Siberia is far more significant than a place on the map: it is a feeling which sticks like a burr, a temperature, the sound of sleepy flakes falling on snowy pillows and the crunch of uneven footsteps coming from behind. Siberia is a wardrobe problem – too cold in winter, and too hot in summer – with wooden cabins and chimney stacks belching corpse-grey smoke into wide white skies. It is a melancholy, a cinematic romance dipped in limpid moonshine, unhurried train journeys, pipes wrapped in sackcloth, and a broken swing hanging from a squeaky chain. You can hear Siberia in the big, soft chords in Russian music that evoke the hush of silver birch trees and the billowing winter snows.
Covering an eleventh of the world’s landmass, Siberia is bordered by the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Mongolian steppe in the south. The Urals mark Siberia’s western edge, and the Pacific its eastern rim. It is the ultimate land beyond ‘The Rock’, as the Urals used to be described, an unwritten register of the missing and the uprooted, an almost-country perceived to be so far from Moscow that when some kind of falling star destroyed a patch of forest twice the size of the Russian capital in the famed ‘Tunguska Event’ of 1908, no one bothered to investigate for twenty years. Before air travel reduced distances, Siberia was too remote for anyone to go and look.
In the seventeenth century, wilderness was therefore ideal for banishing criminals and dissidents when the Tsars first transformed Siberia into the most feared penal colony on Earth. Some exiles had their nostrils split to mark them as outcasts. Others had their tongues removed. One half of their head was shaved to reveal smooth, blue-tinged skin. Among them were ordinary, innocent people labelled ‘convicts’ on the European side of the Urals, and ‘unfortunates’ in Siberia. Hence the habit among fellow exiles of leaving free bread on windowsills to help bedraggled newcomers. Empathy, it seems, has been seared into the Siberian psyche from the start, with these small acts of kindness the difference between life and death in an unimaginably vast realm. Siberia’s size also stands as testimony to our human capacity for indifference. We find it difficult to identify with places that are too far removed. That’s what happens with boundless scale. The effects are dizzying until it is hard to tell truth from fact, whether Siberia is a nightmare or a myth full of impenetrable forests and limitless plains, its murderous proportions strung with groaning oil derricks and sagging wires. Siberia is all these things, and more as well.
It is a modern economic miracle, with natural oil and gas reserves driving powerful shifts in the geopolitics of North Asia and the Arctic Ocean. It is the taste of wild strawberries sweet as sugar cubes, and tiny pine cones stewed in jam. It is home-made pike-and-mushroom pie, clean air and pure nature, the stinging slap of waves on Lake Baikal, and winter light spangled with powdered ice. It is land layered with a rich history of indigenous culture where a kind of magical belief-system still prevails. Despite widespread ecological destruction, including ‘black snow’ from coal mining, toxic lakes, and forest fires contributing to smoke clouds bigger than the EU, Siberia’s abundant nature still persuades you to believe in all sorts of mysteries carved into its petroglyphs and caves. But Siberia’s deep history also makes you realize how short our human story is, given the landscape’s raw tectonic scale.
In Siberia’s centre, a geographical fault, the Baikal Rift Zone, runs vertically through Russia to the Arctic Ocean. Every year the shores around Lake Baikal – the deepest lake on Earth, holding a fifth of the world’s fresh water – move another two centimetres apart, the lake holding the kinetic energy of an immense living landscape about to split. It is a crouched violence, a gathering strain, a power that sits just beneath the visible. The black iris of Russia’s ‘Sacred Sea’ is opening up, the rift so significant that when this eye of water blinks sometime in the far future, Baikal could mark the line where the Eurasian landmass splits in two: Europe on one side, Asia on the other, in one final cataclysmic divorce. Above all, Baikal’s magnificence reasserts the vulnerability of man. Beneath the lake’s quilt of snow in winter lies a mosaic of icy sheets, each fractured vein serving as a reminder that the lake’s surface might give way at any moment. Fissures in the ice look like the surface of a shattered mirror. Other cracks penetrate more deeply, like diamond necklaces suspended in the watery blues. The ice tricks you with its fixity when in fact Baikal can be deadly. Just look at how it devours the drowned. In Baikal there is a little omnivorous crustacean smaller than a grain of rice, with a staggering appetite. These greedy creatures are the reason why Baikal’s water is so clear: they filter the top fifty metres of the lake up to three times a year – another strange endemic aberration like Baikal’s bug-eyed nerpa seals, shaped like rugby balls, whose predecessors got trapped in the lake some two million years ago when the continental plates made their last big shift. Either that or the nerpa are an evolution of ringed seal that swam down from the Arctic into Siberia’s river systems and got stuck – like so much else in Siberia, unable to return to their homeland, re-learning how to survive.
Because Siberia isn’t sleeping. Its resources are under immense pressure from a ravenous economy. Climate change is also hitting Siberia hard. In the Far North, the permafrost is melting. More than half of Russia balances on this unstable layer of frozen ground, Siberia’s mutability revealed in cracks that slice through forlorn buildings, and giant plugs of tundra collapsing without a grunt of warning. Bubbles formed of methane explode then fall in like soufflés. But no one much notices – including Russians who have never visited, whose quality of life owes a debt to Siberia’s wealth – because even with modern air travel there are Siberians living in towns who still refer to European Russia as ‘the mainland’. They might as well be marooned on islands. Take Kolyma in Russia’s remote north-east, flanking an icy cul de sac of water called the Sea of Okhotsk. This chilling territory, where some of the worst of the twentieth-century forced-labour camps, or Gulags, were located, used to be almost impossible to access except by air or boat. Even today, the twelve hundred miles of highway linking Kolyma to Yakutsk, which is among the coldest cities on Earth, are often impassable. In his unflinching record of what occurred in the camps, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s choice of words – The Gulag Archipelago – is therefore rooted in fact, even if the phrase carries an immense metaphorical weight.
The Soviet Gulag – scattered throughout Russia, not just Siberia – was different from the Tsarist penal exile system which came before the 1917 Revolution, although the two are often confused. The Tsars could banish people to permanent settlement in Siberia, as well as condemn them to hard labour. Under the Soviets, the emphasis was on hard-labour camps only, wound together with curious methods of ‘cultural education’. Once your sentence was up (assuming you survived it), you could usually return home, though there were exceptions. Both systems had a great deal of brutality in common, with the Tsarist exile system turning Siberia into a prodigious breeding ground for revolutionary thought. Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin – they all spent time in Siberia as political exiles before the Revolution. So did some of Russia’s greatest writers, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, who in the mid-nineteenth century described convicts chained to the prison wall, unable to move more than a couple of metres for up to ten years. ‘Here was our own peculiar world, unlike anything else at all,’ he wrote – ‘a house of the living dead.’
Yet under winter’s spell, stories about the state’s history of repression slip away. Siberia’s summer bogs are turned into frosted doilies and pine needles into ruffs of Flemish lace. The snow dusts and coats the ground, swirling into mist whenever the surface is caught by wind, concealing the bones of not only Russians but also Italians, French, Spaniards, Poles, Swedes and many more besides who perished in this place of exile, their graves unmarked. In Siberia, everything feels ambiguous, even darkly ironic, given the words used to describe its extremes. Among nineteenth-century prisoners, shackles were called ‘music’, presumably from the jingle of the exiles’ chains. In Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, to ‘play the piano’ meant
having your fingerprints taken when you first arrived in camp.
But there is also another story to Siberia. Dotted throughout this land are pianos, like the humble, Soviet-made upright in the photograph of a Kamchatka lava field, and a few modern imported instruments. There is an abundance of beautiful grand pianos in a bitterly cold town called Mirny – a fifties Soviet settlement enriched by the largest open-cast diamond mine in the world – and more than fifty Steinway pianos in a school for gifted children in Khanty-Mansiysk at the heart of Western Siberia’s oil fields. Such extravagances, however, are few and far between. What is more remarkable are the pianos dating from the boom years of the Empire’s nineteenth-century pianomania. Lost symbols of Western culture in an Asiatic realm, these instruments arrived in Siberia carrying the melodies of Europe’s musical salons a long way from the cultural context of their birth. How such instruments travelled into this wilderness in the first place are tales of fortitude by governors, exiles and adventurers. The fact they survive stands as testimony to the human spirit’s need for solace. ‘Truly, there would be reason to go mad if it were not for music,’ said the Russian pianist and composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky.
Russia’s relationship with the piano began under Catherine the Great – the eighteenth-century Empress with a collector’s habit for new technologies, from musical instruments to her robotic timepiece made up of three life-size birds: an owl which twists its head, a peacock which fans its tail (you can almost see the breast rising for a breath), and a rooster which crows on every hour.* Catherine was also the inheritor of Peter the Great’s Westernizing legacy when his founding of St Petersburg in 1703 first ‘hack[ed] a window through to Europe’. Sixteen years after Peter’s death came the Empress Elizabeth, another modernizer, who introduced a musical Golden Age with her affection for European opera. Elizabeth’s extravagant spending habits on Italian tenors and French troupes affected the musical tastes of the Russian elite – a trend which continued after 1762 when Catherine became Empress and augmented Elizabeth’s mid-century influence and generous patronage of the arts. European culture thrived in St Petersburg, even if the deeper questions surfacing in Western Europe – in books by, for example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher whose theories about the pursuit of individual liberty and the natural equality of men inspired a generation of Romantics – had no place in the Russian court.
While revolution brewed in France, Catherine remained entirely deaf to criticism around Russia’s oppressive system of serfdom, which was such a significant source of imperial wealth. Russian men, women and their children born into feudal bondage were not only vassals employed to work the fields but were also trained as singers and dancers to lighten the manorial gloom. As instrumental music developed, serf orchestras became a distinctly Russian phenomenon, with one well-known musical fanatic of Catherine’s time insisting his entire staff address him only in song. Others were sent abroad to study music – a fashion which continued into the nineteenth century. In 1809 when two of these serf musicians were unhappily recalled to Russia from their training in Leipzig, they took their revenge, and murdered their master by cutting him up into pieces in his bedroom. In Leipzig, not only had they heard beautiful music; they had also tasted liberty.
Punishment was Siberia, where unlucky serfs were routinely exiled without trial for far more trivial transgressions, from impudence to taking snuff. When the dissident Aleksandr Radishchev chronicled the horrors of the Russian system of feudal slavery in his 1790 book, A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow, Catherine cranked up her response.* She exiled her most high-profile naysayer to the penal colony of Siberia, which was rapidly expanding its barbaric shape. When Austria, Prussia and Russia began to carve up Poland and what became known as the Western Provinces – a region that roughly included Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus – Siberia received the first trickle of educated Polish rebels.* Presiding over their fate as exiles were Catherine’s governors, one or two of whom took keyboard instruments with them to their postings in the back of beyond.
This was a time when the instrument was still developing, when even the names of keyboard instruments betrayed an identity problem. The German word Klavier sometimes referred to a harpsichord, spinet, virginal or clavichord. The word ‘clavichord’, if correctly used, referred to an instrument which, like the piano, used a percussive hammer action on the strings rather than the pluck of a harpsichord’s plectrum. Sometimes called ‘the poor man’s keyboard’, it was an instrument which could respond to a player’s fingers, their trembling, sympathetic pauses and emotive intent: ‘In short, the clavichord was the first keyed instrument with a soul.’ Confusingly, however, ‘clavichord’ sometimes also referred to the ‘fortepiano’ – the instrument, which translates as ‘loud-soft’, devised by the Italian maker Bartolomeo Cristofori for the Medici family at the turn of the eighteenth century. What made Cristofori’s invention groundbreaking wasn’t just the piano’s relative portability (unlike an organ): its improved dynamics and musical expression created the illusion there was an entire orchestra in the room.
‘Until about 1770 pianos were ambiguous instruments, transitional in construction and uncertain in status,’ observes one of the twentieth century’s foremost historians on the subject. Catherine’s treasured square piano, or piano anglais, is the perfect example of this evolutionary flux. In 1774, at the dawn of the piano’s vogue, the Empress ordered this new-fangled keyboard instrument from England, made by London’s first manufacturer, a German immigrant called Johann Zumpe. It was the instrument du jour, owned by everyone from Catherine’s great friend the French philosopher and lexicographer Denis Diderot, whose Encyclopédie declared keyboard playing a crucial accomplishment in the education of modern women, to English royalty. Within ten years of its invention, versions of this instrument were being made in England, France, Germany and America. According to one contemporary British composer, Zumpe couldn’t make his pianos fast enough to gratify demand.
Catherine’s 1774 piano anglais, its decorative cabinetry as pretty as a Fabergé egg, now stands behind red rope in Pavlovsk, an eighteenth-century Tsarist pleasure palace outside St Petersburg which functioned as one of Russia’s most important centres of musical life. The piano is displayed alongside a Sèvres toilet set gifted to the imperial family by Marie Antoinette. The Zumpe, which would have been a novelty at the time, has a certain sweetness when playing a slow adagio, but there is also an older, courtlier twang and a tinny thud of keys. Only when the technology’s powerful hammer action improved, thicker strings were stretched to higher tensions, and the pedals were finessed to allow for even better control of the ‘loud-soft’ expression, would the piano’s potential expand into the instrument we know today. This next dramatic phase in piano technology, thriving in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, pushed the instrument into concert halls all over Europe as its more robust mechanisms became better able to tolerate the passions of the virtuoso. In 1821, the French factory Erard patented the ‘double escapement’ action, which allowed for much more rapid repetition of a note without releasing the key. This was when the piano also began to migrate more widely – a trend witnessed by James Holman, a blind Englishman who travelled to Siberia in 1823 for no other reason, it would seem, than to furnish himself with a stack of drawing-room anecdotes. He wrote in his account: ‘One lady of my acquaintance had carried with her to the latter place, a favourite piano-forte from St Petersburg at the bottom of her sledge, and this without inflicting the least injury upon it.’
Violent. Cold. Startlingly beautiful. That stately instruments might still exist in such a profoundly enigmatic place as Siberia feels somehow remarkable. It becomes nothing less than a miracle when one learns that not only did Catherine’s 1774 Zumpe survive a twentieth-century wartime sojourn in Russia’s terra incognita, but that other historic pianos are still making music in sleepy Siberian villages. Where wooden houses seem to cosy up together for warmth, there are pianos washed up and abandoned from the high-tide m
ark of nineteenth-century European romanticism. This was one of the most important periods in the popularization of the piano, when a new breed of virtuoso performer became its most convincing endorsement.
Soon after arriving in Russia in 1802, the Irish pianist John Field – the inventor of the nocturne, a short, dream-like love poem for the piano – could name his price as both a performer and a teacher in the salons of Moscow and St Petersburg. Field sounded the first chord, as it were, in the Russian cult of the piano, but it was the celebrity of the Hungarian Franz Liszt which turned the Russian love of the instrument into a fever in the 1840s.
Women grabbed at strands of Liszt’s iconic bobbed hair to wear close to their chest in lockets. Fans fought over his silk hankies, coffee dregs (which they carried about in phials) and cigarette butts. German girls fashioned bracelets from the piano strings he snapped and turned the cherry stones he spat out into amulets. In Vienna – one of the great capitals of European music – local confectioners sold piano-shaped biscuits iced with his name. When Liszt left Berlin for Russia in the spring of 1842, his coach was drawn by six white horses and followed by a procession of thirty carriages. When he played in St Petersburg in April, the infamous ‘smasher of pianos’ – a reputation derived from the broken instruments Liszt left in his wake – drew the largest audience St Petersburg had ever seen for such an event.
An 1842 drawing of Liszt playing to a frenzied Berlin crowd, the scene not unlike a modern rock concert.
The Lost Pianos of Siberia Page 2
