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By Root 1789 0

where the Teutonic Knights, who had taken control of the peninsula in 1254, administrated the amber trade. The Knights had purged the land of non-believers and, to commemorate the battle, built in 1255 an enormous castle on the banks of the River Pregel 'whose roots and cellars were thrust as far below the surface of the earth as its pinnacles scaled the heavens'.8 It would become known as Konigsberg Castle and its Knights' Hall, crowned with a tower, rose above a flagged limestone dungeon lit by burning torches where prisoners were suspended from iron trapezes. This was the castle where, 691 years later, Colonel Ivanyenko, of the Third Belorussian front, would find a Nazi Gift Book containing a reference to the arrival of the Amber Room.

Pre-war photograph of Konigsberg Castle

The Dominican Grunovii paid the Knight's Grand Master Albrecht, ten vierdings - equivalent to a small bag of gold pieces - for a 'gleaming amber - a half finger's length'. It took a team of men from the nearby Danzig Guild, working in shifts, six weeks to 'carve from it an image of John the Baptist as a child'. (In 1707 the same guild would send carvers to Berlin to assist architect Eosander in trying to assemble the original amber chamber.)

Grunovii rode home with the icon in his saddlebag, arriving at the Vatican only to find Rome preoccupied with Martin Luther, who attacked, among other things, the practice of Papal Indulgences. Grunovii sought out 'Cardinal John N', the Pope's private secretary, and showed him the amber carving. 'It was surely worth more than 2,000 florins [over fifteen pounds of gold] to Rome,' the Cardinal said, but he had bad news for Grunovii: Leo X was now gravely ill. In December 1521 the Pope died, along with the Dominican's bid for salvation.

The Protestant Reformation rapidly reached across the Baltic and in 1525 the Teutonic Knights' Grand Master Albrecht also converted to Lutheranism, detaching the religious order from Rome. This transformed the region into a ducal state, which it would remain until Frederick I was crowned 'King in Prussia' in Konigsberg Castle on 18 January 170L (a celebration that spurred Andreas Schliiter to begin building the original amber chamber).

We can see that P. J. Hartmann's book would have taught Kuchumov how the Amber Room captured the Nazis' ethos. Its transportation to Konigsberg was far from coincidental and its preservation in the ancient Teutonic castle would have been of paramount importance to German curators.

On the fifth morning in the National Library of Russia a packet from Moscow arrives for us. We are directed to the Bolshoi Reading Hall, where a waddling librarian escorts us to one of hundreds of identical worn wooden desks. We eagerly pull apart the bundle from the Leninka. Inside are photocopied pages and a small photograph of a melancholic figure with ice-white hair and jet-black eyebrows whose dark eye-sockets recede like metro tunnels. His serge suit is crumpled. His tie looks to be strangling him. His features are more Semitic than Slavic. The caption says that this is Professor Alexander Ivanovich Brusov and the picture was taken around the time of his mission to Konigsberg. We wonder why he looks so tired of life.

We leaf through the photocopies. They are extracts from Brusov's desk diary, seven days to a double page.9 We had not been sure what we would be sent from Moscow but this is better than we could have hoped for.

The desk diary began on 25 May 1945. It reveals that only a fortnight after the German surrender, while Europe was still in chaos, SovNarKom (the Council of People's Commissars), the highest authority in the Soviet Union, ordered Professor Alexander Brusov to find and bring back the Amber Room. It must have been of tremendous significance for the Soviet leadership for it to have acted so quickly.

Brusov was to be assisted by Ivan Pozharsky from the Moscow Theatre Library. The expedition leader was Comrade Tatyana Beliaeva of the Lenin Library. According to Leninka records, Comrade Beliaeva was chief of the 'inquiry apparatchiki'.