• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

'When we were liberated the Red Army came to escort us back. Our brave soldiers. We walked or sat on carts pulled by heavy horses. The road was wide and deep with mud. We went through a big German city. I think it was Konigsberg. We were then in Smolensk and my mother said "This is your city," although I could see no city. But even then we were elated. Eventually we arrived at the village and saw that it too had gone. Still we got down on to our hands and knees and dug in the mud, proud of the Motherland, happy as we excavated holes. Over them we threw tin and wood, pits that became our temporary homes. But then the NKVD came.'

In the post-war Soviet Union there would be no room for anyone exposed to a foreign ideology that could unsettle the programme. By the summer of 1945 Stalin had rounded up Soviet citizens who had been prisoners of war in Germany, 126,000 of them, like those in Albina's village, who were now damned as 'capitulators'.2

Bolshoi Albina says, 'When we thought we could be no happier, living deep inside the Soviet earth, our friends and neighbours began to disappear. "Don't say you were captured," the whisper went. "Don't ever let the NKVD know that you were a prisoner of the Germans."'

Despite the purges, at the end of the war the vast majority of Soviet citizens felt deeply patriotic, and this sense of nationhood would become a valuable tool. In 1946 Andrei Zhdanov, leader of the Leningrad Communist Party, proposed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) a new theme, 'no servility before the West'.3 Emancipation meant recouping everything Soviet. Victory over the Hitlerites was now the Great Patriotic War, in which Soviet losses and the ability to endure were brought to the fore: the battle of Stalingrad, the 900 days of siege, the desecration and rebuilding of the Leningrad palaces. All that was Russian had to be found, brought back, reconstructed and celebrated. Every treasure looted had to be tracked down and returned to its rightful place, and the world was to be advised of these Soviet losses and triumphs through the new Communist Information Bureau (CominformJ, established by Zhdanov in 1947.

We walk to the metro and Bolshoi Albina links arms with us as we dodge between speeding marshrutkis. 'It was when I began working at the palaces that I learned how to be proud of my country. Anatoly Mikhailovich, with his ceaseless searching for looted treasure, made sure of that.'

Our Friend the Professor calls. The literature archive has found the missing Anatoly Kuchumov file we requested several weeks ago and we have been given permission to come and read it, as a special favour from the director. When we open it the next morning we find a report entitled 'Document Defending the Character of Mikryukov'. The document is stamped 31 October 1945 and was compiled by the colleagues of Ivan Mikryukov, director of Pavlovsk, who had been arrested on suspicion of being 'anti-political'.4

It states, in his defence, that he led the packing of treasures at Pavlovsk Palace in the late summer of 1941, after the first shipments had left with Kuchumov for Novosibirsk. Like Kuchumov, Mikryukov had 'improvised wadding and containers, salvaging curtains and linen to bulk out cases that were sewn together from old sheets and carpets, saving 42,000 treasures valued at an estimated 1.5 billion roubles'. How could Mikryukov be anything other than a patriot? Many risked their liberty to sign this document, but on the reverse is stamped the verdict: attempted to 'pack too early', a defeatist. The sentence: 'komandirovat to Kazakhstan'. The official wording suggests a business trip to the Central Asian state, but Mikryukov never returned.

Surprisingly, Kuchumov's name was not attached to this petition to save Mikryukov and yet he preserved the document for many decades. Within six months of the defence document being submitted to the Leningrad authorities, Kuchumov was on his way to Konigsberg,