The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [163]
We have never even considered that Kuchumov might have had KGB connections until now, other than having to deal with the local KGB officials at the Pavlovsk and Catherine palaces, as every other curator did as a matter of course. There must have been a significant political dimension to the Amber Room search for the KGB to have become so closely involved, and whatever it was, Kuchumov was evidently up to his neck in it.
Beneath the KGB letters are komandirovat passes, similar to the ones we have seen before that authorized a worker to be transferred to another town or city.4 They show that, while corresponding with the KGB, Kuchumov bobbed back and forth, at its behest, between Leningrad, Moscow and Kaliningrad throughout the 1970S, always telling his colleagues that he was on holiday - keeping in touch with KGB chief Fors about the failings of the Kaliningrad search team, sharing intelligence about the Amber Room that appears not to have been shown to chairman Jelena Storozhenko. It is beginning to look as if Kuchumov's loyalties lay more with the KGB than his fellow academics on the dig team in Kaliningrad. If there was a cover-up of any kind involving the Amber Room, Kuchumov must have been in on it, maybe while those physically searching were kept in the dark.
The file goes back to the 1960S, a page ripped from a school exercise book, a diary jotted down by Kuchumov over three days in 1969:
26 May: I came by plane to Kaliningrad at 9.40 a.m, settled in my hotel, got very comfortable and quiet suite No. 182. Meeting with G. S. Fors (KGB chief) and people from State Historical Museum, Moscow... Preparing documents and papers for the meeting of the State Commission that will take place tomorrow.
27 May: LO a.m. meeting with Major Bogdanchikov. Also here are... military regiments and some from geophysics, some from local museums, some from Moscow. Evening: my birthday.
28 May: went with specialists to see bunker. Looking at area near Steindamm Strasse. Trip to garden of Alfred Rohde's house on Bickstrasse and former estate of Erich Koch at Gross Friedrichsberg...5
We recall a previous document stating that in May 1969 Deputy Culture Minister Vasily Striganov had ordered a major revamp of the Amber Room investigation, Moscow seizing control of the provincial search. And here was Kuchumov in Kaliningrad at that time advising, leading, coaching and preparing, guiding a string of dignitaries and security officials through the stage set of the last days of the Amber Room (and into a bunker).
But frustratingly the information here provides only snapshots in time. The file flips back to 1967. A succession of orders and telegrams show how Kuchumov had come to Striganov's attention two years earlier.6 On 11 March 1967 Striganov called Kuchumov to address a committee in Moscow, comprising a phalanx of security and military officials: Comrade Z. V. Nordman, vice-director of the KGB; Comrade T. M. Shukayev, vice-directors of the MVD; M. G. Kokornikov, the chief of engineering regiments of the Red Army; Major Bogdanchikov of the Kaliningrad Communist Party. The committee asked Kuchumov to prepare a briefing for the Executive Committee of the Council of Ministers, the highest administrative organ of the Russian Federation.7
Kuchumov presented his briefing on 21 March 1967 at 4 p.m. He was asked back two weeks later, on 5 April. The minutes of these meetings are not here. But the title of the topic of discussion is: 'A plan of practical affairs to organize the search [for the Amber Room]'. So the Soviet authorities were absolutely serious about the Amber Room and Kuchumov, the son of a carpenter, had become a driving force behind national policy on the matter.
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