The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [37]
'The two hundredth item in this Nazi Gift Book, recorded, as received on 5 December 1941, is the Amber Room from Tsarskoye Selo, to which the whole page is devoted. In this inventory are listed 140 items [from the room]... and it is written that these items were gifted to the Konigsberg museum by the German authorities.'
Telemakov fixes us in his gaze. 'The Amber Room had survived, you see? While Anatoly Mikhailovich was stuck in Siberia, worrying about its safety in the Catherine Palace, the Nazis dismantled the room and transported it to Konigsberg. The Amber Room arrived in East Prussia less than three months after the siege of Leningrad began. Even when Anatoly Mikhailovich told me this story, thirty-five years later, there were tears in his eyes.'
On 16 May 1945 Anatoly Kuchumov sent three telegrams: one to LenGorlsPolKom, another to Nikolai Belokhov, the director of the Government Directorate of the Preservation of Monuments, and a third to Igor Grabar in Moscow. Grabar was director of the Committee on Architecture of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, a Titan of the Soviet art world, winner of the Stalin Prize, a man who had the General Secretary's ear.
'Kuchumov was the obvious person to bring the Amber Room home. He wrote requesting funds and a travel permit. He packed a small bag and said goodbye to Anna Mikhailovna,' Telemakov says. 'A telegram from Moscow arrived. Yes, Comrade Kuchumov was correct, Moscow was running a rescue operation to bring home the Amber Room. And yes, Moscow needed an expert. But someone was already on the way. Professor A. I. Brusov, from Moscow.'
Telemakov shrugs. 'Brusov! Anatoly Mikhailovich was shocked by the decision. Was he being punished? He wondered if the party blamed him for failing to take down the Amber Room while the Nazis seemingly managed it.' Telemakov sighs. I can't tell you more other than I heard that Brusov gave an interview to the Soviet press. Go and find it. I hope my little bits and pieces help you.' And, as the spruce front door closes, 'Please don't forget me. Your promise to help. Do come back.'
The National Library of Russia, set back from a statue of Catherine the Great dominating her circle of advisers and lovers (Suvorov, Orlov, Potemkin), is a sprawling citadel of books. One of the largest libraries in the world, it houses more than 32 million volumes. In Soviet times, the books' spines were turned away from the reader, its catalogue room planted in a maze of corridors, patrolled by the KGB.
The Soviet reader could not be trusted with potentially contagious thoughts, such as Andrei Sakharov's calculations of what would happen if Khrushchev had gone ahead and test-blasted in the Soviet atmosphere a Loo-megaton hydrogen bomb. Such ideas had to be quarantined. All library research was chaperoned, readers standing in line waiting for the patrician 'inquiry apparatchiki', who flicked up and down unseen stacks like beads of an abacus, sorting and sifting. And even though the system had prominent critics, among them Maxim Gorky, who boldly advised Stalin, 'the one-sidedness of our treatment of reality - created by us - exerts an extremely unhealthy influence on our young people', still it prevailed.2
Nowadays anyone can roam the corridors, but in New Russia the profit-driven state barely pays library staff and, flat broke, they are elusive. We eventually find a woman sitting at a rucked baize desk littered with dribbling glue pots and official stamps. To her left is a mechanical crank-driven calendar, embossed 'Leningrad'. Grudgingly, she admits to having been a member of the old 'inquiry apparatchiki'. Now she is responsible for issuing temporary readers' tickets and she sends us down into the basement.
One, two, three corridors along,