The Lost Pianos of Siberia

by Sophy Roberts

  Kadykchan was one of the largest of the Kolyma towns which emptied out after the collapse of the USSR. These days, there are only a handful of small settlements still clinging on. In Kolyma Stories, a semi-fictionalized account of his Gulag experience, Varlam Shalamov wrote about the region’s summer greenery – how it grew with a kind of wild rush, as if to catch the briefest of temperate seasons. I came in July and the landscape was still a dull brown pit decorated with the white balls of dandelions, the colour gone, their ghostly seeds clinging on to stalks. Some days, a thick, wet mist hung so low that headlights didn’t shine but bled a smudged yellow. Other days, in the dry heat, dust clouds ballooned along the road whenever a rare vehicle came into view – dust I couldn’t shake off my shoes. More than anything, the land flanking the main Kolyma Highway felt like a place where people didn’t belong. Walking through Kadykchan’s ruins, the absences unnerved me: the numbered coat-hooks without any coats; the rolls of film curled up like wood shavings in looted apartment blocks; a Pushkin mural peeling off a schoolroom’s walls.

  In the settlements we passed through, I found a few sad instruments. In a garage there was an upright piano stored with rotting rubber gas masks; another in a disused cinema; and an ill-sounding Red October, serial number 154273, in a music school standing among portraits of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. In this same building, in the town of Ust-Nera, where the Kolyma Highway branches south for Yakutsk, there were also pictures of brilliant students who at one time in Kolyma’s past had thrived under the Soviet musical education system. The Gulag may have been filling up under Stalin at an appalling pace, but at the same time, literacy rates in the USSR nearly doubled by the end of the decade. In the thirties, when Kolyma was being mined by a constant supply of prisoners, new departments at the Moscow and Leningrad conservatories were bringing music students from peasant and worker backgrounds into the academic fold.

  In a town called Susuman, a mining community with a small guest house tucked inside an apartment block, I sank into a smelly bed. Dogs cried through the night. Some late arrivals pulled their bags up the stairwell – truck drivers, geologists and miners who still scratch about in Kolyma for gold. There was a groaning from heating pipes, but otherwise nothing but a hollow silence. In Kolyma Stories, Shalamov described sour sweat embedded in the clothes that survivors took from the dead. The poet said it was a good thing there was no scent to the convicts’ tears. As I lay awake staring at the ceiling, waiting for a water droplet to break, Kolyma felt like the saddest place on the planet. It was too far from anything I might ever understand. A week later, the road too difficult to travel, I was eager to fly out. I left in a small plane, my eyes mapping the close-shaven fat on a man who sat in a seat in front, the texture of his skull like a brain exposed. The image stayed with me, along with the sight of a handgun in our driver’s glove compartment, the swellings in the land from mass graves, and the statue of Lenin in Kadykchan with half his face shot away.

  ________________

  * British historian Robert Conquest details the Spanish presence in Kolyma: some five thousand young children, first taken to the USSR as a ‘humanitarian gesture’, were brought up in orphanages then fell into crime. Kolyma (London: Macmillan, 1978).

  * Kozin’s flat is now a small museum at 1 Shkolnaya Street, Magadan.

  * Smack in the middle of Siberia, a long way from any mitigating oceanic climate, there is the bitterly cold diamond town of Mirny. When I visited in the summer of 2016, I paused at a crossroads in the town centre. On one corner stood a newly installed statue of Joseph Stalin, and on the second corner a Russian Orthodox Church featuring an image of the last Tsar of Russia, his head haloed in gold. On the third corner, there were flags promoting President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party. Close to the fourth corner, or thereabouts, stood a children’s school of art, with numerous modern grand pianos partly paid for by the diamond company that employs much of the community. Standing here felt like being at the centre of a whirlwind: how can Putin, Stalin, the last Tsar and big business all coexist like this, as if the past and future are in harmony? The confluence seemed to me bewildering, made all the more haunting by the music playing out of the loudspeakers in every street.

  13

  The Siberian Colosseum: Novosibirsk

  ‘METRONOME’ COMES FROM THE Greek metron, meaning ‘measure’, and nomos, meaning ‘rule’ or ‘law’. It is an instrument of inevitability, a musician’s measurement of time. During the Leningrad blockade, which ran for nearly nine hundred days from September 1941 to January 1944, Soviet authorities mounted hundreds of loudspeakers through the city’s streets. Music was a way to keep the people’s spirits up. The authorities also broadcast the tick-tock of a metronome – at first to signal an air raid, the pulse speeding up with the approaching enemy, then to fill the silences in programme intervals. To Leningraders, it was a well-documented adage that the rhythm of the metronome took on the feeling of a heartbeat.

  For many living through the Leningrad blockade, their hearing adjusted to a different soundscape as curfews set in, along with the roar and scream of enemy bombardment, and the silence which comes with death and dystrophy. The Soviet poet Vera Inber said Leningraders got so adept at listening they could separate the sounds of an air raid like the orchestral parts in a Tchaikovsky concert. Another diarist, a fifteen-year-old student at the Leningrad Conservatory, described stepping over the entrails of a trolley bus into her ruined apartment, where her grand piano stood in a cold room: ‘Music makes me fearless; shell fragments hit upon the roof, but I play. The plaster begins to fall down but I go into the melody.’

  For the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, his siege experience may have been brief – the blockade started on 8 September 1941, and Shostakovich left the city in October – but it helped him repair his reputation after the disastrous review of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk as ‘Muddle instead of Music’. Shostakovich’s famously stirring and patriotic Seventh, or Leningrad Symphony, was music which tore at the world’s heartstrings: ‘Your song tells us of a great singing people beyond defeat or conquest who across years to come shall pay their share and contribution to the meanings of human freedom,’ wrote the American poet Carl Sandburg. As a piece of psychological warfare, it was brilliant – a calling card for the USSR about the urgency of their fight against the fascist advance. It used music as a political instrument of war, just as the Nazis announced their victories on German radio with a broadcast of Liszt’s Les Préludes.

  ‘My weapon was music,’ wrote Shostakovich: ‘I sat at my piano and worked, fast and intensely. I wanted to create a piece about our lives, about these days, about the Soviet people, who would go to any lengths for the sake of victory.’ Moscow’s Bolshoi Orchestra, which had been evacuated ahead of the Nazi advance, gave the world premiere of his Leningrad Symphony in the city of Samara on 5 March 1942. The score was then flown to Moscow, where it was performed three weeks later. Sometime in the late spring, it was taken out of the country on microfilm via Tehran, Cairo and Casablanca in a heroic evacuation route, then on to London and New York. When it made its premiere in the US on 19 July 1942, Shostakovich was turned into an international celebrity, the composer’s rapturous reception earning him the cover of Time magazine.

  From inside a besieged Leningrad, the Soviet authorities knew the music would be at its most powerful. But there was only one ensemble left that could possibly play this hugely ambitious work. The city’s best orchestra, the Leningrad Philharmonic, had already been evacuated to Novosibirsk in Siberia, leaving behind a starving, lower-rank alternative. The Leningrad Radio Orchestra comprised a hundred members before the war. In the middle of the siege when the orchestra was ordered to re-form, the list of members made for dismal reading: there were numerous names crossed out (known to be dead), and others marked up in red to indicate they were on their way out. At the first rehearsal fewer than twenty musicians turned up, so military commanders called on soldiers to make up numbers. In late June, Shostakovich’s s
core was airlifted into the besieged city and the improvised orchestra – playing in layers of old clothes, described by one participant as ‘dressed like cabbages’ – began to prepare as best they could.

  The drummer perished on his way to work, wind players fainted for lack of food, while musicians were pulled out mid-rehearsal to go fight fires. When a date was finally fixed for the Leningrad premiere, Soviet artillery targeted German guns within range of the Philharmonic Hall, where the performance would take place, to ensure that Nazi bombers wouldn’t be able to overwhelm the music. The city already had seventeen hundred loudspeakers in situ; in the run-up to the Leningrad performance, many more were erected to broadcast the symphony across German lines.

  In the falling afternoon light of 9 August 1942, the city’s hungry populace fell silent for one of the most dramatic moments in an incomprehensible war. ‘[W]e were stunned by the number of people, that there could be so many people starving for food but also starving for music,’ said the trombonist: ‘Some had come in suits, some from the front. Most were thin and dystrophic.’ When it was over, not only Leningraders but also German soldiers listened to the half-hour standing ovation given by a people on its knees.

  As Leningrad suffered, Novosibirsk – the de facto capital of Siberia, sitting almost a third of the way between Moscow and Vladivostok – was doing rather better: it wasn’t under bombardment, and could therefore function as a kind of Siberian safe house during the war. Once known as the ‘Chicago of the Soviet Union’, Novosibirsk is still home to the largest opera house in Russia, founded under Stalin in the thirties. The so-called Siberian Colosseum dominates an empty square frilled with Soviet statuary. The dome, almost twice the size of the cupola belonging to St Paul’s Cathedral in London, heaves itself out of the city’s skyline. The building may not be conventionally beautiful – the façade’s tall columns and stunted concrete pediments seem to obey no discernible law of classical harmony – but there is no denying its grand intention: a panoramic theatre so huge it could accommodate a column of tanks above the orchestra pit, the scale so significant that Soviet tractors could be driven from the street to the stage. The original decor was equally extravagant: crystal chandeliers, red velvet drapes, faux-Roman statues and Victorian bric-a-brac. Built into the basement, according to local rumours, was one of Stalin’s bunkers.

  In order to complete this mammoth project, the wartime factories of Novosibirsk, many of them evacuated from Western Russia, contributed specialist expertise, including aviation engineers who assembled the mechanics for a ninety-tonne stage curtain that came up out of the floor and shut like a crocodile locking its jaw. Novosibirsk’s opera house became one of the boldest, most defiant expressions of Soviet ambition yet. While it was being built, more than twenty-four million Russians, both soldiers and civilians, perished in the Great Patriotic War. That was enough dead to sell every ticket in its auditorium nearly twenty thousand times over – the equivalent of a full house every day for fifty-five years.

  The Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre under construction in the 1930s.

  The Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre, which officially opened on 12 May 1945, carried another layer of heroic significance: it was where the Soviet Union’s cultural treasures – including musical instruments – were evacuated for safekeeping during the Nazi onslaught. It was used as the main storehouse for some of the greatest works of art in Russia’s possession, delivered from both Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery and Leningrad’s Pavlovsk Palace and State Hermitage Museum.

  Packing was done in a hurry. Some three thousand pieces were sent from the Tretyakov, including the string instruments that had been gathered with such enthusiasm after the October Revolution. The largest canvases were transferred on to rolls – including Vasily Surikov’s famous nineteenth-century painting depicting the Old Believer and religious martyr Boyarina Morozova being carried off to Siberia in an exile’s chains. The collection was then loaded on to railway wagons bound for Siberia, followed by another two thousand works, and fifty museum employees and their families.

  Owing to the speed of the Nazi encirclement, the evacuation of artworks from a besieged Leningrad was even more frantic. As the noose tightened, Pavlovsk Palace – a centre of musical culture in Russia ever since the late eighteenth century – became a target for German guns. Museum staff buried what they could in the palace grounds. Leningraders boxed the porcelain toilet set, gifted to the Romanovs by Marie Antoinette, in freshly cut grass. They wrapped up breakables in imperial dresses. A member of Pavlovsk’s staff made sketches of how the interior looked before it was abandoned, as well as the swagged curtains of the Tsar’s baldaquin bed. Priceless treasures too large to extract were abandoned where they stood, including Maria Feodorovna’s late-eighteenth-century Clementi upright grand piano.*

  Siberian painter Vasily Surikov’s Boyarina Morozova being returned to the walls of the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, in 1945 after its wartime stay in Novosibirsk.

  It was Andrei Zhdanov – the Leningrad boss and Stalin’s heir apparent, nicknamed ‘The Pianist’ by rivals mocking his musical abilities and cultural ambitions – who issued the order to extract the city’s historic treasures. When Leningrad’s first museum trains departed in July 1941, they were filled to bursting. The armoured cars pulled out of Leningrad with several thousand pieces from the Hermitage Museum, as well as another forty-two boxes from Pavlovsk – including ‘Crate 63’, containing Catherine the Great’s precious 1774 Zumpe piano anglais.

  Until November, the Zumpe was kept in Gorky outside Moscow, where it was placed under guard in a city church. When German aircraft closed in again, the piano was evacuated first to Tomsk, then to Novosibirsk, with the onward destination of each train revealed to the museums’ keepers only as the cavalcade reached a new station.* On the long, two-month journey to Siberia, the convoy encountered hostile railway workers, brutal weather conditions and a fire from a stove. To escape bombardment, one of the trainloads hid for two weeks in a forest siding. Another attack, which directly targeted the Zumpe train, sent the museum workers running for shelter. Despite all these hazards, Catherine’s precious square piano was finally offloaded in Novosibirsk at the end of December 1941 in a staggering winter low temperature of minus fifty-five degrees.

  The Novosibirsk opera house was where the Zumpe stayed until the end of the war, cared for in the same half-finished building that the museum workers made their home for over two years. The Tretyakov employees slept in a dormitory in the make-up rooms. The Pavlovsk workers occupied the basement, where they slept on one of the rugs salvaged from the Romanovs’ last family home.

  Packed boxes of paintings from the Tretyakov Gallery stored at the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre in 1944.

  The evacuation plans had been executed almost perfectly – including the safe extraction to Novosibirsk of Yevgeny Mravinsky, conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic. Like the artworks, Mravinsky and his orchestra made a circuitous journey to dodge enemy bombardment, and on 4 September 1941, arrived in Novosibirsk with their instruments. Mravinsky travelled with his mother, wife and several domestic cats.

  Over the next three years, Mravinsky’s orchestra went on to play more than five hundred concerts in Siberian exile, with the city’s radio stations broadcasting the Philharmonic’s music across the Soviet Union. Sometimes they performed in Novosibirsk’s still-unfinished opera house. The Philharmonic also travelled to various Siberian towns, with concert standards, said Mravinsky, equal to the orchestra’s Leningrad appearances. This included the biggest event of all: the Novosibirsk premiere of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony on 9 July 1942, which the composer went to Siberia to hear, going straight from the railway station to Mravinsky. Swept up in the patriotic fervour, museum staff put on an exhibition entitled ‘Treasures Saved from the Germans’ featuring a selection of works from Russia’s outstanding cultural heritage in safekeeping in Siberia.

  ‘Not one of the orchestras that have performed my work has atta
ined such a perfect fulfilment of ideas,’ wrote Shostakovich of the Leningrad Philharmonic-in-exile. An article in the newspaper Soviet Siberia described the fearful horror in the music, and how deep inside there was this animal-like howling. Shostakovich was rather pleased with the result: ‘Far off in the middle of Siberia, one suddenly felt so much the Leningrad milieu one has been familiar with and which one misses so much. During the rehearsals and concerts, I again experienced that creative process – that noble musical culture that is so characteristic of the city of Lenin.’

  An exhibition of Russian artwork in the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre during the Great Patriotic War. In the foreground, an art expert measures the room’s humidity.

  That noble musical culture. The concert grand used by the Leningrad Philharmonic during the siege years would be a prize to find – a piano which understood music as an expression of continuity and defiance. If the true instrument survived – the one revealed in a two-second flash of a piano lid in grainy film footage, as well as in the descriptions of an instrument which accompanied the Philharmonic’s celebrated Glazunov Quartet – it seemed one of the likely possibilities was a nineteenth-century Steinway concert grand, serial number 45731, standing unused in an organ room at the Novosibirsk Conservatory. Instruments such as this aren’t common in Siberia, said my source, Vladimir Biryukov, the president of the Siberian Piano Tuners Association and head tuner at the Novosibirsk Philharmonic. He believed the Steinway had first come to Siberia with or for Mravinsky’s Leningrad orchestra. His reasoning was simple: the concert grand was too spectacular to have had any purpose other than to service the most important venue and musicians of the period.