The once-grand façades of wooden houses were smeared with graffiti, and one of the cemeteries smelled of urine. There was a menacing stasis to both Kiakhta, where the merchants had their homes and trading houses in the nineteenth century, and Troitskosavsk, the adjacent settlement, which was once populated by the shops, schools and administrators. It felt as though the town was only just surviving, its edge of existence marked by a thin line of trucks lingering for a couple of lazy hours as they waited to cross the border between Russia and Mongolia.
Yet once Kiakhta had been so lively. During its pre-Revolution heyday, the town’s club put on balls and musical events. Concerts by European pianists visiting Kiakhta were advertised in Irkutsk, Tomsk and Chita. At one time in history, there were enough good pianos in town to justify a tuner travelling here all the way from Kiev.
A nineteenth-century account called the town Asia’s ‘Sandy Venice’. Tea caravans, loaded up on to camels, would arrive from Mongolia, looking like the merchants and their ships that once sailed into Italy’s great maritime capital. Up to a hundred horses filled the yard of a Kiakhta merchant’s home. Mansions shimmered with winter gardens. The merchants’ wives ordered their dresses from the Paris couturier The House of Worth, and filled their cellars with rare wines. The merchants also had summer cottages, or dachas, with bathing pools and a boating lake. The children were given donkeys with miniature carriages, and piano lessons from Polish political exiles. At Christmas-time, tables were loaded with champagne. Dressed in masks and festive costumes, the first families of Kiakhta would parade through town with a small orchestra and a local composer. The party would continue through the night to other merchants’ homes, where they danced quadrilles and waltzes.
The reason for this wealth was unique in Russia: for every consignment of tea that passed through this border, Kiakhta’s merchants creamed off a tidy local tax, part of which was invested in local philanthropy. It worked brilliantly until the money started to show signs of drying up after 1869, when the access provided by the Suez Canal took business from Eurasia’s camel trains. When the Trans-Siberian Railway was built many miles to the town’s north, Kiakhta’s relevance began to wane even further. By the first decade of the twentieth century, Siberia’s richest marketplace no longer teemed with Chinese, or crates of tea stacked in pyramids taller than the merchants’ homes. But Kiakhta was still very, very wealthy. Right up until the Revolution, it remained a place where pianos – like Kiakhta’s Bechstein grand, which Tsogt had found on my behalf – tinkled with mazurkas and other Polish dances. The Bechstein was thought to be connected to the Lushnikov merchant family, said the guide who showed me around the town’s splendid museum the first time I came.
I went to find the Lushnikov residence where the piano would have stood, close to Kiakhta’s Resurrection Cathedral, which once had columns made of crystal. On top of a small hill looking down on Mongolia, I found the house where the Lushnikovs hosted scientists and explorers, many of whom were stopping on their travels to Central Asia, whether looking for new species, or seeking out the holy secrets of Tibet. Kiakhta was also where Grigory Potanin buried his wife, the brilliant Russian explorer Aleksandra Potanina, who was among the first women to win a gold medal from the Imperial Russian Geographical Society. During her funeral, the Lushnikov house was overflowing with mourners. Her husband was among the nineteenth century’s most outspoken advocates for an independent Siberia and an end to the exile system. When the American journalist George Kennan stopped in Kiakhta in the 1880s on his epic journey across Siberia to report on the Tsarist exile system, he too visited the Lushnikovs’ home. ‘We were very often surprised in these far-away parts of the globe to find ourselves linked by so many persons and associations to the civilized world,’ remarked Kennan.
A late-nineteenth-century photograph of Aleksei Lushnikov, pictured with his wife, Klavdia, and their family at their country residence situated about twenty miles outside Kiakhta.
The Lushnikovs were in fact a powerful example of the Decembrists’ reach and influence, the family’s lives testament to an extraordinary moment in Siberian culture. The matriarch, Klavdia Lushnikov – a Kandinsky cousin – was educated in Irkutsk at the Institute of Noblewomen. Standing at the centre of the Kiakhta intelligentsia, she was a gifted pianist, nicknamed ‘Lushnikova the Liberal’, who became well known for her musical salons. Twice a week, she would gather the women for lectures on literature, politics and economics. She had married the millionaire tea trader Aleksei Lushnikov – a sophisticated man born into a modest family in the nearby Selenga Valley. Aleksei had been educated from the age of eight by Mikhail and Nikolai Bestuzhev, two Decembrists who had made an impressive job of exile by farming and teaching in the region after their hard-labour sentences were up. As for Aleksei Lushnikov’s children, one daughter studied sculpture with Rodin in Paris. Another daughter went on to sing at the Tbilisi Opera House.
The American journalist George Kennan pictured next to his Siberian tarantass, c. 1885.
Both Bestuzhevs were well qualified to act as teachers – Nikolai in particular, whose story is so full of charm and conviction. A musician, scientist and painter, Nikolai was responsible for most of the surviving portraits of his fellow Decembrists in Siberia. During exile, he relied on colour pigments sent by Maria Volkonsky’s sister-in-law Zinaida, who also posted seeds for the Decembrists’ vegetable garden. The gentle countenance in Nikolai’s self-portrait is hard to square with the image of a violent revolutionary who briefed the Tsar’s would-be assassin on the morning of the Decembrist Revolt. He made his journey to Siberia with a volume of the Rambler tucked into his luggage – an English periodical full of elevated prose and humanist ideas encouraging greater social mobility between classes.
While Nikolai tended to paint the Decembrists’ lives in rosier hues than their grubby reality, he still communicated the sorrow of exile with a moving depth. He drew his compatriots reading, talking, painting, often in lonely thought. He depicted their prison as if it were an English landscape, and the Decembrists’ children playing with kites. He also painted that famous image of Maria Volkonsky sitting with her narrow back to the artist in the Volkonskys’ cell, her right hand on the piano. The picture is a reminder of how fragile Beethoven must have sounded in this part of the world, rendered into quivering melodies on Maria’s clavichord – ghost sounds from the salons of Europe played on this weak and imperfect instrument, its parts fixed up by the convict with the so-called ‘golden fingers’. Nikolai was also an able engineer. He made hats, jewellery from the Decembrists’ old fetters (coveted by fashionable women in Kiakhta and Irkutsk as rings), cradles and coffins. He was an expert watchmaker. Many years after his release, Nikolai had finessed his chronometer designs developed in prison. He made a clock, which kept time at his house near Kiakhta: ‘In spite of a frost of twenty-five degrees, it went perfectly,’ said his fellow Decembrist Baron Rozen.
Aleksei Lushnikov’s daughters in the 1870s; the family pictured at a Russian-made Becker piano.
With the Bestuzhevs as his teachers, Aleksei Lushnikov therefore received one of the most unusual educations in nineteenth-century Siberia for a child of such modest roots. By the time he had entered the service of a Kiakhta merchant, Lushnikov could recite pages of Pushkin by heart. Once he had made his fortune, Lushnikov opened Kiakhta’s first printing house, and founded its first newspaper, the Kiakhta Page – one of many that flourished in the late nineteenth century when Siberia was developing lively journalism, its own universities and home-grown intelligentsia. Lushnikov subscribed to all sorts of politically progressive magazines and newspapers, including The Bell, printed in London by the émigré Alexander Herzen, who became Russia’s first independent political publisher. Although
