The Lost Pianos of Siberia

by Sophy Roberts

  * A number of Hermitage treasures were stored in the Ipatiev House for safekeeping during the war. This is ironic given that so many of the evacuated objects used to belong to the imperial family, who were murdered in the same house in 1918.

  * In the seventies, after a drawn-out legal tussle, Grotrian-Steinweg were forbidden from disclosing the Steinway family connection to the American market. Grotrian-Steinweg therefore dropped the Steinweg name when they exported pianos to North America, where the brand is known as Grotrian.

  † The surname is not entirely clear owing to the smudged ink.

  14

  Vera’s Mühlbach: Akademgorodok

  WHEN VASILY LOMATCHENKO first moved to Akademgorodok, he was among seventy thousand construction workers who believed they were building some kind of Soviet paradise. A bold new science city made profound economic sense in the ideological thaw that followed Stalin’s death in 1953, with part of its purpose to help the new First Secretary of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, develop the technology to exploit Siberia’s vast potential. Siberia may have been home to only a small proportion of the country’s population, but it was also home to up to ninety per cent of the country’s natural resources.

  On paper, Akademgorodok looked spectacular. The spirit of optimism would be articulated not just in the city planning – a beach beside an artificially flooded River Ob, an ice rink, cycle paths and meandering forest walks – but in the social clubs, cafés, theatres and music societies. Laboratories and libraries would be world-class. Senior members of Akademgorodok’s scientific elite would each get a detached woodland cottage to live in rather than a flat in a Soviet apartment block. Even the city hotel would be a cut above the rest in order to host some of the country’s most brilliant minds.

  It was a powerful idea that appealed to just about everyone, leading to the creation of what was later described as ‘the little town with probably the biggest I.Q. anywhere’. For the country’s intelligentsia with a renegade bent, the far-off location of Akademgorodok meant their work might be less shackled to the party’s chain than the equivalent institutions in Moscow. Then there were the dreamers who would have chased utopia wherever it showed up. The challenge was to manipulate these mixed motives (and the state’s uncertain funds) in order to construct a viable, lively community with scientific excellence at its heart.

  Within a decade of breaking ground, Akademgorodok had fifteen functioning research institutes. An Institute of Cytology and Genetics was opened – ‘a miracle’, wrote the geneticist Raissa L. Berg, given that not long before, the study of genetics had been banned by Stalin, who considered genetic inheritance ideologically opposed to Marxism. In deep Siberia, the academic elite found more freedom to work. Houses had electric ranges and fridges, and benefitted from subsidized utility bills. The higher the ceiling, the higher the salary, Berg observed. Scientists benefitted from superior grocery rations. Musicians, artists and poets arrived, along with everyday Russians in support of this dazzlingly inventive city where the mushrooms were bountiful, and the mosquitoes horrid.

  Within this close-knit community lived a French-born concert pianist, Vera Lotar-Shevchenko, who settled in Akademgorodok in 1966 and lived there until her death in the early eighties. I was told about her story by Memorial, a human rights organization in Moscow. One thing led to another and now Anastasia Bliznyuk, a beautiful, outstandingly educated violinist in the Akademgorodok chamber orchestra, was helping me look for Vera’s last instrument: a pre-Revolution, Russian-made Mühlbach grand piano.

  Vera Lotar-Shevchenko was born Vera Lautard on 2 October 1899 in the Mediterranean resort of Nice in France. People who knew her described her as stout, round-shouldered, with arthritic hands and stubby fingers. She had short nails, clipped or bitten down to the quick. The red joints of her fingers were gnarled from labour. She wore a backwards hat and old jumpers. Later in life, she dyed her hair an orange colour. She made friends easily, with a French accent and gravelly voice that never left her. She showed little interest in everyday domesticity, and would let her dinner burn while she practised the piano, forgetting about the pan until neighbours complained about the smoke. She would eat a tin of fish for lunch, liked cheap Bulgarian ‘ox heart’ red wine, and Russian Camembert cheese from Moscow. She also liked astronomy. She used to say the magnitude of the stars kept life’s trifles in perspective.

  According to one of her friends, Vera described her early childhood as bourgeois, presided over by a socialite Spanish mother and a tough English governess who made her take cold showers – a regime Vera hated, even though she later said it helped her survive some of her toughest years in the USSR. Vera’s father was said to have been a brilliant, hot-tempered mathematician who worked as a professor at Turin University. He also loved to gamble, his card losses eventually forcing the family to move from a grand villa into a cheap hotel on the Côte d’Azur.

  Taught piano from a very young age, Vera showed signs of exceptional musical talent, and advanced rapidly. There is confusion as to where she trained, and under whom. One account leads back to the Franco-Swiss pianist and composer Alfred Cortot, whose technique was so impressive that even Vladimir Horowitz, one of the twentieth century’s most iconic classical pianists, approached Cortot and asked him to reveal his secret. Another source cited her teacher as the Italian Ernesto Consolo. Whatever the truth of it, Vera perfected a spectacular ‘velvet’ playing style. By 1920, her profile was significant enough for the French newspaper Le Figaro to describe Vera’s performances of Liszt as ‘rare brilliance’.

  Vera’s personal life, however, was unhappy. When her first marriage to a Frenchman failed, she fled to Rome in 1930, where she met her second husband, a Russian engineer called Vladimir Shevchenko whom she had encountered at the salon of a Russian émigré duchess. In the most romantic telling of their love affair, Shevchenko used to arrive with a violin tucked under his arm. Shevchenko, however, wanted to go back to the homeland his family had fled in the early twentieth century. In 1939, the couple moved to Leningrad, where Vera found work as a performer. Then Shevchenko was arrested, accused of acting as a foreign spy. He was sent to a Gulag in Zlatoust in the Urals. When Vera travelled to the town to try and prove his innocence, she, too, was arrested. In February 1943, Vera was sentenced under Article 58.10, for ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’, and sent to a labour camp not far from Ekaterinburg.

  What happened to Vera’s husband in the Gulag is unclear. Some said Shevchenko was diagnosed with schizophrenia, then dystrophy. Other accounts claimed he was shot. A few said he jumped out of a window. Vera believed none of them and continued to write letters to him deep into her eight-year incarceration. It was to no avail. By the time she came out of the Gulag herself, the man she loved had been taken from her, leaving her nothing but the music inside her head. She didn’t even have her husband’s violin, which was eventually delivered to her. Unable to look at the case, which she said resembled a small coffin, she gave the instrument away to rid herself of the memory.

  Vera couldn’t, however, give up music altogether. She adored Bach, and she admired Chopin’s Preludes. To Vera, music was like breathing. In prison, the female prisoners had seen how badly she had pined for her piano, so they carved a keyboard into her wooden bunk with a kitchen knife so she could practise silently at night. Another account gives her Gulag piano as a kitchen table. Yet another said her playing in prison was limited to a one-off encounter with a piano in a village house. Where the stories do converge is in 1950: the first thing she did on her release was walk on to the streets of the local town, Nizhny Tagil, to find a music school. Still wearing her convict’s quilted pea coat, she asked to play the piano.

  Vera sat at that instrument for one, maybe two hours (typically of Vera’s story, there are others who say far longer). She played without stopping, laughing and crying, the recall of her repertoire note-perfect as her stubby fingers behaved with the same exhilarating precision as they had before her arrest. Teachers a
nd students who were listening at the door were dumbfounded by this magnificent squall of Chopin, Liszt and Beethoven. It was as if every part of Vera’s being were lost to the power of music, as if she could see everything all at once, the ‘[n]othing that is not there and the nothing that is’.

  The face of Vera Lotar-Shevchenko on her gravestone in Akademgorodok.

  Vera didn’t leave any memoirs. She was a charismatic introvert who lived deep inside herself, except when she played the piano with a divine intensity which seemed to draw people in. There is an old recording of Vera playing Beethoven’s Sonata No. 32, Op. 111. Listen to the music and, despite the crackle, the effect is mesmerizing. She plays with a fevered urgency, each note brimming with the strength of her character, as if playing the piano is a kind of therapy.

  After her Gulag experience, Vera never recovered her international career. She didn’t return to France. On her release, she got a job at the Railway Club Theatre in the Urals city where she had first walked out of prison. By 1965, she was working in Barnaul in the Altai. This was where the Soviet journalist Simon Soloveychik happened to hear her play to an audience of fifty-three people in a hall for five hundred. On 19 December 1965, Soloveychik wrote about her performance in the Soviet newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. Describing her extraordinary sophistication, poetry and ambitious French repertoire, he cited the world-class virtuoso Sviatoslav Richter and a Beethoven recording by Artur Schnabel. He said listening to Vera induced the same feeling – that he was hearing piano music for the first time. He called it an encounter with beauty at its very limit.

  Endorsed by that article, Vera was hired as a soloist by the Novosibirsk Philharmonic and moved to Akademgorodok at the invitation of the city’s academics. The Soviet scientist and computer pioneer Alexei Lyapunov, who became one of her Akademgorodok patrons, hosted intimate concerts in his home. It seemed as if Vera had found her safe house, a place where she could focus on the music she lived for, even if there were still moments when she remained tainted by her Gulag past. On a cold Tuesday night during the winter of 1966, she played in the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre. The concert had barely been advertised. There was only a single poster pinned up inside the theatre beside the cashier. When Vera arrived on stage, there were two instruments: a Steinway concert grand – was this the same instrument I had tried to trace back to the Leningrad Philharmonic-in-exile? – and a dilapidated Soviet-era Estonia. The Steinway was locked shut, in what felt like a deliberate snub. Vera cried a little. She asked her friend for a shot of vodka, then walked back on stage in a borrowed, ill-fitting concert dress to play the Estonia so spectacularly that everyone from the coat-check to the kitchen staff was spellbound. Vera refused an encore, telling the audience how hard it had been to perform on the Soviet piano when beside it stood the greatest instrument of them all.

  Anastasia, the violinist helping me with Vera’s story, was among those who had heard Vera play during her Akademgorodok years. Anastasia’s family had lived in the same apartment block. Whenever she practised, Vera would open the door to her flat and leave it slightly ajar. People would gather on the stairwell to listen to her rehearse – a concert hall on the third floor of a Khrushchev-era flat fashioned from sixties prefabricated concrete.

  Anastasia took me to the city’s South Cemetery, where Vera was buried in a quiet grove of birch trees. On the way, she pointed out the town’s public sculptures, which included a computer start-up button and a lab mouse on a granite plinth knitting a double-helix string of DNA. There was a tidy order to Akademgorodok, as if everyone knew their purpose. Slender black shapes moved slowly through the wide, quiet streets, nobody touching or talking, their bodies pressed slightly forward into the cold. There were barely any cars, yet the town’s traffic lights seemed to pause longer than in other towns, as if someone had decided to give Akademgorodok’s citizens more time to think.

  At a stonecutter’s shop beside the cemetery gate, new headstones were layered up like sheaves of paper. Inside the cemetery, the tips of graves nudged out of the snow like stone buds. The academicians’ grand memorials lined the main, well-kept boulevard, as if the same lead scientists who benefitted from favourable grocery rations in life also merited a better plot than regular citizens when their time was up.

  Anastasia led me to Section Six in the cemetery, where Vera’s coffin had been draped with a home-made French tricolour flag and lowered into the Russian earth. I had paid for her grave to be cleared of snow, which revealed a headstone decorated with an etched portrait of Vera as an older woman, her hair cropped to the ears and her eyes downcast. On the headstone was written: ‘Life in which there is Bach is blessed.’ As I stood in front of the memorial, I wondered what part of Vera’s story she would have wanted to be remembered, and if she would have been glad of my search for her last piano and the story it told of the cultural landscape which opened up with Khrushchev’s thaw.

  During the construction of Akademgorodok, restrictions on freedom of expression began to relax throughout the USSR. On 25 February 1956, Khrushchev made a ‘secret speech’ to delegates at the Twentieth Communist Party Congress – an event which had a cataclysmic effect, not only in denouncing a system that by the time of Stalin’s death was entirely totalitarian, but by destroying Stalin’s cult of infallibility. Some of Stalin’s most feared labour camps were abolished, with large numbers of political prisoners granted amnesty, or ‘rehabilitated’ (a process which exonerated victims of their alleged crimes, often posthumously). More overt signs of renewed confidence and tolerance spread into Russian society. There was even a tentative melt in Cold War relations. In 1958, the Texan pianist Harvey Van Cliburn won the International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow – with Khrushchev’s approval.

  A year later, in July 1959, Richard Nixon, then Vice-President of the United States, flew to Novosibirsk. He visited the city’s opera house, comparing Novosibirsk’s hunger for culture with that of nineteenth-century San Francisco. The audience of two thousand, observed a New York Times journalist, were ‘dressed as if ready for a football game’. On the same trip, Mrs Nixon went to a Siberian fashion show.

  In this busy period of de-Stalinization, hope for some kind of freedom was a very real possibility. In 1962, Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in the Soviet Union, giving a first-hand account of the Gulag experience. This was an extraordinarily significant moment, indicating a new transparency on the past. Then in 1964 the USSR’s new leader, Leonid Brezhnev, ousted Khrushchev and began his eighteen-year tenure as General Secretary when the Soviet Union shifted gear again. His anti-reformist stance gave the USSR stability and prestige – as well as the world’s fastest, deepest submarine, and a functioning space station – but it also induced an era of political, cultural and economic stagnation.

  Nikita Khrushchev congratulating the American pianist Harvey Van Cliburn.

  In Akademgorodok, however, there were citizens who behaved as if none of this was happening, as if they considered themselves somehow immune to the renewed ideological clampdown. In May 1968, the city’s House of Scientists hosted a Festival of Bards. The event was announced with a banner over the door to the concert hall: ‘Poets! Siberia Awaits You!’

  Locals queued enthusiastically for tickets to the festival’s main act: the pianist, guitarist and underground poet Alexander Ginzburg, or ‘Galich’, as he was known. Galich was used to performing his satirical work behind closed doors. This would therefore be the first open concert of his career. When the day came, Galich sang ‘Clouds’, about a former Gulag prisoner who got drunk in a bar, and ‘Pasternak in Memoriam’, which described Pasternak’s funeral at a time when his masterpiece, Dr Zhivago, remained banned.

  At first, Galich’s lyrics were met by stunned silence. Then all two thousand people in the audience rose to their feet in applause.

  As word spread through Akademgorodok, Galich was fetched from the city hotel for a 2 a.m. encore at the movie theatre to perform for the stud
ents of the Physics and Mathematics School. In Galich’s provocative rendition, Russians were hearing the truth about Soviet doublespeak in a public auditorium – and they couldn’t get enough of it. But the honeymoon wasn’t to last. For a while, some of the party faithful had been concerned that the town’s outspokenness represented a danger to the status quo. Then, in the same year as the Festival of Bards, a leaked petition – signed by forty-six Akademgorodok researchers denouncing the closed trials of political dissidents – sent shockwaves through the system. Not long after came the most dramatic expression of the changing times: three months after Galich’s performance, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to put an end to the Prague Spring.

  Now all that remains of Akademgorodok’s Galich story is pushed into a corner of a private home on the felicitously named No. 4 Truth Street in the heart of Akademgorodok – the armchair which sat on the stage during Galich’s famous 1968 performance.* The chair is part of a precious collection of memorabilia – a kind of private museum filling the four-room, ground-floor apartment belonging to Anastasia. I visited for tea. Among the treasure trove of objects and photo albums, there was one image which stood out among the rest: a woman in a Mary Quant-style minidress on a set of weighing scales. The photograph recorded a beauty contest in Akademgorodok. A year earlier, the same contest was won by a man in drag.

  ‘My father,’ said Anastasia; ‘he had beautiful legs.’

  When Anastasia’s family arrived in Akademgorodok, the city was still being built. Back then, the only way to make a telephone call was by travelling on one of the two daily buses, route number eight, to Novosibirsk. Anastasia’s father, who worked as a scientist-engineer in the Research Institute of Automation, was nicknamed the city’s Minister of Bizarre Affairs. He was one of the earliest members of the irreverent social club, Under the Integral, which organized the Festival of Bards.