Synopsis
"The Amber Room was one of mankind's greatest treasures, a masterpiece of staggering ambition and value. Commissioned by Frederick I of Prussia in 1701, its vast and intricately worked amber panels - many times more valuable than gold - were sent in 1717 as a gift to Peter the Great of Russia. Passed on by imperial succession, the room was finally erected by Catherine the Great in her palace outside St. Petersburg, where it became legendary throughout the world." "A symbol of Russia's glory, the Amber Room remained in the village of Tsarskoye Selo for almost two hundred years. When the Nazi army invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Soviet curators evacuated millions of precious objects; however, the Amber Room was too fragile to dismantle, so they were forced to hide it. But it was Its panels were wrenched from the walls, packed into crates, and taken to Konigsberg on the Baltic coast, where they remained until the Nazi surrender in April 1945. The Amber Room has never been seen since." "In the last sixty years, hundreds of people have spent tens of millions of dollars tracing the whereabouts of the Amber Room, to no avail. Catherine Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy have gone farther along the trail of this great, lost treasure than anyone before them and, in a masterpiece of detection, have at last unraveled the jumble of evidence surrounding its fate. Their search catapulted them across eastern Europe and into the menacing world of espionage and counterespionage that still exists in Russia and the former Soviet bloc. In archives in St. Petersburg and Berlin, amid boxes of hitherto unseen diaries, letters, and classified reports, they have uncovered an astounding conspiracy to hide the truth." The Amber Room shows incontrovertibly what happened to the most valuable lost treasure in the world and why the truth has been withheld for so long. Its conclusions recolor our understanding of the Cold War and its aftermath.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
