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Anatoly Kuchumov had lied. His die was cast on 30 June 1941 when seventeen train carriages pulled out of Leningrad bound for a secret location in Siberia without the panels from the Amber Room. At this moment the life of the inexperienced curator, who had concealed the Soviet's unique treasure rather than evacuate it, changed for ever. We know from his book that Anatoly Mikhailovich Kuchumov was haunted by his decision, realizing that, had the panels from the Amber Room been evacuated to Siberia, they would have been returned to Leningrad in 1944, with all the other saved treasures, and reinstalled in the Catherine Palace when it was restored.

By the time Kuchumov was sent to reinvestigate the fate of the Amber Room in March 1946, he had good reason to be worried about his error of judgement. The literature archive files show that Kuchumov was monitoring the fate of a colleague, Ivan Mikryukov, the former director of Pavlovsk Palace, who had been exiled to Kazakhstan, accused of having packed his palace treasures too early and being 'defeatist'. It would soon be well publicized in the Soviet Union that a team of Nazis had taken only thirty-six hours to dismantle and carry off the Amber Room. Working in a climate of spiteful recriminations, Kuchumov must have felt extremely vulnerable.

He had no choice other than to dedicate the rest of his career to bringing back to life that which he had lost, spending thirty-nine years looking for it and forty-eight years writing about it in a book that concluded with the words 'the Amber Room did not die'. It could not have been 'deliberately destroyed'.

But the reason why the Soviet authorities were so ready to dismiss Brusov's conclusions of 194 5 in favour of Kuchumov's ramshackle theory of 194 6 is less obvious and has to be prised from the history of the Cold War.

We know that in April 1945 the US Army broke its agreement with the Soviet Union, stalking into the Soviet Zone of Germany to take the Reichsbank gold and priceless caches of German art. But we also read in the files of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington and in war-time papers kept at the Public Records Office in London that when Berlin fell in May 1945, Allied intelligence immediately began picking up reports that the Soviets were plundering the British, French and US sectors in retribution.

By 18 October 1945, when the International Military Tribunal opened at Nuremberg, emotions were running high. A favourite story doing the rounds among British and American prosecutors was that the Soviet Union only erected fences around its military camps to give the animals in the woods some peace. The Soviets countered with a saying of their own (reminding all that it was the USA that had first broken international compensation agreements by seizing the Nazi gold): 'While we were taking the Reichstag,' the Soviet slogan went, 'who was taking the Reichsbank?'18

However, soon there were so many priceless things missing from German collections in regions swarmed over by the Red Army that allegations of wanton behaviour by Soviet trophy brigades and regular troops would not go away. Where was the 'Pergamum Altar', American journalists asked, referring to the ancient Hellenistic altar of Zeus that had been on display in Berlin until it was evacuated to an anti-aircraft tower in the capital? Where was the 'Trojan Gold', excavated by Heinrich Schliemann and bequeathed in 1881 to the Pre and Early History Museum in Berlin as 'a gift to the German people for ever to be shown in the German capital'.19 It was last seen on i May 1945 in three crates that were also stored in a Berlin anti-aircraft tower. Where was the Bremen Kunsthalle collection? The L,715 drawings, 3,000 prints and fifty paintings by Diirer, Goya, Titian, Rembrandt and Cezanne had been evacuated to Karnzow Castle, a country estate north of Berlin. And the list went on and on: a Gutenberg Bible (one of only forty still