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Even in 1945 Professor Brusov was worried about the behaviour of the Red Army, believing that treasures were at risk.

According to these extracts from Brusov's diary, he was not the only one concerned at the melee. On 8 July 1945 Brusov wrote: 'General Galitsky of the LLth Guards Army arrived and gathered a meeting of trophy brigades, treasure hunters and komandirovochnya [people on komandirovat trips] and in very rough speech called everyone "free-marketeers". Galitsky said: "I will not allow anything else to be taken from the city. I will cancel the guards in all the store places."'

Trophy brigades and komandirovochnya, treasure hunters part-time and professional, exactly the scene in Konigsberg described by Colonel Avenir Ovsianov. Even General Galitsky had become concerned at the level of looting, threatening to throw all the thieves out of Konigsberg. The Soviets would have to stamp on the story.

Brusov continued in his diary:

We are still working in the castle. We have found very interesting Chinese, Meissen and Berlin porcelain and two marble busts given by Mussolini. What is going to happen to all these things? My mood is spoilt. Why should we continue working? Should I go back to Moscow?'

This was a very different Konigsberg from that conjured by Kuchumov in his propaganda articles of 1948. Brusov's city was occupied by thieves and nothing in it was safe, as all of them were wearing the uniform of the Red Army. Kuchumov's Konigsberg was a crime-free zone where the Soviet troops struggled to piece together the shattered legacy of the tsars.

Brusov's last diary entry was dated 13 July 1945. He wrote:

I found four boxes with very good porcelain that fell down from the [castle's] third floor to the second. Lots of things were broken but forty pieces survived. I have packed them into five boxes for Moscow. I have stopped searching. Everything is packed into sixty boxes. I will give things to the archive where they have special security.

We know from reading previous extracts from Brusov's diary that among the items in these crates were thousands of pieces from the Konigsberg Albertus-University amber collection. Brusov told Kuchumov that he had handed these sixty crates to a Red Army guard, and they had subsequently vanished. It was another incident that Comrade Krolevsky (a.k.a. Dmetriev) would distort in Kaliningradskaya Pravda in 1958, accusing 'Barsov' of the theft.

Kuchumov kept something else we had never seen before, a 'fourteen-page defence', written by Brusov after Kaliningradskaya Pravda published its assault on him. Professor Brusov was incandescent: 'This story is portrayed in the most fantastic way. So many facts are distorted and of course as I appear in the story, thinly disguised as "Barsov", I am strongly against this rubbish.'17 Brusov repeated his concerns about indiscriminate Red Army looting and added that, far from not thoroughly investigating the bunker on Steindamm Strasse (which Kuchumov would develop into his major theory of the 1960S and 1970S), he had visited it in 1945 and discovered that 'Some people had got there before me and taken all the important things.'

The 'people' were undoubtedly Soviet troops or trophy brigades and their reports are probably in the closed section of the Podolsk archive.

Kuchumov wrapped distorted evidence around his theory of 1946 to make it fly. He joined the Communist Party in 1948 and wrote stories about the Red Army that he knew not to be true. He rail-roaded Brusov in 1949, forcing him to recant, and was closely connected with the Kaliningradskaya Pravda articles of 19 5 8 that destroyed Brusov's character and conclusions. Kuchumov steered all subsequent Amber Room searches to follow his reasoning. In the early 1970S, he forged a conspiratorial relationship with the KGB, reporting to it far more intimately than he did to his colleagues in Kaliningrad. While Brusov sank, it was Kuchumov who would be embraced by the Motherland, feted by Gorbachev with the Lenin Prize. And then