The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [152]
Striganov's report confirms what the Stasi long suspected: that the Anatoly Kuchumov-Gerhard Strauss mission of December 1949 was the beginning of intensive Soviet investigations in Kaliningrad, not the end.
Even while Kuchumov was interrogating Gerhard Strauss in the freezing Hotel Moscow about the location of the Amber Room, a powerful provincial search committee was already being formed. It was led by Comrade Veniamin Krolevsky, the Secretary of Kaliningrad ObKom (the oblast or provincial committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) and slotted between the technical experts were agents of the security apparatus including the provincial KGB chairman and the director of Kaliningrad UVD, its Department of Internal Affairs or security police.
While it was standard practice for intelligence agents to be attached to every civil organization, office, factory and college, the fact that such high-ranking officials sat on Krolevsky's committee suggested that its work was being closely observed.
We see that against Comrade Krolevsky's name Kuchumov has written in pencil 'a.k.a. Vladimir Dmetriev'. This is a vitally important piece of information.3 We immediately recall the July 1958 Kaliningradskaya Pravda articles written by Vladimir Dmetriev of July 1958, in which he claimed: I was really involved and excited. I had never done anything so interesting before. We reported every day to ObKom our measurements of the castle and during the evening analysed results, as if it was a difficult crossword... This was vital work...'
We could find no record of a journalist called Vladimir Dmetriev and had assumed (incorrectly) it was a pseudonym for Anatoly Kuchumov. But here we see that Vladimir Dmetriev was a nom de plume for the Secretary of the Kaliningrad Communist Party, one of the most powerful men in the province, Veniamin Krolevsky. This means that the articles Kaliningradskaya Pravda published and Freie Welt regurgitated had emanated from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This puts the claims made in them in a different light.
It was the party, then, that had revealed that the Amber Room had survived and was being secretly hunted for. It was the party that publicly humiliated and defamed Professor Alexander Brusov, who, the Party claimed, had incorrectly concluded that the Amber Room had been destroyed. And it was the party that decided to keep Kuchumov's name out of print, shielding his role in the Amber Room investigation for some reason.
It is beginning to look as if Brusov was sacrificed for some greater purpose. So eager was the party to keep the Amber Room alive, while punishing the man who had killed it off, that it begins to feel as if the Soviet authorities were covering something up.
Striganov's report continued. It revealed that on 9 September 1959 Party Secretary Krolevsky's committee was subsumed by another, more powerful one led by his superior, Comrade G. I. Harkov, the vice-director of OballsPolKom (the Kaliningrad Executive Committee of the People's Deputies).
Harkov enlisted a twelve-man team, pooled from practically every Soviet security, party and defence organization: the vice-director of the Cultural Department, two vice-directors of the Kaliningrad Department of Internal Affairs [UVD], a vice-commander of the Baltic Fleet DKBF (building committee) and the provincial KGB deputy. A column marked 'Findings' stated: 'No archive documents available.' Perhaps they had found nothing and wanted no one to know, or perhaps they had found something that they wished to keep a secret.
On 11 March 1967 Comrade Harkov's search was also taken over. An executive directive issued by the Council of Ministers of the Russian Federation, the highest executive body of state, ordered a new search team be formed.4 We have before us the minutes of its first meeting, on 25 March 1967:
Comrade