The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [160]
'On 17 July 1996 I received a reply from Colonel Vimuchkin. "In your letter you petitioned to get various documents. After our analysis we have ascertained that the material that is interesting to you is not to be found anywhere in our archive. There is no reason for you to research this any further." I wrote back, this time with names and titles of documents, to the chief of the unit.'14 The colonel pulls another letter from his grey case. 'Then I received this. "At the moment in the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defence we have special works which are connected to a new law about restoration of art treasures and due to this reason the access to these documents is restricted."'
In May 1997 the law was passed and on 16 October the colonel reapplied to Podolsk for the papers. 'This time an answer came from a Colonel Dorothiayev.' Another letter emerges from the grey case. '"We have received your petition... and we are trying to extract the following documents and will let you know in due course."
I am still waiting to hear from the archive,' the colonel says. 'Is the truth still so powerful and strange that no one can be allowed to see it?'
13
Colonel Ovsianov is a watchful man. He believes that there was some kind of Soviet cover-up concerning the Amber Room. But he won't be drawn until he gets into the military archive in Podolsk.
He might be waiting a long time. However, there are strong indications about what this cover-up involves: the Red Army doing the unthinkable, destroying the Soviet treasure or stealing it in the last days of the battle for East Prussia. This is the last thing we expected to discover when we began our search. But now Ovsianov has raised it, the story begins to make sense for the first time.
Professor Alexander Brusov voiced similar concerns in 1945, killing off all hope about the Amber Room just weeks after he had been sent to Konigsberg to find it, concluding that it was burned in the Knights' Hall by troops as the city fell.
The point at which the Amber Room story changed forever was when the Soviets ordered a reinvestigation in 1946. Then Anatoly Kuchumov returned to the scene of the crime and forensically analysed the castle ruins, finding new evidence that led him to conclude that Brusov was wrong, febrile and misinformed. And since then there have been many searches for the Amber Room - in the GDR and Soviet Union - based on Kuchumov's hypothesis. Ridiculous amounts of money have been thrown at recovering the missing treasure from its Nazi hiding place. Politicians and security officials from both countries have urged on the investigations. Yet nothing has been found and the possibility that the culprits might have been Soviet was never even considered.
At the Kaliningrad Hotel reception, squeezed between counters selling garish amber jewellery and German posters advertising nostalgia tours for old East Prussians, a package is waiting. A parting gift from the literature archive in St Petersburg, a miscellany of biographical and research information connected to Anatoly Kuchumov. This will be our last foray into the curator's private papers.
Anatoly Mikhailovich Kuchumov, the man who had panicked and left the Amber Room in the Catherine Palace in 1941, had leapt at the chance of reinvestigating its fate in Konigsberg in 1946. Having knocked out Brusov's evidence, he had pursued his own theory to Berlin in 1947 and the new Kaliningrad in 1949 and again to that city in 1959. The story keeps coming back to the man who resurrected the Amber Room.
We take the file up to the third floor and close the curtains in our room. We cannot bear looking at the 'Monster'. In the packet is a small hard-backed volume with a grey and beige cover, The Amber Room by Anatoly Kuchumov and M. G. Voronov.
The book was published in 1989, as the Soviet Union staggered to its end, forty-eight