If it weren’t for the barbed wire, guards’ towers and prison slang, the troupe’s performances would be as good as anything heard in the capital, remarked one of the artists, who remembered the sound of waltzes floating across Arctic marshes under the glance of prison lights. If there is dark irony in this remark, it’s hard to determine the desperate depths given the complex nuances, censorship and fear of reprisal (the musicians also commented on the better living conditions they enjoyed, and clean sheets). Lyudmila described how the ensembles and their instruments travelled throughout the region, the backs of their trucks functioning as concert stages. They moved up the rivers when the summer melt arrived, performing at several dozen construction camps along the advancing line of rails. They also performed in Salekhard, their repertoire hosted on two main stages: the House of Culture – a Soviet community hall for art instruction and entertainment – and a stage at the local fish factory. In one of these fixed venues, there would have been a piano, said Lyudmila. They functioned like municipal theatres, giving performances for the free people of Salekhard.
A prisoner sings for Gulag officials.
A Gulag orchestra is marched to a local village to perform. These two drawings are taken from Drawings from the Gulag by Danzig Baldaev © FUEL Publishing. Baldaev worked as a prison guard in the USSR from 1948, allowing him to record an unflinching portrayal of the labour camp system.
I called the music schools in town, but there was no trace of the German instrument Semion’s wife recalled. Evidence of Railway 501 was also almost gone. Lyudmila drove me to a clump of sagging buildings on the other side of town. She showed me an old railway workers’ barracks. Go in there, she said, and get a sense of what Salekhard was before.
I entered a long, dank corridor. It was windowless, with duckboards sitting on bare earth. Outside a closed door, which was partially felted to keep out the cold, there were two oil drums filled with water. Above them ran loops of electrical wire. The ceiling was peeling paint. The herringbone wood and plaster walls were caving in. I knocked on a door at one end, and a wheezing couple let me in. There were two tiny rooms, barely a window, three cats, one dog, a TV, a small table where one person could sit if the bed were moved, and a carpet hanging on the wall. They didn’t want me to take photographs. They were people I couldn’t place – Ukrainians, Tajiks, Nenets, I wasn’t sure.
‘If you want to understand people, you have to go deeper, and live among them a long time,’ said Lyudmila. ‘When I came to Salekhard, the stories were thick as a forest. I started to make my research, and I got caught in the thought: Who are we Russians? Why don’t we know our roots? We know the names of Greek gods, but not our own Slavic history. But people like the Nenets know more; their stories go back further. They know why the forests and the sun have a soul.’
‘I am Orthodox, a believer,’ she said, ‘but we all grew out of paganism. I think we will all grow back to it again. We will go back to nature to understand the depth of what is happening and what is going to be.’
In another part of Salekhard, Lyudmila took me to see a few remaining sleepers from Railway 501, revealed when she scraped away the snow with her foot. This tiny patch of history, which betrayed nothing of the railway’s epic sorrow, felt like a stark moral prompt to engage with the extreme opposite of music. Confronting memory and repression, I knew that however hard I wanted my piano hunt to celebrate all that is magnificent about Siberia, much of what I was looking for was tied up with a terrifying past. I needed to heed the warning I was given by a brave Russian journalist early on: you have to know why you’re ignoring things you don’t want to hear, what should be remembered, and why people fall silent and try to forget.
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* This is a whodunnit that continues to this day, and divides historians. There has always been speculation that Stalin himself ordered the hit on Kirov and, by doing so, created a reason for any possible ‘enemy of the state’ to be hunted down.
12
Music in the Gulag Archipelago: Kolyma
MY FIRST GLIMPSE OF the Sea of Okhotsk, the steel-coloured cul-de-sac of water between Russia’s eastern edge and the Kamchatka Peninsula, was from the foot of a woolly mammoth cloaked in a North Pacific drizzle. The sculpture, made from scrap cogs, chains and pipes, was cartoonish. It felt out of synch with the dismal human history of the place. Its backside faced the water of Nagaevo Bay, where prisoners began arriving in the early thirties to complete their sentences in a string of Gulag camps scattered through Kolyma. The mammoth’s tusks faced the former Soviet convict town of Magadan.
Nearby was a half-moon of gravel fashioned into a plinth of artificial beach. On concrete foundations stood metal sun umbrellas, which were out of proportion – the small caps on long stalks incapable of casting any shade, even if the sun did appear. A ship’s carcass was snagged in the shallows beside a web of cranes. Even in July, one of only five months of the year the Sea of Okhotsk isn’t frozen, there were no vessels coming in or out of the harbour. It was a raw landscape: bald, scarred, austere. On the tourist map I had picked up, the city was surrounded by areas marked ‘undersized vegetation’. It was as if there were nothing to hold the town in place: no roots, no pilings, no foundations. The jetty looked as if it were finally slipping into the sea, and there weren’t any people. Something was missing. It was like my hotel, where there was no second floor, just a first and a third.
An Okhotsk sea fog moved in until I could barely see the grey stillness of the bay where Stalin’s Gulag ships had offloaded their human cargo, including Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Hungarians and Volga Germans, Koreans, Japanese, and Spaniards ‘rescued’ by the USSR during the Spanish Civil War.* Among them were political dissidents, hardened criminals, recidivist killers, invalids half dead with dystrophy, poets, pianists, and starving women with skinny clavicles – ‘half-human, half-bird creatures’, as they were described by one Kolyma survivor.
The ships travelled to Nagaevo Bay from three ports on Russia’s Pacific seaboard: Vladivostok, which marked the eastern terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway, Nakhodka Harbour, and the coal port of Vanino. This was where the Leningrad violinist Georgi Feldgun remembered playing for criminals in one of the transit camps: ‘Here we are on the edge of the world, and we are playing eternal music written more than two hundred years ago, we are playing Vivaldi for fifty gorillas.’ Feldgun experienced music as a means of torture. For others, such as the Lithuanians singing their hymns from the ships’ holds, music was an act of defiance, a collective comfort as the steamers left the mainland, sailed past the southern end of Sakhalin Island, and into the narrow strait dividing Russia from Japan. The Kolyma-bound ships then swung north towards Magadan.
During the Stalin years, everyone who lived and died in Kolyma made the journey from the Russian mainland via the Sea of Okhotsk – unconfirmed thousands transported in American, Dutch, British and German-built vessels. An unknowable number of prisoners perished on these ships. Typhus, hunger and cold were the predictable enemies on voyages that took anything between five and thirteen days. The prisoners were also susceptible to the capricious, virtually unlimited power of the Soviet authorities. Guards used hoses of freezing water to push their wards back into the holds, which were stuffed with four-tiered bunks, the bodies layered tight, like anchovies in a tin. Other ships were crammed with prisoners cooped up in cages. Muscles atrophied. Skin turned white. Witnesses described the grinding of the ships’ engines. They also remembered the sound of ‘wild laughter’, the entreaties of women, and the caterwauling. A Polish survivor, Janusz Bardach, described the hard-core criminals, the urkas, laughing, talking and groping each other as if they were on some kind of holiday cruise. In such a twisted reality, every noise took on a sinister meaning.
‘The boat moved off to the sound of the mournful singing and dancing and the noise of retching,’ wrote one female prisoner. ‘In the darkness hands reached out towards me from all sides.’ The same prisoner described a docto
r’s assistant, a Polish Jew, who helped her when he could: he played softly on an accordion, ‘a melody which was grey like the sea, like our ship, like the fog’. When one of these ships ran aground on the shores of Japan, rescuers managed to retrieve only a handful of survivors from the pile of over six hundred prisoners battened down beneath the hatches. As well as the drowned, they found convicts who had chosen to cut their own throats rather than wait for the rising water.
Foreign shipyards made the convict ships sold to Stalin. When repairs of Gulag vessels were being undertaken in America, workers remembered the horrid stench still rising from the holds. In 1939, the New York Times reported that the Soviet ship which foundered in Japan, drowning seven hundred, was carrying fishermen from Kamchatka – a piece of misreporting based on a staggering system of Soviet lies. In 1944, the American Vice-President Henry Wallace visited Magadan. At the time, the West was the principal buyer of Soviet gold, with Kolyma’s mines a major source. Local authorities went to great lengths to deceive their visitors. The watchtowers that lined the road into Magadan were taken down. The shops were stuffed with luxury items hitherto unknown in the region. Wallace bought a bottle of perfume and, for entertainment, was taken to the Magadan Theatre, where he watched a play performed by prisoners.
The US Vice-President Henry Wallace, pictured in Kolyma in 1944. Instead of meeting actual Gulag labourers, Wallace was introduced to a group of ‘big husky young men’ – members of the Young Communist Organization dressed up as miners.
I came to Magadan knowing that there had been pianos played by the Gulag’s performing troupes. I intended to travel along the Kolyma Highway, a rough road pockmarked with old labour camps, stretching twelve hundred miles from Magadan to Yakutsk, the largest city in the world built on permafrost and the capital of Yakutia. During the Gulag period, Kolyma’s number of camps and its extreme remoteness made it feel like ‘a whole separate continent of the Archipelago’, wrote Solzhenitsyn; it was the place beyond the materik, or mainland. According to a Polish historian and Gulag survivor writing in 1949, over three million prisoners were exiled to Kolyma, of whom only five hundred thousand made it through.
Among them was the composer Vsevolod Zaderatsky, a graduate of the Moscow Conservatory who had worked as the last Tsarevich’s piano teacher. In 1915, he travelled once a week, almost every week, from Moscow to the royal household in St Petersburg. In Kolyma, Zaderatsky convinced his camp overseers to give him a few scraps of paper, promising that he would never write words, only musical notations, at a time when just being caught with a pen and paper was asking for a death sentence. From 1937 to 1938, Zaderatsky composed a cycle of twenty-four preludes and fugues for piano on telegraph forms and two small notepads. In a letter home to his family, the Muscovite director Leonid Varpakhovsky, who kept a copy of a Handel concerto under his pillow, wrote about playing in the camp’s wind orchestra: ‘My comfort is the music into which I immerse myself, so that I forget the world.’
For some musicians, however, picking up an instrument in the camps was a travesty of the brave creative life they had known before. They resisted cultural programmes for the ‘re-education’ of prisoners. For many musicians, it was performance by brute force; for others, it was indescribably sad. Kolyma survivor Yelena Vladimirova described an orchestra of Kolyma prisoners tasked to provide culture to fellow convicts in a frozen landscape – how it was a ‘travesty of freedom’ performed by ‘people half alive’.
In the Magadan archives there is a picture of a grand piano sitting centre-stage in an empty theatre in the forties. The instrument, which would have been played by the town’s convict-musicians, was photographed in the main hall on the second floor of the Magadan State Music and Drama Theatre – a building constructed by prisoners as the Kolyma camps were being developed. There had been amateur theatre before, at two local venues, but with the arrival of talented prisoners, performance standards improved, and so did the facilities. According to the theatre archives, the town’s first professional play, staged in 1933, was called Utopia. Among the new venue’s most important patrons was Eduard Berzin, the first commander of Dalstroi, the pseudo-corporation founded in 1931 to develop roads, settlements and mines in north-east Siberia, which relied upon Gulag labour. A graduate of the Berlin College of Fine Arts, Berzin had a fondness for European culture.
With the city’s population of free workers and Soviet officials, the Magadan Theatre evolved into a lively centre for music and entertainment. Solzhenitsyn writes about the famous Soviet tenor Vadim Kozin performing in the venue. How Kozin ended up here was quite another story. He was born in St Petersburg in 1905. In the twenties, he made his way in Western Russia by playing the piano in cinemas. Throughout the thirties, he toured the Soviet Union as a tenor, becoming so famous that mounted police were needed to keep the concert fans at bay.
A piano in the performance hall of the Magadan State Music and Drama Theatre, c. 1940.
In 1944, three years after his mother and sister had perished in the Siege of Leningrad, Kozin was arrested and sent to Kolyma with a combination of charges, including sodomy. When he was released in 1950, his career looked set to pick up again. In 1956, he bought a piano from Kamchatka, a modest Red October upright, serial number 113075, delivered to Magadan by boat. Then he was arrested a second time in 1959 when he was on tour in Khabarovsk. Released a few months later, Kozin stayed on in Kolyma and lived in an apartment in Magadan. He wrote songs about the town, which became his adopted home. Its citizens celebrated Kozin’s presence, once again lauding his performances. Kozin’s surviving diaries, however, reveal a man tortured by the hypocrisy of Soviet society.
I visited Kozin’s Kamchatkan Red October upright, which survives in his former one-room flat on the fourth floor of a bleak, rain-scoured housing block.* But it was the grand piano in that black-and-white archive photograph I wanted to find. There was something enigmatic about its presence, like a black crow about to take flight from a public entertainment hall in one of the most feared Gulag zones in the USSR – a piano played by a run of both free citizens and persecuted musicians.
Was this the piano which accompanied Kozin at his inaugural performance in front of the Gulag commanders? Was it the same instrument I saw in a photograph of a short, hollow-eyed Kozin standing beside an orchestra on the Magadan stage? Solzhenitsyn’s account describes how Nikishov, another Dalstroi chief, interrupted Kozin’s applause: ‘“All right, Kozin, stop the bowing and get out!”’ Another account described Kozin’s rapturous reception, then the chief’s thundering voice as he stood up and called him a pederast.
I visited the Magadan Theatre when it was under renovation, half expecting to find the original plaster relief of Stalin on the rear wall of the main auditorium. It is one of the weirder features in twenty-first-century Russia that, in spite of all the unfathomable acts of mass murder, Stalin is consistently voted by Russians as the greatest man who ever lived. Statues of Stalin aren’t unusual in modern Russia, some having been erected only in the last few years.* In Magadan, however, Stalin isn’t the local hero: on a hill above Nagaevo Bay, there is a statue glorifying Berzin.
Everything disturbed me about Magadan: the city’s fairground at night, its big wheel creaking in the Pacific fog; the garden ornaments for sale in the market, which looked half alive; the graffiti depicting a child’s teddy with stitched wounds to its head. Then I met the Tatar caretaker in Magadan’s Cathedral of the Holy Trinity. He had a young face with bright eyes, black hair and a long white beard that fell over his sternum. He showed me a picture on his mobile phone: a blue flash of light in front of an icon. An angel, he said, a little miracle.
Vadim Kozin performing in Madagan in the late forties. According to Solzhenitsyn, Kozin tried to hang himself after his first performance in Kolyma but was taken down out of the noose.
Don’t think it’s all bad here, said a mining executive I accosted for help on the street. In Magadan, he described a lively contemporary culture. In the city’s Philha
rmonic Hall he showed me a brand-new Kawai grand piano made in Japan, serial number 2605001, pushed back among the scenery props. In 2010, this concert grand was shipped from Japan to Finland, then to Riga in Latvia, and on to St Petersburg, where it was unloaded and taken to Moscow. Here it boarded an Aeroflot Tu-204 jetliner and was flown to Magadan. The piano’s journey covered two thirds of the Earth’s circumference. A direct route from Japan across the Okhotsk Sea would have been ten times shorter, but the port customs proved too forbidding – ironic given the ease with which human cargo arrived into Magadan during the Gulag period.
Despite all the benevolent townspeople willing to help me, there was still something rotten about Kolyma. Gone were the buoyant post-Stalin years when government subsidies kept the working people in reasonable comfort. Among the region’s former draws was Kadykchan, a town along the highway built up around an old Gulag coal mine. This was where the poet Varlam Shalamov was sent to complete his hard-labour sentence under Stalin. After the camp system started to be dismantled in the late fifties, Kadykchan’s population swelled when a number of Russians moved to the region, lured by salary bonuses for workers prepared to live this remotely.
By 1986, there were around ten thousand people living in Kadykchan, and a functioning community. A cinema was built called ‘The Miner’, and a restaurant opened called ‘The One Who Lived Near the North Pole’. There was a local Kadykchan newspaper, a TV station and even a municipal ice rink – unusual for Soviet times, but a way to attract free workers to the middle of nowhere. In the late nineties, the coal mine closed down – an event linked to an explosion, a dramatically altered perestroika economy, and according to one impassioned local historian, a foreign conspiracy to monopolize the gold trade. Soon after, the town’s boiler system also stopped working and the town emptied out, leaving just a hundred and thirty-eight families. Now there was no one, or at least no one I could find. Kadykchan was simply too cold to carry on without hot water. Savage nature had pulled the buildings into ruin. Grids of housing blocks had been evacuated and plundered to the last few panes of glass. Bridges had collapsed over rivers. In Kadykchan, the only remnants of music were broken pianos in a practice room in the town’s abandoned school, the instruments’ innards strewn about the floor.
The Lost Pianos of Siberia Page 18