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The war also edged towards the Volga basin. The chairman of Gorky IsPolKom ordered Kuchumov and the palace collections deeper into the Russian interior, towards the place that the Tatars call their Sleeping Land. The treasure train steamed from the west into the east, leaving Europe for Siberia and the frozen tundra of Tomsk. Four weeks later it arrived at the confluence of the Tom and Ob rivers. But it would still go 190 miles further into the blinding whiteness of the snow-fields. Leningrad to Gorky, Gorky to Tomsk, Tomsk to no one knew where, five months on the tracks, L,6ookm traversed, until Kuchumov arrived in Novosibirsk, a 'town covered in hoar frost, minus 55°C on the thermometer', at the end of November 1941.10 To the east lay the ferocious republic of Sakha, the old Cossack outpost of Yakutsk. And still further east were all that was left of the 10-40 million disappeared, who had been exiled by Stalin to the gulags of Magadan and Komsomolsk, the City of Youth.

In Novosibirsk the treasure train was finally unloaded, its precious cargo checked and aired. The theatre was chosen as a temporary store. Kuchumov wrote in his diary on 20 December 1941: 'This brightly lit town, with its white puffs of smoke, its wooden houses and churches, was delighted to receive us. We lay on tapestries in our makeshift quarters and clutched our bread ration cards.'

Back in Leningrad, Food Supply Chief Pavlov estimated that 6,000 people a day were dying from starvation. Those who were still alive were freezing to death, shredding their books and furniture for kindling. 'We've never been as remote from one another as now,' wrote the Soviet chemist Elena Kochina of her husband in her siege memoirs. 'There is no way we can help one another. We realize now that a person must be able to struggle alone with life and death.'11

Citizens crept out through the German lines at Pushkin, hunger overcoming their fear, to forage for root vegetables in abandoned allotments and dachas. Pavlov's team experimented with melting lipstick, smearing its fat on the hard bread ration. Leather machine belts were stewed to extract gelatine. The Badaev food factory crater was still being crawled over by a team of scientists, engaging desperately in alchemical experiments to transform the ruins into something edible.

In Novosibirsk, there was food but little else. 'We sit in the cellars watching our priceless charges. Sometimes we even hold small exhibitions. But there is nothing that can lift our mood, the frustration of not knowing what is happening to the things we were forced to leave behind,' Kuchumov wrote.

The Amber Room weighed heavily on his mind as he shivered in Maxim Gorky's 'land of chains and ice', surrounded by evacuated treasures from the Leningrad.12 Time stood still and, in order to fill the hours of not knowing what had happened to the Amber Room, Kuchumov began to write a book about its history.

On 29 January 1743 Empress Elizabeth, who had ascended to the Russian throne one year before, issued a decree: 'Take this Amber Room to decorate the chambers under your command and you can use the Italian Martelli...'13

We found a copy of this decree in the Hermitage library, following footnotes made by Kuchumov while stranded in Siberia. The journalist Telemakov transcribed all of them for us.

What Kuchumov had discovered was that one of Elizabeth's first acts as Empress was to take the Amber Room from its store in Peter the Great's Summer Palace and move it to her new Winter Palace on the River Neva. Her father had died without ever seeing it assembled and she was determined to complete the task. Her favourite sculptor, Alexander Martelli, was placed in charge.

Using Kuchumov's microscopic footnotes we located Martelli's contract (signed by the sculptor), dated 11 February 1743: 'You promise to fix the [Amber] Room, sort all the pieces you have and find out what is missing and for them make replacement parts and erect the Room.' Martelli would be paid 600 roubles