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The Soviet Union that Kuchumov returned to would soon become a quagmire. On 31 August 1948 Stalin's protege Zhdanov dropped dead, starting a ferocious three-way fight between Georgy Malenkov, Deputy Prime Minister, Lavrenty Beria, Minister for Internal Affairs, and Viktor Abakumov, the Minister for State Security and former head of SMERSH. The instability also consumed the cultural establishment.

Sergei Eisenstein's rushes for Ivan the Terrible Part II (the Tsar was Stalin's role model) were denounced and his new work was suppressed. Shostakovich was banned from teaching at the Leningrad and Moscow conservatories. Prokofiev, who had willingly abandoned a life in America for Mother Russia, now hid in his dacha, destroying anything that he owned from those foreign times. Polina Molotov, the Jewish wife of Stalin's foreign minister, was accused of being a Zionist plotter who intended to establish 'California on the Crimea'. Her husband left her on Stalin's orders and the following year she was renamed Object No. 12 and exiled to Kustanai oblast in northern Kazakhstan.12

The slightest hint of disloyalty could end one's career. In 1946 Leningrad writers Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova were both expelled from the Writer's Union. Zoshchenko's manuscripts and letters were later thrown into a rubbish skip by workmen clearing his apartment.13

Those things that were deemed quintessentially Russian were feted and, although he had struggled to find time to search for the Amber Room in Berlin, Kuchumov could not afford to give up on it now. The final paper in the file before us reveals how the curator exploited his contacts in the Red Army to revive the search for the treasure. It is a letter from someone called Simeon Pavlovich Kazakhov, who wrote to the curator:

Before my visit to Zorin, they had heard nothing from you. But they listened to me very well and the affair has now begun. Tomorrow I will go to the general commander with a report and inevitably they will send the doctor to Kaliningrad along with someone else to investigate this place, because either he really did forget or he is pretending he cannot remember.

The future destiny of the Amber Room will proceed in ways that I just don't know. We will wait for the resolutions of the Lord God, but not the one in the heavens, the one who lives on earth. I am certain there will be good results to this affair. I long to return to my native Motherland. That is my only wish. I shake your hand, yours in solidarity, Comrade Kazakhov.

The small blue envelope is postmarked '19 October 1949, Poland, Post Dept No. 40223' and the stationery is that which the Red Army issued to its soldiers in the field. There is a stamp from the military censor that confirms this letter came from an army camp. And there is a postscript. 'Don't write letters to me here. Send them to Leningrad.'14

It is clear that Kuchumov was engaged in an ongoing correspondence with Soldier Kazakhov concerning the Amber Room, but frustratingly there are no other references to him in the literature archive index. We have no idea who 'the doctor' was or what 'place' in Kaliningrad they were referring to. Whatever the 'the doctor' claimed to know was obviously connected with the Amber Room and was of such significance that special arrangements were being made to send him to the Baltic city. Our translator notes that in 1949 the phrase 'Lord God on earth' could only have been a reference to the Soviet secret services or Stalin himself. The Kremlin was closely connected with the whole enterprise.

We make a copy of the letter.

Alexandra Vasilevna, the literature archive director, has advised us that she intends to carry out an important audit of the Anatoly Kuchumov papers so they will not be made available to readers again for at least six months. We cannot afford to sit around in St Petersburg doing nothing. We have to find another route. We need to trace Kuchumov's contemporaries from 1949 or at least someone