The Lost Pianos of Siberia

by Sophy Roberts

  Salekhard is the Yamal Peninsula’s main settlement, on the rim of the Arctic Circle. It is near the mouth of the River Ob, which is the world’s longest estuary. The peninsula reaching north extends far beyond where the firs run out, where the frayed edge of north-west Siberia extends into the Arctic Ocean. Up here, the sky is ‘a deep blue, like a water-sky’, which was the description given by the explorer and scientist Fridtjof Nansen when he came to Yamal in 1913. Nansen, famous for his 1895 attempt on the North Pole, travelled to Siberia by sea from Norway to explore the potential of a northern trade connection with the Siberian interior, reached via the Arctic. I came on the train from Moscow, the last stages of my journey hugging the Polar Urals.

  When I left Salekhard to travel even further north into the tundra, a snow-squall was gusting, the blizzard moving in drifts of smoke as we crossed the River Ob by amphibious truck. During the Second World War, German U-boats slipped into these waters as part of an ambitious Nazi strategy called Operation Wunderland to command Siberia’s Arctic sea lanes. Despite its strategic importance then and now, Salekhard remains isolated. There is still no bridge over the Ob between the train station at Labytnangi and Salekhard, which is on the opposite side of the river. In summer, Salekhard is reached by ferry. In the mid-season melt, when the river is clogged with chunks of ice, locals use a helicopter.

  The further north we went, the more the sun seemed to nudge the surface of the Earth. Where the snow had been blown off pools of frozen water, the ice was the colour of pewter. We passed abandoned skeletons of iron – diggers, lorries and drilling machines stuck in hollows of land from Yamal’s vast natural gas fields. As the day turned to dusk, the territory became lonelier. This wasn’t ‘the land of the future’, as Nansen called Siberia; it felt closer to the start of time.

  Getting around the Yamal Peninsula before helicopters became common. Then, as now, the Yamal is hard to penetrate. Decommissioned tanks are used, their caterpillar tracks ideal for the tundra when the ground turns to bog in summer.

  Nansen loved his Russian voyage – the flushes of sunset, the sea’s billowy surface, the darting skuas skimming a leaden ocean. He described listening to the whine and hum of the ship’s radio, and the splash of water against the boat at midnight, which was easily mistaken for the sound of surf on an illusory shore. For entertainment, he took a gramophone. The Nenets told Nansen they had heard better music in Salekhard.

  It was probably true, since pianos had already reached this pocket of Siberia, with one instrument in particular making an unusual journey around the Yamal Peninsula at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1893, a Victorian spinster called Helen Peel played the piano for sailors on the Blencathra, a British ship tasked to deliver rails for the new Trans-Siberian Railway. The piano was brought to accompany a Mr Popham on violin, and a Mr James on flute. Miss Peel, whose ambition of eating strawberries at the Pole was never realized, returned home overland through Siberia, but the ship stayed on.

  Nansen wrote how this tough little vessel made several further voyages to Siberia’s River Yenisei before disappearing without trace in 1912 after getting caught in ice off the Yamal Peninsula. Nothing was heard of the ship or crew for a year. Nansen thought there was an outside possibility that rather than having sunk, she might still be locked into the pack ice and was floating somewhere in the north of the Arctic Ocean. Nansen had no idea that fourteen crew had in fact abandoned ship and were using a map copied from one of his previous books, Farthest North, to find their way home across the frozen water – a journey only two men survived.

  Where was the lost ship’s piano now? I pictured the instrument drifting in a polar sea, its ivories washed up among a colony of seals, the notes entwined with the clicks and trills of a beluga whale. I wondered if the instrument might one day reappear beside the stove in a fisherman’s cabin, or as a piece of soundless furniture stripped of its wires to make snares for Arctic hare. The further I travelled into the whiteness, the stranger it seemed that people might choose to live all the way out here. Then towards the end of the day’s drive, a settlement next to a church appeared at the head of a smooth white plain.

  The church, which stood on a squat hill, was surrounded by small chapels painted in the cartoon blue of a Californian swimming pool. The encampment was girdled by a cluster of golden crosses and a hem of trees. This was where the Nenets author and advocate for native rights Anna Nerkagi had founded a community school. She came out to meet me – a tiny bird-like woman who stood no taller than my shoulder. The children gathered behind her full skirts, their cone-shaped hooded capes fashioned from reindeer fur – diamonds of white and brown, the designs like one of Picasso’s harlequins. Anna’s brother wore a kind of cassock and thick leather belt strung with a sheathed knife and a pouch of snuff. Other men in the community wore long, thigh-high boots, or pimy, gartered in colourful bands strung with pom-poms. Some of the younger men wore army fatigues and tracksuits.

  In the nineties, Anna had led protests against the industrial invasion of the Nenets’ territory. When roads were put through Yamal, they brought gas fields and well heads which interfered with the Nenets’ old migration routes. These days, she has accepted the changes. But then adaptability is in the Nenets’ history; without it, they would never have survived. Anna’s endeavours – to teach young Nenets the traditional methods for living in the tundra – is among her best attempts to help her people hold on to some of the last of the old ways. She encourages the community to make money with a modest tourist operation. She is also a committed Christian, who corralled various resources in order to get the church built.

  We settled in for hot tea inside the chum. Anna offered me frozen fish cut into slivers, and reindeer meat as chewy as leather. There were significant lulls in the conversation as we got used to each other’s presence, as if everybody was waiting on someone else to break the silence. As we shared the food being passed around the tent – the women seated on one side, men on the other – I asked Anna about music.

  ‘The only music you will hear in the tundra,’ Anna snapped, ‘is the kettle whistling on the fire.’

  I had been too abrupt with my questioning, and needed to find a different, gentler way in. I knew that Anna was brave and respected by her people. I also knew the Nenets had some musical history. I had read about how their oral traditions were closely bound to elemental sound – the scratch of fire and wood, the whoosh of wind, a metal pike driving a hole into a frozen lake. I had heard recordings of Nenets who could imitate birdsong. In their childhood, they sang to help with hunting. The children lay in the snow with their feet in the air to trick other birds into thinking their legs were the necks of geese. This attracted inquisitive birds, which the men then netted or shot. Musicians in Salekhard told me how song – the Nenets’ beautiful, yearning voices – could be heard in their lullabies, shamanic rituals and ecstatic rites. In Yamal, music played a part in survival, like the presence of a friend. It was a way to endure extreme monotony in an empty place. Just as music allowed Maria Volkonsky to hang on to the threads of her European culture during her Siberian exile, song helped the Nenets cling on to the one part of their identity that the Soviets couldn’t destroy when they attacked their traditions and persecuted their shamans.

  Had it all disappeared? Would I hear anything of their rare song tradition that so fascinates musicologists – a tradition which bears ‘not a single trace of Western influence’? Where were the magic drums? The stretched reindeer-skins beaten with antlers? Maybe I had to accept that I was at least a century too late, the Nenets’ belief system already destroyed by Tsarist missionaries, then by the state’s massive attack on religion in the thirties. Because when I tried to ask Anna once again about music, she was crystal clear: her community lived by its Russian Orthodox principles. In her opinion, music and dance were pastimes for lazy people with city lifestyles. Pianos out here were a wishful leap too far.

  Later on, as we started to get to know each other, Anna took me to a nea
rby hill covered with flinty stones. With the tundra spread out around us, she said the stones concealed the entrance to the chum belonging to the Sihirtia – trolls, or magical people, who the Nenets believe are their predecessors. The Nenets say they pushed them off the land until the Sihirtia retreated and started living underground. Occasionally, the Sihirtia come out at night, in a mist or a sea fret, but otherwise they’re elusive. As I struggled to understand how the Sihirtia, a cornerstone of the Nenets’ culture, lined up with her Christian beliefs, Anna explained it thus: these sacred rocks were God’s unfinished altars and churches, she said.

  The more Anna opened up, the more I began to understand how the community’s Orthodoxy seemed to blur with the Nenets’ residual conviction that the landscape was instilled with an ancient spiritualism not even Stalin could stamp out. When I spent time with Anna’s brother fishing, then herding the reindeer, it was if he could read the landscape in a different way to other people I had encountered in Siberia. He took me to the cliff edge at the head of another valley.

  ‘I’ve been to the end of the world,’ he said, describing journeys north to the Kara Sea, ‘but I’ve never been to Moscow.’

  A Nenets boy had told me the Sihirtia were huge, with white fur and ferocious teeth. Anna’s brother said no, the Sihirtia were small.

  I asked Anna’s brother if he could explain to me the contradictions between shamanism and the presence of the church, between the music that belongs to the Nenets culture and the Russian culture which had been overlaid. I wanted to know when the Sihirtia were last seen.

  ‘Best to ask Anna,’ he said. ‘My main thing is fishing and reindeer.’

  The ridiculousness of encountering a piano among these people became clearer the more I learned about the Nenets’ way of life: it wasn’t just Anna’s version of Russian Orthodoxy that forbade instrumental music and dance; the absence was a true feature of the Nenets’ original culture. Given the sparse economy of the Nenets’ way of life, their lack of instruments was entirely logical. They harvest nothing more than they eat, and own nothing more than they use.

  On my last night in camp, I listened to the church bells – the only music I heard in three days. When I walked beyond the ring of trees, everything was blanketed in white. It was hard to tell if the hunched mounds were dogs or sledges or clumps of stones and Sihirtia tombs. The tundra was skinned with ice, hiding the life beneath the surface. I watched the sun sink. Soon the sky turned black except for the prick and pulse of satellites and stars. The church bells stopped ringing. The footsteps fell still. A glimmer of green light appeared as the aurora borealis began to dance over the plain.

  I swapped the stars for streetlights on my return to Salekhard to find the celebrated Nenets composer Semion Nyaruy. Like Anna, he was a figurehead of Nenets culture – a man whose expressive, syncopated songs unshackled the Nenets from any feeling of shame about their native language or cultural heritage. In the sixties, his talents took him to the Leningrad Conservatory. His songs were distributed throughout the country’s radio stations. He also owned a piano, or so I was told.

  When we met, Semion was a very old man living with his wife in the city outskirts in a wooden house with tundra views. When I knocked on the door, he was watching TV. He sat on the stool beside his instrument, a Tyumen upright, serial number 31116, which was covered with the flag of the Russian Federation. He was too delicate to stand up, his frailty barely concealed under a purple satin robe (a malitsa in Nenets culture) cuffed in white Arctic fox. He had a beard like Lenin’s, which suited his pointed face, and a bald pate, like a tonsured monk. His eyebrows were strongly arched, and his hands, which looked arthritic, had a violent shake. His wife brought tea and sweets while he played with a black puppy on his lap.

  He loved dogs. He said he had eight when he was a boy living in the tundra. He talked about the instrument he used at his boarding school, where he wasn’t allowed to speak his Nenets language. He struggled at maths and Russian, but when his perfect pitch was recognized, he won a place at a music college in Tyumen. He talked about his mother, who died when he was twelve. His father, a party member, used to move the Red chums through Yamal on a sledge, setting them up for government doctors, teachers and cinema operators.

  ‘I would listen to Beethoven in the Red chum,’ says Semion. ‘Whenever I heard Beethoven, I disappeared inside his music.’

  Semion described the projector, the books, and the portraits of Stalin and Lenin his father transported about Yamal. His father was a wonderful singer. There was never a piano, he said; it would have taken twenty reindeer to pull a piano through the tundra.

  Semion’s wife, who knew by heart every song he had ever composed, was a linguist, a specialist in the Nenets language.

  ‘Like music, our words go deep inside ourselves,’ she said. ‘Our language is like cell memory. We have many words for snow and wind, but nothing for physics.’

  Semion was drifting from our conversation when the outside door opened and closed. I asked him if music belonged in the tundra. He looked up.

  ‘You should ask the sun how the oxygen appeared,’ he said.

  A minute or so passed. Semion looked exhausted. Then, upon the arrival of his son in the room, a smile broke out on his face.

  I asked Semion if his first instrument was the one behind him, and if he would play one of his songs.

  ‘My fingers won’t listen to me. And my head won’t either,’ he said.

  With his son’s gentle urging, Semion agreed to sing. They performed one of his compositions – mother, father and child in melodic unison, their bodies linked in a close-knit triptych with Semion seated at the piano stool. Sometimes he seemed a beat behind. Sometimes it was as if he had forgotten the words. Sometimes the puppy put him off. Then his wife handed him a china reindeer, which he gripped with both trembling hands. His chest rose boldly. Hey hey hey, he called, partly singing, partly chanting, his hands holding up the ornament like a priest might an icon. He delivered his Nenets song – part lament, part gleeful celebration, with nothing familiar or European to its melodies – as if he wanted all the world to know the tundra was the soul of the planet.

  Semion wouldn’t, however, be persuaded to play the piano – an instrument he encountered for the first time in his boarding school. He said the Tyumen was out of tune. He talked instead about a German-made piano he had bought forty years ago. He loved how each note would stay in the air. His wife said she thought the German piano may have come from the Salekhard theatre – one of the ones used by construction workers on Railway 501. In the nineties, she had handed it on as a teaching piano to a local music school.

  It was a curious moment: in pursuit of an instrument that carried the melodies of an indigenous people’s song, I had in fact tripped up on a different story. Railway 501 was one of the most notorious white elephants of the entire Stalinist regime: in 1947, Stalin ordered the construction of a new railway linking Salekhard in the west to Igarka a thousand miles further east along the polar circle. It was a brutal idea – part of what Stalin called his Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature – through treacherous Arctic territory.

  To make up the workforce – which in 1950 included around ten thousand paid labourers – thousands of convicts were gathered out of the Gulag camps. In July of that year, the total number of prisoners feeding the railway construction was an estimated seventy-five thousand – for the most part ‘politicals’, including engineers, teachers, scientists, composers, famous musicians, and Japanese prisoners of war. Time would be taken off sentences for extra work, which encouraged construction crews to shore up the railway with light trees instead of rock to advance the line’s progress. Within two years, labour gangs of up to fifteen hundred prisoners were working from camps based no more than four miles apart. On top of the starvation rations and scalding freeze, there were cases of prisoners being tortured in un fathomable acts of sadism. A geologist, accused of giving information on the territory to a group of escapees, was tied to
a birch with wire, attacked first by nesting ants, then by vicious tundra mosquitoes until he finally lost consciousness.

  At the height of the build in the spring of 1953, nine miles of track were being laid every month – in temperatures dipping to fifty degrees below. The workers’ hair froze on to their neighbour’s skin as they slept close to keep warm. Advance parties made beds in the open snow using branches for mattresses. Frozen bread was cut with a saw, as if each loaf were a piece of wood. By the time Stalin died, so many thousands of people had perished in the building of Railway 501 that the track was renamed Dead Road. His plan was then abandoned with just a few hundred miles to go.

  ‘Do you know what I dream about now?’ said Lyudmila Lipatova, a historian in Salekhard who started researching this story in 1988: ‘A bridge over the Ob, which would help complete the railway Stalin almost finished. It was a crime to start such a construction after the Great Patriotic War, when our country was in the condition it was in. But to stop when so close to finishing? That was a crime even worse.’

  Lyudmila, who had interviewed survivors from the railway construction, found evidence of extreme human resilience. A Greek poet studied higher maths by writing numbers in the snow. A travelling arts troupe of some two hundred prisoners was formed, including set painters, singers and ballet dancers. There was also a symphony orchestra forty members strong. Among them were Russian musicians captured by the Nazis in Stalingrad – prisoners of war whom Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany, had commandeered for performances at camps in Germany. On their release, Stalin re-arrested his own Red Army soldiers as traitors and sent them to Railway 501.

  With a cheap thirty-kopek ticket, everyone could afford to hear the travelling operettas. The railway’s chief of construction considered theatre necessary to raise their spirits in the dark polar nights – not only for his workforce, but also for the free working people of the Far North. He requested the transfer of some of the best musicians from other Gulags, including a conductor of the Odessa Opera, as well as pianists and singers he knew by name.