The Lost Pianos of Siberia

by Sophy Roberts

  there were over four hundred thousand primary-age children enrolled . . . twenty-four college-level conservatories: See Maria Pisarenko, ‘Cultural Influences upon Soviet-era Programmatic Piano Music for Children’, UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones (Las Vegas: University of Nevada, 2017)

  a massive panic migration: In Antony Beevor’s The Second World War (New York, Boston and London: Little, Brown & Company, 2012), the British historian writes that after the Soviet offensive, which included extraordinary levels of mass rape, only 193,000 Germans of the pre-war population of 2.2 million were left in East Prussia. In Berlin: The Downfall, 1945 (New York: Viking, 2002), Beevor describes the Red Army leaving eastern Germany with tanks filled to the brim with plunder. Both books are important reading to understand the depth and horror of what occurred.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, then an artillery captain stationed in East Prussia: See Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Prussian Nights, trans. Robert Conquest (London: Fontana Press, 1978)

  collections were also burnt or looted by civilians before the Red Army arrived: See Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944–45 (London: Macmillan, 2004)

  14. VERA’S MÜHLBACH: AKADEMGORODOK

  seventy thousand construction workers: This statistic was published in Richard Nixon, ‘Russia as I Saw It’, National Geographic (December 1959).

  ninety per cent of the country’s natural resources: See Committee on Improving the Effectiveness of Environmental Nongovernmental Organizations in Russia et al., The Role of Environmental NGOs – Russian Challenges, American Lessons (Washington DC: National Academy Press, 2001)

  On paper, Akademgorodok looked spectacular: For comprehensive descriptions of Akademgorodok’s founding, purposes and achievements, I have leaned heavily on Paul R. Josephson’s New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, the Siberian City of Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

  ‘the little town with probably the biggest I.Q. anywhere’: See Daniel Ford, ‘Rebirth of a Nation’, New Yorker (March 1998)

  For the country’s intelligentsia with a renegade bent: Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited

  Within a decade of breaking ground . . . fifteen functioning research institutes: Ibid.

  ‘a miracle’: Raissa L. Berg’s autobiography captures the nuances of daily life in newly built Akademgorodok, detailing the preferential treatment of the city’s ‘elite’ academics: Raissa L. Berg, Acquired Traits, trans. David Lowe (London: Penguin, 1988).

  Vera Lotar-Shevchenko was born Vera Lautard . . . Mediterranean resort of Nice in France: I am indebted to a number of detailed accounts of Vera’s life, principally: Liubov’ Kachan, ‘Zhalet’ sebia – kakaia erunda!’, Novo Russkoe Slovo (April 1999); Simon Soloveychik, ‘Pianistka’, Komsomol’skaia Pravda (December 1965); and the Russian-language documentary My eshchë budem zhit’ nastoiashcheĭ zhizn’iu (1991) directed by Valeriĭ Klabukov. With the help of Anastasia Bliznyuk, I also gathered various accounts by the Akademgorodok historian Mikhail Kachan, and Georgiĭ Ugodnikov, who studied piano under Vera in Nizhny Tagil. There are further accounts by local historians in Nizhny Tagil, and others written by people who knew Vera, on historyntagil.ru. Some of the sources are contradictory, not least the fundamentals: there are variations in Vera’s date of birth and death (with arguments that even the year on her gravestone is wrong). Her definitive biography is further complicated by the fact that Vera left no known diaries or memoirs. In my version of her life, I have no reason to doubt the truth of these sources. While I did my best to seek verification from living people who knew her, my telling also conveys a deliberate level of uncertainty here and there, given some of the contradictions.

  Another source cited her teacher as the Italian, Ernesto Consolo: ‘Concerts “Vera Lautard”’, Figaro (November 1920)

  ‘velvet’ playing style: The description given by Kachan, ‘Zhalet’ sebia – kakaia erunda!’

  ‘rare brilliance’: ‘Concerts “Vera Lautard”’, Figaro

  ‘[n]othing that is not there and the nothing that is’: Wallace Stevens, ‘The Snow Man’, in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954)

  There is an old recording of Vera playing . . . : ADGO, ‘Vera Lotar-Shevchenko plays Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 32, Op. 111’, YouTube (June 2017)

  beauty at its very limit: Soloveychik, ‘Pianistka’

  Vera refused an encore, telling the audience how hard it had been to perform: This account of Vera’s performance in the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre is given in the Russian-language documentary My eshchë budem zhit’ nastoiashcheĭ zhizn’iu (1991) directed by Valeriĭ Klabukov. The Akademgorodok historian Mikhail Kachan, however, believed the Estonia-Steinway event occurred in a different concert hall in another Siberian city.

  large numbers of political prisoners granted amnesty, or ‘rehabilitated’: ‘If 7, 000-odd people had been rehabilitated in the three years preceding the secret speech, 617,000 were rehabilitated in the ten months that followed it’ – Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (London: Penguin, 2004).

  In 1958, the Texan pianist Harvey Van Cliburn . . . with Khrushchev’s approval: See Stuart Isacoff, When the World Stopped to Listen (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2017)

  ‘dressed as if ready for a football game’: James Reston, ‘Siberia and Surprises’, New York Times (July 1959)

  Mrs Nixon went to a Siberian fashion show: ‘Mrs. Nixon Views Siberian Fashions’, Ibid.

  began his eighteen-year tenure as General Secretary: The use of this title, as opposed to First Secretary, was a telling throwback to the language of the Stalin era. See Stephen E. Hanson, ‘The Brezhnev era’, in Ronald Suny (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

  The event was announced with a banner . . . : See Alexander Galich, Songs and Poems, trans. Gerald Stanton Smith (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1983)

  Then all two thousand people in the audience rose to their feet: Galich, Songs and Poems

  Galich was fetched from the city hotel for a 2 a.m. encore: Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited

  the top four floors of the projected twelve-storey hotel were quickly lopped off: Ibid.

  1905, when the factory was producing two hundred and fifty grand pianos a year: Anne Swartz, Piano Makers in Russia in the Nineteenth Century (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2014)

  The German maker was among the foreign artisans: Robert Palmieri (ed.), The Piano: An Encyclopedia, Second Edition (New York and London: Routledge, 2015)

  Klavdiya Shulzhenko, ‘Russia’s Vera Lynn’: Anna Reid, Leningrad: Tragedy of a City Under Siege, 1941–44 (London: Bloomsbury, 2011)

  the spire of the Admiralty scaled by mountaineers: See also Albert Pleysier, Frozen Tears: The Blockade and Battle of Leningrad (Maryland: University Press of America, 2008)

  Lagoda’s ice held for six months . . . half a million people: See Harrison E. Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad (London: Macmillan, 2000)

  knew the ‘Road of Life’ by another name: the ‘Road of Death’: Ibid.

  Rönisch was a manufacturer from Dresden . . . : The history of Rönisch pianos in Russia is told in detail by Swartz, Piano Makers in Russia in the Nineteenth Century.

  J. Alfred Prufrock measured out his life with coffee spoons: T. S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, in The Wasteland and Other Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1999)

  thirty million people outside America were listening in: John S. Wilson, ‘Who is Conover? Only We Ask’, New York Times (September 1959)

  PART THREE: GOODNESS KNOWS WHERE

  ‘Often the object of desire . . . becomes more real than reality itself’: Umberto Eco, The Book of Legendary Lands, trans. Alastair McEwan (London: MacLehose Press, 2015)

  ‘’Tis wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log-hut on the frontier’: Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume VII (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press, 2007)
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  ‘There are many kinds of endings – triumphant and tragic . . . mysterious, unseal an enigma’: Alfred Brendel, A Pianist’s A–Z: A Piano Lover’s Reader (London: Faber & Faber, 2013)

  15. A GAME OF RISK: KAMCHATKA

  In 1986, the legendary Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter took a piece of cardboard . . . : See Valentina Chemberdzhi, V puteshestvii so Sviatoslavom Rikhterom (Moscow: M. RIK ‘Kul’tura’, 1993) – a comprehensive portrait of the pianist’s Siberian travels, which Chemberdzhi experienced. Sensitive to Richter’s complex character and melancholy, her account is a fascinating read.

  Liszt performing on a rattling Tompkinson upright in an Irish hotel sitting room: Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993)

  ‘it’s hard to imagine a grand piano in a yurt or in the taiga!’: Chemberdzhi , V puteshestvii so Sviatoslavom Rikhterom

  ‘In deepest Russia . . . I’ve played on terrible pianos, and played extremely well’: Bruno Monsaingeon, Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and Conversations, trans. Stewart Spencer (London: Faber & Faber, 2001)

  visited Khabarovsk, Chita . . . Ulan-Ude, Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk and Barnaul: Richter’s full itinerary, and many an anecdote along the way, is given in Chemberdzhi, V puteshestvii so Sviatoslavom Rikhterom

  In Abakan on the Yenisei River . . . Siberians could hear him perform live: Ibid.

  scribbled on pieces of paper . . . sometimes in less than thirty minutes: Monsaingeon, Sviatoslav Richter

  ‘[T]hrough word of mouth the hall would be full. That’s not done in the West’: Ibid.

  ‘All that matters is that people come not out of snobbery but to listen to the music’: Ibid.

  ‘In tsarist Russia’s last years . . . And we call that socialism!?’: Gorbachev’s visit to Nizhnevartovsk and this quote is given in William Taubman, Gorbachev: His Life and Times (London: Simon & Schuster, 2017).

  extraordinary queues on the day McDonald’s opened: Francis X. Clines, ‘Upheaval in the East; Moscow McDonald’s Opens: Milkshakes and Human Kindness’, New York Times (February 1990)

  In Leningrad, rock surged out of illegal clubs: Mark Yoffe and Dave Laing, ‘History of Soviet and Russian Rock Music’, in John Shepherd, David Horn, Dave Laing, Paul Oliver and Peter Wicke (eds), Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World: Locations, Volume VII (London and New York: Continuum, 2005)

  By 1992, queues outside food stores had returned to city streets: Serge Schmemann, ‘Yeltsin Takes to Now-Restive Streets’, New York Times (January 1992)

  One of the regions that emptied out most dramatically: See Stephanie Hitztaler, ‘The Relationship between Resources and Human Migration Patterns in Central Kamchatka during the Post-Soviet Period’, Population and Environment, 25:4 (March 2004)

  Getting to Kamchatka . . . : For a full account of the challenges of reaching Kamchatka, see James R. Gibson, Feeding the Russian Fur Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011).

  ‘[H]ere there were not what we call roads . . . choosing paths in various directions’: Lyudmila Rikord, cited in ibid.

  ‘I consider myself particularly fortunate . . . bringing to Kamchatka a pianoforte’: V. I. Golovnin, Around the World on the Kamchatka, trans. Ella Wiswell (Honolulu: Hawaii University Press, 1979) about an epic voyage little known outside Russia.

  ‘[T]he pleasure of playing the piano in such an isolated spot, for someone who loves music, is immense!’: Ibid.

  Golovnin’s seaborne piano delivery had taken eight months and eight days: Ibid.

  Kamchatka was the place at the back of the classroom: Boris Pasternak, Safe Conduct, trans. Beatrice Scott (New York: New Directions, 1958)

  One in ten of Kamchatka’s population left: Hitztaler, ‘The Relationship between Resources and Human Migration Patterns in Central Kamchatka during the Post-Soviet Period’

  ‘America’s best friend’: T. De Witt Talmage, ‘Truth about Russia’, Herald and News. Vermont (November 1892)

  The country’s two leaders were being favourably compared: Ibid.

  ‘waste space on the map of the globe’: Perry Collins, Overland Explorations in Siberia, Northern Asia and the Great Amoor River Country (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1864)

  his bestselling indictment of the Tsarist exile system: See George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System, Volumes I & II (New York: The Century Co., 1891)

  He writes about the captain of the port . . . refined musical tastes: George Kennan, Tent Life in Siberia (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893)

  ‘an occasional but rare piano’: Thomas Wallace Knox, Overland through Asia (Hartford: American Publishing Co., 1870)

  ‘Evidently, many of those rough but kindly people . . . the evening’s entertainment’: Washington Vanderlip and Homer Hulbert, In Search of a Siberian Klondike (New York: Century Co., 1903)

  ‘classical concerts were replaced by the howling of sledge-dogs’: Elim Demidoff, A Shooting Trip to Kamchatka (London: Rowland Ward, 1904)

  At volcanic mud baths . . . an old stained piano: Ibid.

  Nazi SS execution squads were shooting, hanging and burning communist partisans: ‘Einsatzgruppen’, in Israel Gutman (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Volume II (New York: Macmillan, 1990)

  ‘The Boy and the Bird’: See Vasiliĭ Peskov, Polnoe sobranie sochineniĭ, Tom 5: Moshchenye reki (Moscow: LitRes, 2017)

  16. SIBERIA’S LAST PIANO: THE COMMANDERS TO THE KURILS

  ‘too much certainty is a miserable thing’: Horatio Clare, Orison for a Curlew (Toller Fratrum: Little Toller Books, 2015)

  measured using a mechanism fashioned from piano wire: Albert E. Theberge, ‘George Belknap and the Thomson Sounding Machine’, Hydro (April 2014)

  piano wire was also used by the Soviets to hang traitors during the Second World War: Peter Julicher, ‘Enemies of the People’ under the Soviets (Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2015)

  Current research suggests there are no more than two hundred and fifty nesting pairs left in the world: This figure was accurate in July 2019, according to the most up-to-date information provided by the RSPB (The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). The same source rated the bird as ‘critically endangered’.

  annotated book on birds of the Russian Far East: Mark Brazil, Field Guide to the Birds of East Asia (London: Christopher Helm, 2009)

  ‘By another spring I may be a mail-carrier in Peru . . . Let us migrate interiorly without intermission’: Henry David Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906)

  Among them is one book I adore . . . : Kate Marsden, On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers (London: Record Press, 1892). Marsden’s map, published in her book, is a treasure in the annals of Siberian adventures.

  ‘of course, it was quite natural for the gentlemen . . . get at the end of the journey before setting off’: Ibid.

  ‘Even my own attention, I must confess . . . in thinking what to wear’: Ibid.

  the land-and-sea journey made in the eighteenth century by the explorer Vitus Bering: Peter Ulf Møller and Natasha Okhotina Lind, Until Death Do Us Part (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2008)

  In July 1741, Bering made landfall on Kayak Island . . . : For Bering’s story, see Glynn Barratt, Russia in Pacific Waters, 1715–1825: A Survey of the Origins of Russia’s Naval Presence in the North and South Pacific (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1981).

  Steller described these creatures as over seven metres in length . . . able to feed forty hungry sailors for two weeks: See George W. Steller, ‘De bestiis marinis, or, The Beasts of the Sea (1751)’, trans. W. Miller and J. E. Miller, Faculty Publications, UNL Libraries, 17

  indigenous Aleuts originally imported from the Aleutian Islands to harvest the pelts: James S. Olson (ed.), An Ethnohistorical Dictionary of the Russian and Soviet Empires (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994)

  This has always been sensitive border territory: John J. Stephan, The Kuril Islands: Russo-Japanese Fro
ntier in the Pacific (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). This detailed, elegantly told history of the Kurils is one I have relied on closely – and one of the main reasons why I wanted to travel this far east and see the islands for myself.

  on Russian maps first drawn by the Tobolsk map maker Semion Remezov in 1700: Ibid.

  The Japanese strike force set sail from the island of Iturup: Ibid.

  ‘the end of the world’: Ibid.

  Then came a series of muffled booms: Henry James Snow, In Forbidden Seas (London: Edward Arnold, 1910)

  the Kuril Islands’ only purpose was to provide a refuge for the shipwrecked: Jean-François de La Pérouse, A Voyage Round the World in the Years 1785, 1786, 1787 and 1788, Volume II (London: J. Johnson, 1799)

  Franklin D. Roosevelt valued them as so utterly irrelevant . . . for less than the time: Stephan, The Kuril Islands

  reducing the Kurils’ sea-otter population to near extinction: See Ann B. Irish, Hokkaido: A History of Ethnic Transition and Development on Japan’s Northern Island (Jefferson and London: McFarland & Company, 2009)

  ‘Fog Archipelago’: John D. Grainger, The First Pacific War: Britain and Russia, 1854–1856 (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2008)

  17. PROVENANCE REGAINED: KHABAROVSK

  hall Richter played: He complained it was over-heated, badly ventilated and with poor acoustics. See Valentina Chemberdzhi, V puteshestvii so Sviatoslavom Rikhterom (Moscow: M. RIK ‘Kul’tura’, 1993)

  Léopold Stürzwage, who opened a Moscow workshop: Martha Novak Clinkscale, Makers of the Piano: 1820–1860, Volume II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)

  Stürzwage’s heir, also called Léopold: See Maksim Sergeev, ‘Professiia fortepiannovo mastera v Rossii. Tsekhovoĭ remeslennik kak klassicheskiĭ tip nastroĭshchika fortepiano’, Opera Musicologica, 2:28 (2016)

  ‘You regard the world with one eye, and with the other you look inside yourself’: Cited in Mason Klein, Modigliani Unmasked (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017)

  ‘Exile is strangely compelling . . . the loss of something left behind forever’: Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000)