The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [47]
4
We slip-slide through the melting snow along the darkening Dvortsovaya Embankment that runs beside St Petersburg's River Neva. 'Our twentieth century was so ugly,' Our Friend the Professor from Leningrad University had repeatedly complained, as we forced her to revisit the Soviet Union so that we could investigate the Amber Room mystery. 'We had to live through the Stalin times and we now choose to forget them. Instead we study Russia's nineteenth century, an epoch of innovation and elegance, the time of our Grand Duke Vladimir. You must see this side of our history too. I promise it won't be a waste of your time.'
She has been helping us for many weeks and so we are here for her tonight, outside No. 26, a Florentine-style palazzo built by Grand Duke Vladimir for 1 million roubles. He constructed it in 1865 on a site facing the Peter Paul Cathedral that was originally owned by the rear-admiral of Peter the Great's rowing fleet. The professor presents us with a book she has written about this palace. Later we will meet her publisher, she says.
Grand Duke Vladimir, third son of Tsar Alexander II, was Commander of the City Guard and President of the Academy of Arts, the professor says, as she climbs the Italian marble staircase writhing with mermaids and cherubs, its handrail upholstered in purple velvet. 'Our great operatic bass Shaliapin and even Rachmaninov came here to dine,' she says, pulling open the door into a hall of oak panelling painted with Russian fairy tales. Leading us through the state rooms towards the boudoir of Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, she throws back another door to reveal a Moorish antechamber with an inlaid cupola.
The professor guides us along a corridor. 'The Grand Duke's exiled son proclaimed himself Russian Emperor Cyril I in August 1924, having convinced himself that the stories of the execution of the Romanovs in Ekaterinburg were true,' she says. 'This vacated palace was handed over to Soviet researchers and thinkers on the request of Maxim Gorky, becoming our House of Scientists.'
There is no time to linger. We are here to attend a meeting of the Club of Scholars of the Russian Academy of Science in honour of a curator from Pavlovsk Palace who died last year. Although we dare not say this to the professor, we hope it won't take too long. 'The people you will meet tonight live, like me, for Russian history. Come,' she says, opening a plain door to what must have been the staff quarters.
Men and women, young and old, in pressed suits with frayed cuffs, their skin translucent, are crammed beside a grand piano that is not needed tonight but fits nowhere else. The room is filled with locksmiths, clock-smiths, painters and hangers, sculptors and carvers, gilders and seamstresses, specialists in Meissen, miniatures and Sevres, all of them earning no more than twenty dollars a month at Pavlovsk or the Catherine Palace, where they work as curators.
The gathering is called to order and a sturdy woman stands and begins to speak. 'Albina Vasiliava,' the professor whispers. 'Bolshoi Albina we call her. Porcelain curator at Pavlovsk. Great friend of Anatoly Kuchumov.'
Albina delivers a tribute to her recently deceased colleague, who worked for forty-six years in the sculpture department of Pavlovsk. The audience listens reverently to the story of how this curator in 1941 saved palace statues from the Nazis by burying them so deeply that, though the Germans dug, they never discovered them. And then, when the park was liberated in 1944, the curator came back and disinterred every one of them, even though the land was mined, recording the salvage operation in photographs.
'Some sculptures were broken in more than seven places,' Bolshoi Albina