The Lost Pianos of Siberia Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2020 by Sophy Roberts

  Maps by Lovell Johns Ltd

  Jacket design by Becca Fox Design

  Jacket photographs: piano © Michael Turek; map courtesy of MS Russ 72, Houghton Library, Harvard University

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  Lines from Prussian Nights by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (trans. Robert Conquest) on p. 256 reproduced by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Lines from Cyprian Kamil Norwid’s poem Fortepian Szopena (trans. Leonard Kress) on p. 118, from Maya Trochimczyk (ed.) Chopin with Cherries: A Tribute in Verse, reproduced by permission of Moonrise Press. Lines from Vladimir Mayakovsky’s ‘Battle-order to the Army of Art’ on p. 155 in Vladimir Mayakovsky and Other Poems (2016, trans. James Womack) reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press. Extracts from Anton Chekhov, Sakhalin Island, on pp. 36, 69, 71, 72, 127, 128, 129, 132–3, 134, 138, 337, 339, and 341 (trans. Brian Reeve) reproduced by permission of Alma Books Ltd.

  First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Doubleday an imprint of Transworld Publishers

  First Grove Atlantic eBook editon: August 2020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  eISBN 978-0-8021-4930-5

  Typeset in 11/15.25 pt Sabon Next LT Pro by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  Dedication

  For John, Danny and Jack

  ‘Once a certain idea of landscape, a myth, a vision, establishes itself in an actual place, it has a peculiar way of muddling categories, of making metaphors more real than their referents, of becoming, in fact, part of the scenery.’

  SIMON SCHAMA

  Landscape and Memory

  ‘Objects have always been carried, sold, bartered, stolen, retrieved and lost. People have always given gifts. It is how you tell their stories that matters.’

  EDMUND DE WAAL

  The Hare with Amber Eyes

  ‘My piano is to me what his vessel is to the sailor, his horse to the Arab, nay even more, till now it has been myself, my speech, my life . . . I confided to it all my desires, my dreams, my joys, and my sorrows. Its strings vibrated to my emotions, and its keys obeyed my every caprice.’

  FRANZ LISZT

  Franz Liszt, Gesammelte Schriften, Volume II

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map of Russia

  Author’s Note

  PART ONE

  Pianomania · 1762–1917

  1 · Music in a Sleeping Land: Sibir

  2 · Traces in the Snow: Khabarovsk

  3 · Siberia is ‘Civilized’: St Petersburg to the Pacific

  4 · The Paris of Siberia: Irkutsk

  5 · Pianos in a Sandy Venice: Kiakhta

  6 · The Sound of Chopin’s Poland: Tomsk

  7 · Home in a Hundred Years: Sakhalin Island

  PART TWO

  Broken Chords · 1917–1991

  8 · The Last Tsar’s Piano: The Urals

  9 · The End of Everything: The Altai Mountains

  10 · The Moscow of the East: Harbin

  11 · Beethoven in a Red Chum: The Yamal Peninsula

  12 · Music in the Gulag Archipelago: Kolyma

  13 · The Siberian Colosseum: Novosibirsk

  14 · Vera’s Mühlbach: Akademgorodok

  PART THREE

  Goodness Knows Where · 1992–Present Day

  15 · A Game of Risk: Kamchatka

  16 · Siberia’s Last Piano: The Commanders to the Kurils

  17 · Provenance Regained: Khabarovsk

  EPILOGUE

  Epilogue: The Orkhon Valley

  A Brief Historical Chronology

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Source Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Map of Russia

  Author’s Note

  TRAVEL EAST BY TRAIN from Moscow and the clip of iron on track beats out the rhythm of your approach towards the Ural Mountains. This band of hills separates Western Russia from Siberia, rising in Kazakhstan and following an almost direct line up through Russia to the Arctic Ocean. The train passes lazy trails of chimney smoke, gilded churches, and layers of snow stacked like bolts of silk, with the rhythm of the journey – the sluggish gait, the grinding stops into gaunt platforms and huddled towns – much as early travellers described Russian trains in the fashionable Siberian railway sketches of the time. These days, however, fellow passengers are few; most Russians now fly to and from Siberia rather than use the railways.

  During the time of the last Tsar, travellers on the country’s most iconic train of all – the train de luxe Sibérien, running for some five-and-a-half thousand miles from Moscow to Vladivostok on Russia’s Pacific coast – described an ebullient opulence, with passengers dripping in ‘diamonds that made one’s eyes ache’, and music from a Bechstein piano. Siberia’s railway was dizzy with ambition: ‘From the shores of the Pacific and the heights of the Himalayas, Russia will not only dominate the affairs of Asia but Europe as well,’ declared Sergei Witte, the statesman and engineer responsible for building the track at the end of the nineteenth century. In the fancy tourist carriages, there was a busy restaurant panelled in mahogany, and a Chinese-style smoking lounge, the train presided over by a heavily perfumed fat conductor with a pink silk handkerchief. French-speaking waiters came and went with Crimean clarets and beluga caviar, pushing through carriages decorated with mirrored walls and frescoes, a library, a darkroom for passengers to process camera film, and according to adverts promoting Siberia to tourists, a hairdressing salon, and a gym equipped with a rudimentary exercise bike. Singsongs tumbled out of the dining car as if it were a music hall, with the piano used like a kitchen sideboard to stack the dirty dishes on.

  At no point on this great Eurasian railway journey, then or now, was there a sign saying ‘Welcome to Siberia’. There was only the dark smudge bestowed by cartographers denoting the Ural Mountains – a line that conjures up something vaguely monumental. In reality, the Urals feel closer to a kind of topographical humph, as if the land is somehow bored, the mountains showing as bumps and knuckles and straggling knolls. There is no dramatic curtain-raiser to the edge of Siberia, no meaningful brink to a specific place, just thick weather hanging over an abstract idea.

  Siberia is difficult to pin down, its loose boundaries allowing each visitor to make of it whatever shape they want. In a drive for simplicity to organize these indistinct frontiers, I have therefore provided a few notes to explain my parameters.

  The breadth of Russia has been squashed and squeezed into chapter maps in a struggle to fit this vast te
rritory on to a single page. What makes it even more challenging is that aside from China, this country has more international borders than any other nation. In this Author’s Note I also give explanations about the time periods and terminology, which can get complicated in Russia. If my definitions are in any way reductive, it is because I am not a historian. If they are Eurocentric, it is because I am English; any journey to Siberia is one I take from the West to the East – physically, culturally, musically. This book – written for the general reader, about a hunt that is sometimes more about the looking than the finding in the so-called ‘land of endless talk’ – is a personal, literary adventure. More nuanced scholarly research and further reading is indicated in the Source Notes and Selected Bibliography.

  My Siberia covers all the territory east of the Ural Mountains as far as the Pacific, which is the ‘Siberia’ defined on imperial Russian maps up until the Soviet period. It is an extremely broad interpretation, which includes the Far North and the Russian Far East, taking in dominions lost and gained during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I therefore apologize in advance with the full knowledge that I have not subscribed to modern administrative boundaries or prevailing political correctness about who or what is Siberian. I have instead gone by Anton Chekhov’s description: ‘The plain of Siberia begins, I think, from Ekaterinburg, and ends goodness knows where.’

  There were three significant revolutions in early twentieth-century Russia. The first was in January 1905, after government soldiers opened fire on peaceful protesters in St Petersburg in what became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known by his alias, Lenin, and Leon Trotsky became the main architects of the two socialist revolutions in 1917 – the February Revolution, and the October, or Bolshevik, Revolution. I tend to refer to the events of 1917 collectively as the Russian Revolution, unless otherwise stated.

  As archival evidence has emerged during the last few decades, historians have been able to piece together more authoritative figures relating to Siberian exile under the Tsars, and prisoner numbers in the Soviet Gulag.* Some of the most reliable current statistics† for a basic understanding of the scale are as follows: from 1801 to 1917, more than a million subjects were banished to Siberia under the Tsarist penal exile system. From 1929 to 1953, 2,749,163 forced labourers died in the Soviet Gulag.‡ There are many more numbers, and unknowable quantities of suffering, but I make little further mention of death tolls and prisoner counts. This is because official figures are untrustworthy and other counts remain reluctant estimates.

  I use ‘Russia’ to describe the country prior to the end of the Russian Civil War, which ran from 1918 to 1922, when the ‘Reds’ (Bolsheviks, later known as communists) fought the ‘Whites’ (anti-communists, with some factions retaining Tsarist sympathies). The USSR refers to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union, formed in 1922, which expanded to comprise Russia and fourteen surrounding republics. After the breakdown of the Soviet regime following a tumultuous period of economic restruc turing known as perestroika, Russia changed its name. On 31 December 1991, it became known as the Russian Fed eration, which I shorten to Russia for the sake of simplicity. To track these political changes, as well as key moments in the history of Siberia, please refer to the brief Chronology at the end of the book.

  Until 31 January 1918, Russian dates conformed to the Julian, or Old Style, calendar, which ran between eleven and thirteen days behind the Gregorian, or New Style, system. I use the Old Style for events that took place inside Russia before the Revolution. I use the New Style thereafter.

  Sometimes I am the one out of synch. Although this book is written as a continuous journey for narrative coherence, my various research trips were not all taken in the order they are documented. Sometimes I had to return to a location to deepen my research. I also had to work with opportunistic leads, inclement weather and unpredictable scrutiny from Russia’s FSB, the state security and surveillance apparatus and a direct descendant of the KGB. I mostly travelled Siberia in winter, not summer. The main reason for this was a dangerous allergic response to the region’s mosquitoes – as vicious as the Siberian legend suggests, that they were born from the ashes of a cannibal.

  The Great Patriotic War is a term widely used by Russians to refer to the Soviet experience of the Second World War. I have used the most familiar, Western version of people’s names. I have tended to avoid patronymics, as well as the feminine forms of a surname customarily used for Russian women. Nicholas II is the common name by which most readers will know the last Tsar. The other Nikolais I met, along with the Alekseis, Marias and Lidiyas, I don’t anglicize. I like the sound of their Russianness, though these decisions are idiosyncratic. The transliteration of Russian to English follows the Library of Congress system in the Source Notes and the Selected Bibliography only.

  All interviews have relied on interpreters, who have stuck as close as possible to the spirit of intention, as per the advice of the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt about transcribing orchestral works to the piano: ‘In matters of translation there are some exactitudes which are the equivalent of infidelities.’ Many of my interviews were digitally recorded. Original direct quotes were re-checked with sources, and sometimes subsequently amended to refine meaning.

  I relied on one interpreter more than any other: Elena Voytenko, whose fortitude helped me through many a black hole in Siberia. On a number of my trips to Russia, I was also joined by the American photographer Michael Turek. I picked up all manner of local guides, from music teachers to mountain-rescue specialists. I travelled ‘on the hoof’ wherever a lead might take me, by plane, train, helicopter, snowmobile, reindeer, amphibious truck, ship, hovercraft and taxi. I also hitched lifts with oil and gas workers. False leads induced a certain amount of backtracking, which was another reason for return visits.

  Siberia’s Altai Region (capital, Barnaul) is contiguous with the Altai Republic (capital, Gorno-Altaysk); the latter is the more remote and mountainous. For simplicity, I use the term Altai to cover both. I have gone by the modern designation of Russian place names (since 1991, cities have generally gone back to their pre-Revolution names). St Petersburg I refer to by its current name as well as Petrograd (from 1914 to 1924) and Leningrad (the name from Lenin’s death until the end of the Soviet Union in 1991). Again, my decision is idiosyncratic. The events that took place in this city during the Leningrad Siege from 1941 to 1944 were so monumental, the name is hard to cleave from specific historical incidents. This is not so true of Novonikolaevsk, now known as Novosibirsk. Before starting this book, I hadn’t heard of either.

  ________________

  * GULAG is an acronym for the Main Administration of Camps – in Russian, Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei – which is now more commonly used as a proper noun to describe the whole horrifying system of Soviet penal labour.

  † At the time of this book’s first publication: 2020.

  ‡ Numbers relating to Tsarist exile are taken from Daniel Beer’s The House of the Dead (London: Allen Lane, 2016). Anne Applebaum’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag: A History (London: Penguin, 2004) hesitantly cites the Gulag death toll. Both books are critically important to an understanding of the statistics, while both also acknowledge the unreliability of any final number.

  PART ONE

  Pianomania

  1762–1917

  ‘Liszt. It is only noon. Where are those brilliant carriages travelling from every direction going with such speed at this unusual hour? Probably to some celebration? Not at all. But what is the reason for such haste? A very small notice, brief and simple. Here’s what it says. A virtuoso announces that on a certain day, at two o’clock, in the Hall of the Assembly of the Nobles, he will play on his piano, without the accompaniment of the orchestra, without the usual prestige of a concert . . . five or six pieces. Upon hearing this news, the entire city rushed. Look! An immense crowd gathers, people squeeze together, elbow each other and enter.’

  – Journal de St-Pétersbo
urg, August 1842

  1

  Music in a Sleeping Land: Sibir

  EARLY ON IN MY travels in Siberia, I was sent a photograph from a musician living in Kamchatka, a remote peninsula which juts out of the eastern edge of Russia into the fog of the North Pacific. In the photograph, volcanoes rise out of the flatness, the scoops and hollows dominated by an A-shaped cone. Ice loiters in pockets of the landscape. In the foreground stands an upright piano. The focus belongs to the music, which has attracted an audience of ten.

  A young man wearing an American ice-hockey shirt crouches at the pianist’s feet. With his face turned from the camera, it is difficult to tell what he is thinking, if it is the pianist’s music he finds engaging or the strangeness of the location where the instrument has appeared. The young man listens as if he might belong to an intimate gathering around a drawing-room piano, a scene that pops up like a motif in Russia’s nineteenth-century literature, rather than a common upright marooned in a lava field in one of the world’s most savage landscapes. There is no supporting dialogue to the photograph, no thickening romance, as happens around the instruments in Leo Tolstoy’s epic novels. Nor is there any explanation about how or why the piano ended up here in the first place. The image has arrived with no mention of what is being played, which is music the picture can’t capture anyway. Yet all sorts of intonations fill the word ‘Siberia’ written in the subject line of the email.

  Siberia. The word makes everything it touches vibrate at a different pitch. Early Arab traders called Siberia Ibis-Shibir, Sibir-i-Abir and Abir-i-Sabir. Modern etymology suggests its roots lie in the Tatar word sibir, meaning ‘the sleeping land’. Others contend that ‘Siberia’ is derived from the mythical mountain Sumbyr found in Siberian-Turkic folklore. Sumbyr, like ‘slumber’. Or Wissibur, like ‘whisper’, which was the name the Bavarian traveller Johann Schiltberger bestowed upon this enigmatic hole in fifteenth-century cartography. Whatever the word’s ancestry, the sound is right. ‘Siberia’ rolls off the tongue with a sibilant chill. It is a word full of poetry and alliterative suggestion. But by inferring sleep, the etymology also undersells Siberia’s scope, both real and imagined.