http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3738593.stmA mystery surrounding the whereabouts of one of the world's greatest works of art, Peter the Great's Amber Room, may have been solved.
It had been thought that the treasure - erected at a palace near St Petersburg in the mid-18th century - was stolen by the Nazis on invading the Soviet Union.
But new evidence suggests that the Amber Room may have been destroyed by the Russians themselves.
The revelation is made in previously unpublished KGB and Stasi files.
The chamber, crafted from six tons of amber, was erected at the tsars' palace in Tsarskoye Selo, outside St Petersburg.
When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, they wrenched its precious panels from the walls and took them to Konigsberg (the modern Kaliningrad) on the Baltic Coast.
The Amber Room was never seen again, and the Russians have always insisted the Nazis buried or destroyed it.
But an examination of the previously unpublished papers appears to reveal that the Red Army itself destroyed the Amber Room when it stormed Konigsberg in 1945.
The files also suggest that the Russian authorities have known what really happened since the end of the Second World War.
BBC arts correspondent Rebecca Jones said the Amber Room was hailed by those who saw it as the eighth wonder of the world.
Presented as a gift to Tsar Peter the Great in 1716 by Prussia's King Frederick William I, the elaborately carved chamber with its amber panels became a major feature of the Catherine Palace.
Last year Russia announced that work to recreate the room had been completed, weeks before St Petersburg celebrated its 300th anniversary.
Its reconstruction was begun by the Soviet Government in 1979.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/sto ... 08,00.htmlAccording to evidence disclosed today in Guardian Weekend, the truth is more squalid. Peter the Great's 18th century Amber Room, rated as the world's prime missing art treasure, valued at £150m, perished in the chaos of the wartime collapse of Nazi Germany.
Sixty years of looking for it have been futile. And it was not destroyed or hidden as loot by the Germans who had stolen it, as often assumed. It was lost in a fire while in the hands of occupying Red Army troops in a castle they captured in Königsberg, Germany.
Russia - according to the Weekend article - inadvertently destroyed one of its finest artefacts and officials have been trying to conceal the fact ever since.
The room, fully panelled and ornamented in amber, then 12 times more precious than gold, was built by German craftsmen as a present for Peter the Great in 1717.
When Germany invaded Russia, craftsmen at the Catherine Palace tried to mask the amber with gauze and fake wallpaper. But when enemy troops captured the palace - just outside what was then Leningrad, now St Petersburg - they penetrated the disguise and dismantled it. It was known to have been stored at Königsberg. But there, after the war, its trail vanished.
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But the authors of the study say they have found previously unused archive papers kept by the chief official postwar searcher for the Amber Room, Anatoly Kuzumov.
These show Kuzumov was told by a castle staff member in 1946 that the hall where the stolen room was kept had burned down after Red Army artillerymen occupied the building. However, the authors add, Kuzumov omitted this account from his report to his government.
This, they suggest, was because he felt responsible for failing to hide the room from the Germans and had an interest in perpetuating the myth that it still existed.
But Russian officials appear to be accepting its loss. "It doesn't exist any more," Professor Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the Leningrad Hermitage museum, told the authors. "It's dead, destroyed. The thing was burned during the Königsberg fire."
/Marcus
