedly and the sculptor was asked to participate in Frederick Ill's plans to transform Berlin into a city of parks and palaces more suited to a king. Schliiter began sculpting the exterior of the Zeughaus (Arsenal) and the Royal Palace.
The Elector's second wife, Sophie Charlotte (the great-grandaughter of James I of England), admired Schliiter's designs. Sophie Charlotte's marriage, arranged when she was sixteen, was largely a political affair and she withdrew from the bombastic Prussian