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As we scan the members of the 1949-60 search team that hunted for the bunker, a piece of the puzzle slips into place. We see that the chairman was Comrade Veniamin Krolevsky, secretary of the Kaliningrad Communist Party, the man who wrote (under an alias) the Kaliningradskaya Pravda articles of 1958.10 This was the series which first revealed to the Soviet public that Professor Brusov's original findings were wrong, his powers of deduction at fault, and that the Amber Room had in fact survived the war and was being concealed in a secret bunker.

So the Leningrad curator Kuchumov, Krolevsky's special adviser, had not stopped at disproving Brusov's 1945 findings. He had brought Brusov back to Kaliningrad in 1949 and made him recant. And then in 1958 a close colleague of Kuchumov's had launched a broadside against Professor Brusov in Kaliningradskaya Pravda, ridiculing his findings and his powers of recall. We can only conclude that Kuchumov had a hand in these articles. With the professor out of the way, Kuchumov was free to promote his bunker theory to Leningrad, pushing it ever higher until he and his plan reached the Executive Committee of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Federation. But what was it that made everyone so sure that Brusov had got it wrong in 1945?

The file from the literature archive goes back to the 1940S. One year before Kuchumov's second visit to Kaliningrad, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, his card number 0874033 L.11 Kuchumov was now among the 7 per cent of Soviet citizens who chose to embrace the system.12 He began to write propaganda. Among the papers we have here is a draft of an article by him, entitled 'The Wonderful Palaces of Pushkin and Pavlovsk Rise out of the Ash and Rubble'.13 In it he praised the actions of the Red Army in Konigsberg during the summer of 1945:

The Soviet army preserved cultural treasures, even those that belonged to the enemy. The soldiers of the Konigsberg regiments, when they learned that under the rubble was hidden the famous Amber Room, took part in the searching, within the ruins, cellars and bunkers... with an enthusiasm that never waned.

Some were so industrious that Kuchumov gave them a special mention:

A feat was achieved by Guard Major Rakitsin, who found gilded furniture stolen from the Catherine Palace in the rubble of Konigsberg. With the help of his men, he carried forty pieces through the city to an empty apartment where he was staying. They were damaged. The silk was ripped. The legs were broken and during the evenings, after serving his duty, the major glued back together every broken part.

Kuchumov described:

a Red Army recruit from Potava, Misha Kulot, who wrote to me in February 1947. '... I worked in the rubble and I found roog piece of beautiful amber. If you need it I can send it to you. This piece was with me everywhere. Even in Sakhalin Island. Now I have brought it home.' Kulot was an ordinary Russian soldier who carefully took with him an amber detail, believing it was part of the Amber Room that he wanted to give back to us. What a contrast to the behaviour of the Nazis in our Motherland.

He concluded:

At the end of the war it was impossible to say 'my story', only 'our story', about the preserving and returning of treasures from the palace museums. I have enough examples to prove to you [the reader]... the high-spirit and culture of all Soviet soldiers and officers who carefully guarded the peaceful works of our nation built on Communism.

Colonel Avenir Ovsianov, director of the Kaliningrad Centre for Coordinating the Search for Cultural Relics, had told us a strikingly different version of events, one that raised questions about the discipline and motives of the Red Army in Konigsberg. If Ovsianov was right, then Kuchumov was blinkered by his patriotism. We will have to read everything else Kuchumov wrote with this in mind.

The last report in the file was compiled by Kuchumov and takes us back to the critical year of 1946. 'Destiny of the Amber Room' is its title.14 There are