A late-nineteenth-century photograph of Aleksei Lushnikov, pictured with his wife, Klavdia, and their family at their country residence situated about twenty miles outside Kiakhta.
The Lushnikovs were in fact a powerful example of the Decembrists’ reach and influence, the family’s lives testament to an extraordinary moment in Siberian culture. The matriarch, Klavdia Lushnikov – a Kandinsky cousin – was educated in Irkutsk at the Institute of Noblewomen. Standing at the centre of the Kiakhta intelligentsia, she was a gifted pianist, nicknamed ‘Lushnikova the Liberal’, who became well known for her musical salons. Twice a week, she would gather the women for lectures on literature, politics and economics. She had married the millionaire tea trader Aleksei Lushnikov – a sophisticated man born into a modest family in the nearby Selenga Valley. Aleksei had been educated from the age of eight by Mikhail and Nikolai Bestuzhev, two Decembrists who had made an impressive job of exile by farming and teaching in the region after their hard-labour sentences were up. As for Aleksei Lushnikov’s children, one daughter studied sculpture with Rodin in Paris. Another daughter went on to sing at the Tbilisi Opera House.
The American journalist George Kennan pictured next to his Siberian tarantass, c. 1885.
Both Bestuzhevs were well qualified to act as teachers – Nikolai in particular, whose story is so full of charm and conviction. A musician, scientist and painter, Nikolai was responsible for most of the surviving portraits of his fellow Decembrists in Siberia. During exile, he relied on colour pigments sent by Maria Volkonsky’s sister-in-law Zinaida, who also posted seeds for the Decembrists’ vegetable garden. The gentle countenance in Nikolai’s self-portrait is hard to square with the image of a violent revolutionary who briefed the Tsar’s would-be assassin on the morning of the Decembrist Revolt. He made his journey to Siberia with a volume of the Rambler tucked into his luggage – an English periodical full of elevated prose and humanist ideas encouraging greater social mobility between classes.
While Nikolai tended to paint the Decembrists’ lives in rosier hues than their grubby reality, he still communicated the sorrow of exile with a moving depth. He drew his compatriots reading, talking, painting, often in lonely thought. He depicted their prison as if it were an English landscape, and the Decembrists’ children playing with kites. He also painted that famous image of Maria Volkonsky sitting with her narrow back to the artist in the Volkonskys’ cell, her right hand on the piano. The picture is a reminder of how fragile Beethoven must have sounded in this part of the world, rendered into quivering melodies on Maria’s clavichord – ghost sounds from the salons of Europe played on this weak and imperfect instrument, its parts fixed up by the convict with the so-called ‘golden fingers’. Nikolai was also an able engineer. He made hats, jewellery from the Decembrists’ old fetters (coveted by fashionable women in Kiakhta and Irkutsk as rings), cradles and coffins. He was an expert watchmaker. Many years after his release, Nikolai had finessed his chronometer designs developed in prison. He made a clock, which kept time at his house near Kiakhta: ‘In spite of a frost of twenty-five degrees, it went perfectly,’ said his fellow Decembrist Baron Rozen.
Aleksei Lushnikov’s daughters in the 1870s; the family pictured at a Russian-made Becker piano.
With the Bestuzhevs as his teachers, Aleksei Lushnikov therefore received one of the most unusual educations in nineteenth-century Siberia for a child of such modest roots. By the time he had entered the service of a Kiakhta merchant, Lushnikov could recite pages of Pushkin by heart. Once he had made his fortune, Lushnikov opened Kiakhta’s first printing house, and founded its first newspaper, the Kiakhta Page – one of many that flourished in the late nineteenth century when Siberia was developing lively journalism, its own universities and home-grown intelligentsia. Lushnikov subscribed to all sorts of politically progressive magazines and newspapers, including The Bell, printed in London by the émigré Alexander Herzen, who became Russia’s first independent political publisher. Although prohibited by the Tsarist government, The Bell was distributed to Siberia by the Kiakhta trading caravans, with Kiakhta’s merchants providing a safe house and funds to others in Herzen’s circle.
The democratic values which flowed out of Lushnikov’s home – like many of the Kiakhta merchants, Lushnikov contributed generously to the city’s library, museum, orphanage and schools – were sustained by the lifelong friendship the family kept up with both Bestuzhevs. Nikolai visited the Lushnikovs frequently to paint dozens of portraits of the Kiakhta elite. Before he died, he entrusted many of his paintings to Lushnikov, a collection lost in the post in the 1870s, according to one account. There was also a trunk Lushnikov asked nobody to open until twenty-five years after his death. He kept the key on a chain with a crucifix around his neck. Both the key and the trunk vanished, presumably in the chaos of the Russian Civil War.
That was why the Bechstein felt so remarkable, even if it was sad and weary, the piano’s bald hammers and loose strings barely able to produce a sound. Located in one of the museum’s cold corners, its bones were chilled from a draught that slunk in through the windows. I pressed for more information, with calls and a second visit to Kiakhta two years later. Locals helping me around town also spoke of the Lushnikov connection; that was how the story ran. One of the archivists, a woman who was new to me when I returned to Kiakhta, said she would make some further investigations. ‘I suspect it is a legend,’ she said after a while. ‘People say it is the Lushnikovs’, but these things are hard to prove.’
Before I left Kiakhta for the last time, I went back to the Lushnikov mansion. I walked around the back to try and peek through the windows. A man answered the door. He let me into the only room of the house still occupied.
On the ground floor, there was just enough room for a cooker and a bed, which the man shared with his four-year-old son. He couldn’t remember how long he had lived there, but it was from around the time that he got work helping Kiakhta’s Father Oleg clean up the church in the nineties. Back then, there had been another family living on the second floor of the house, but otherwise there hadn’t been anyone else he could recall for twenty-five years. The decaying wood was too dangerous; the roof had fallen in. As we talked, the dogs were circling again outside. In the stableyard, a man who had offered to help me fell to the ground in an epileptic fit.
On my last night in Kiakhta, I slipped into the back of the Trinity Cathedral – the town’s largest abandoned church, opposite the old trading houses – through a gap in some metal railings. The nave, missing its dome, looked like a skull that had been trepanned for a post-mortem. The masonry was loose, the ground tangled with undergrowth and broken glass.
I didn’t know what I had expected to find, especially in the dark, but as soon as I was beyond the cordon, it felt as if something bad had happened here, that I was walking unquiet earth. I had read about Kiakhta in the Russian Civil War, how the massacres were so brutal, the museum’s records of events were deliberately destroyed. When the enemy was approaching, the White Army killed some sixteen hundred Reds in Kiakhta in a cold-blooded orgy of bayonets and poison.
The tea millionaires scattered. Some of them were murdered, others fled to the Pacific ports via the Trans-Siberian trains. Kiakhta was in chaos, derived not only from the fallout of the Russian Civil War but from the Mongolian Revolution of 1921 just across the border. Leading the army of Mongol revolutionaries was a madman with an identity crisis: an Austrian-born German warlord – Baron von Ungern-Sternberg, known as the Bloody White Baron – who had originally attached himself to imperial Russia as a Tsarist officer, then ‘went rogue’. Believing he was an incarnation of Genghis Khan, von Ungern wanted to reinstate Mongolia’s old Buddhist theocracy. To achieve his goal, he enacted a reign of terror against the Bolsheviks, which eventually brought him back to the Russia–Mongolia border territory. In the Mongolian town abutting Kiakhta, a suspected ‘Red’ met his death in a baker’s oven. In Kiakhta, the Baron’s enemies were locked into a room, and cold water spraye
d on to their naked bodies. They were frozen to death rather than shot, so as not to waste bullets, the Baron’s capacity for murder said to be so bottomless that he was constantly inventing new ways of killing. One of his methods of execution was to tie his victim to two trees bent to the ground, which, when released, split the body in two.
Baron von Ungern-Sternberg, photographed in Mongolia in the early 1920s.
The currents of history swirled among the cathedral ruins – the story about the Bestuzhev drawings which went missing in the post, the trunk full of Decembrist secrets, the merchants’ pianos the tuner from Kiev came to fix. If none of this had happened – no 1917 Revolution, no White Baron, no Russian Civil War – what would Kiakhta have become? Would Siberia have flourished differently? Would it have spun off and become its own independent state as Potanin had once advocated?
The Kiakhta Bechstein, photographed in the town’s museum in 2016.
How had the Bechstein survived the chaos, I wondered, when so little else had made it through? If all the assumptions were true, this was a piano that carried the musical ambitions of a rich merchant family. It was also a direct connection to the vision of those brilliant exiles of 1825 who spread their European culture through a region that still feels fundamentally Asiatic – fenceless steppe country imbued with Buddhist history, where there are as many churches as there are Buryat invocations to the spirits evident in the blue and yellow ribbons tied to trees. The Bechstein was an instrument invested with so much desire, I was ready to believe almost any version of events as Siberia’s past and enigmatic present pulled me in. ‘From Baikal onwards, the poetry of Siberia begins,’ wrote Chekhov to a friend: ‘Before Baikal it was all prose.’
6
The Sound of Chopin’s Poland: Tomsk
IN A SMALL VILLAGE east of Lake Baikal, in a tiny church hidden behind a Soviet candy factory, I went to meet a priest, Sergei Paliy, who I had been told had a good piano. His coarse beard, which forked in the wind, reached down to his belly button. His long black cassock had a solemn weight to it, and fell slightly too high on the ankle. He belonged to the Old Believers, a traditionalist division of the Russian Orthodox Church that broke off in the mid-seventeenth century when they refused to subscribe to Moscow’s liturgical reforms. Around twenty thousand Old Believers chose to commit mass suicide rather than fall into line.
Many of the Old Believers, both clergymen and followers, left Russia for the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth on the Empire’s western border. A large number went east to Siberia – some voluntarily, others by force. The most famous Old Believer exiled to Siberia was Archpriest Avvakum, who was the only one of the four main dissenters who didn’t have his tongue cut out.*
As a means of self-protection, the Old Believers became increasingly closed to outsiders – a habit which continues today. One family retreated so far into the Siberian taiga in 1945, they lived in total isolation in the western Sayan Mountains until a Soviet journalist documented their discovery by a group of prospecting geologists in the late seventies. The family had missed the death of Stalin and the moon landing, which they didn’t believe anyway. They thought cellophane was crumpled glass, and had never seen a lemon. They went about barefoot, in birch-bark galoshes and burlap clothes. They possessed a spinning wheel and a Bible, but otherwise entertained each other by remembering their dreams. They kept track of time with methods that predated Peter the Great. There was no instrumental music. As for dancing, it was the devil’s art.
Various splinters of these Old Believer communities survive throughout Siberia, their traditions representing some of the strongest examples of Slavic civilization before the Westernizing reforms of the eighteenth century. I encountered opportunists who posed for tourists in gaudy outfits, and those who were still so committed to their secret rituals they refused to talk. I met a piano tuner who no longer observed his parents’ religion; he fed me generously with food he could ill afford to spare, yet he didn’t share the meal’s only knife. Even today, you can tell an Old Believer by the set of crockery and cutlery he keeps to himself – a legacy of their fear of contamination beyond their own closed world.
The Baikal priest was quite the opposite: a good talker, and a formidable collector of Siberian paraphernalia, including a Becker upright piano that had once belonged to a local teacher. It turned out his more interesting story lay hidden inside the church, where he opened up a three-hundred-year-old Book of the Apocalypse. It belonged to the community’s forefathers, who spent eighteen months from 1765 walking into Siberia from Vietka, a town which was then part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The book’s dark images were a premonition loaded with irony given what was to happen next, when the Commonwealth underwent three major partitions during Catherine the Great’s reign alone. The territory was divvied up between Russia, Prussia and Austria. What was Poland’s loss, however, was Siberia’s gain, with significant forced migrations of musically educated Polish rebels – including a significant Jewish population.
In 1795, which was the most dramatic partition of the three, Poland lost its sovereign statehood. Even the country’s name was wiped when Catherine annexed the Western Provinces, a region that roughly included Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus. Cultural repression contributed to Poland’s demise, with Catherine’s military confiscating important historic possessions, including magnificent libraries. Poland enjoyed a brief moment of semi-autonomy during the Napoleonic Wars, but that vanished when the Poles actively participated in the French invasion of Russia, and Tsar Alexander I decided the Poles needed to be punished. At the 1815 Congress of Vienna, Europe’s borders were redrawn yet again, with the Tsar’s brother – the one who needed Chopin to calm his moods – appointed as de facto Viceroy.
It wasn’t that the Poles were universally at odds with the Russians. On the one hand, they identified with an imagined national Polish community; on the other hand, they had also partaken in imperial Russian society for some time, with lives played out along the Empire’s shifting borders. Over the years, many Russified Poles had risen to powerful positions in Russia, including the Decembrists’ prison commander, who had allowed their Siberian academy to flourish. But after the 1815 Congress, the dominant nationalist feeling inside Catholic Poland turned more sharply against the Orthodox empire to the east. Press censorship grew tighter. Secret societies such as Freemasonry were banned.
With their experience of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, the Poles increasingly regarded themselves as the boundary between two profoundly opposed world views, between democratic government’s defence of the rights of man, and the autocratic opposite. But it was also a pipe dream to think Poland would be able to shake off the Russian yoke. When the Poles launched their November Uprising of 1830, they were crushed within eight months. Their university was closed, and Warsaw effectively transformed into a barracks for Russian soldiers. This was a time when the notion of Polish nationality, observed the novelist Joseph Conrad, was ‘not so much alive as surviving, which persists in thinking, breathing, speaking, hoping, and suffering in its grave, railed in by a million of bayonets and triple-sealed with the seals of three great empires’.*
This Polish myth of noble martyrdom, prevalent all over Europe, was inflamed by Tsar Nicholas I’s predictably vengeful handling of the 1830 rebels. Still smarting from the treachery shown by the Decembrists four years earlier, Nicholas specifically ordered one of the most high-profile Polish insurrectionists, Prince Roman Sanguszko, to travel to his Siberian exile on foot – a brutal and humiliating journey which took the prince a year to walk. There are numerous echoes, in fact, between the story of the Polish rebels of 1830 and the Decembrists. At different prisons and mines in Eastern Siberia, the new influx of Polish prisoners organized lectures, orchestras and a formidable library of books.
Meanwhile, the Polish romance – a nostalgic quest for freedom, which of course ignored the persecution of Russians inside Poland – found significant support in a politically progressive Paris, where a
round five thousand of the highest ranking rebels managed to escape Russian arrest. Paris was also the city where a twenty-two-year-old Pole called Frédéric Chopin, though not a political refugee himself, arrived in 1831 from Warsaw – via eight months in Vienna – looking for work.* He joined several other famous figures in the Polish Romantic movement gathered in France, including the poet Adam Mickiewicz – a friend and confidant of a number of the Decembrists, who later married the daughter of the virtuoso pianist Maria Szymanowska.
Some of the Polish prisoners taken by the Russians were used as soldiers to replenish military garrisons in Siberia. Tens of thousands were subjected to forced penal labour in towns like Tomsk, Omsk, Tobolsk and Irkutsk† – a tragedy Chopin sought to capture in his brooding ‘Siberian’ or ‘Revolt Polonaise’.‡ It opens very quietly, in a low, gloomy register, with the piano’s newly invented damper pedal allowing for ravishing variances in mood and texture. The music then explodes – con forza! agitato! molto crescendo! – before slipping back into a sense of hopeless defeat, the dark ending of the polonaise evoking the cold and damp of the Siberian mines. According to Robert Schumann, not just this ‘Revolt Polonaise’ but all Chopin’s work in this Polish dance form was expressive of a chivalrous and oppressed people – of ‘cannon buried in flowers’.
The Lost Pianos of Siberia Page 9
