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We bump along a raised road to where the city begins and the potholes open up, patches of cobble poking through the meagre Soviet crust of asphalt. East Prussia refuses to die. Old photographs show Konigsberg as a bustling medieval town hunched over canals and rivers, dominated by God and the rule of law, the forbidding cathedral and the dark turrets of the castle.

Now the signs of Kaliningrad's Teutonic antecedence are more subtle: the battered iron tramlines, the manhole cover embossed with a Prussian eagle, the avenues of linden trees, antiques shops stuffed with white crockery stamped with a crimson swastika and the logo of the Blutgericht, the Nazi's Blood Court restaurant, which once occupied the cellars of Konigsberg Castle.

Pre-war Konigsberg

The 'Monster'

Where Leninsky Prospekt (the road once called Steindamm Strasse) merges with Ulitsa Shevchenko, Valery the driver points to a giant concrete tower-block, the windows of which have all been blown out. It is a building so eye-blindingly hideous that it provides the dour residents of Kaliningrad with a moment of levity every time they sit here in the traffic and contemplate it. 'Monster,' Valery declares, telling us how the city council spent years building it upon the ruins of Konigsberg Castle without having surveyed the flooded cellars, into which their 'Monster' immediately began to sink. It was on this junction that Kuchumov and Tronchinsky must have posed for one of their photographs taken in 1946, trouser bottoms stuffed into socks, a pork-pie hat and a black beret.

We have an appointment with the Kaliningrad Centre for Coordinating the Search for Cultural Relics, an organization whose name suggests that it can tell us something about the state investigations into missing art works. We pull up outside a pebbledash 193os-style villa. We ring and hear a scraping as a key is inserted in a lock. We follow a silent woman upstairs.

'The Colonel isn't here,' she announces, as we enter a darkened office, lined with maps and locked cupboards. 'But he knows you have arrived.'

Who is she talking about, we ask?

'Colonel Avenir Ovsianov. He runs the centre. He'll be back tomorrow.'

The last time we had seen Colonel Ovsianov's name was in a news report from August 1988 that revealed he was heading a dig in the suburbs of Kaliningrad city for the Amber Room (the same report that drove Erich Mielke to write in haste to the chairman of the KGB).

At the Kaliningrad Hotel a receptionist offers us a view for a few dollars extra. We reach the third-floor room and pull back the curtains to see an expanse of concrete and, rising from it, the 'Monster'.

We close the curtains. We were in St Petersburg's airport just long enough to catch up with Our Friend the Professor. She thrust a large envelope into our hands as she waved us off. All the papers come from the literature archive and concern Kaliningrad, she said. Our reader's tickets have expired but she has gutted the Kuchumov files and will post on the rest of the documents when she has translated them.

We open a file. The first page is stamped 'For Official Use Only'. In the top left-hand corner is written: 'Approval of the chairman of the Committee on Searching for Museum Treasures, Deputy Minister of Culture for the Russian Federation, Comrade Vasily Mikhailovich Striganov, 1969.'1

As with all the papers from the Kuchumov archive, the readers' slip confirms that we are the first to study this file and we expectantly turn the page. Here is the material that the Stasi was never permitted to see, a table of Soviet officials who searched for the Amber Room in Kaliningrad from December 1949 to January 1984. It is also material that previous Amber Room researchers have been prevented from reading, since the original copies of all documentation connected with Kaliningrad search committees remain classified in the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow.2

Vasily Striganov's report fills twenty pages. It lists search sites covering the entire province, teams sponsored by