The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [9]
Empress Elizabeth, Peter's daughter, inherited the manor in 1752, ordering her Italian architect, Bartolomeo Rastrelli, to transform it into a Baroque imperial summer residence. A 'wide, light-blue ribbon, a palace with snow-white columns', rose above the birch, maple and cherries.1 The exterior of the Catherine Palace was gilded with 220 pounds of gold and its interior was a jewelled chain of linked halls, salon opening into salon, white, then crimson, green and then amber, to create the golden enfilades.
Soon other palaces sprang up around it and the suburb became known as Tsarskoye Selo, the Tsar's Village. In the 1770S, the new Empress, Catherine the Great, ordered her Scottish architect, Charles Cameron, to remodel the Catherine Palace in a Classical style. It was here that she entertained her legion of lovers, the last being twenty-five-year-old Count Platon Zubov, whose name still graces the ground floor of the southern wing.
The adjacent hall, which we can see through the old comrade's window, became the Imperial Lyceum, a school that would in 1811 enrol the twelve-year-old Alexander Pushkin, who later immortalized the town: 'Whatever partings destiny may bring, whatever fortunes fate may have in hand, we're still the same; the world an alien thing, and Tsarskoye Selo our Fatherland.'2
The Catherine Palace
From the rooms of the Alexander Palace, behind us, Tsar Nicholas II unsuccessfully petitioned 'Cousin Bertie' in England for help before being taken to Ekaterinburg where his bloodline ended in a dank cellar. Below us, in the Great Courtyard, the Cossacks of Alexander Kerensky surrendered to the Russian people in October 1917 bringing down the Russian Provisional Government and handing power to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. At the first opportunity, the great-coated heroes of the Revolution flocked in to jockey for a peek at the decadent world of the aristocrats.
And here too, in 1952, arrived the old comrade before us, Alexander Alexandrevich Kedrinsky: one of the Soviet Union's most feted architects; fellow of the hallowed Russian Academy of Arts; winner of the Lenin Prize; his life's work commended by LenGorSoviet (the former city council); his achievements recognized by general secretaries, premiers and presidents - Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Chernomyrdin, Yeltsin and Putin.
But difficult as it has been to reach Kedrinsky (and there have been many meetings in London and St Petersburg since we began researching the Amber Room story in September 2001 and as many letters, faxes and phone calls to emigres and functionaries, distant voices lost in a storm of static), we have an even more delicate task ahead of us: telling Kedrinsky that it is not him we have come all this way to see.
We are searching for another elderly Russian curator who once cared for his country's most loved treasure: Anatoly Kuchumov, the Amber Room's last guardian and one of Comrade Kedrinsky's oldest colleagues. The men had worked together for more than forty years. But Kuchumov's telephone is disconnected and there is no one who remembers him at the state retirement home on the outskirts of Tsarskoye Selo.
Kedrinsky is distracted. 'There is a new order at the court, you know,' he says, rising to shut the door. 'Bardovskaya will cut off my head if I utter one word to you.' Bardovskaya? The name means nothing to us but we do not challenge him. Elderly cadre like Kedrinsky are sticklers for formality and instead we endure a long silence. It is stifling in his cavernous studio. The centralized heating system has yet to experience perestroika. Kedrinsky sharpens his pencil the old-fashioned way - with long assured strokes of a knife. Caviar tins of paint-wash that resemble various shades of snow-melt litter his desk, as do his holy triptych: a disposable lighter, an ashtray and a black and gold packet of Peter I, the city's newest cigarette brand.
Alexander Kedrinsky