The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [150]
'A can for you, sir.' 'A shot for you.' Eight fishermen on their way back to a fleet of rusting hulks that plunder the cod banks of the Baltic rise like a swell in the rows behind us. The sour stench of Baltika beer fills the cabin.
Through the fatigued plastic portholes we watch a snowstorm whip us along the runway. It is early March 2003, ten months after our last trip to Russia, and we are heading towards the source of the mystery of the Amber Room: the former East Prussian city of Konigsberg, which fell to the Red Army on 9 April 1945.
Professor Alexander Brusov went there in May 1945, only to conclude that the Amber Room had been destroyed. Anatoly Kuchumov and his friend Stanislav Tronchinsky followed in March 1946 and argued that Brusov was mistaken. Kuchumov returned in December 1949 to interrogate Dr Gerhard Strauss, who claimed to know where the Amber Room was but then forgot. A decade later it was the local newspaper, Kaliningradskaya Pravda, which broke the story that the Amber Room had been concealed in a secret bunker and was being hunted for, setting Europe abuzz with excitement about lost treasure. Within weeks GDR citizen 'Rudi Ringel' had emerged and was brought to Kaliningrad to be interrogated by Anatoly Kuchumov as the Soviets struggled to locate SS Sturmbannfiihrer 'Ringel's' hiding place, codenamed BSCH.
After 1959 an untold number of secret Soviet investigations dug for the Amber Room in the province, but their findings were never published. If it is true what they say about Kaliningrad, that tens of thousands of Soviet citizens were brought here by force after the war and none of them ever left, then some of those involved in these investigations should still be around.
Once airborne, the fishermen all light up cigarettes and pound the backs of our seats as they regale one another with holiday tales of losing their hearts to girls on the Gulf of Finland. 'No-smoking flight,' the stewardess barks across the PA. Half a dozen figures stagger off to the toilet cubicle.
By the time we descend into Kaliningrad International Airport, the beer and vodka have gone and the fishermen are agitated. As the Tupolev makes its final approach, one of them picks up his kitbag and staggers down the aisle. When the plane touches down and the engines flick into reverse thrust, he collides with the galley. A loud cheer resounds as the stewardess steps over his prone body to open the cabin door.
A wrought-iron hammer and sickle spins like a weather vane on top of a hangar containing a single metal desk. Although opened up to the world in 199 L, hardly anybody visits Kaliningrad. The immigration officer lazily stamps our paperwork and we emerge into the forecourt to face a wall of leather-coated taxi drivers.
We pick the man whose car seats are covered with fake Siberian tiger fur. 'It was a shock when I first arrived too,' Valery, the taxi driver says, grinning at us in the rear-view mirror. 'Got sent here from Minsk in the 1960S. It was like a lottery. And I lost. I had to leave everything behind for our new frontier.'
News footage from after the war showed garlanded Soviet farmers and their families jiggling into the new Kaliningrad on party-issue tractors. And then the province sealed itself off from the outside world: the ancient amber pits of Palmnicken becoming the Yantarny Mining Combine No. 9, while the Teutonic town of Pillau was levelled to become Baltiysk, new home to the Baltic Fleet. Hundreds of thousands of troops converged on Kaliningrad to transform it into one of the Soviet Union's most secure military bases. Only party officials would come and go, holidaying in exclusive spas that popped up along the seashore.
'Now everyone is trying to leave,' Valery murmurs. Disconnected from Moscow by 1,000 miles, the amber capital of the world is plagued by poverty and a trigger-happy mafia, and is best known as Europe's epicentre