Treasure Grab

The Russian cultural establishment has, predictably, been outraged by assertions that the Soviets -- and not the Germans -- bear responsibility for the wartime loss of one of Russia's most priceless imperial treasures. After years of archival work and interviews, two British journalists have turned up persuasive circumstantial evidence that the luxurious amber panelling of a room in the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoye Selo was incinerated by riotous Red Army troops in 1945. This is perceived as blasphemy in Russia.

Catherine Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy base their conclusions on the findings of Alexander Bryusov, a professor of archaeology at Moscow's Historical Museum who was charged with locating and recovering the Amber Room in May 1945. Bryusov went to Koenigsberg, where the Germans had stowed the amber panels after stripping them from the Catherine Palace's walls four years earlier. But there the trail went cold, and Bryusov's interviews led him to believe that the room had been destroyed in the Red Army invasion of East Prussia the month before.

In 1946, the Soviet Union reopened the investigation under the leadership of Anatoly Kuchumov, the Alexander Palace curator who had made the decision to leave the Amber Room in the Catherine Palace on the eve of the German invasion. Kuchumov threw out Bryusov's findings, claiming that the Germans had spirited the Amber Room from Koenigsberg to an unknown location. Since then, authorities have searched for the Amber Room again and again in Kaliningrad and in East and West Germany, spending vast sums of money on false leads.

And yet, despite the fact that nothing has been found, the possibility that the culprit might have been the Red Army was never considered until now. Scott-Clark and Levy exploit that possibility to its fullest, charging the Soviet Council of People's Commissars with deliberately disregarding and covering up Bryusov's 1945 investigation in order to promulgate the hypothesis that the Amber Room had, in fact, survived. And current Russian officials have only fed the controversy with their unwavering adherence to the Soviet version of events; former Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi accused the authors of trying to rewrite history.

Walker & Company Today, the original panelling of the 18th-century Amber Room would be worth some $250 million.

Commissioned in 1701 by King Frederick I of Prussia for a palace in Berlin, the Amber Room was carved from tens of thousands of pieces of East Prussian amber scooped with nets from the Baltic Sea and considered to be 12 times more valuable than gold. Frederick I's successor, the Soldier King Frederick William I, had no use for budget-draining frivolities, and, knowing that Russia's Peter I loved amber, presented the room to him. Scott-Clark and Levy describe the trip to St. Petersburg, where the panels arrived chipped and broken in 1717, not to be assembled for another 26 years. Eventually, the Amber Room made its way to the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoye Selo. And there it remained for almost 200 years, dazzling visitors both before and after the Russian Revolution. Some considered it the eighth wonder of the world.

The order to evacuate Leningrad's treasures was issued by the city's executive committee on June 22, 1941. The Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union at 4:00 that morning, and it was calculated that they would reach Leningrad within weeks. Collections from the city's museums and palaces had to be saved. Scott-Clark and Levy movingly describe the curators packing around the clock under Kuchumov's command, leaning over the crates until their noses began to bleed. On June 30, 1941, Kuchumov set out for Siberia along with 17 train cars of precious objects, leaving the legendary Amber Room behind. Having deemed the panels too fragile to move, the curator had covered the walls with sheets of gauze and cotton padding, then redecorated the room with coarse hessian strips.

However, hopes that the Germans would think it just another empty room proved short-lived. Almost immediately after arriving on Sept. 17, a unit skilled in the looting of art removed the panels from the walls and took them to the Koenigsberg Castle in East Prussia, where they vanished for good when the city fell to the Red Army in April 1945. The Amber Room became one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of World War II, and was consistently pointed to by successive Soviet regimes (as well as at the Nuremberg trials) as a symbol of national loss. Its value is estimated at $250 million.

Scott-Clark and Levy's dogged detective work draws on 12 crates of new Russian files, including many letters and diaries; more than 18,000 pages of East German Stasi material that recently surfaced in Berlin; and interviews with more than 100 eyewitnesses in Germany and Russia. All their research led them to the conclusion that, while the Nazis did loot the Amber Room in 1941, the Red Army accidentally destroyed it after the fall of Koenigsberg four years later.

If the authors' conclusions are correct, they constitute a severe embarrassment for the Russian government, which is currently lobbying to have its own debts to the former East Germany dropped on the grounds that Germany owes Russia far more. The Russians are also holding out on returning to Germany an unknown number of art objects, including the Trojan gold now at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, and 346 drawings from the Bremen Kunsthalle. Meanwhile, on May 31, 2003, Russian President Vladimir Putin inaugurated a reconstructed Amber Room in the Catherine Palace, built with a total of $6 million apiece from Germany and Russia.

In the midst of unravelling the truth, Scott-Clark and Levy intersperse their efforts with informative pages on the history of amber, revealing insights into the deviant megalomania of the KGB and Stasi, and descriptions of the frustrating bureaucracy that persists in Russia's libraries and archives. This rounds out the corners of the story they tell, though the haphazard organization makes for a repetitive, and often tedious, read.

Scott-Clark and Levy go further than ever before in describing the Soviet Union's cover-up of the probable true fate of the Amber Room; however, they do not prove their argument incontrovertibly, and treasure hunters will continue their search. Even if their proof were undeniable, it seems more than likely the Russians would find a way of putting the Germans to blame. For, as Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the State Hermitage Museum, said when asked about the book's conclusions, "Most importantly, the destruction of the Amber Room during the Second World War is the fault of the people who started the war."

Nina Lobanov-Rostovsky is a freelance writer and lecturer living in London.