The Lost Pianos of Siberia

by Sophy Roberts

  Amateur musicians, inspired by the beautiful cacophony, included a young Siberian engineering student from the Trans-Siberian Railway town of Chita: Oleg Lundstrem, whose family had left Russia for Harbin in 1921. When Lundstrem stumbled on a recording of ‘Dear Old Southland’ by Duke Ellington, that was it: the swing was on. In 1934, Lundstrem founded what was to become the world’s longest existing jazz band. Oleg played the piano. His brother, Igor, played the saxophone. In Harbin and then Shanghai, where the siblings moved in 1936, the appetite for this Russian-embellished style was so significant that within six years of forming his nine-piece orchestra, Lundstrem was nicknamed the ‘King of Jazz in the Far East’.

  For Harbin’s entertainers, these were glittering times. There was first-class cabaret and ballet, with artists from Moscow’s Bolshoi later moving to Paris for careers at the Folies Bergère. White Russian ‘princesses’ worked as dancing girls alongside gypsy performers (the less attractive Harbin women, observed an American journalist in 1933, tended to work in dentistry). Theatre, film and opera were on fire. ‘Here in Harbin, the whole house rocked with “Bravas!”’ observed the New York Times. The era’s biggest voices – Sergei Lemeshev, Aleksandr Vertinsky, Fyodor Chaliapin – all toured here, performing at the art nouveau Hotel Moderne, founded by the magnificently rich, somewhat controversial Russian-Jewish owner, Josef Kaspe, who had arrived in Harbin around 1903. During the Russian Civil War, it is thought Kaspe made his fortune trading in émigré jewels. Whatever the truth of it, his wealth was so significant that he brought in craftsmen from Europe to build his Harbin empire. He opened a chain of theatres and a cinema, and hired an entire philharmonic orchestra to accompany the silent movies.

  For a brief moment in time, the Moderne became the main stage for the Oleg Lundstrem Orchestra. Where was that piano? I wondered. The Moderne was also where the hotel owner’s younger son, Semion Kaspe, was booked to perform in 1933. A talented concert pianist trained at the Paris Conservatory, Semion returned to Harbin in order to give a series of recitals – a plan which went tragically wrong when on a hot day in August he was kidnapped on his way back from a party. When his father refused to pay the ransom – it is unclear if Josef Kaspe was calling their bluff, or simply couldn’t afford the vast sum being asked of him – the kidnappers sent the old man his son’s ear lobes in an envelope.

  ‘Finish it quickly,’ Semion wrote in a letter to his father: ‘Do not forget that human beings have limited strength.’

  When his father still refused to cooperate, the kidnappers killed the young pianist. When Semion’s body was recovered, it was so mutilated from torture it is said that Josef Kaspe lost his mind.

  The motivations for the murder were political, not just about greed. At the time of Semion’s kidnapping, a French flag was flying on top of the Hotel Moderne because Kaspe had transferred ownership to his two sons, who held French citizenship. Kaspe had hoped this would give the hotel immunity from the Japanese, who had invaded Manchuria in 1931 and established the puppet state of Manchukuo. The Japanese wanted to get their hands on the hotel, which was the most iconic symbol of the city.

  The concert pianist Semion Kaspe, pictured in 1931.

  White Russian fascists working as proxies for the Japanese were among the suspects accused of Semion’s kidnapping. However, the judge was murdered a week after the sentencing. The suspects were retried several years later, and found not guilty. The liberal atmosphere of Harbin may have been creatively exciting, but it was also plagued by a hostile clash of ideologies, corruption, terror and violent anti-Semitism.

  As Japanese influence increased across the region, the habit for kidnapping and extortion became something of ‘a cottage industry’. During the decade-long occupation, which only ended with Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, the tensions ran so high that more than twenty thousand Russian residents in Harbin chose to be repatriated into the USSR. Natalia Spirina was among them – a disciple of the Roerichs who managed to take her beloved upright piano back with her from Harbin to Novosibirsk. The 1910 Schröder, serial number 36494, survives in Siberia to this day.*

  A large proportion of kharbintsky – ethnic Russians from Harbin – met less than salubrious fates. They returned to the USSR, only to perish in the Gulag because of their connection to the Whites in the Russian Civil War, or because of an alleged collaboration with the Japanese. Others felt tricked by Soviet propaganda when apartments they had been promised weren’t ready. The returnees were abandoned in the middle of nowhere with their baggage, including the odd piano left to spoil in the Siberian rain. Russian Jews, Harbin’s second-largest community in the early twenties, fled to Australia and Palestine. Some also made it out to California, others to South America. Sticking around wasn’t much of an option. From 1936 to 1945, the Japanese turned a Harbin suburb into a centre for biological-weapons research, where thousands of prisoners, including Chinese, Koreans and Russians, were subjected to grisly human experiments.

  These days, Harbin is one of the newest megacities of the People’s Republic. The city blinks with multi-lane highways, super-modern hotels and a world-class opera house in flashing silver. Harbin’s enormous wealth flows out of the nearby Daqing oil fields, each pumping elbow of iron moving in a constant, syncopated rhythm as China’s high-speed trains fly past like snub-nosed planes. After Siberia’s rib-thin settlements, where the train gropes through the empty steppe, the hurry of Harbin feels like a shock to the system.

  I spent four days looking for a living Russian connection to Siberian pianos in this city of over ten million people. Instead, I discovered the Kaspe files were still locked shut by the Chinese government. Any significant first-hand sources connected with the Russian diaspora had already perished or fled many years ago. The only direct connection to one of the early émigrés I was able to track down was an eighty-five-year-old half-Russian, half-Chinese woman who agreed to meet, then backed out. I sought help from an Israeli academic, Professor Dan Ben-Canaan, the Founder of the Harbin Jewish Culture Association who taught at the city university. He had written about Kaspe and the Jewish story in Harbin. He had also done much to try and protect the old architecture.

  Still, Harbin’s Russian buildings weren’t what they used to be. All but a handful of the turn-of-the-century dachas where the Russian train managers had once lived were now demolished. The Orthodox Cathedral of St Sophia, whose bells had once echoed through Harbin’s streets, had been turned into a museum. The old synagogue – a rare architectural survivor, given around eighty per cent of Harbin’s fifty churches and synagogues were ravaged during Mao’s Cultural Revolution – was now a concert hall. Harbin’s only working Russian Orthodox church functioned out of the back of an old shop, next door to a dental surgery; it was presided over by a Chinese priest, and on the day I visited had a congregation of thirteen. As for surviving Russian pianos, I learned that Mao Zedong’s widow, who was fond of piano music, didn’t quite manage to save the instrument from its unpalatable Western reputation. ‘During China’s Cultural Revolution,’ writes one leading historian, ‘the piano was likened to a coffin, in which notes rattled about like the bones of the bourgeoisie’. In 1966, Mao’s Red Guards smashed instruments to pieces, raided music schools, and locked keyboards shut. Their campaign of terror drove soloists to suicide.

  These days, there are plenty of Russian music teachers working in China. Russia’s pedagogy has value in this country; China’s brilliant virtuosos continue to be the beneficiaries of a migration of Russia’s intellectual capital. But it seemed strange to me that in a country which now counted piano talent as one of its most important cultural exports, there was only negligible evidence of the wonderful old Russian artists who did so much to turn the Chinese ear to piano music in the first place. There was the occasional reproduced photograph in a museum display or hotel lobby. I found a piano shop, a tuner, but no traces of old instruments. In all my days of looking, the only antique piano I uncovered (but wasn’t allowed to touch) stood in a rest
aurant serving borscht to tourists.

  Then a promising lead. I received word from a Russian musicologist about a collection of survivors in a small museum put together by a committed Chinese academic. I visited the pianos in a new building designed to look like something out of imperial St Petersburg – a tactful nod, I was told, to an ongoing economic warming between these countries. One or two of the instruments were Japanese, but most of the display rooms were occupied by Russian pianos. Of the pre-Revolution instruments, nearly all of them carried the same provenance: ‘Harbin Musical School’.

  It was my story’s Room 101.* As I wandered through the salvaged remains, I couldn’t find a piano attached to an individual’s past, whether the ghost of Lundstrem, Kaspe or any of the humble Russian teachers and performers who gave this city its brief and glittering place in Eurasia’s musical history. It was as if there was no past before Mao, no individual before state property. Above all, it was as if there were no spectacular refugees who had brought with them (and left behind) that brilliant early sound of jazz as piano music began to seep out of the hands of the intelligentsia to inspire new strata of society both inside and beyond Siberia’s borders. The collection was significant, given what little remains of Russia’s true history in China, but there was also much that was missing. I longed to know who had played this or that instrument, whose fingers had expressed the love or pain of their Harbin exile. The sense of dystopia struck me forcefully, how an object can lose its meaning when it has lost its owner’s story, like a body detached from its soul, or a refugee from his homeland.

  ________________

  * In the Nicholas Roerich Museum in Novosibirsk.

  * ‘“You asked me once,” said O’Brien, “what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.”

  . . . “The worst thing in the world,” said O’Brien, “varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.”’

  George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Secker & Warburg, 1949).

  11

  Beethoven in a Red Chum: The Yamal Peninsula

  IN HARBIN, LIFE WAS a fluid, bubbling improvisation, like a brilliant, unpredictable jazz set feeling its way to the next note. The dazzle of a sequin, the shimmy of a skirt, the sight of a pretty ankle in the dance clubs were enough to make you think life was worth living, at least for today. In Harbin, Russians didn’t have Stalin sitting behind them as he sat listening to Shostakovich in his box at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. ‘Muddle instead of Music’ was the story that ran in Pravda two days after Stalin heard Shostakovich’s popular opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1936 and walked out halfway through.

  The USSR of the thirties, while leading to better living standards and greater opportunities for the general population, also resulted in trauma on an unprecedented scale. With his policy of mass collectivization, Stalin created huge state farms, once again chaining peasants to the land in what has been called Russia’s ‘second serfdom’. Alongside the agrarian revolution, rapid industrialization pulled the country into the twentieth century, but with astronomical human costs that included famine and ecological devastation. In Ukraine, an estimated 3.9 million people died from starvation in the early 1930s alone.

  All sorts of incongruities developed in the musical arts during ‘The Great Retreat’, as the Soviet historian Nicholas Timasheff described Stalin’s policies of the thirties. Music splintered into a spectrum of innovations, sometimes random, sometimes of true musical value, as Soviet culture locked itself in. Replacing the comparative artistic freedom of the twenties were the aesthetics of socialist realism: a return to a romantic musical language, sometimes aggressive nationalism, and a strong resistance to the avant-garde. A new genre of mass song evolved, with state interference – sometimes implied, other times overt – helping to turn music into a powerful ideological tool. With tight censorship causing artists of every kind to be terrified about where in Stalin’s hierarchy of ideas their work might be filed, all that composers had to protect themselves was the innate ambiguity in music: you can hear in it what you like. This was one of the reasons musicians were comparatively less affected than other artists by Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD. Musicians were also protected by the Soviet virtuoso’s propaganda value at home and abroad. That said, the toughest years of repression still led to an escalation of attacks on music that didn’t align with Soviet values. (Shostakovich, for example, always kept a suitcase packed with necessities on the basis he could be arrested at any time.) In the thirties, threats were omnipresent: the whisper of a neighbour, a hint of Western inspiration, a flurry of defiant notes could lead to the labour camps.

  In this single decade, the number of prisoners in the Gulag doubled, then tripled. Historians argue about the relevance of the assassination of the top party official Sergei Kirov in 1934: was this the trigger Stalin needed for his fear of counter-revolution to spiral into paranoia?* By 1936, the clampdown had escalated into the Great Terror – a two-year assault that saw charges of treason and terrorism brought against some of the Politburo’s most powerful figures. No one was safe. The culture of suspicion affected every kind of citizen – worker, peasant, pianist or senior official, with several new orders made in 1937 to widen the net for arrests.

  During this intense period of change, people also began to move around the USSR in search of security and opportunities. As a result, Siberia underwent its most dramatic shift in history, its population swelling by three hundred per cent in the thirties alone. Incomers included forced labourers sent to Siberia to work in the Gulag system, victims of famine seeking a better life, tens of thousands of Poles and other repressed ethnic groups in targeted deportations, and Russians drawn by the sudden economic growth of Siberia’s industrial cities. The influx helped to break up Siberia’s previously cohesive ethnic groups. While the USSR’s ‘friendship of nations’ supported multiculturalism, it was strongly controlled from Moscow. Stalin rearranged the country’s autonomous republics and administrative regions in a way that further divided Russia’s indigenous people – many of whom were resistant to the ideologies of the regime, their new Soviet-approved identities, and the precedence being given to the Russian language.

  For people like the Nenets, who traditionally moved about the Arctic with their reindeer herds, special state boarding schools were created to teach them to read Russian and be good communist workers. The Nenets still live on the Yamal Peninsula, which sticks up like a crooked finger where the Urals peter out inside the polar circle. Even today, a proportion of Nenets travel some eight hundred miles on an annual round-trip migration in pursuit of lichen to graze their reindeer. Under Soviet power, the young were separated from their traditions, as well as from their families. The Nenets’ education in music changed, too, now they were no longer as close to the lullabies of their mothers. In addition, propaganda brigades turned up in the tundra with all sorts of new ideas about the Soviet way of life. The brigades installed musical instruments in cultural stations, which were founded to provide basic social services while encouraging a new settled existence around collective reindeer farms. Where there were no fixed meeting places, the brigades travelled with their ideas instead. In the Yamal Peninsula, music floated out of Red chums – the traditional reindeer-skin tents shaped much like tepees – which moved about the tundra with film projectors and crank-operated gramophones. These portable schools, while few in number, brought benefits, including veterinary and medical assistance. They also functioned as a Soviet experiment in acculturation.

  Those who wanted no part of the changes took their native shamanism underground. They migrated to more remote pastures. Unwilling to adjust to collective rules during this period of ‘galloping Sovietization’ – including industrial development on an unprecedented scale – the Nenets began to
sabotage Soviet trading posts, and team up as best they could in uprisings, with the heaviest years of repression, from 1937 to 1938, regarded by some groups of Nenets as a war.

  The change from nomadism led to purposelessness, which tipped easily into alcoholic chaos. Others were thoroughly seduced by what they saw and heard, like a Nenets woman I met who described how odd these Red chum visitations were, at least in the beginning, when as a child she watched a tank charge at her on the screen put up inside the tent. She and the other children, terrified by what they could only think was magic, were desperate to look behind the screen to see who or what was making the menacing sound. The music was baffling to them until, bit by bit, they not only got used to the new arrivals, but yearned for more. In the settlement club, this same Nenets child used to warm a coin in her hand and put it against the frosted window to make a peephole for looking through the ice to watch the adults’ film. How that tiny kopek-sized hole in the window expanded over time – bringing together Russians with very different cultural histories – seemed to me a powerful parable of what had happened to Siberia over centuries of complex assimilation. I was fascinated by it, and while I didn’t expect to find a surfeit of pianos in the tundra, I wanted to know if there might be any evidence remaining – even just one eccentric outlier to capture the imagination.