The Lost Pianos of Siberia

by Sophy Roberts

Russia’s ‘second serfdom’: David R. Shearer, ‘Stalinism, 1928–1940’, in Ronald Suny (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)

  In Ukraine, an estimated 3.9 million people died from starvation: See Anne Applebaum, Red Famine (London: Penguin, 2017). Other estimates, like those given by Robert Conquest in Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) put the figure far higher.

  ‘The Great Retreat’: Nicholas Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1946)

  Music splintered into a spectrum . . . lead to the labour camps: I am very grateful for the expert advice of Russian musicologist Vladimir Orlov in navigating this period. Both his work and that of Marina Frovlova-Walker constitute important reading on the nuanced history of Soviet music, its innovations and contradictions.

  In this single decade, the number of prisoners in the Gulag doubled then tripled: Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (London: Penguin, 2004)

  its population swelling by three hundred per cent in the thirties alone: Shearer, ‘Stalinism, 1928–1940’

  portable schools, while few in number: See Andrei V. Golovnev and Gail Osherenko, Siberian Survival (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). The authors say the Red chums were less common, and therefore less influential, than the state boarding schools, which they describe in some detail.

  Unwilling to adjust to collective rules . . . 1937 to 1938, regarded by some groups of Nenets as a war: Andrei V. Golovnev and Gail Osherenko, Siberian Survival (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999)

  ‘galloping Sovietization’: Ibid.

  ‘a deep blue, like a water-sky’: See Fridtjof Nansen, Through Siberia, The Land of the Future, trans. Arthur G. Chater (London: William Heinemann, 1914)

  Operation Wunderland: See Pier Horensma, The Soviet Arctic (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003)

  ‘the land of the future’: Nansen, Through Siberia, The Land of the Future

  In 1893, a Victorian spinster called Helen Peel played the piano: See Helen Peel, Polar Gleams (London: Edward Arnold, 1894)

  Nansen wrote how this tough little vessel . . . before disappearing without trace in 1912: See Nansen, Through Siberia, The Land of the Future, and Phil Carradice, The Ships of Pembroke Dockyard (Stroud: Amberley Publishing Limited, 2013)

  fourteen crew had in fact abandoned ship . . . using a map: See William James Mills, Exploring Polar Frontiers: A Historical Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2003). By this time, the ship had been re-named St. Anna. For a full account of the ship’s history, see Carradice, The Ships of Pembroke Dockyard.

  Anna had led protests against the industrial invasion of the Nenets’ territory: See Golovnev and Osherenko, Siberian Survival

  She encourages the community to make money with a modest tourist operation: Sophy Roberts, ‘A warm welcome: the Siberian reindeer herders opening their tents to tourists’, Financial Times (July 2017)

  their oral traditions were closely bound to elemental sound . . . music played a part in survival: A number of these details are derived from the original fieldwork of musicologist Alla Abramovich-Gomon, The Nenets’ Song (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999) – the first book-length study of the Nenets’ song tradition, with much of the research undertaken in the seventies.

  ‘not a single trace of Western influence’: Ibid.

  Railway 501 was one of the most notorious white elephants: The descriptions I give of Railway 501 owe a significant debt to the in-depth research undertaken by Lyudmila Lipatova and published in 2016. No one can match the first-hand testimonies Lipatova has gathered; not just the Gulag stories, but also the evidence of everyday lives in Salekhard at the time: L. F. Lipatova, Dorogi i Sud’by (Salekhard: GU Severnoe izdatel’stvo, 2016).

  12. MUSIC IN THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO: KOLYMA

  where Stalin’s Gulag ships had offloaded their human cargo . . . : Hot on the heels of the English-language translation of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, British historian Robert Conquest published an entire volume dedicated to the Kolyma camps. Conquest’s Kolyma (London: Macmillan, 1978) used evidence from almost forty sources – many of them first-person testimonies – to tell the story of the Kolyma Gulag under Stalin. After perestroika much of Conquest’s controversial work was published in Russia.

  ‘half-human, half-bird creatures’: Michael Solomon was a journalist arrested in communist Romania after the Second World War and sent to the Kolyma Gulag. After his release he emigrated to Canada and wrote an account of his imprisonment: Magadan (Princeton: Vertex, 1971).

  ‘Here we are on the edge of the world . . . playing Vivaldi for fifty gorillas’: Georgi Feldgun cited in Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (London: Penguin, 2004), and Brian Moynahan, Leningrad: Siege and Symphony (London: Quercus, 2013)

  For others, such as the Lithuanians singing their hymns: Miron Ėtlis, Sovremenniki Gulaga: Kniga vospominaniĭ i razmyshleniĭ (Magadan: Kn. Izd-vo, 1991)

  Guards used hoses of freezing water to push their wards back into the holds: Janusz Bardach and Kathleen Gleeson, Man is Wolf to Man (London: Simon & Schuster, 1998)

  four-tiered bunks: Aino Kuusinen, Before and After Stalin: A Personal Account of Soviet Russia from the 1920s to the 1960s, trans. Paul Stevenson (London: Michael Joseph, 1974)

  cooped up in cages: Solomon, Magadan

  Witnesses described the grinding of the ships’ engines: Bardach and Gleeson, Man is Wolf to Man

  They also remembered the sound of ‘wild laughter’ . . . caterwauling: Eugenia Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, trans. Paul Stevenson and Manya Harari (London: Persephone Books, 2014)

  A Polish survivor, Janusz Bardach, described the hard-core criminals . . . some kind of holiday cruise: Bardach and Gleeson, Man is Wolf to Man

  ‘The boat moved off to the sound of the mournful singing . . . reached out towards me from all sides’: Zoe Zajdlerowa was an Irish woman, married to a Pole, who was sent to the Kolyma Gulag after the Soviet Union’s occupation of Poland. Her account was initially published anonymously, but Zajdlerowa identified herself in later editions of her book: The Dark Side of the Moon (London: Faber & Faber, 1946).

  ‘a melody which was grey like the sea, like our ship, like the fog’: Ibid.

  When one of these ships ran aground . . . wait for the rising water: Martin Bollinger, Stalin’s Slave Ships (Toronto: Praeger, 2003)

  the horrid stench still rising from the holds: Ibid.

  In 1939, the New York Times reported . . . : ‘700 Believed Dead on Russian Vessel’, New York Times (December 1939)

  At the time, the West was the principal buyer of Soviet gold: Applebaum, Gulag: A History

  The watchtowers that lined the road into Magadan were taken down: Robert Conquest, Kolyma

  Wallace bought a bottle of perfume: Vadim J. Birstein, ‘Three Days in “Auschwitz without Gas Chambers”: Henry A. Wallace’s Visit to Magadan in 1944’, The Wilson Center (April 2012)

  he watched a play performed by prisoners: Conquest, Kolyma

  Instead of meeting actual Gulag labourers . . . dressed up as miners: Thomas Sgovio, Dear America! (New York: Partners’ Press, 1979). In Henry Wallace’s own record of events, he wrote: ‘The Kolyma gold miners are big, husky young men, who came out to the Far East from European Russia.’ See Henry A. Wallace, Soviet Asia Mission (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1946).

  ‘a whole separate continent of the Archipelago’: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Volume II, trans. Thomas Whitney (London: Harper Perennial, 2007)

  over three million prisoners were exiled to Kolyma . . . five hundred thousand made it through: Kazimierz Zamorski, Gold Mining and Forced Labour in the USSR (Washington: Foundation for Foreign Affairs, 1949)

  Among them was the composer Vsevolod Zaderatsky . . . composed a cycle of twenty-four preludes and fugues: See the account by the composer’s son, Vsevolod Zaderatsky Jr., ‘Vsevolod Petrovich Za
deratsky (1891–1953): A Lost Soviet Composer’, trans. Anthony Phillips, International Centre for Suppressed Music, Online Journal (May 2006).

  ‘My comfort is the music into which I immerse myself, so that I forget the world’: Inna Klause has produced a number of academic articles which relate little-known stories of musicians in the Gulag. Both Zaderatsky’s and Varpakhovsky’s experiences are documented in her paper: ‘Musical Activity of Gulag Prisoners from the 1920s to 1950s’, in Amaury du Closel (ed.), Symposium: Music and Concentration Camps (Strasbourg: European Council, 2013). The author also talks about the different feelings prisoners had towards being part of the musical ensembles.

  ‘travesty of freedom’ and ‘people half-alive’: Yelena Vladimirova, ‘Kolyma’, trans. Catriona Kelly. Cited in Simeon Vilensky (ed.) Till My Tale is Told: Women’s Memoirs of the Gulag (London: Virago Press, 1999)

  Dalstroi, the pseudo-corporation founded in 1931: A legitimate-seeming corporate front was required to attract the engineers and free workers needed to get this vast mining project off the ground. See Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History.

  Solzhenitsyn writes about the famous Soviet tenor Vadim Kozin: Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Volume II

  How Kozin ended up here was quite another story: Kozin recorded his life and inner thoughts in private diaries which were found after his death. The content of these diaries, and Kozin’s biography and arrests, is movingly told in my main source about the singer: Dan Healey’s Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).

  mounted police were needed to keep the concert fans at bay: Monica Whitlock, ‘Searching for Vadim Kozin, the Soviet tango king’, BBC News (December 2015)

  Kozin’s surviving diaries, however, reveal a man tortured by the hypocrisy of Soviet society: Healey, Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi

  ‘“All right, Kozin, stop the bowing and get out!”’: Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Volume II

  he stood up and called him a pederast: Healey, Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi

  Stalin is consistently voted by Russians . . . : See David Filipov, ‘For Russians, Stalin is the “Most Outstanding” Figure in World History, Followed by Putin’, Washington Post (June 2017)

  According to Solzhenitsyn, Kozin tried to hang himself: Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Volume II

  Varlam Shalamov wrote about the region’s summer greenery – how it grew with a kind of wild rush: See Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Stories, trans. Donald Rayfield (New York: NYRB Classics, 2018)

  literacy rates in the USSR nearly doubled by the end of the decade: See David R. Shearer, ‘Stalinism, 1928–1940’, in Ronald Suny (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)

  new departments at the Moscow and Leningrad conservatories: See Simo Mikkonen, State Composers and the Red Courtiers (Jyväskylä: Jyväskylä University Press, 2007)

  a good thing there was no scent to the convicts’ tears: Shalamov, Kolyma Stories

  13. THE SIBERIAN COLOSSEUM: NOVOSIBIRSK

  Soviet authorities mounted hundreds of loudspeakers: Albert Pleysier, Frozen Tears: The Blockade and Battle of Leningrad (Maryland: University Press of America, 2008)

  The authorities also broadcast the tick-tock of a metronome: See Alexis Peri, The War Within (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2017)

  the rhythm of the metronome took on the feeling of a heartbeat: See Pleysier, Frozen Tears

  The Soviet poet Vera Inber said Leningraders . . . in a Tchaikovsky concert: Ibid.

  ‘Music makes me fearless . . . but I go into the melody’: Susanna Ivanova, cited in Boris Skomorovsky and E. G. Morris, The Siege of Leningrad (St Petersburg: Books Inc., 1944)

  ‘Your song tells us of a great singing people . . . the meanings of human freedom’: Carl Sandburg, ‘Take a Letter to Dmitri Shostakovich’, Washington Post (July 1942), cited in Brian Moynahan, Leningrad: Siege and Symphony (London: Quercus, 2013)

  a calling card for the USSR about the urgency of their fight against the fascist advance: The fascinating ambiguity in Shostakovich’s musical message is revealed in the composer’s controversial memoirs published after his death: ‘Hitler is a criminal, that’s clear, but so is Stalin. I feel eternal pain for those who were killed by Hitler, but I feel no less pain for those killed on Stalin’s orders. I suffer for everyone who was tortured, shot, or starved to death. There were millions of them in our country before the war with Hitler began. The war brought much new sorrow and much new destruction, but I haven’t forgotten the terrible prewar years. This is what all my symphonies, beginning with the Fourth, are about, including the Seventh and Eighth.’ See Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979).

  ‘My weapon was music . . . go to any lengths for the sake of victory’: Literaturnaya Gazeta (December 1965), cited in Brian Moynahan, Leningrad: Siege and Symphony

  the composer’s rapturous reception earning him the cover of Time magazine: ‘Music: Shostakovich & the Guns’, Time (July 1942)

  there were numerous names crossed out (known to be dead), and others marked up in red: Pauline Fairclough, Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity Under Lenin and Stalin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016)

  At the first rehearsal fewer than twenty musicians turned up . . . : One of the most riveting tellings of the blockade story is by Moynahan, Leningrad: Siege and Symphony – a book I have relied on for some of the very human details.

  ‘dressed like cabbages’: Ed Vulliamy, ‘Orchestral Manoeuvres’, Observer (November 2001)

  The drummer perished on his way to work: ‘The first violin is dying, the drum died on his way to work, the French horn is at death’s door’. Yasha Babushkin, the Radiokom art director, cited in Moynahan, Leningrad: Siege and Symphony.

  ‘[W]e were stunned by the number of people . . . Most were thin and dystrophic’: Mikhail Parfionov, cited in Vulliamy, ‘Orchestral Manoeuvres’

  ‘Chicago of the Soviet Union’: Richard Nixon, ‘Russia as I Saw It’, National Geographic (December 1959)

  Siberian Colosseum: This is a phrase commonly used. See Peter Conradi, Who Lost Russia? How the World Entered a New Cold War (London: Oneworld, 2017)

  it could accommodate a column of tanks . . . tractors could be driven from the street to the stage: For a detailed account of the builders’ ambitions, failures and successes, see Ivan Nevzgodin, ‘A Great Achievement of the Soviet Construction Technology in Siberia: The Reinforced Concrete Cupola of the Novosibirsk Theatre’, in Ine Wouters, Stephanie Van de Voorde, Inge Bertels, Bernard Espion, Krista de Jonge and Denis Zastavni (eds), Building Knowledge, Constructing Histories, Volume I (Leiden: CRC Press/Balema, 2018). One of the challenges to understanding the building’s history, remark the authors, is that the chief engineer was executed in 1937 during Stalin’s purges.

  The original decor was equally extravagant: Descriptions of the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre in its early Soviet days can be found in Eric Johnstone, ‘Russian Visit’, Life Magazine (September 1944) and Richard Lauterbach, These are the Russians (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945).

  aviation engineers who assembled the mechanics for a ninety-tonne stage curtain: Lauterbach, These are the Russians

  more than twenty-four million Russians, both soldiers and civilians, perished in the Great Patriotic War: Mark Harrison and John Barber, ‘Patriotic War, 1941–1945’, in Ronald Suny (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). These numbers do, inevitably, vary from source to source.

  Packing was done in a hurry . . . : The wartime evacuation of art from Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery is extensively recorded in Z. I. Tregilova’s history, which tracks the journeys of some of Russia’s most iconic artworks: Z. I. Tregilova (ed.), Istoriia Tret’iakovskoĭ galerei XX vek, 1941–1945 (Moscow: Tret’iakovskaia galerei
a, 2015).

  Museum staff buried what they could . . . A member of Pavlovsk’s staff made sketches: These details are derived from two comprehensive sources: Suzanne Massie, Pavlovsk: The Life of a Russian Palace (Leipzig: Liki Rossii, 1990), an extraordinarily rigorous piece of historical research which reads like a thriller as the museum trains make their escape from Leningrad to Siberia; and R. R. Gafifullin, In Memoriam: Pavlovsk. Sobranie dvortsamuzeia, Poteri i utraty (St Petersburg: GMZ ‘Perriavlovsk’, 2015).

  Stalin’s heir apparent, nicknamed ‘The Pianist’: Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004)

  ‘Crate 63’: I am indebted to the work of Aleksei Guzanov and Nataliya Kulina at Pavlovsk Palace, who dug into the archives on my behalf to reveal the previously untold Siberian tale of Catherine’s Zumpe piano. For more on the railway journeys to Novosibirsk, see Massie, Pavlovsk: Life of a Russian Palace.

  The Tretyakov employees slept in a dormitory in the make-up rooms: Tregilova (ed.), Istoriia Tret’iakovskoĭ galerei XX vek, 1941–1945

  The Pavlovsk workers occupied the basement: Massie, Pavlovsk: Life of a Russian Palace

  Mravinsky travelled with his mother, wife and several domestic cats: See Gregor Tassie, Yevgeny Mravinsky: The Noble Conductor (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2005)

  Mravinsky’s orchestra went on to play . . . : Ibid.

  The Philharmonic also travelled to various Siberian towns . . . equal to the orchestra’s Leningrad appearances: Ibid.

  ‘Treasures Saved from the Germans’: See Tregilova (ed.), Istoriia Tret’iakovskoĭ galerei XX vek, 1941–1945

  ‘Not one of the orchestras that have performed my work . . . a perfect fulfilment of ideas’: D. D. Shostakovich, Sovetsky Sibir (July 1942)

  An article in the newspaper Soviet Siberia described . . . this animal-like howling: I. Sollertinskii, ‘Sed’maia simfoniia Shostakovicha’, Sovetsky Sibir (July 1942)

  ‘Far off in the middle of Siberia . . . the city of Lenin’: D. D. Shostakovich, ‘Zamechatelniye orkester’, Literature i Isskustvo (August 1942), cited in Tassie, Yevgeny Mravinsky