The Lost Pianos of Siberia

by Sophy Roberts

  Richter, who hated flying, visited Khabarovsk, Chita (where he looked for the Decembrists’ pianos, and failed to find them), Ulan-Ude, Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk and Barnaul, as well as numerous settlements in between. In Abakan on the Yenisei River, a local article described the Richter frenzy: for the first time, Siberians could hear him perform live. Venues included local music schools and concert halls. Richter’s programmes – even those scribbled on pieces of paper and posted shortly before the event – always sold out fast, sometimes in less than thirty minutes. ‘[T]hrough word of mouth the hall would be full. That’s not done in the West,’ he once remarked. With Richter, simplicity was the point. He liked to play in the dark so that the audience would focus on the music, not the performer. ‘All that matters is that people come not out of snobbery but to listen to the music,’ he said. Reading Chemberdzhi’s account, it seems Richter’s Siberian audience understood: her spirited descriptions reveal the people’s genuine appreciation for a live musical art, which was exactly as Denis Matsuev had described Siberia to me early on in my search.

  Still, it must have been a strange time to be on the road in the USSR. A few months before Richter set out, an explosion at Chernobyl caused the largest nuclear-power-plant disaster in history – an event which could be squarely blamed on a long-standing lack of state investment. The centrally planned economy, on the verge of bankruptcy, was dependent on the price of exported oil, which was falling through the floor. The new leader of the Soviet Union, the General Secretary of the Communist Party Mikhail Gorbachev, travelled to Nizhnevartovsk, a Siberian oil town on the River Ob, where he got a measure of the country’s socio-economic doldrums. ‘In tsarist Russia’s last years, the average number of people in prison was 108,000. In 1986, ten times more. And we call that socialism!?’ remarked Gorbachev at a party meeting in September the same year.

  Gorbachev proposed a series of changes with the policy of glasnost, or openness, to encourage a more questioning press and consultative government. This unravelling of the old order continued through the perestroika years as Gorbachev began to restructure the Soviet Union’s economic system. On the one hand, there was plenty to celebrate. There was access to hitherto forbidden experiences, from the taste of an American burger – the extraordinary queues on the day McDonald’s opened in Moscow in January 1990 symbolizing everything tempting about Western life – to the explosion of music in youth culture. In Leningrad, rock surged out of illegal clubs and electronic synthesizers. Punk and heavy metal fed audiences hungry for artists’ subversive, often political, lyrics, which began to spread via self-published records.* On the other hand, all the old securities of the socialist system disappeared when, on 25 December 1991, Gorbachev announced that the Soviet Union would be dismantled once and for all, heralding a new era of free elections, free press and freedom of worship. The economy went into freefall. For Russians already struggling to make ends meet, everything fell apart, from reliable salaries to subsidized holidays. To have capitalism come along and offer Russians a completely novel (and hitherto despised) economic model was like turning around and questioning all the sacrifices every family had endured one way or another: Marxist revolution, the Great Patriotic War, Stalin’s Terror. It was too much, too soon, the slump into national poverty and panic an indignity too far. By 1992, queues outside food stores had returned to city streets, with rising prices and dramatic shortages. The memory of this experience was one reason why not only Putinism but Russian Orthodoxy was thriving when I was travelling in Siberia. Twenty-five years after perestroika, Putin was giving a form of highly charged national pride back to his country, while the Church was providing a powerful belief system to fill the vacuum lingering from the changes. Although Putin had created a new regime under controls that chilled me every time I picked up a newspaper back home in England, it was still attractive for most Russians, who remembered the unpaid salaries, rapid rise of gangsterism and a corrupt new oligarchy.

  One of the regions which emptied out most dramatically after the dissolution of the Soviet Union was Kamchatka, a place so out of the way it has always been significantly subsidized by Moscow. Kamchatka is in the same time zone as Auckland, nine hours ahead of Moscow. On its eastern edge lie the Commander Islands, a short distance from the Aleutians, which are US sovereign territory. At its southern tip, the Kamchatka Peninsula peters out into the Kuril Islands. Arctic in the north and subtropical in the south, this bewitching archipelago curves in an arc around the eastern boundary of the Okhotsk Sea, until it almost touches the tip of Japan.

  A fan of the Russian punk group Miracle Yudo, photographed by Igor Mukhin in 1986. The image comes from the photographer’s book I’ve Seen Rock’n’Roll, which documented the new generation of Soviet musicians unleashed by glasnost.

  A queue to buy food in St Petersburg in 1992.

  Getting to Kamchatka has also always been challenging. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts are riven with complaints. For most visitors to Kamchatka, their spirit if not their body had already been broken by the overland journey from European Russia to the Pacific along the Yakutsk–Okhotsk Trakt. They moaned about corduroy roads made from logs laid across sunken pilings. They feared the bogs and anthrax, which obliterated strings of pack horses as they picked their way through swamp, forest and mountain ravines. Bears and escaped convicts added to the threats. On reaching the Sea of Okhotsk, the Kamchatka-bound traveller would then have to pick up a ship.

  ‘[H]ere there were not what we call roads,’ wrote Lyudmila Rikord, wife of the newly appointed chief of Kamchatka, Pyotr Rikord, in 1817: ‘the horses wander at will, choosing paths in various directions.’ But despite the challenges of the journey from St Petersburg, Lyudmila wasn’t to be relegated to the back of beyond without the musical sophistications associated with a woman of her elevated rank. Her instrument, made in the imperial capital, was brought to the peninsula as a gift by a Russian admiral called Vasily Golovnin – a man of action who had come to survey the Kuril Islands in 1811 only to be captured by the Japanese. He languished in captivity for two years until his friend, Lyudmila’s husband, busted him out. The piano was a thank-you for this act of gallantry, the instrument travelling in a Russian man-o’-war from St Petersburg through the Baltic and North Sea, south to Cape Horn in South America, then across the Pacific, finishing its passage to Kamchatka in 1818. When it got close to the peninsula’s main harbour, Golovnin’s sloop was unable to reach the shore. For three days the settlement was locked in by fog. Sea ice pulled the ship from her anchor, but Golovnin persevered. ‘I consider myself particularly fortunate that I could provide some pleasure to this most worthy lady by bringing to Kamchatka a pianoforte’ – ‘delivered in good condition’, Golovnin noted with pride. He added: ‘[T]he pleasure of playing the piano in such an isolated spot, for someone who loves music, is immense!’

  Golovnin’s seaborne piano delivery had taken eight months and eight days to complete. Even today an overland journey would be close to impossible. There is still no road connecting the neck of the Kamchatka Peninsula to the rest of Russia. The Sredinny Range, a spine of ice caps and lava plateaus, runs down the centre of Kamchatka in a line of volcanic cones. Off these peaks flow short, fast-moving rivers which flood alluvial plains. Wildlife has the upper hand, thriving in a hostile landscape where geysers burst into the air. Pools of chocolate mud bubble and steam, while up above, the sky is often draped in rainbows – double, even triple half-moon crescents of splintered light. There is jeopardy in the whorls of molten lava glowing red at night, and the petrified forests which stand like fields of stubble, the scorched birch as thin as matchsticks. Boris Pasternak’s remark that Kamchatka was the place at the back of the classroom where the worst-behaved kids would be sent still resonates with Russians. Among Westerners, however, the word rings with a different association: in the board game Risk, Kamchatka is ideal territory for launching an invasion of North America, which isn’t far from the truth. During the Cold War, the entire region functio
ned as a highly militarized zone closed to foreigners. But when the Soviet support machine dried up with perestroika, the military also shrank. One in ten of Kamchatka’s population left for what they thought would be an easier, more affordable life on ‘the mainland’.

  On the day I arrived, the sky was bruised with rain. It was lunchtime and the canteen in the capital, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, smelled of grease. The server dumped a piece of battered fish on a plate and moved me along, past sugared puddings in a glass cabinet and cold soups which looked as appetizing as the leftovers of a party from the seventies. The cashier, who didn’t smile, had fingers as fat as sausages. I sat down, disappointed that my first view of Kamchatka’s capital, famously nestled beside a rim of volcanoes, was concealed by thick Pacific weather.

  The fish, it turned out, tasted better than it looked. I remarked on this with an enthusiastic gesture to the stranger at the neighbouring table. There was an exactitude to him – neat grey hair, a leather jacket with squared-off shoulder pads, and a gold pin fixing his red tie. He pulled out a photograph from his bag, a picture of him and his friend Mikhail Kalashnikov, a Siberia-born military engineer who invented the AK-47. I asked my new acquaintance if he, too, was in the military. The Russian army is still a major employer in Kamchatka – something I was aware of from pianos I had been told about, the instruments passed from one military family to another as postings changed.

  Another diner was listening to our conversation – a woman in white ankle boots with stubby heels, a white silk shirt with a high neckline, and a matching white belt cinching her waist. With her hair combed into place under a fawn mohair hat, she looked like a woman in a French café painted by one of the Impressionists.

  ‘You are talking with our most famous Kamchatka poet,’ she announced.

  I asked what she did for a living.

  ‘I clean. Four floors, five toilets, three rooms, every day,’ she said, her coffee cup elegantly pinched between her forefinger and thumb.

  I mentioned a rendezvous I had with Valery Kravchenko, a teacher and performing pianist who had been living in Kamchatka since 1968. Kravchenko was also a journalist and a photographer, and the person who had told me about Golovnin’s piano delivery to Rikord’s wife. I had been in touch with him ever since he had first emailed me the picture of a piano sitting at the foot of Gorely volcano at the beginning of my search. Valery had many more stories to tell about pianos in Kamchatka, he said, as well as something special to show me – a nineteenth-century Ibach grand brought here in the thirties. I asked my new café acquaintances if either of them knew the man I was talking about.

  The woman put down her mug with exaggerated condescension. The poet rolled his eyes.

  Of course they knew Valery Kravchenko, they said.

  ‘Kamchatka is a very cultured place,’ said the woman.

  She talked about Inspirations – a club she had been going to for years, where they liked to sing. The man recited one of his poems: ‘I am very useful to this Earth, to this very fairy-tale Earth.’ My local guide – a tall, athletic seventy-year-old who claimed direct descent from one of Napoleon’s soldiers left behind in Russia after 1812 – joined the conversation. He said Valery Kravchenko was a friend. Together they had travelled into the mountains with pianos in tow, as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

  The poet gave a high kick, which probably wasn’t as high as he had hoped for, but was impressive all the same.

  The cashier with the sausage fingers smiled.

  Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, or Petropavlovsk for short, is unlike any other Russian city. At night, there is something of San Francisco to the pinpricks of light curled around the hills, dips and shoreline. The horseshoe-shaped Avacha Bay lies out in front, the lid of water heavy, as if it is a bowl of liquid mercury. By day, the city returns to being utterly, unapologetically Soviet. Housing blocks crawl up the hillsides. Winds burnish the statue of Lenin, his long coat seeming to fill like a sail in a Pacific gale. In Kamchatka, they say spring, summer and autumn pass so quickly, it is as if they are a single season. Locals also know the rules. In summer, when Kamchatkans collect berries in the woods close to their homes, they occasionally take a wrong turn; if not found within three days, they are usually assumed dead.

  In Kamchatka, you can lose a lot of time waiting for the weather to clear. On one visit, I didn’t see further than the brake lights on the car in front of me on a four-hour drive. On another visit, in one of the village houses where I stayed, I spent days watching the rain fall in long, strong lines. In the plot opposite, a woman tended her ground as if she relied on this small piece of black Kamchatkan sod for more than just the potatoes it yielded. Her whole bearing was downturned, her drooping shoulders hunching her to the earth. In a corner of her plot stood a blue tractor. At the back was a greenhouse. Each morning she deadheaded her purple dahlias with a delicacy that didn’t feel like it belonged to her. Her sadness was present in every slow step, in her mournful journeys back and forth across her little square of earth. When I mentioned the scene to my host, she said her neighbour used to work on the collective farm nearby, which was now in ruin. She understood the old woman had lost one of her sons – a soldier who fought for the Russians in the Chechen war in the mid-nineties, when the poorly paid, post-perestroika Russian army was fighting for a country exhausted by reform.

  A Chechen separatist plays the piano in the republic’s capital, Grozny, on 27 December 1994.

  Exactly one month and a day later, a Russian soldier plays an abandoned piano in the same city.

  I wanted to go and talk to the old woman, but whenever I walked by her gate, a fierce dog drove me away. The dog also scared off a pony, which wandered the street like a community pet. Its owner was a young boy who led the animal home each day, the child tiptoeing over puddles so as not to dirty his shoes. He didn’t bother to stop at the garages where the other local kids hung out – sea containers, which lay higgledy-piggledy along one side of the unpaved street. One of the neighbours had converted his box into a local bar; in another, a group of teenagers stretched themselves out on cast-off sofas with exposed springs. The kids unnerved me at first – the red-headed twins, and the creepy gas mask one of them always wore. After a while, we became familiar.

  These masks were staples in the Cold War – originally made in case an attack from America took place. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the Russian–American relationship was fuelled by a very different propaganda. Russia was being called ‘America’s best friend’. The country’s two leaders were being favourably compared in the press – Tsar Alexander II for abolishing serfdom in Russia, and Abraham Lincoln for outlawing slavery in the United States. America was consumed by ‘Russia Fever’. The American entrepreneur Perry Collins declared Siberia to be anything but a ‘waste space on the map of the globe’. This enterprising New Yorker, who had already followed the Gold Rush to California, saw a lucrative future for America with a new trans-Siberian telegraph – a cable which would snake up the coast of British Columbia, across the narrow Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska, then skirt the northern edge of Kamchatka before slipping south and straight for Moscow. This plan to bind the Pacific – a bold collaboration in a race against the transatlantic cable being laid between America and Britain – brought American adventurers, as well as pianos, deep into the Kamchatka wilderness.

  George Kennan – who poured a bucket of cold water over ‘Russia Fever’ a quarter of a century later with his bestselling indictment of the Tsarist exile system – was a member of Collins’ first exploratory party, which made landfall at Petropavlovsk in 1865. He writes about the captain of the port, who owned a Russian-made piano, the collection of German, Russian and American sheet music testament to the captain’s refined musical tastes. In 1866, a swashbuckling Thomas Wallace Knox, who made his name as a war correspondent during the American Civil War, described the simplicity of a Kamchatkan home with its stove, table, simple chairs and ‘an occasional bu
t rare piano’. In Ghijiga, a truly cut-off settlement tucked inside the western armpit of the Kamchatka Peninsula, an American gold prospector encountered a piano some thirty years after the US telegraph crew. He sat down and struck up the ‘Washington Post’ march: ‘Evidently, many of those rough but kindly people had never heard anything like it in their lives, and, as the Russian is musical to his heart’s core, I felt pleased to have added my mite to the evening’s entertainment.’

  Of all these accounts, one of the most intriguing was the bathhouse piano spotted on a hunting expedition in 1900, when Prince Demidoff, the Russian hunter who had already shot his way through the Altai, travelled to Kamchatka to bag some Ovis nivicola – a relative of the snow sheep. It turned out to be a journey rough beyond reckoning. In Kamchatka, ‘classical concerts were replaced by the howling of sledge-dogs’. Even the horses streamed with blood from the mosquito bites. There were, however, glimmers of what he called ‘civilization’. At volcanic mud baths in the shadow of Vilyuchinsky volcano, the party encountered a villa with taps running on hot water from the geothermal springs, a drawing room with a sprung sofa, and an old, stained piano.

  When I met the pianist Valery Kravchenko in Petropavlovsk and told him about these nineteenth-century sightings, I was looking for his help. He was a petite man with glasses, a slight stutter, and a warm voice. He looked a bit like Liszt, with white hair cut into a bob, which he swept off his face with a modest flourish.

  Valery took me to hear the Ibach grand piano he had been telling me about for a while: an instrument which was poorly lacquered, with a surface crumpled from water damage, but still in possession of its original strings and hammers. It occupied an attic at the top of a writers’ club overlooking some sleepy port buildings. Dating from the 1850s, the Ibach was the most interesting survivor in Kamchatka, said Valery. In 1936, it had travelled to Petropavlovsk from Moscow with David Lerner, an artist of the Moscow Philharmonic tasked to bring music to the citizens of Kamchatka.