The Lost Pianos of Siberia

by Sophy Roberts

  The imperial family taking fresh air on the roof at the Governor’s House in Tobolsk.

  As political chaos spread out of the capital, instruments were being stolen, sold to foreigners or burnt as firewood. Noble families were saving what they could, huddled up around their few remaining possessions, including instruments too big to move. Grand pianos were being driven around the city on the back of trucks to propagandize ‘live’ to the masses. ‘Drag pianos out onto the streets,’ exhorted the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky as the new ideas began to spread: ‘Beat them until they fall to pieces.’

  The nineteenth-century piano factories, which were already faltering due to a dramatic fall-off in demand during the First World War, came to a standstill. Becker ceased output. The Diederichs factory was reduced to ten men – a situation compounded by trade embargos imposed by European countries during the civil war, when production fell through the floor. Musicians were fleeing Russia, apprehensive of the shifting social order. Sergei Rachmaninoff, the country’s most prestigious composer, left for the United States in December 1917, and Sergei Prokofiev emigrated to America in May the following year.* Out of necessity, some musicians kept on performing for new audiences of workers and civil servants. Many more fell silent. ‘We are all either consumed by ceaseless activity, or else we retreat into ourselves, in order to find an interior equilibrium that will allow us to stand firm in all the confusion about us,’ wrote the music publisher Mitrofan Belyayev.

  It is astonishing that not everything was destroyed in these dark days of revolution. This was because of the immediate, prescient actions taken by Lenin to protect the country’s enormous cultural wealth. On day three of the October Revolution, Lenin appointed the critic and playwright Anatoly Lunacharsky as Commissar of Enlightenment – an Orwellian-sounding title for a sensitive, artistic man whose numerous roles as head of the Soviet Ministry of Arts included shoring up the country’s cultural treasures. Lunacharsky needed to stem the flow of instruments out of Russia; he needed to nationalize them, like the piano factories, making them state rather than private property.

  Before long, a young cellist called Viktor Kubatsky was lending Lunacharsky an enthusiastic hand, making house visits to gather the best instruments in private ownership. Kubatsky was given his own train and soldiers to help him execute orders. His sweep included a cello made by Nicolò Amati, which was discovered in a derelict mansion in the Crimea, and four Stradivarius violins confiscated from an old count; they were handed over only after the count performed one last melancholy solo dressed in his ceremonial military uniform. These state treasures now form a significant part of Russia’s two principal collections of musical instruments. Remarkably, not a single piece in either collection has since been lost, not even during the Nazis’ Siege of Leningrad, when the number of civilian casualties ran to nearly four times more than the total of bombing victims in Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined – a siege so devastating not even the city’s cat population survived.*

  For the Romanovs languishing in Siberia, it was hard to know what might happen to them as the country lurched from their old regime to its extreme opposite. The Bolsheviks – by now the dominant political power in the capital following the October Revolution – became increasingly concerned that for as long as the royal family remained alive, factions among pro-royalist Whites had a rallying call in the Tsar to draw popular support. On 26 April 1918, Nicholas, his wife and their third daughter, the eighteen-year-old Grand Duchess Maria, were escorted from Tobolsk to Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains and placed under much stricter bondage inside a new place of house arrest. Because the Tsarevich was too ill to travel with his parents, he followed three weeks later with the rest of his siblings and a few remaining loyal retainers. This time, the family’s guards were commanded by the hard-line Ekaterinburg Soviet, who were much less sympathetic than the family’s Tobolsk jailers.

  The family were locked inside the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg’s city centre. In its early days, before it was renamed the House of Special Purpose by their Bolshevik captors, it had been home to Pyotr Davydov, a dramatic tenor and graduate of the St Petersburg Conservatory. Later it was bought by Nikolai Ipatiev, a private railway contractor of considerable wealth. The family were assigned four rooms. The rest of the building was occupied by their guards. Heavy iron bars had been fastened across the windows, and the plate glass painted out white so the prisoners couldn’t even see a bird flying. The Romanovs were allowed to breathe fresh air for an hour or less each day in the small garden to the rear, which was surrounded by a high, hastily erected fence. Food was scant: black bread for breakfast, while all the Empress ate was macaroni.

  At least there was a grand piano – an ebony instrument noted in an inventory taken by a Soviet official on 27 April 1918 just before the imperial family’s arrival. The piano occupied the drawing room, although it was later moved upstairs to the commandant’s room. It was still there after the Tsar and his family had been executed, according to a report by Nikolai Sokolov, the Whites’ criminal investigator into the Romanov assassinations, who picked over the evidence when the killers fled Ekaterinburg. He noted that a Russian-made Schröder had been pushed into the right-hand corner of the room. On top of the piano were several boxes, a scent bottle, sewing threads and a type-lined office ledger. Downstairs in a narrow basement, bullet holes from the executions still marked the walls – scars betraying little of the magnitude of events when three hundred years of Romanov rule came to their final, cataclysmic end.

  It occurred soon after midnight on 17 July 1918. Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, their five children and four remaining retainers, including the family doctor and a maidservant, were herded into the basement. They were faced by three principal executioners, and seven guards. The Tsarevich, who was sick, and his mother, who complained, were given chairs.

  The Bolsheviks shot the Tsar first, striking him in the chest before unleashing a fusillade of bullets which filled the room with smoke. One of the murderers vomited. Another was injured in the arm by a ricocheting bullet. The executioners let the smoke settle, then shot the Tsarevich. The boy crumpled from his chair to the floor, broken but still breathing. When the bullets didn’t appear to penetrate the other children’s bodies, the executioners resorted to knives and bayonets, slipping about a room pooled with blood. It took a full twenty minutes to kill them all. The youngest daughter, Anastasia, was the last Romanov to die, her skull crushed by rifle butts.

  Unbeknown to their executioners, the girls’ corsets had been tightly sewn with jewels before they had left Petrograd. The diamonds protected them like bulletproof vests, with fragments of jewellery later found scattered in a Urals mineshaft a few miles to the city’s north-west, where the bodies were first interred. Precious stones and pearls, hacked and tarnished by fire, had been trampled underfoot, along with splinters of glass from the Empress’s spectacles, the family doctor’s false teeth, and eggshells from the executioners’ picnic. Of the Romanovs’ entourage present that night, the only survivor was the Tsarevich’s spaniel, Joy. The dog turned up a few days after the execution. It was standing half-starved in the Ipatiev House courtyard. As for the family’s other lapdog, its head had been smashed with a rifle, just like Anastasia’s, and thrown into the same disused mine as the family, deep in a Urals forest.

  After the slaughter, the Bolsheviks tried to destroy the evidence before abandoning Ekaterinburg ahead of the Whites who were rapidly gaining ground. Sokolov’s report described the scene. The Ipatiev House had been ransacked, the fireplaces littered with everything deemed not worth stealing. Papers, plates, even the Tsar’s precious epaulettes, which he hadn’t been allowed to wear during his imprisonment, were thrown into the flames. But neither the cake of soap, nor the sheets bearing the imperial monogram were destroyed – and neither was the last piano the Romanovs ever played.

  *

  That’s why I came to Ekaterinburg – to see if I could track down this instrument because of its profound rel
evance at the time of the assassinations when the Russian Empire died and the Soviet state was born. This city on the brink of Europe and Asia felt too significant to pass through on a train, too much of a geographical and historical turning point. Then I entered the station cafeteria, and was so unnerved by an encounter with a bearded priest, I wanted to leave in the same moment I arrived. He crossed himself every time he caught my eye. He smelled of mould, and was followed by a silent wife in a black headscarf and full-length tunic. She had the deadest skin I had ever seen on a living human being. Whenever he spoke to her, she tautened and withdrew, as a snail into its shell.

  It was as if the city was contaminated: the mangy dogs with ribby coats, the parking lots where not even weeds seemed to put out any shoots, the hotel elevator where the air felt too close to share it with a troupe of Russian weightlifters. I was quick to judge, but then my interpreter was reluctant to come. She had spent her childhood in Ekaterinburg. During perestroika, her mother, a laboratory assistant, sold cigarettes one by one in a booth at the tram stop. These were deadbeat, joyless years, when heroin took hold in their community. She described the glazed eyes and foot-shuffling on her journeys to and from school. She described how lives were worn thin by a city she considered innately cruel. It made complete sense that Ekaterinburg was the place of the Romanov executions, she said; its spirit had always oppressed her.

  There were times, however, when the imperial murders were considered a feather in Ekaterinburg’s cap. Within a decade of the killings, the Ipatiev House was turned into a Museum of Revolution, which told the Bolsheviks’ narrative of the Romanov deaths.

  Tourists and officials visiting the cellar of the Ipatiev House in 1927.

  In 1977, when a cultural institute occupied half the building, a local theatre group staged a play in the Ipatiev cellars. It was a private performance for family and friends. The play was The House of Bernarda Alba by the Spanish writer Federico García Lorca in which an entire family lives in the shadow of a domineering mother, until one of the daughters hangs herself. In a group portrait taken in 1977, the eleven actors pose beside a noose-like contraption.

  Although the very room where the blood was spilt was not used, looking at these pictures through the lens of what we now know happened to the Romanovs induces a powerful response: the composition of the photograph is still haunted by the image of the cellars as a place of execution – a story the Soviet authorities first extolled when they turned the Ipatiev House into a kind of shrine and renamed it the House of the People’s Revolt. Later, as Russians came to mourn the royal family, the Soviets did everything they could to excise events from national memory, even wiping the executions from history books. But regicide isn’t easy to forget. So when the Ipatiev House was being cited as the location of the Romanov murders in propaganda by anti-Soviet circles in the West, the authorities ordered the house to be destroyed.

  The basement of the Ipatiev House after the executions.

  Rehearsals for a private performance of The House of Bernarda Alba in the Ipatiev basement, photographed in 1977 by Vitaly Shitov, a photojournalist who spent forty years researching the story of the Ipatiev House.

  Even if the house was gone, I still hoped the Ipatiev piano might be somewhere in the city, its keys holding on to the memory of the last of the Romanov melodies described by the guards, who recalled sacred songs and women singing. They remembered secular pieces, too, which were always melancholy. The music was different in the commandant’s room, where the drunk guards made a racket banging on the instrument (the piano was moved from the hall, according to Nicholas’s diary). The jailers chose music which was deliberately offensive: songs like ‘You Fell as a Victim in the Struggle’, or ‘Let Us Forget the Old World’. Prince Lvov, the first prime minister after the Tsar’s abdication, was in Ekaterinburg at the same time as the Romanovs. While not a reliable witness, Lvov told a more sinister version of events: in the evenings, the guards bullied the Tsar’s daughters to play the piano. This claim was later substantiated by a peasant woman who lived with one of the soldiers.

  The demolition of the Ipatiev House in September 1977, photographed by Vitaly Shitov. He was the only person, aside from officials inside the cordon, to photograph its destruction. He used a hidden camera, recording events from a bus some twenty metres away.

  But what of the instrument they played? My most promising lead was a local tuner who had been trying to make enough money to restore the piano he believed was in the Ipatiev House at the time of the murders: a Bechstein grand piano pushed up against the back wall of his dusty Ekaterinburg warehouse. Together we extracted a date from its keyboard frame – 8 April 1921 – and the signature of a tuner well known in the city at the time. The words ‘House of Revolution’ were written in black ink.

  At Ekaterinburg’s newly constructed Church on the Blood, built on the site of the Ipatiev House, there was a Becker grand piano, serial number 15177, in the museum’s conference hall next door. The museum’s official guide said he believed that the Becker had come with the Romanovs to Siberia all the way from Petrograd. He said a member of the Austrian royal family gave it to the Tsar. It ended up in the Siberian city of Tobolsk, where the Romanovs were incarcerated, before it was sold to the church by a vet. The story was compelling, but I couldn’t verify it. There was no evidence of a piano leaving Petrograd on the imperial train – not a whiff of music, in fact, beyond a portable gramophone, and the piano Nicholas mentions in a diary entry. The instrument belonged to the steamer the family used for the last part of their journey to Tobolsk.

  When I repeated the claims of the official guide to a city archivist, he scoffed: ‘Our church loves beautiful legends.’ When I told it to an Ekaterinburg antiques specialist, he tipped back in his chair and sighed. He couldn’t lead me to the definitive piano – possibilities, yes – but he could show me a plate purchased from descendants of a cleaner who worked in the Ipatiev House during the Romanovs’ imprisonment. The cleaner’s husband, a Bolshevik sympathizer, had wanted to smash the crockery. That wouldn’t happen now, he said. The Romanovs were fashionable again; there were some useful principles in Russia’s imperial history that suited the present political culture. ‘Revolution. Civil war. The Great Patriotic War. The migrations of people. It’s surprising that out of all that history we can save a single atom,’ he said, ‘but ideas have survived.’

  ‘I can find you many, many pianos from the Ipatiev House,’ said one of the city’s museum directors. ‘The only thing that was saved on the day the house was destroyed was the fireplace and a stair rail.’

  And bricks, said one of his colleagues. Someone who witnessed the mansion’s demolition took a brick from the site. He cut it into little pieces, and sold them off as relics.

  The director warned me to be cautious. ‘In Pompeii tourists take away pieces of stone as keepsakes,’ he said. ‘I read somewhere that the Italians bring these stones in on lorries and scatter them to protect the true relics.’

  Not long after this conversation, when I was about to give up on Ekaterinburg, I received news that the man who had first discovered the Romanov remains in the forest outside the city had agreed to meet me. His name was Aleksandr Avdonin. I had been told he knew more about the end of the Romanovs than anyone else – expertise I had originally pursued in the hope it might extend to the lost piano. An academic in geological and mineralogical science, he kept a low profile. My interpreter, who had pressed hard for the meeting, supposed music must have appeared a relatively neutral approach.

  Aleksandr Avdonin lives in an attractive wooden cottage beside a river, not far from the city outskirts. You can tell the home belongs to a geologist. In a kitchen as tidy as the cabin of a sailing boat, there is a collection of rock crystals, chunks of malachite, and a bowl of sky-coloured marble stones polished into the shape of eggs.

  Galina, Aleksandr’s wife, showed me to my seat at the kitchen table. As she made a large pot of tea, I explained I was looking for a specific piano – the
Ipatiev grand.

  Galina said she used to have a piano – a Soviet-made Red October instrument, serial number 48 if she recalled correctly, but she had given it away a few years ago.

  But what did she know of pre-Revolution instruments?

  The old pianos had almost all gone, she said as she cut the ham into thick slices, arranged small pastries on a paper doily, and Aleksandr entered the room. He wore a cream roll-neck sweater with a white Adidas sports jacket. He had white, thinning hair and was clearly weary. He had recently been ill, said his wife.

  We ate spoonfuls of berries from the woods, which were just like the pickings of wild strawberries Aleksandr collected before breakfast when he was young. He loved the Urals, he said; it was the region where he was born, in 1932. He came from a poor family of five. In his childhood, they lived in a railway workers’ barracks close to the station in Ekaterinburg where the Romanovs had disembarked from their final train journey – a mild and tender family is how people described them when they witnessed their arrival in the city. Aleksandr was interested in this history, but with the official silence around the Romanov murders, he kept his curiosity to himself.

  When I asked Aleksandr if he knew where the Ipatiev piano might have ended up, the conversation digressed. He looked out of the window as the light cast a golden glint across the table on to the bowl of jam. All the rivers in the Urals flow east, he said. But not the one that runs close to their house. In March the river is frozen. Only after the melt does the river flow hard and fast to the west. There was something he liked about this fact, about living on the great Eurasian divide. He talked about Magnitogorsk, another city in the southern Urals. When he was younger, they watched the cinema in Europe, and had dinner in Asia. He turned to his wife.