The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [51]
She spins her chair round to watch the rain falling through a portholelike window. 'We still have to get used to letting people in. To this openness, as you would call it. You are the first Angliyski I have ever met. Do you know that the only time I talked with an American was last year? At a social function at his embassy. I watched and I listened. He told me we were soulful, long-suffering, our leaders corrupt.' She tuts and shakes her head. 'They come here like children, quoting Orwell: "Four legs good. Two legs bad."' The director is asking for our understanding before advising us of the archive fees. But is there anything worth buying?
Alexandra Vasilevna begins to calculate, her pink nails tapping on a row of numbers she scribbles on a pad. 'All files will have to hurdle a vetting procedure'. Well, at least there are files. 'Their contents are to be assessed by a censor who will decide what is and is not pertinent. You may come in for one day next week,' the director rules cheerily. In Russia it is never today. And even though she has given us a day pass into the reading room, we are not sure what we have been granted access to.
The St Petersburg Literature Archive reading room
The following Wednesday the frothy guard barely fizzes as we enter. She knows we know the way. The reading room on the second floor is disappointing, in its ordinariness, with formica-topped tables and red kitchenette chairs. Unloved cheese plants clutter the windowsill. Infused with tobacco smoke, with gloss mocha walls, the room feels like we are in a railway waiting hall. The only other notable feature is Vitalia Petrovna, the buck-toothed superintendent, who is sporting a pair of mohair leg-warmers.
But on our desk is a file wrapped in ribbon. The file contains a batch of Kuchumov's private papers. Our names are the only ones written in the readers' record that has been stuck inside the folder so recently that the spittle to moisten the glue is still damp. Not even Kedrinsky has seen these documents. We are consigned to a far corner with the virgin file. Our Friend the Professor has agreed to translate for us and we begin to read.
A form printed on sugar paper:
Order 88, 1 March 1946, Kuchumov, Anatoly Mikhailovich, former curator of Amber Room and Chief of Central Stores, Leningrad, is sent on komandirovat from 3 March to Moscow, for several questions in connection with searching for museum treasures. Expenses to be paid by GA [General Administration], State Historical Museum.
The form is stamped: Staff Department, Catherine Palace. At the bottom someone has written, 'Kuchumov is to say he is on vacation.'2
Komandirovat is 'to be sent on a business trip' and in Soviet times it was a regular feature of working life, but citizens sent on these routine exchanges were never normally instructed to assume a cover story, telling friends and colleagues they were on holiday. This first document seems to confirm what Voronova told us. Anatoly Kuchumov had embarked on a clandestine state-sanctioned mission in 1946.
A letter is attached to the komandirovat form, written by the Soviet Ministry of Culture to the Leningrad authorities: 'L March 1946, ref 04-18, to LenGorlsPolKom. Kuchumov, Anatoly Mikhailovich, komandirovat to Moscow on orders of SovNarKom. Komandirovat also for Tronchinsky, Stanislav Valerianovich. Mission status: Secret.'3
The document confirmed that SovNarKom, one of the highest authorities in the Russian Federation, ordered Kuchumov's mission. He was to be accompanied by Stanislav Tronchinsky, who, according to museum workers at the House of Scientists, was a senior cultural bureaucrat stationed in Leningrad. They had met during the evacuation of the palaces in the summer of 1941 and corresponded throughout the war: Kuchumov in Novosibirsk and Tronchinsky in Leninsk-Kuznetsky, in the foothills of the Alatay Mountains.
The next documents are notes, an impromptu diary written