The Lost Pianos of Siberia

by Sophy Roberts

  ‘You remember that?’ he asked.

  Aleksandr said he had visited the Ipatiev House before it was destroyed. As he was growing up, he had also met and talked to people who had been present in Ekaterinburg shortly after the executions. He had spoken with a local man who as a fifteen-year-old boy had taken part in a search for traces of the royal family, carried out under the aegis of the Ekaterinburg District Court after the White Army had occupied the city.

  Aleksandr had also read a book which had slipped the censors’ net – a bibliographical rarity called Last Days of the Romanovs, written in 1926 (then withdrawn and destroyed) by the chairman of the Ekaterinburg Soviet during the period of revolution. Although the chairman did not participate directly, the circumstances of the massacre would have presumably been well known to him. This report said that Sokolov failed to find the grave of the Romanovs because what was left of the corpses, which didn’t burn, was buried in a site which investigators didn’t excavate. Then there was a poem by Mayakovsky, which hinted at the real site of the bodies: ‘nine versts’, or six miles, past Iset mines and cliffs. Mayakovsky, it seemed, had been shown the site by a member of the City Executive Committee, who had acted as the poet’s tour guide in 1928.

  These leads indicated that Sokolov’s original report may have been wrong when he had first described the place where it was assumed the bodies were disposed of – a mineshaft at Ganina Yama, nine miles outside the city. Among other fragments, Sokolov found the Empress’s emerald crucifix, two pieces of skin and a severed finger, but no substantial remains. Sokolov concluded the bodies had been dismembered, burnt and dissolved in sulphuric acid there and then in an attempt to destroy the evidence.

  Sokolov, it turned out, had based his original conclusion on a number of assumptions. The bodies were initially thrown down the Ganina Yama mineshaft on the night of the assassinations as Sokolov more or less described, but the hole was shallower than the killers had thought. Two days later, the murderers had in fact moved the bodies three miles to the west, to a swampy meadow near Railway Crossing 184 on the Old Koptyaki Road, also known as Pig’s Meadow. This was where the murderers attempted a second cremation, and used sulphuric acid to do away with the evidence. What was left, including the skulls, was buried in a shallow grave under railway sleepers. This is how the alternative version of events goes – a version revealed by a chain of discoveries that began to unravel in the 1970s.

  It started with a meeting in Ekaterinburg during the summer of 1976 with a nationally famous screenwriter, Geli Ryabov, who was also a press officer at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. According to Aleksandr, Ryabov suggested they should look for the Romanov remains. Aleksandr was a good person to lean on; his work as a geologist meant he was deeply familiar with these Ural forests. Discretion, however, was paramount. Sensitivities around the Romanov story were running high. Only a year after this meeting, the Ipatiev House was bulldozed to the ground. If the party was so quick to destroy evidence of the Tsar’s place of execution, then there would be more trouble if another burial site was identified.

  On 1 June 1979, the secret search party began to dig at Pig’s Meadow. They removed the railway sleepers and dug out three skulls. As Aleksandr talked, I couldn’t stop thinking how it must have felt to touch this history; forever after, it must have been like sleeping in the presence of unquiet ghosts. Galina said that her husband was so stressed by the discovery that he didn’t speak for a couple of months.

  Two skulls went with Ryabov to Moscow for expert examination. One stayed in Ekaterinburg. The investigation was highly secretive, wrapped up in all sorts of feelings I found hard to pull clearly out of the conversation, given the layers of meaning too untouchable for an outsider to understand. Then a year later, in July 1980, all the findings were returned to their swampy grave. The discovery was locked back down with the gravity of what they had found lying heavily upon their conscience for another nine years. Occasionally, Aleksandr would walk past Pig’s Meadow to see if anyone else had dug. No one was to speak of it: it was still too dangerous. As for all Aleksandr’s notes, he didn’t dare keep them at his home, so took them to the house of a trusted friend for safekeeping – a detail given in the book he later wrote, documenting every part of the search. It is an important testimony given the controversy which was unleashed in 1989 when the discovery at Pig’s Meadow was leaked to a Russian newspaper, and this dramatic switch of burial place ricocheted through every stratum of the country’s political, civil and religious society.

  One of the murderers, Pyotr Ermakov, photographed in the twenties standing on railway sleepers in the forest where the Romanovs were buried. It’s not known who took the image, nor who wrote the words on the back of the picture: ‘Place where the Romanovs were burned.’

  The news seemed to divide everybody: the Orthodox faithful, royalists, journalists and scientists trying to make sense of this unfinished chapter in Russia’s violent history. Boris Yeltsin – born near Ekaterinburg, and by this time a member of the Politburo, the Soviet Union’s ruling body – argued for the rehabilitation of the Romanovs. Forensic DNA specialists, both foreign and domestic, got involved. Further investigations were made, revealing many new findings and yet more family remains, with an official state exhumation of the Pig’s Meadow site in 1991. The Russian Orthodox Church, however, couldn’t agree that the discoveries were conclusive. There were arguments over the Romanovs’ canonization status and how to remember and glorify the dead. Books were written. Documentaries were made. Everyone had an opinion – they still do.* In 2001 the Church then built a grand monastery and place of pilgrimage at Ganina Yama – effectively committing to the simpler version of events that went by the original Sokolov report, which asserted that Ganina Yama was where the bodies had dissolved into the earth.

  Galina got up from the table and went to fetch Aleksandr’s book from a shelf. She also handed me a handwritten card, cut from a box of tea bags, on which was written a simple sentence: ‘A scientist defends his invention* when he is absolutely certain or sure in the correctness of his research.’

  ‘The rest,’ she said, ‘is pseudo-scientific ignorance.’

  I had come to the Urals to find the Tsar’s last piano. Instead I had found myself trying to make sense of a bizarre knot in the nation’s relationship with its past. I wanted to listen to Aleksandr talk, an elegant, erudite man who said he didn’t make the investigation out of a desire for fame, wealth or political gain. I found myself wanting to understand his motivations.

  ‘The truth was a burden I felt from childhood,’ said Aleksandr. ‘Historical truth had not been established, and it needs to be finished.’

  Over one more cup of tea, I told Aleksandr I had found three instruments with possible ties to the Ipatiev House. I described the Bechstein carrying the signature of the well-known Ekaterinburg piano tuner, with the words ‘House of Revolution’ written on the soundboard.

  Aleksandr shook his head. He thought the piano I had found was interesting, but he believed it belonged to a different place. He started to talk again about how the forest was a place of sorrow. He was also exhausted. As I watched Galina take his hand, I realized we all need them in the end. Pivots. The fixed point on which a mechanism depends. The person or thing on which something hangs. Like a piano, movement is dependent on the stability of its fixed parts. When a key on a grand piano is pressed down, it sets in motion a small pivot movement that throws a felted hammer upwards to strike a string, or strings. Only with a stable pivot will the music ever sound.

  The next day, before I left Ekaterinburg, I visited Ganina Yama with Nikolai Neuimin, head of the Romanov Memorial Hall, which is a branch of the city’s regional history museum. Neuimin was present at another excavation at the Pig’s Meadow site in 2007, when the remains of two of the missing children, the Tsarevich and his sister Maria, were found some seventy metres from Aleksandr Avdonin’s original discovery. At the entrance to the Ganina Yama complex, we refused an official guide, and instead w
alked among the chapels dotted about the forest, their green roofs and golden crosses glinting through the trees.

  There was scaffolding surrounding new additions, and a bronze sculpture of the five Romanov children wearing crowns. Groups of visitors came and went, including families on walking tours with priests. They stood by the sinkhole where the imperial family was first thrown, the depression’s snowy surface stippled by the drip of water from overhanging boughs. The devout crossed themselves and prayed in an expression of religious conviction that my companion, Nikolai, didn’t share.

  Moving away from one of the tour groups, Nikolai started to talk about Pig’s Meadow.

  But someone had been listening.

  Nikolai was pulled aside.

  A church official warned him not to speak of the second grave.

  We drove to the Pig’s Meadow site nearby. At the end of a path which had been swept to the graves, Nikolai pulled out a set of photographs from his bag, including a black-and-white image of some of the remains as they were originally discovered.

  We stood beside the simple metal cross above the railway sleepers, which was strung with a white, red and pink plastic wreath. At the base of the cross someone had hammered a small bronze plaque: ‘The Children. Good Night. God Bless.’

  In the snow, I could see the colour of Aleksandr Avdonin’s hair, which Galina said turned shock-white two days after the discovery of the skulls. In the quivering forest, I could hear the shouts of the killers and the victims. Beneath the Urals’ black soil, I could feel the questions reverberating deep inside Russia’s conscience, like the last working key on the Ipatiev piano hitting a broken pivot and not making any sound. My conscience also hummed and hawed. Something in me found it violently exciting to have stepped so close to the end of the Russian Empire; every hint of a lost piano encouraged my ambitions, as if the historic instruments with state stories somehow carried a deeper timbre. I also felt ashamed, as if I had joined the ranks of the early nosy parkers, the ‘amateur Sherlocks or Pushfuls’, which were the words the British journalist Robert Wilton gave to the people thirsting for information about the murders in his controversial account written soon after they had occurred. As Galina had pointed out when we had met, my search for a piano was different to the kind of search a scientist undertakes. I had come looking for a specific instrument, but I was also interested in the symbolic connections of my quest. Now as I stood beside the cross, I was struck by an overwhelming sense of sadness. Even if I had found the Tsar’s last instrument, how could such a piano ever sing again? There was too much tragedy in it. I knew I was chasing the impossible, looking for an object with clear, undisputed provenance in a country where Ipatiev crockery is fought over, bought and sold, where in spite of an abundance of facts, not even the location or identity of the Romanov remains are a universally accepted truth. Just find a piano with a pure sound, I told myself, something humble, human and loved.

  ________________

  * The British historian Orlando Figes tells a curious story about how Rasputin’s embalmed body, originally buried in the grounds of the Tsarskoe Selo palace complex outside St Petersburg, was dug up after the Revolution, carried off in an old piano, and taken into the forest to be burnt by soldiers. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996).

  * There were many musicians who supported the Bolsheviks, only to regret their decision later. The Futurist composer Arthur Lourié stayed and joined the revolutionary cause full of hope; in 1918, he was appointed head of the music division of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment. But when he went to visit Berlin in 1922, Lourié never returned home. Prokofiev, on the other hand, returned to Russia permanently in 1936.

  * Cats provided a food source for a starving populace during the Leningrad Siege. The Hermitage cats, however, were saved in order to keep the treasures of the museum safe from mice.

  * My last correspondence with a spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church in March 2019: ‘The Church is ready to wait for the results as long as it might happen. For us the most important thing is that the results are accepted by everyone, so they don’t divide the Orthodox believers into those who accept and those who do not accept the remains.’

  * It could say ‘intention’ or ‘invention’. The handwriting is unclear, but the meaning is not.

  9

  The End of Everything: The Altai Mountains

  AT ONE OF THE most southerly points of Siberia, where the border crumples up against Central Asia’s great belt of mountains, four countries converge: Russia, China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan, close to a plateau which locals call ‘the End of Everything’. At some point in my search I needed to survey a route out of Russia into Mongolia. With a successful piano discovery, the Altai Mountains might provide a possible exit route. Aside from the border at Kiakhta, this was the only road into Mongolia open to foreigners.

  I was feeling optimistic. Not only was my work with local radio and TV raising possibilities, but other research had thrown up reassuring traces of European piano culture making it out this far. In 1848, an English couple, Lucy and Thomas Atkinson, travelled through the Altai. Among their charming descriptions of frozen Winsor and Newton paints, and encounters with the Decembrists, they said the town of Barnaul was alive with pianos. The instruments belonged to the new industrialists cashing in on the Altai’s nineteenth-century silver mines.

  History showed that these mountains had also proved happy hunting grounds for those prepared to look. In 1825, the eminent German biologist Carl Friedrich von Ledebour, a narrow-faced plant-hunter with a slightly forward stoop, ventured into the Altai and extracted an impressive cache: forty-two chests of plants and seeds, and five hundred insects. Henry J. Elwes, a British naturalist remembered for his booming voice, made another significant haul. He gathered close to a thousand butterflies when the sun shone, and when it rained, he hunted the region’s Ovis ammon, or Altai argali sheep, instead. But it was Russia’s Prince Elim Pavlovich Demidoff – the richest man in the world – who made perhaps the biggest killing after he spotted some of the Altai’s most alluring quarry in a London taxidermist’s shop. In 1898, he bagged thirty-two of the largest wild sheep on the planet, each animal weighing more than two big men, a single horn if it were uncoiled measuring almost two metres in length.

  Given their rugged isolation, the people of the Altai Mountains had a reputation for being confidently self-sufficient. With some good country for farming, it had a long history of attracting hardy migrants with their pot-bellied horses and cows tied to the tails of wagons. The region had also proved a good place for Russians to find refuge from the civil war, which ravaged the country from around the time of the Tsar’s execution until 1922. I therefore reasoned that any pianos that had made it all the way out here were less likely to have been destroyed in a place where a quiet frontier spirit still endured. This was especially true of the region’s edges, in the shadow of the Ukok Plateau, which holds some of the deepest layers of Siberian human history known to archaeologists. I wanted to explore this neck of mountains near the Altai’s southern edge – specifically, a village called Ust-Koksa a couple of hundred miles from Ukok. There was a former Aeroflot navigator living here who had collected forty-one pianos and distributed them among local children living in the mountain communities. Like the Decembrists, he wanted to spread culture and education through Siberia’s backcountry.

  Clement St George Royds Littledale, a member of Demidoff’s Altaian hunting party, trying out a yak for size.

  The collector was an enthusiastic bibliophile called Leonid Kaloshin. I thought it heroic that he had brought in not only tens of thousands of books, but also pianos from Moscow – all at his own cost – having been lured here by the esoteric philosophies of the Russian author Nicholas Roerich and his wife, Helena, whose spiritual writings drew him in even more. The Roerichs had spent the summer of 1926 in the Altai as part of a four-year painting and ethnographical expedition at a time when the graves of Red soldi
ers were still fresh from the country’s civil-war upheavals.

  Nicholas Roerich, born in St Petersburg in 1874, was one of Russia’s great twentieth-century polymaths. He first rose to prominence as an archaeologist, then as a set designer for the composer Igor Stravinsky, and Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario and founder of the Ballets Russes.* Roerich was a brilliant painter. His wife, Helena, was a talented pianist (her uncle was the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, who was one of the so-called ‘Mighty Five’). The Roerichs were also deeply unconventional. When they ventured into Siberia, walking into the Altai Mountains accompanied by Wagner’s music and a portable gramophone, they were searching for the mythical kingdom of Shambhala – the earthly paradise in Tibetan Buddhism. The couple’s writings still bring followers here nearly a century later, people who not only share the Roerichs’ belief in the existence of Shambhala, but also in the notion, much like the Decembrists, that only with the assistance of high culture, distributed beyond the city’s elite theatres, concert halls and galleries, will humanity thrive. In the nineties, when Russians were suffering a crisis of faith, people began to migrate to the Altai from all over the country with the conviction that the Roerichs were right – that this region was some kind of Shangri-La, or Promised Land.

  Paradise, however, has never been an easy place to get to. Ust-Koksa, where the Aeroflot captain lived, was a three-day journey from Novosibirsk, travelling through imposing territory with narrow saddles, chiselled cliffs and dangerous roads. The Altai was also a geopolitical hotspot. The Russians were building a new gas line through the region, linking Western Siberia to China. There was nervous talk among ecologists and locals, who were intent on ensuring any kind of developments steered clear of sacred ground. Wildlife and conservation activists were under scrutiny from authorities. An English writer poking around for pianos in these parts might look suspicious. At Biysk, a town midway on my Altaian journey, I therefore took advice, and picked up ‘security’.