The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [155]
The letter was very carefully worded but the message was clear. Storozhenko's search had failed because she had not been given 'the highest levels of control and organization' and she could see no reason for winding up the KGA. We wonder who was holding her back and turn to the twenty-page statement itself in which Storozhenko gave Kuchumov a frank and detailed explanation of her failed ten-year inquiry.
She confirmed that her team was financed by Moscow and that she was required to make quarterly reports back to Deputy Culture Minister Striganov. However, it was the Culture Ministry's KGB chief, G. S. Fors, who supervised the day-to-day running of the KGA operation.
Storozhenko wrote that her remit was to 're-examine all material connected directly or indirectly with the mystery of the Amber Room ...' as she had discovered that all previous searches 'have been unscientific and uncoordinated and that no digs were conducted at a depth greater than eight feet'. Storozhenko's statement reveals something significant. For fifteen years, Soviet Amber Room searchers had been sifting around only in the topsoil. If Storozhenko's predecessors had been genuinely looking for hidden cellars and bunkers, they would have had to dig far deeper. But the KGA chairman did not say whether she believed the decision not to was premeditated or simply incompetent.
Storozhenko explained that 'it was important to have a scientific foundation to our work'. Her team was ordered to 'check and analyse all previous statements of citizens of the USSR, East and West Germany and Poland. These statements were filtered and those meriting further investigation set aside... and copied to Moscow.' Everything was submitted to the KGB and vetted by Fors.
Witness accounts were checked against old maps and wartime literature, tested against other eyewitnesses and archive material. While we read in the Ministry of Truth in Berlin that the Stasi was repeatedly denied access to archive material in the Soviet Union, Storozhenko listed here more than twenty archives used by her team in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and provincial cities from the Ukraine to Estonia.
But it is the section entitled 'Findings' that tells the real story of the KGA. Storozhenko revealed to Kuchumov that her ten-year expedition had discovered:
Forty pieces of artillery, cannonballs, bullets and aerial bombs in the former Teutonic castle of Lochstadt, a private collection of amber (weighing nine pounds) in a blocked-up cellar. And under the floor of a private house in the centre of the city we found dead bodies, a coffin and a red flag on which was the hammer and sickle. Perhaps this flag dates from the Revolution period of 1918, when Soviet workers rose up for the first time against East Prussia. Maybe then this workers' flag flew over Konigsberg.
Cannonballs and skeletons were not much to show for a scientific expedition and Storozhenko drew Kuchumov's attention to some critical factors:
The expedition had some difficulties. We worked at a time when the city was being rebuilt very quickly and it was impossible to get admission to sites having no documents. We also had no opportunity to organize invitations for those people who had made previous statements to come over here. We also suffered from a lack of technical devices.
Kuchumov had been permitted to fly witnesses to Kaliningrad and was empowered to search wherever he wanted. He even had a mechanical digger. Storozhenko advised him that a Kaliningrad Party directive supposedly backed the KGA. Issued in 1969, it ordered every administrative, military and utility office in the province to support the activities of the search.9 But the directive had not been adhered to. Something had gone wrong. Storozhenko thought she had been prevented