The Amber Room Read online

  And summons the crows, and the crows come flying.5

  Many of those who worked in Leningrad's cultural institutions were descended from the nobility (as they were the only ones who had had access to further education and travel) and they also came under scrutiny. The Black Crows flew through Leningrad's museums, whisking away so many curators that the NKVD holding centre spilled out into the corridors. 'It was very, very full and people were sleeping on the mattresses on the floor. I couldn't guess what I had been arrested for,' wrote curator Boris Piotrovksy, a future director of the Hermitage. I had to occupy a place under someone's bed.'6 Piotrovsky was released but twelve others were shot: Orientalists (possible double agents and/or Armenian nationalists), coin collectors (a Germanic passion), armament historians (obviously capable of rallying a mob) and anyone who had ever published abroad (disloyal/spy/saboteur).7

  It was in the wake of Karlik's purges that relatively inexperienced curators like Kuchumov, young men from the working and peasant classes, rose quickly. But who from the old school was left to assist the country boy in June 1941?

  Kedrinsky rustles in his desk. 'My manuscript,' he declares, slapping down a pile of papers. He reaches for a cigarette and pushes his fishbowl glasses back up the greasy bridge of his nose. '"All of the palace workers had been dismissed on 22 June apart from the most trusted, and that evening, after the crowds had departed, Kuchumov went with his team to the reserve halls of the Catherine Palace,"' Kedrinsky reads aloud. '"As he had been instructed, Kuchumov ripped the seals from the doors, placed there by the Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Inside he found piles of boxes and wadding, waterproof canvas and sawdust, with which to begin to pack the palace treasures."'

  However, none of the boxes fitted the exhibits they were supposed to house and too few of them had been set aside. Just like the lists drawn up in 1936, this task had also been poorly carried out.

  Kedrinsky sets aside his manuscript and shows us a party report written in 1941. 'It is necessary to make hundreds of new boxes,' an unnamed official stated. 'There is insufficient wadding. No packing materials. And the storeroom chosen for the sealed crates is flooded and too narrow.' And time spent remaking boxes and worrying over packing material would lead to rash decisions later.8

  Kedrinsky begins to read another extract from Kuchumov's diary:

  'June 22. Flown through the halls this evening, packing what we can.

  'June 23. After we packed what was on the 1936 list I asked the director if we could pack more. "Do what you can," Comrade Ladukhin told me. And so we have done what we can. We never stop. We do not stop even at dawn. Few electric lights are needed; it is light all night. We will carry on working.

  'June 24. Not stopped for forty-eight hours. Comrades having nosebleeds from leaning over the packing crates. Run out of boxes and paper. Cutting grass and using the fresh hay. Had to use the tsarinas' dress trunks and their clothes to wrap up our treasures.'

  Curators pack up Leningrad's palaces after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941

  Kedrinsky hands us a summary report submitted by Kuchumov to the NKVD:

  'Vice-director (science), the directors of the palaces, and three museum workers, including a wallpaper hanger and two carpenters, have supervised the first stage of the evacuation. Miniatures, Gobelins, Sevres, Meissen, gold and silver, paintings and books, ivory. Passports have been made for every crate - inventories written up by palace scholars. To date more than 900 items are now in fifty-two boxes, each one sealed with black canvas.'

  All were secretly taken to the Armoury, where each box was logged in by a member of the People's Commissar of Internal Acts. The entrance was sealed and a sentry posted.9

  Kedrinsky lights another cigarette, lingering over the smoke. 'Listen to this, from Kuchumov's diary: "What should we do with Amber Room? What can we do? I sent for Comrade V. A. Alspector, the specialist from the palace restoration department, and gave him instructions to prepare the Amber Room for evacuation."' Kedrinsky savours the moment before reading on. '"Amber panels are to be tightly fastened with cigarette papers on a special glue solution."'

  Since the eighteenth century the amber panels had been attached on to wooden backing boards and now would have to be pasted over with cigarette rolling papers to prevent the brittle resin from splintering when Kuchumov attempted to prise the amber free from the boards.

  Kedrinsky hesitates and then continues: '"A trial moving of one of the panels has resulted in disaster. The amber facing has come off the mount and shattered completely. We cannot move the Amber Room. We dare not move it. What are we to do?"'

  The old comrade rises from his desk, rifling through pages: 'References, references, archival references, all recorded by Anatoly Mikhailovich Kuchumov. That's all that's left - nothing more, nothing less - in this report.'

  The Prussian sculptor Andreas Schliiter waited almost a lifetime to achieve greatness.10 He underwent years of training with some of the most distinguished master craftsmen of his time. Guild records show that he was apprenticed in Warsaw and in Danzig (now Gdansk) to amber and ivory cutters. But it was not until 1694, when he was over fifty years old, that Schliiter received a summons from the Hohenzollerns in Berlin to work at the court of Prussian Elector Frederick III.11

  Schliiter's first creations were accomplished, formal pieces: a bronze of the Elector himself and a statue of the Elector's late father, Frederick William, sitting astride his horse. Frederick William had overhauled Prussia's financial systems, uniting fractious ducal states as part of his campaign to transform Prussia into a fully fledged kingdom. His son was now attempting to finish the job and to be recognized by European powers as a monarch in his own right.

  Then in 1695 Andreas Schliiter had some luck. Arnold Nering, the Elector's Superintendent of Building, died unexpectedly and the sculptor was asked to participate in Frederick Ill's plans to transform Berlin into a city of parks and palaces more suited to a king. Schliiter began sculpting the exterior of the Zeughaus (Arsenal) and the Royal Palace.

  The Elector's second wife, Sophie Charlotte (the great-grandaughter of James I of England), admired Schliiter's designs. Sophie Charlotte's marriage, arranged when she was sixteen, was largely a political affair and she withdrew from the bombastic Prussian court, investing her passion in dance and literature. Chamber music filled her time. 'It is a loyal friend,' she wrote to Agostino Steffani, director of the Hanover Opera. 'It does not let you down or deceive you; it is not a traitor and it is never cruel. No, it gives you all the charms and delights of heaven, whereas friends are indifferent or deceitful and loved ones ungrateful.'12

  Sophie Charlotte wanted Berlin to ring with music and its drawing rooms to be nourished by intelligent conversation. Her palaces were to be intimate, divided into small but elaborate salons decorated with muted bronze and burnished gold. It was Charlottenburg, a maison de plaisance and the Prussian equivalent of Tsarskoye Selo, that was to be the expression of these ideas. In 1696 Sophie Charlotte asked Schliiter to begin working on the interior designs of the building.

  However, in 1699 Johan Friedrich d'Eosander, a brilliant Swedish architect and Sophie Charlotte's favourite, returned to Berlin from study leave and took over the Charlottenburg project. Schliiter was so rankled at being usurped by a man twenty-five years his junior that he abandoned Charlottenburg and reverted to the Royal Palace renovations. He was determined to create something eye-catching, lavish and innovative - rooms embellished with luxurious and novel materials: rare minerals, wood and fabrics. However, the idea for the Royal Palace's most radical feature, the one that he hoped would outshine the work of Sophie Charlotte's favourite, would come to him only by accident.

  Searching the cellar stores of the Royal Palace for raw materials, Schliiter found dozens of chests packed with nuggets of golden resin that he recognized from his days in Poland. It was East Prussian amber, scooped from the Baltic Sea, a substance whose trade was controlled by the Hohenzollerns. More than 40 million years ago thi
s region had been part of Fennoscandia, a vast forest that stretched from the Norwegian coast to the Caspian Sea. For centuries this humid, coniferous jungle, teeming with reptile and insect life, exuded hundreds of millions of droplets of resin on to the heavy clay floor, trapping countless frozen moments: a fly touching down on to a branch, the brush of a lizard's skin against it. Then the landmasses separated, ice sheets froze and thawed, flooding the Baltic, creating seas and inland lagoons, fossilizing and scattering the Gold of the North, throwing it towards the spits of land that would later be home to the cities of Danzig, Konigsberg and Memel.13

  Because of the primitive methods used to collect amber - it was fished from the Baltic Sea by men wielding giant nets - it was exorbitantly expensive and used almost exclusively to create small decorative or devotional objects like altar sets, cabinets and rosaries. However, in this cellar lay more amber than Schliiter had ever seen before.

  Schliiter would have appreciated that Baltic amber had a particular resonance for Prussian aristocrats. In 168E the Great Elector Frederick William had used amber to forge diplomatic ties with Russia, sending Fedor III in Moscow a throne made from the resin that was proclaimed by the tsar to be 'the greatest curiosity in the world'. When reports reached Prussia the following year that Fedor was sick, Frederick William sent more amber to nine-year-old Grand Duke Peter, who spies told him was to be the tsar's successor. An amber mirror was dispatched, accompanied by a deal: access to strategic, unfrozen Baltic ports in exchange for Russia's support for Prussia's claim to a crown.14

  In the cellar, Andreas Schliiter must have conceived his idea. There was enough amber here to panel an entire chamber. His plan crystallized on 18 January 1701, when Frederick was at last crowned 'King in Prussia' at Konigsberg Castle, with Queen Sophie Charlotte at his side, resplendent in amber jewellery. The monarch had consciously chosen the historic capital of his forefathers on the Baltic coast and crown jewels fished from the Baltic Sea. Schliiter immediately sent to Copenhagen for a carver.

  Gottfried Wolfram, master craftsman to the Danish court, was an expert in fashioning ornate miniatures from ivory and was captivated by Schliiter's audacious idea. The workshops in Copenhagen were capable of producing only thirty amber pieces a year and all of them were small icons or jewellery.15 To manufacture an entire chamber would require hundreds of thousands of slivers that would, somehow, have to be laced together like an enormous jigsaw puzzle. New thinking was required. Gottfried Wolfram arrived in Berlin in April 1701 with a reference from King Frederick IV of Denmark.16 He would need to work quickly. Eosander's influence was growing. Sophie Charlotte wrote to her mother about the young architect on 3 May 1702, describing him as 'the oracle as regards all... building affairs'.17

  Wolfram painstakingly fashioned palm-sized leaves of amber, gently heating them to a temperature of between 140°C and 200°C, using a new technique developed by Christian Porschin of the Konigsberg Guild, who was experimenting with manufacturing amber sunglasses.18 Any hotter and the amber would catch light and burn. The moulded pieces, dipped into heated water infused with honey, linseed and cognac, to give a subtle tincture to the resin, were set to harden on cooling racks before being polished and slotted into place on a paper scheme. Wolfram joined the pieces with gum refined from the acacia tree, the finished panels resembling stained-glass windows. Backed by feather-thin gold or silver leaves and wooden boards, these amber walls (comprising a dozen large panels twelve feet high, ten panels just over three feet high and twenty-four sections of amber skirting board) would come alive in candlelight.19

  Construction went well, but soon the inspiration behind it fell sick. Sophie Charlotte contracted pneumonia during a journey to Hanover for the carnival of January 1705. 'Don't grieve for me, for I am about to satisfy my curiosity about things that even Leibniz was never able to explain - space, the infinite, being and nothingness - and for my husband, the King, I am about to provide a funeral-spectacle that will give him a new opportunity to display his pomposity and splendour!' she wrote, before succumbing to her condition on 1 February, aged thirty-seven.20

  In 1707 Schliiter's career also suddenly expired when another piece of ambitious engineering, a 325-foot tower he had designed for the Berlin Mint, collapsed. An investigation concluded that he had mistakenly built the tower on a sandbank. The sixty-three-year-old was exiled from court. He made his way to Russia, where he would assist in the building of the new St Petersburg - on a marsh.21 In Berlin, court favourite Eosander took over the amber chamber project and dismissed master carver Gottfried Wolfram, accusing him of overcharging and lingering unnecessarily. In his place Ernst Schacht and Gottfried Turau, carvers from Danzig (the latter a master trained at the ancient Danzig Guild), were hired.

  When Wolfram demanded compensation and refused to hand over the amber pieces, Eosander broke into his workshop and seized the partially completed frames, panels and lozenges. Wolfram hired a lawyer and sued Eosander, who in turn had him jailed.

  When Wolfram was finally released he was exiled. His last and most passionate appeal to King Frederick I coincided with the death of the monarch on 25 February 1713. Frederick William I, who succeeded his father, had no time for the budget-draining frivolities of the salon or the prohibitively expensive amber chamber. The Soldier King was more interested in creating a military super-state than a folly that came attached to an irritating legal battle. Eosander was sacked, as were amber masters Schacht and Turau, who had been unable to solve Wolfram's cryptic amber puzzle that still lay in pieces, consigned to the cellars of the Zeughaus.22

  Anatoly Kuchumov, the Soviet guardian of the Amber Room, had worked hard to compile this piece of German history. His notes, shown to us by Kedrinsky, reveal that five scholars assisted him through 1940 and 194 L (continuing their work even during the period of the Leningrad palace evacuations): an academic from the Union of Scientific Research and Restoration, one from the Hermitage, two from the Central State Historical Archive, including the head of the reading hall, and a Soviet student stationed abroad who scoured Germany for material to send home.23

  Reading these notes, compiled in 1942, it is clear that Kuchumov was attempting to understand the mechanics used by Wolfram in constructing his amber panels. Kuchumov's references identified a cluster of files that recorded how, in 1716, Tsar Peter I set off for France via Germany, where he held an unscheduled meeting with Frederick William I, during which they discussed the Amber Room. Tsar Peter's court diary stated: 'In Habelberg their majesties saw each other and were together from 13 to 17 November, where they assured each other of their friendship and had some discussions for the use of both majesties.'24 Etiquette dictated an exchange of gifts and yet both monarchs were unprepared. Thrifty King Frederick William's first consideration was cost, a fact confirmed by a Russian spy working in his court:

  The King has assigned 6,000 talers for the meeting. But the financial ministry has been told that they should use this money so that the King can satisfy the expenditure of travelling from Wesel to Memel [today Klaipeda in Lithuania]. He ordered that the Tsar should be especially well looked after in Berlin but stated that he would not give a pfennig more for this occasion. 'You must tell all the world around I have paid 30-40,000 talers for meeting Peter the Great,' he added.25

  King Frederick William decided to present the tsar with two of his father's lavish commissions that were of no interest to him. One was a once-famous yacht Liburnika, and the Russian court diary showed that the tsar was delighted with it, unaware that it was in such a parlous state that his crew would nearly drown when sailing it from Hamburg. The Liburnika eventually limped into Copenhagen, where it was repaired, only to be refitted for a second time when it at last arrived in St Petersburg in 1718. (According to the court records, it was renamed the Corona and did not leave the Neva embankment until it was towed to the naval junkyard in 1741.26 )

  The second money-saving idea was the Amber Room. King Frederick William had been told of Tsar Peter's love for amber. In 1696,
one year after Peter I had come to the Russian throne, the twenty-four-year-old had embarked on a secret tour of Europe. Assuming the alias of 'Sergeant Petr Mikhailov', he had travelled the Swedish Baltic, Poland and Prussia. In Konigsberg, in East Prussia, 'Sergeant Petr Mikhailov' had been mesmerized by amber, assailed by the city's quacks, who touted it as a cure for everything from rheumatism, lung disease and toothache, to throat infections and the evil eye. 'Sergeant Petr Mikhailov' had even bought a copy of P. J. Hartmann's Succini Prussia, the authoritative amber treatise of the day.

  Anatoly Kuchumov also rooted out an article written in 1877 by the head of the Moscow Archive of Foreign Affairs that confirmed how the unfinished amber chamber was dispatched to Peter the Great in 1716. A team of amber masters were hired by King Frederick William I to pack Wolfram's puzzle into eighteen crates that were each covered with flannel.27 They were then wrapped in straw and waxed waterproof cotton before being loaded on to eight carts that were to be maintained by an engineer and guarded by a watchman. The Russians appointed Count Alexander Golovkin, a close friend of the tsar, to oversee the operation.

  The amber cargo set off for St Petersburg via Konigsberg, the capital of East Prussia. Such was the poor condition of the road that the carts had to be rebuilt. Leather was stitched around the crates as rain had destroyed the waxed cotton. The amber caravan's next destination was Memel. It arrived six weeks later, the convoy having travelled at a snail's pace to ensure that no further damage was caused by potholes. When the gift eventually reached St Petersburg the entire operation would have cost the miserly Prussian king only 205 talers.