The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [153]
COMRADE YERMOLIEV: 'Let me start [by saying] there have been many attempts to search for the Amber Room and the Kaliningrad authorities have played an important part. However, not enough has been done and the work has not been systematic, the analysis unscientific.
A stinging attack on the Kaliningrad authorities and evidence that Moscow was intent on taking over the search.
COMRADE JAKOBOVICH [chief of Kaliningrad air-raid defences]: How much time do we have for finding the Amber Room? Do we have to do it by the fiftieth jubilee of the Soviet Union [the founding of the Bolshevik state was only seven months away] ?
COMRADE YERMOLIEV: Well, that would be very good, to make a gift to the Motherland for the jubilee. However, it would be very difficult to set a time limit.
COMRADE GLUSHKOV [director of the Kaliningrad Cultural Department]: One of the most important questions we should put to Soviet ministries of the Russian Federation is about financing.
MAJOR v. v. BOGDANCHIKOV [vice-chairman of the Kaliningrad Communist Party]: Our group should have its own car and we are bound to have a lot of material. So we need someone who can type up everything.
COMRADE VASHNA [a senior official from Moscow]: I want to ask a question of Comrade Maximov. What hindered the previous searches and have there been any significant findings to date that need our attention? And if things have been found, where are they now?
COMRADE MAXIMOV [civil engineer and a member of the old Krolevsky team]: There were no valuable findings.
COMRADE JAKOBOVICH: Well, all valuable findings were sent to the KGB.
Maximov and Jakobovich were tripping over each other. Here the minutes abruptly move on to a discussion about the previous search commissions' lack of equipment. We wonder what was found and spirited away by the KGB.
COMRADE MAXIMOV: For example, we went into dark basements and we had no torches so we could see nothing.
It seems almost unbelievable that the Kaliningrad KGB and MVD, which backed the searches, were not able to provide their teams with even the most basic equipment like torches. Unless, of course, there was nothing worth illuminating.
Before the issue could be discussed further there was a suggestion from the floor. Why not round up everyone living in the oblast who had been a resident since 1945 and interrogate them about the Amber Room?
According to Comrade Yermoliev: 'It is not a good idea. The bigger the circle of people knowing the problem the greater the problem. We need secrecy. Well comrades, today's meeting was a very useful one because we have all expressed our concerns and suggestions.' Secrecy was a strange notion to introduce after millions of newspaper readers of Pravda and Freie Welt had been alerted nine years earlier to the existence of a secret search for the Amber Room in Kaliningrad.
Then, in March 1969, seventeen months after the fiftieth jubilee of the Soviet Union, with the search for the Amber Room still ongoing, Moscow took over completely. A telegram dated 15 April 1969 arrived for the investigation's new chairman, Comrade Jakobovich.5 In it the Deputy Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation, Comrade Vasily Striganov, instructed him on the theory he was to follow:
Since the end of the war our stolen art collections that were stored in East Prussia haven't turned up. You might think that somebody is still hiding them. That seems unlikely, as not one jot of information over fifteen years has emerged...If the Germans had taken out the treasures, they were bound to turn up in Germany and yet nothing has. So what can we see from this?
One can come to a conclusion that the Amber Room is still in Kaliningrad. I think that the Germans never thought East Prussia would remain within the USSR. They thought they would return to the province and we would leave.6
This summary dismissal