The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [36]
He climbed up, although not by the Monighetti marble staircase, as that had been destroyed, but by the administration staircase used by staff. I enter the administration quarters and there is no single wooden partition left, everything is broken off, the rooms are empty. On some of the doors we can still see the pre-war doorplates, People's Commissar and Director's Assistant. It seems that the palace is still living like before the war.' But the roof had collapsed and shell-holes pitted the walls. 'A carbonized plafond [ceiling painting] is hanging... like a black mourning banner.'
Kuchumov moved slowly through each chamber, absorbing the scale of destruction. 'Everything from the doors is hacked off with axes. The sculptures are without heads. The bas-reliefs are hardly damaged but the parquet and fireplaces are smashed and broken.' And then, 'climbing over heaps of burnt beams, bricks and iron', Kuchumov held his breath.
The Oval Anteroom was as far as he could get. 'The whole room was covered with soot from when the suite of rooms had burned. This is the last room left in the whole suite. Next we see a terrible site of fire. Naked brick walls covered with soot. Neither floors nor ceilings have survived. Nothing but a huge collapse through all three floors.' Nothing stood where once had been the thing that he had painstakingly concealed with gauze and wadding from the Pushkin sewing factory. The Amber Room had been destroyed.
'Every step kills me,' Kuchumov wrote. 'These beasts made stables of the palace-museum, of our pride. But even the animals couldn't have soiled the rooms worse than the beasts with two legs have done. We have to begin again.'
The ruined Catherine Palace after Nazi occupation
3
At a small apartment in Ozerki, we press the doorbell that tolls 'The Volga Boatmen'. We have come to return Vladimir Telemakov's manuscript and we need his help again. He was not expecting visitors, Telemakov says. But still he wears his smart jacket and trousers. 'Welcome. Welcome. Please come in.' He glances at our bag and smiles at his green document file poking out. 'Did my manuscript help? The diary extracts and letters. All those intricate details. It was difficult for me to gather. The material is extremely rare.'
It is fantastic, we say, a work of great dedication. But we are confused. If Kuchumov found evidence in 1944 that the Amber Room had burned when the Catherine Palace was partially destroyed (whether by German troops in retreat or the Soviet blitzkrieg), why are people still searching for it today?
Telemakov walks off and returns with a blue file. From it he pulls a notebook. I was invited to Kuchumov's old apartment in Pavlovsk only once and when I went there I saw he had volumes of newspaper cuttings stretching back to the Great Patriotic War. They, like everything else, vanished after he died. But I copied down one or two articles.'
Telemakov begins to read:
'Pravda. 15 May 1945. Our Special Correspondent writes: Could we imagine that Konigsberg has fallen, the fortress of central eastern Prussia, the city that the Hitlerites named the springboard to the East? We could not imagine - because the Germans not only lost in Konigsberg a strategically important nerve centre but also the "crucible" of Nazism from where the citizens of the dark world rose. London radio has also confirmed our great Soviet success, saying that Konigsberg is the epicentre of Prussia and it was its capital even when Berlin was a swamp.'1
Telemakov looks up. 'Be patient,' he says. 'There is a second article from Pravda on the same day. "Colonel D. D. Ivanyenko, Third Belorussian Front. 12 May 1945. By telegraph."' It had taken three days for the report to get into print.
In the ruins of Konigsberg Castle, where the museum of Prussia was located, we have found nearly thirty armchairs from the Tsarskoye Selo palaces of Pushkin town. On them are labels written by Tsarskoye Selo officials