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By Root 1747 0

being evacuated he was not referring to the Amber Room but to the Albertus-University's scientific amber collection. It was the most famous in the world. Brusov had located part of it, tens of thousands of pieces, and, judging by the communique he had sent to Moscow, he regarded it as the crowning achievement of his mission. 'Claims he found nearly all of the amber collection. Catalogued it. Sent everything to Moscow. Has witnesses,' Kuchumov wrote. 'Why, then, did this collection never turn up in Moscow?'

Brusov became agitated. Why was he being criticized given that he had found so much while enduring such appalling conditions? Was he being accused of theft, or lying, or treason? What had they found, the professor demanded, of Tronchinsky and Kuchumov? Nothing, they said, as they left.

This is what they wrote to SovNarKom in Moscow:

The conclusion is self-evident. The Amber Room was kept and hidden in safety in a place that was without doubt familiar to Rohde and the version he told [Brusov] about the destruction of the Amber Room in the fire in the Knights' Hall distracted the attention of the Beliaeva/Brusov commission from future searches.

The mistake of Professor Brusov was that he believed easily the words of Rohde, taking as truth the words of this museum co-worker, forgetting that he was dealing with a Nazi fanatic. Brusov didn't know the Amber Room or details of its decoration, so he couldn't check the veracity of Rohde's words by digging in the area where the fire occurred and so he couldn't tell truth from fiction. The most direct and best way to know the location of the Amber Room has been lost to us - Dr Alfred Rohde - but we now have the opportunity to gather additional information from former workers of the Konigsberg Castle Museum.19

Kuchumov submitted a list of names of those he wished to interrogate to SovNarKom and applied for a special permit to travel to Berlin.

5

After lunch at Kolobok restaurant, another file is waiting for us at the literature archive, an enticing box three times the size of the previous file. No one looks up as we scrape our chairs across the parquet floor, even though the reading room is bustling with men and women in white dustcoats. All of them are preoccupied, armed with small pencil erasers, which they feverishly apply to sections of files, as if rubbing out entire episodes from history.

We spring open the box and pick through the contents, but there is no response from Moscow to Kuchumov's list of German eyewitnesses to interrogate or a reaction to his taking apart of Brusov. No instructions or orders. Only greetings cards.1

We double-check the readers' record slip. Our names are freshly inked on it. But when we examine the file number, we see that it is not the one we have requested. The only sign of Vitalia Petrovna, the reading-room supervisor, is a lukewarm cup of tea and a trail of biscuit crumbs across her desk. So we walk down past the photographs of Makarova, Granin and Vokraniv to the director's office, where we find Alexandra Vasilevna Istomina studying the rain falling outside her window.

'We must assess what is pertinent to your research. We have decided that certain files are extraneous.' Alexandra Vasilevna smiles weakly. 'Well, of course you may resubmit your application. Errors are sometimes made. Decisions faulty. I can't vouch for all of my staff. We are dreadfully overworked,.' We nod and she fumbles under the desk. A bell rings in the corridor. Vitalia Petrovna, pops her head around the door, wiping her mouth, only to be hit by a raging gust of Russian invective.

Alexandra Vasilevna spins back to us on her chair's silky castors: 'It takes two days to locate a new file normally. The archive for which I am responsible is vast. There are several million files to pick through.' She motions up to the rafters and we nod appreciatively. 'But if you pay double rate, yes, pay a double rate, you can make an emergency submission. If I recall, an emergency submission comes back in only twenty-four hours. Is that right, Vitalia Petrovna? Come