The Lost Pianos of Siberia

by Sophy Roberts

  ‘Security’s’ name was Uncle Vitya – a geologist with friends in useful places, who knew a great deal about Roerich. Uncle Vitya was also acquainted with the Aeroflot navigator. He knew the criminals who once ran amok in the mountain villages. In the nineties, he had survived an attack when bandits attempted to knife him. I was travelling in January, which is a month of deep snow and road closures. I needed someone who knew the lie of the land.

  I liked him immediately. Uncle Vitya sported a gnome-ish woollen hat from beneath which his thick curls constantly escaped. He waddled rather than walked, and wore sturdy glasses. Sitting in the car, his belly spread so wide that it was difficult to work the gear stick. There was something calming about his presence – a happy-go-lucky man with a generous double chin and cheeks that wobbled when he laughed. Uncle Vitya would become important to my travels in Siberia, like a kind of lucky charm. Whenever Uncle Vitya was with me, I felt safe. Whatever Uncle Vitya said, I trusted. He was warm and witty, his stories mixing myth, Soviet history and various random metallurgical observations.

  We stopped every now and again to make offerings to the spirits – near springs, high passes and holy cairns – with Uncle Vitya’s lulling voice the only thing I could hear across plains that spread out so far and wide, the roads vanished in the distance. We talked about scattered Soyuz rockets, and in the absolute whiteness of winter, how Siberia must be a perfect hunting ground for meteorites. If the stones lay on top of the snow cover, they could only have fallen from the cosmos. Uncle Vitya used to spend large amounts of time as a geologist in the field, which was when he first saw a yeti. These days, he lived in a housing block in Biysk, a town that once processed rocket fuel for the Russian cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, just across the border.

  Isolated spots of the Altai are peppered with metal scraps jettisoned by Soviet spacecraft. There is one such piece, photographed in the Altai Republic in 2000, which stands upright like a chesspiece in a field. The image depicts two men on top of a crown of crumpled metal photographed at the very moment a butterfly storm is taking place. The creatures are swarming in a thick cloud of beating wings, the butterflies as white as snow. The image thrums with vibrations in the air, a rushing whirr against the Altai’s summer flush of grass. The landscape feels like a kind of paradise, a throwback to an untamed planet – raw and unpopulated, the rocket the poisoned apple in a field of blooming life.

  Altaian space junk, shot by Norwegian photographer Jonas Bendiksen in 2000. The men in the image are collecting scrap metal from the crashed spacecraft. The white flecks are butterflies.

  The farther we went into the mountains, the more insistent the feeling of nature’s plenitude. The landscape had a thrumming, superabundant energy as we headed towards Belukha, among the highest peaks in Siberia. In Boris Pasternak’s autobiography, the writer of Doctor Zhivago described the Russian composer Aleksandr Scriabin at the piano and ‘the pitch of an unheard-of blending’ – music that could also describe the colours of the Altaian landcape. The snow crust creaked when I waded into drifts as deep as my thighs. We crossed narrow bridges strung with baubles of snow dangling off scoops of wire. Above the skirts of forest which draped the mountains, the sky turned from white to pink. When snow began to fall, the flakes looked like diamond dust, then splinters of trembling gold. The Altai is a wild and secretive place, said Uncle Vitya. He talked about a group of Freemasons rumoured to be building ‘Moon Cities’ in the mountains, and how he, too, was filling his dacha’s basement up to its roof with potatoes to see him through the Apocalypse. He talked of Roerich again, who considered the Altai a kind of ‘melting pot of nations’.

  The Russian belief in mysticism can get to you sometimes, especially on the edge of Siberia where superstitions seem to lurk under every boulder. A piano, a piano, I kept telling myself; I needed to keep the object front of mind, not the symbolism Russians can read into every experience, which was pulling me in with the same ease as Uncle Vitya’s stories. If a photographer could come upon a piece of space junk in the Altai at the very moment a butterfly storm was taking place, then surely I would find an instrument for Odgerel.

  ‘Of course you’ll be successful,’ nodded Uncle Vitya with conviction: ‘You’ll not only find music in the Altai,’ he said reassuringly, ‘but a universe beyond perception.’

  We entered a river valley shrouded in winter – a slumbering landscape threaded by a stream. When crystals fell from the feathered branches, it felt like I was walking into a cloudburst. We crossed high-altitude plains and zigzagged down switchbacks – in Russian, nicknamed ‘a mother-in-law’s tongue’. We passed ancient standing stones that marked our slippage from modern Russia. Familiar place names gave way to different sounds as we travelled towards an older, Turkic etymology, in words which revealed the extraordinary layers of ethnic history in the Altai, where a Bronze Age civilization developed some three thousand years ago and began to spread outwards with man’s mastery of the horse.

  The Altai’s roots run as far back as the Pazyryks, a Scythian tribe who invented saddles, said Uncle Vitya, as well as the Huns, Uyghurs and Mongols. The stories of human prehistory in these mountains make the Altai another cradle of mankind. In caves hollowed out like honeycombs, scientists have discovered relics of a subspecies of human more than a hundred thousand years old. A finger bone here, a child’s tooth there. In all, just four tiny specimens of ‘Denisovan Man’ have ever been found.

  That this relic DNA endures not only in Altaian bone fragments but also in modern-day Oceania is spectacular testimony to the extent of hominin migration, and the fact different subspecies of prehistoric humans likely interbred. The discoveries also underline the advantages of Siberia’s remoteness, implying how much more is still left uncovered. Then there is Siberia’s protective permafrost. The land functions like a dry freezer, preserving the mummies of early nomadic tribes which scientists keep uncovering from the Altai’s kurgans, or underground tombs. These chambers, filled with objects to support the deceased on their next journey, are treasure troves of story, with the best of them the Ukok Princess, a Scythian mummy buried some two thousand five hundred years ago with the conviction that her death was a continuation of her life. Six horses were found on top of her funerary chamber. Beside her head, there was a meal of mutton still smelling of the cooking juices. The Ukok Princess – found lying sideways ‘like a sleeping child’ – had been sent on her way with a bag of cosmetics, a yellow silk top with maroon piping, and flakes of gold. She shouldn’t have been disturbed, say local naysayers; it was a profane meddling with worlds we don’t understand. The Altai’s mummies are still of this world, which is why every time an ice-plugged tomb is opened up, earthquakes seem to follow. We are interfering with a lost mythology written into the tattoos of these ancient people, each gaunt corpse commanding a presence far larger than skin and bone, weaving together this world and the afterlife. The patterns curl and loop over sinewy bodies the colour of soaked leather: a reindeer here, a bird’s wing there; a tiger with claws and stripes cut like a shadow puppet; and the women, beautiful in plumes of silk, who lived and fought like men.

  Then another dose of tough Siberian reality. On our way to meet the Aeroflot navigator, we stopped to meet a piano tuner who was also a self-taught rock musician. He owned a Becker grand, dating from the 1890s, which he had picked up after a flood in a local music school. Descended from Old Believers, he was fixing the piano up to sell. We talked about Freddie Mercury, while sharing bread and pickles in a room short of seats. He talked about the Led Zeppelin records that got him into music in the first place. When American rock was hard to find during Soviet times, ‘we listened to it hidden-ly’, he said.

  Hidden-ly. The word seemed to describe the heart of the Altai, like the vibration inside the butterfly storm, or what the English poet Shelley called the ‘gleams of a remoter world’. Hidden-ly was a way of life in these mountains, said Uncle Vitya. It was why Leonid Kaloshin, the Aeroflot navigator, came to live here in the first place, in
a cabin on a hill at the head of Ust-Koksa village.

  Leonid seemed pleased to see me when he bounded down the steps to the door. He was burly, with a slim bandana which kept his unkempt hair off his vigorous face. His handshake was firm and matter-of-fact, and his eyes a twinkling grey. He was charismatic, over seventy years old, but looked fifty as he leapt back up his rickety stairs to the warren of rooms and corridors of his house.

  A kitchen and bed were squeezed in among piles of books. Shelves curled out of the main living area past a small stove into a back room with narrow walkways. There were novels, poetry, history books, an 1837 edition entitled Activities of Peter the Great and Wise, a 1902 copy of Byron’s works, and an illustrated collection of Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales. Among the shelves stood a picture of a passenger jet, a wooden sculpture of Helena Roerich in the lotus position, and a portrait of Ernest Hemingway. On the windowsill, geranium leaves released the sweet, oily smell of summer. The rooms, however, were freezing. Leonid, who had run out of money to buy fuel, hadn’t had a chance to replenish his stocks. Whenever he ran short, Leonid went to collect his own wood from the forest using a rusty UAZ van – a Soviet classic, in gunmetal grey – parked up beside his house.

  Leonid Kaloshin photographed in his library in Ust-Koksa village in 2017.

  For twenty years, from 1969 to 1989, Leonid had worked as a flight navigator on Aeroflot passenger planes. He had flown nearly eleven thousand hours in his career, criss-crossing the USSR. Then one day in 1984, he went to an exhibition of Nicholas Roerich’s paintings in Moscow. Leonid was entranced. Ever since, he had attached himself to the idea that the Altai was the spiritual heart of Russia.

  ‘I left my job to move to a place I’d never been,’ said Leonid. ‘I got some work with air traffic control in Ust-Koksa, which I did for four years until perestroika. I brought my books. I lent them out to my neighbours. I started to catalogue them. I wanted to open a community library.’

  The first passenger flight from Novosibirsk to Moscow in July 1957 pulled Siberia closer to European Russia than the Trans-Siberian Railway had half a century before. This is an airport waiting room in Siberia in January 1964.

  Part of me thought it was odd that this man had left all the security of a successful Soviet career because of the promise of some kind of Siberian Shambhala. Another part of me knew it made sense, given his view from the library of some of the most beautiful country on Earth. As for Leonid’s interest in music, that came later, when he encountered a little boy in Uymon Village – the same settlement where the Roerichs stayed when they travelled through the Altai and lived with a family of Old Believers. The child who inspired Leonid’s piano quest was trying to play a wooden table painted with a keyboard.

  ‘When I saw how strongly he wanted to hear music, I went to Moscow and bought him an instrument,’ said Leonid. ‘Nothing special; it was one of four pianos an old man was selling off cheaply from his garage. I’ve done the same ever since, bringing pianos to the Altai.’

  Leonid was now building a concert hall at the back of his house with the help of friends and volunteers. Soon he would need to find a grand piano for performances. The concert hall would have perfect acoustics, he said, for around seventy people. He said he couldn’t sell any instrument, not for now; all those he had brought to the Altai were simple uprights given out to children, or purchased by local families at a very low price. But if I found a good grand piano suitable for his hall – the Old Believer’s Becker sounded interesting to him – then he would be very grateful if I could find the money for it. He didn’t have much; he lived on a small Aeroflot pension, but he usually found a way of working things out. In fact, would the Mongolian concert pianist like to come and play here when his concert hall was completed?

  ‘But this place is so remote,’ I remarked, feeling the tables turn: Leonid was asking me to find him a piano, rather than the other way around.

  ‘The world is very remote,’ he said, his grey eyes alight: ‘We are at the centre.’

  ________________

  * Their production of The Rite of Spring, which premiered in Paris in 1913 with Roerich’s stage sets, was deemed scandalously avant-garde. It caused all sorts of trouble, with rumours of police being called to stop the hurling of missiles from the audience.

  10

  The Moscow of the East: Harbin

  EARLY ON IN MY travels in Siberia, I had come across the memoirs of Thomas Preston, the British Consul to Western Siberia during the Russian Revolution. A consummate pianist, Preston was living in Ekaterinburg when Tsar Nicholas II arrived in the city as the Bolsheviks’ prisoner. It may have been a country falling apart with the end of the old regime, but it was also alive with the nineteenth-century musical greats, evidenced by all those moments in Preston’s narrative when he says more about the likes of Tchaikovsky and Alexander Glazunov than he gives astute political insights into the disintegrating social order. ‘A passport . . . particularly in Russia,’ is how Preston describes music. I was drawn to what Preston noticed – specifically the image of pianos flowing out of Siberia on the last trains out as chaos took over.

  Preston saw the car drive past that took the Romanovs to the Ipatiev House, which was located a few doors down from the British Consulate. After the executions, Preston also witnessed the Whites and the Reds converging in the Urals, and the people of Ekaterinburg rushing to escape. On a hot day in July 1919, he described some fifty, sixty trains backed up on a single line of railway, and citizens fighting for space on the trains’ roofs and buffers. Those with the means bought entire rail coaches, ramming them full of safes, expensive furniture and grand pianos. Everyone was headed in the same direction, including Nikolai Sokolov, the Whites’ criminal investigator into the Romanov assassinations. Sokolov was travelling with three suitcases and a small wooden box containing his official report on the murders, along with bullets, splintered jewels and a finger – likely cut from the hand of the Empress in order to retrieve a ring.

  The trains went first to Omsk, then to Chita via the Trans-Siberian Railway. They then took the branch line south via the Chinese Eastern Railway to Harbin – these days a Chinese metropolis, but at that time in history a Russian city across the Siberian border in Qing-controlled Manchuria. Known as the Moscow of the East, Harbin was bubbling and cosmopolitan, swollen with floods from the Songhua River. There was a brittle glamour to the city, with cabaret nights, rampant prostitution and banditry. But at least life felt free. As early as 1907, plays censored by Tsarist Russia premiered in Harbin. Against the brutality of the Russian Civil War and the rise of Bolshevism, Harbin’s libertarianism was appealing, the city full of pianos which had belonged to brilliant early jazz artists who gave Harbin its swing in one of the stranger twists in the musical history of Eurasia.

  Harbin’s evolution had been a curious one – a freak Russian settlement in Chinese territory established in 1898 when the Tsar struck a deal allowing Russia to run a railway through Manchuria to the Pacific. Within a decade of Russian engineers arriving, the little village swelled into a city, bolstered by an influx of Russian Jews escaping the pogroms in the Pale. Recuperating Russian soldiers, waylaid on their return home from the Russo-Japanese War, also chose to stick around. Before long, European-trained architects were finding work designing mansions for the city’s nouveau riche.

  A flooded street in Harbin, 1932.

  Around the time of the October Revolution, Harbin had a population of about a hundred thousand Russians, and twice that number of Chinese. Those numbers soon surged due to refugee arrivals from the Russian Civil War. Newspapers were being published in Russian, Chinese, Ukrainian, German and Yiddish. During festival weeks, Russian drosky drivers in brightly coloured silk shirts drove their jangling horses up and down Harbin’s wide boulevards. Some of the buildings looked as if they had been lifted straight out of St Petersburg, their blue onion domes puncturing the sky. ‘It was like a dream of old Russia,’ wrote a New York Times journalist in 1923, ‘beauty in a pla
ce raw and unbeautiful.’

  The same journalist described an intimacy coupled with suspicion in the way the city’s huddled souls eyed each other with hunger and distrust. (Former White Russians who became Soviet citizens in Harbin during this period were known as ‘radishes’: ‘red on the outside, white on the inside’). Other first-hand accounts described the half-starving women who disembarked the trains. They became prey to Harbin’s white-slave traders and ‘underworld gentry’ in a city where racketeers and smugglers literally got away with murder, and bodies swung from telegraph poles. This was a town where the law was tenuous and the nightlife, wrote a wide-eyed, twenty-year-old White Guard, was devoid of all pretence to either modesty or temperance. Champagne flowed among desperate characters thrown together by war, with any fear about tomorrow lost in a drunken fog of gaiety and nervous tension. There were two operas, six theatres, and music halls in full blast. Not only did numerous instruments appear in Harbin during this tumultuous period, but a completely new style of music.

  In spring 1917, the first jazz record ever made was released in New York. Four years later, jazz was seeping into Siberia with the American Expeditionary Force that occupied Vladivostok at the end of the Russian Civil War. Gramophone records began travelling along the seams of the Trans-Siberian Railway, this new music spreading nationwide by the thirties as Russian jazz developed its own unique sound.

  In Harbin, musicians became celebrities, playing in the Railway Club, restaurants, cinemas, theatres and hotel ballrooms. Artists made the covers of magazines and established their names before moving on to the glamour of Shanghai, where the French, British and American appetite for jazz in the city’s foreign concessions kept many a Russian musician in employment. The anarchic freedom of improvisation fitted with contemporary Russian culture in the Far East, where big bands and ragtime struck dramatic carpe diem chords in refugee communities. The Harbin Symphony Orchestra included principals who had been soloists in major Russian orchestras. The First Harbin Musical Academy was among the top conservatories in Asia. Some thirty music schools were flourishing in the city.