and lost indigenous cultures. Part of me hoped that the piano, which was such a magnificent symbol of European culture, hadn’t yet made it into a nomad’s tent. Every piano I found would be a victory, but I also wanted to seek out the corners of Siberia which had been left untouched – the parts not even Catherine the Great had managed to pull into line during a reign that helped turn Russia into a European musical nation, and Siberia into a synonym for fear. I not only needed to travel into the musical history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also to look at the piano’s domination, its shifting dominions, and its social role. Only then would I understand the value of something precious in the physical peripheries of Russia at a time when piano music was experienced ‘live’, before radio and recorded music shrank the world. By following the pathway of an object, I would get closer to understanding the place. I would learn that an object is never just an object – that each piano sings differently because of the people who used to play it and polish its wooden case.
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* The contemporary American author Ian Frazier recounts a story about Westerners flattering the seventeenth-century Tsars with the idea that their territory ‘exceeded the size of the surface of the full moon’. It didn’t matter that it was potentially untrue: ‘To say that Russia was larger than the full moon sounded impressive, and had an echo of poetry, and poetry creates empires.’ This is one of my favourite lines ever written about Siberia – a remark which speaks to the power of the great Siberian myth. Travels in Siberia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).
* Two of Remezov’s maps are published on the endpapers of this book.
Siberia is ‘Civilized’: St Petersburg to the Pacific
WHEN I VISITED TOBOLSK for the first time, it was blowing a snowstorm. The weather softened everything – my mood, my expectations. This small town in Western Siberia with its white citadel, circular, frilled towers and windowless walls was built on top of a pleated escarpment. It seemed to belong to the pages of a fairy tale, Tobolsk’s profile glittering with the bulbous gold and turquoise domes of the Russian Orthodox religion. Beside the church stood a seminary – the oldest in Siberia, from which nineteenth-century missionaries were despatched all over the Empire, even to Russian America, when the Tsars’ colonial possessions extended to Alaska and parts of what is now California.* Standing at the heart of this old Siber ian capital, I was close to the site where an important battle took place in 1580 when the Cossack adventurer Ermak Timofeevich ventured east across the Urals with an army of less than a thousand men to defeat the last Sibir khan – an achievement the Tsar rewarded with new chainmail. Unfortunately for Ermak, the weight of his fashionable new armour led to his drowning when he toppled into a river nearby.
Ermak’s story, both mighty and bathetic, marked the beginning of Siberia’s colonization, which saw the Russian Empire expand its territory by more than a hundred times. But if Tobolsk was a symbol of imperial Russia’s glory, the town was also testimony to the punitive tyranny of the Tsarist regime. Before the rise of the Eastern Siberian city of Irkutsk under Catherine the Great, Tobolsk was the main sorting house for Siberia’s incoming exiles. Among them were prisoners of war, including a large Swedish contingent picked up at the 1709 Battle of Poltava – a victory over the Swedish Empire that forever changed the power balance in north-east Europe, to Russia’s advantage. The Swedes not only provided the necessary labour for redirecting the river systems which wind beneath Tobolsk; they also imparted a significant civilizing influence. In 1720, the Scottish traveller John Bell observed the Swedes’ effect on Tobolsk’s culture. He expressed surprise to find such a variety of musical instruments, with the Swedes responsible for introducing several useful arts ‘almost unknown’ before their arrival. Bell attended various concerts with these officer convicts, who also worked as teachers for the Russians.
The Swedes joined the system of penal labour devised by Peter the Great under a late-seventeenth-century initiative called katorga, which banished men and women to Siberia with forced-labour terms. Sometimes amnesty was granted for high-profile political prisoners, usually with a changeover of Tsar, but otherwise marked exiles – the worst offenders with their nostrils split, branded and scarred by a kind of barbed whip called the knout – were deemed ‘officially dead’ in the eyes of the law. For exiles, there was also no return, which was a highly effective way not only to punish people, and push ‘undesirables’ out of sight and out of mind, but to colonize Russia’s acquisitions. With this ambitious penal system to manage, Tobolsk attracted its fair share of officialdom – governors, educators and their wives, and, inevitably, pianos. I had traced and found a few interesting instruments – a beautiful nineteenth-century French Erard, serial number 75796, which had been irretrievably damaged by a burst pipe as recently as 1988. There were a score of pre-Revolution, Russian-made grand pianos, but in poor condition. The civil war had been hard on Tobolsk, said Aleksei, a chatty, energetic one-time priest who had trained at the seminary. He offered to help with my search – a chance encounter that rolled into a whole day of looking when he changed his plans to accommodate a stranger.
Aleksei was tall, handsomely dressed in a black suit, his charismatic presence, whispered my interpreter, reminding her of all the images she had in her head of Peter the Great. He had bright blue eyes, and an even brighter voice that seemed to make the air move differently when he spoke. I suppose both of us were a little bit in love with him. This was partly because Aleksei was everything I didn’t expect of Russian Orthodoxy – a wit, without the long, grave beard I associated with his religion, his cheerfulness so abundant that I soon stopped thinking about the tragedy of the drowned Erard and Tobolsk’s other half-sounding instruments. When Aleksei was studying at the seminary, his favourite game was doing roly-polies off the hill beneath the church in his long black cassock. He would tumble off the edge of the escarpment towards a thicket of wooden houses that flowed beneath the hill like spring’s muddy snowmelt.
In the lee of this ledge, Aleksei took me to the Lower Town, where the great and good once lived, including Cath erine’s governor, Aleksandr Aliabiev, a keen patron of the musical arts, and a significant symbol of Catherine’s expanding cultural influence. The governor’s son, also called Aleksandr Aliabiev, became a well-regarded pianist and composer who trained in St Petersburg. After serving his country in the Napoleonic Wars, Aliabiev junior was exiled back to Tobolsk for his alleged involvement in a murky gambling murder, with his most popular song, ‘The Nightingale’, composed during his stint in Tobolsk jail on a piano a Sister of Mercy arranged to be brought to his cell. At least, that’s how the legend goes – one among many that congregate in this old part of town. Aliabiev’s music, however, is eclipsed by the far larger story lurking among Tobolsk’s nineteenth-century boulevards. In the old Governor’s House, the last Tsar and his family were kept under house arrest by the Bolsheviks in 1917 before being moved to Ekaterinburg, where they were eventually murdered. The family’s German music teacher had travelled with them to Tobolsk from St Petersburg. With no piano among their luggage, the Romanovs’ captors therefore had to acquire an instrument, along with other pieces of furniture, from merchants who lived nearby. It was a piano often played by the Empress when she was left by herself, waiting for news of their fate while the civil war intensified.
Aleksei said Tobolsk’s archivists were looking for the Empress’s instrument, but so far without success. He took me up the rickety stairs of the mansion, which workmen were busy renovating in order to turn it into a museum. They showed me handwritten notes from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which they had found between the floorboards. That such scraps of history might still lie in cracks like these felt somehow reassuring. Then, when we were finishing up for the day, Aleksei suggested I meet some of his friends who were studying at the seminary. He led me into the priests’ canteen, a bare
