Circling the belfry was a balcony, its rim beaded in ice. Arthur warned me not to stand too close to the edge. Three of the wooden balusters were missing. Others were barely holding their place, hanging like loose teeth.
Beneath me lay the city’s wide boulevards. On a shallow incline stood historic wooden houses, and a few other bell towers puncturing the sky, their cupolas skinned in green, gold and peacock blue. With snow unable to stick to their pitch, the domes caught the sun, their satisfying shapes exactly as the author Jules Verne described them, like pot-bellied Chinese jars.
I looked for the train track to orientate me, and the river which runs through Irkutsk, winter’s grip holding it in frigid stasis. In the stillness, two figures in black moved through the whiteness below. One man shovelled snow from the cemetery path. Another swept up behind him, clearing the graves. I looked at them and wondered how they came to be there. Was the one with the dragging leg descended from a murderer, a tea trader, a political exile or a free settler? Or were they Old Siberians, born of the earliest Russian peasants, who intermarried with the indigenes? The pull of private histories is always present in Siberia. Every face informs the enigmatic texture of a place where the legacy of exile lingers, like the smell of incense, or the feeble gleam of traffic lights, with the complexity of Russia’s identity, and the mix of Europe and Asia, evident not just in the jumbled architecture of the Siberian baroque church I stood on top of in a snow-breeze in winter, but in the routes reaching out from every side.
Arthur guided me by the elbow to the edge of the belfry. He wanted to show me the nineteenth-century bell, which had been made in Berlin. The other bells came from the foundry towns ribboning the River Volga – a thousand-year-old tradition of Russian bell-making which had been significantly disrupted by the twentieth century’s atheist Soviet regime. In Irkutsk, the Soviets had turned the oldest church, into a cobbler’s shop, and another into a film studio. Bogoyavlensky Cathedral was used as a bakery, and the bell tower to store salt. These were fates to be preferred over that suffered by Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Though now rebuilt, it was torn down under Stalin’s orders and turned into Russia’s largest open-air swimming pool.
Arthur started to play – softly at first, the resonance making the snow tremble on the belfry’s flimsy balustrade as the bell’s tongue licked its copper skirt. Then the patterns started to build until all eight bells were singing. Arthur pushed and pulled the ropes with his hands, while his feet worked pedals to strike the largest bells, the pace an exhilarating distillation of music’s power, of chords at once melodically familiar and outlandishly foreign.
For five or six minutes Arthur held the city in thrall, sweat riding down the sides of his temples, his body moving with the ease of a dancer, not a giant of a man in clumsy shoes. The sequences quickened until the deepest bell tolled three bass notes. With the sound eddying over Irkutsk, I imagined the townspeople looking up. Would they ever know the identity of this person who found such intense pleasure in such an improbable place? When the last note began to fade, Arthur turned around to face me, wiping his brow.
‘I can play most things, except rock ’n’ roll,’ he said, a broad smile reaching across his face.
*
In 1591, a bell was among the first exiles to Siberia – the weight of a horse, cut down from the belfry in Uglich, a town on a bend in the River Volga in European Russia. The bell had committed the crime of being tolled as a rallying call to urge the citizens to join a small, bold and foolhardy uprising against the state. In response, and to establish his legitimacy, the Tsar Regent executed two hundred of the Uglich townspeople. In a final sadistic twist, those exiled to Siberia were forced to carry the Uglich bell, itself subject to a public lashing, some thirteen hundred miles across the Ural Mountains to Tobolsk. Like the men who bore the instrument on its journey, who had their tongues cut out, the bell was also rendered mute by having its clapper removed. It was a terrifying symbolic act: by silencing music in the belfry, the regime was exerting the alarming reach of its power over every facet of Russian life.
Nor did the horror abate after the Revolution, when the Tsarist exile system was effectively relaunched as the Soviet Gulag. Victims travelled in cattle wagons on the railways to Siberia’s mines and ports. Kolyma-bound prisoners would then sail by Stalin’s convict ships into some of the darkest corners of Soviet Russia, populating the regime’s network of forced-labour camps with political opponents and urkas (prison slang for legitimate thieves, murderers and criminals).
For some, the experience was made bearable with the smallest of survival strategies. Fyodor Dostoevsky – who endured four years as a convict in Siberia, living with dripping ceilings, rotten floors, filth an inch thick, and convicts packed like herrings in a barrel – was given a copy of the New Testament by an exile’s wife, and taught a fellow prisoner to read. The tiger conservationist Aleksandr Batalov spoke about a friend who spent decades in a Stalinist labour camp; he said his friend’s study of the migrating birds around the camp was the thing that stopped him going crazy. Varlam Shalamov, a poet who spent a total of seventeen years in the Soviet Gulag, found no such comfort. He wrote about the terror of indifference, how the cold that froze a man’s spit could also freeze the soul.
I came to Irkutsk in pursuit of a piano which represented the opposite of Shalamov’s tears: the instrument belonging to Maria Volkonsky, the wife of one of the nineteenth century’s most high-profile political exiles. It functioned like a fulcrum in Siberia’s piano history, marking the moment when classical music in this penal wasteland was invested with a keen sense of European identity and pride, the piano’s Siberian story beginning with a poorly conceived rebellion in St Petersburg on 14 December 1825. It was the day of the winter solstice – an event traditionally bound to all sorts of ideas about birth, death and change.
An official NKVD (secret police) photograph of Varlam Shalamov following his January 1937 arrest for ‘counter-revolutionary’ activities.
Before dawn was up, a group of men gathered in the city’s Senate Square with the intention of deposing the Tsarist regime. The Decembrists, as the rebels came to be known, comprised noblemen, gentlemen and soldiers – including Maria Volkonsky’s husband, Sergei. Having fought alongside the peasantry during the Napoleonic Wars, Russia’s elite had come to admire the stoicism of their fellow countrymen. Liberal idealists all, the Decembrists not only wanted emancipation for Russia’s beleaguered serfs; they also sought to replace the country’s political structure with a constitutional monarchy, or even a republican form of government – a response to the despotism of the Romanovs, which had defined the dynasty’s long lineage since 1613.
Dissent had stepped up after Catherine the Great’s death. Her son, Tsar Paul I, had enjoyed a brief, tyrannical tenure before assassins strangled him with a sash in 1801. Paul’s murder was probably a good thing for music. Suspicious of Western thought to the point of paranoia, Paul formalized a ruthless backlash to Catherine’s flirtations with the Enlightenment. He banned any kind of foreign-printed book or pamphlet from entering Russia, including sheet music.
The next in line, Tsar Alexander I, had a reformer’s spirit. He relaxed state censorship but failed to progress emancipation in any meaningful way. After the trauma of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, when Moscow was all but burnt to the ground, Alexander governed with almost schizophrenic swings. He tried to improve the exile system, introducing new rights for convicts; he also fell under the influence of a demonic Russian general, Aleksei Arakcheyev, who was obsessed with turning the Empire into a military state. Alexander took increasingly draconian measures against liberal foreign influence. In 1823, he banned Russian students from entering certain German universities, lest they be exposed to seditious ideas.
When Alexander died childless in 1825, leaving the country in a state of bankruptcy, Alexander’s brothers hesitated to fill the throne. The Russian
