The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [161]
It began with Kuchumov in a reflective mood: the court of the tsars; Peter the Great's dreams of owning the Amber Room; Peter's frustration at his experts' inability to reconstruct it in his Summer Palace; the triumph of empresses Elizabeth and Catherine in resurrecting the treasure in the Catherine Palace; its emergence as the 'Eighth Wonder of the World'.
But when Kuchumov addressed the fate of the Amber Room in the final pages, his tone changed:
The failure of the searches for the Amber Room should not be an embarrassment for the Soviet people, particularly museum workers. The Amber Room did not die. This masterpiece could not have been deliberately destroyed. There are many secret places that we still have not discovered left by the Nazis in the territories of Germany, Austria and other countries. It is only a question of time before it is found, by chance or the continuation of searching. Lovers of beauty, you must not reject the continuation of the search.
We are struck by Kuchumov's choice of words, 'embarrassment', 'the Amber Room did not die', 'deliberately destroyed'. It is as if he was defending himself, and yet as far as we know, he faced no accusers in 1989.
What is also striking is that Kuchumov's book failed to reveal any of the sentiments expressed by Jelena Storozhenko in her twenty-page statement to Kuchumov in 1986. The Amber Room made no mention of Storozhenko's paltry finds or her fears of official obfuscation. For some reason, Kuchumov decided that, even though the Soviet Union had embraced glasnost and perestroika, Storozhenko's allegations were not 'for the world to see'.
We close his book and turn to a file of papers from the literature archive with a growing feeling that Kuchumov was struggling at the end of his life to deal with the consequences of his actions in 1941. Perhaps he was trying to keep something alive that he knew had in reality died.
The documents are in reverse order, the most contemporaneous, a newspaper cutting from 1986, at the top. Leningradskaya Pravda reported on 22 April 1986: 'Mikhail Gorbachev, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and Nikolai Richkov, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, announce... recipients of the Lenin Prize.'2
Among the handful of those chosen to receive the Soviet Union's highest civilian honour in 1986 we spot the name 'A. M. Kuchumov (art historian)', awarded in recognition of 'outstanding achievements' and 'the solution of tasks vital to the state'.
A telegram sent to Kuchumov from Minister of Culture Comrade Dermichev read: 'Honoured Anatoly Mikhailovich! Heartfelt congratulations. your many years and creative labours have returned to life that destroyed by the Hitlerite occupants...'
We recall the man in the photographs: Kuchumov portly in his tatty suit, a provincial curator who rolled up his shirtsleeves to help track down and recover art stolen by the Nazis. Self-taught, as blind as a mole, Kuchumov appeared to live a commonplace existence with his wife, Anna Mikhailovna, in their threadbare Pavlovsk apartment. But here, we see that the party's Central Committee and the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR had plucked Kuchumov out as an exemplary comrade. Many curators we met at the St Petersburg House of Scientists had also struggled with virtually no resources to rebuild Russia's cultural heritage, yet who among them had been recognized? Kuchumov must have done something special, and yet in his book, the epitaph on his career, he was regretful.
Anatoly Kuchumov reading in the mauve boudoir of Empress Alexandra, Alexander Palace, Pushkin, 1940
Dozens of telegrams arrived after news of the 19 8 6 award was published. From First Secretary Comrade Solavyiov of the Leningrad Communist Party. From the Supreme Architect of Leningrad,