merchants, Lushnikov contributed generously to the city’s library, museum, orphanage and schools – were sustained by the lifelong friendship the family kept up with both Bestuzhevs. Nikolai visited the Lushnikovs frequently to paint dozens of portraits of the Kiakhta elite. Before he died, he entrusted many of his paintings to Lushnikov, a collection lost in the post in the 1870s, according to one account. There was also a trunk Lushnikov asked nobody to open until twenty-five years after his death. He kept the key on a chain with a crucifix around his neck. Both the key and the trunk vanished, presumably in the chaos of the Russian Civil War.
That was why the Bechstein felt so remarkable, even if it was sad and weary, the piano’s bald hammers and loose strings barely able to produce a sound. Located in one of the museum’s cold corners, its bones were chilled from a draught that slunk in through the windows. I pressed for more information, with calls and a second visit to Kiakhta two years later. Locals helping me around town also spoke of the Lushnikov connection; that was how the story ran. One of the archivists, a woman who was new to me when I returned to Kiakhta, said she would make some further investigations. ‘I suspect it is a legend,’ she said after a while. ‘People say it is the Lushnikovs’, but these things are hard to prove.’
Before I left Kiakhta for the last time, I went back to the Lushnikov mansion. I walked around the back to try and peek through the windows. A man answered the door. He let me into the only room of the house still occupied.
On the ground floor, there was just enough room for a cooker and a bed, which the man shared with his four-year-old son. He couldn’t remember how long he had lived there, but it was from around the time that he got work helping Kiakhta’s Father Oleg clean up the church in the nineties. Back then, there had been another family living on the second floor of the house, but otherwise there hadn’t been anyone else he could recall for twenty-five years. The decaying wood was too dangerous; the roof had fallen in. As we talked, the dogs were circling again outside. In the stableyard, a man who had offered to help me fell to the ground in an epileptic fit.
On my last night in Kiakhta, I slipped into the back of the Trinity Cathedral – the town’s largest abandoned church, opposite the old trading houses – through a gap in some metal railings. The nave, missing its dome, looked like a skull that had been trepanned for a post-mortem. The masonry was loose, the ground tangled with undergrowth and broken glass.
I didn’t know what I had expected to find, especially in the dark, but as soon as I was beyond the cordon, it felt as if something bad had happened here, that I was walking unquiet earth. I had read about Kiakhta in the Russian Civil War, how the massacres were so brutal, the museum’s records of events were deliberately destroyed. When the enemy was approaching, the White Army killed some sixteen hundred Reds in Kiakhta in a cold-blooded orgy of bayonets and poison.
The tea millionaires scattered. Some of them were murdered, others fled to the Pacific ports via the Trans-Siberian trains. Kiakhta was in chaos, derived not only from the fallout of the Russian Civil War but from the Mongolian Revolution of 1921 just across the border. Leading the army of Mongol revolutionaries was a madman with an identity crisis: an Austrian-born German warlord – Baron von Ungern-Sternberg, known as the Bloody White Baron – who had originally attached himself to imperial Russia as a Tsarist officer, then ‘went rogue’. Believing he was an incarnation of Genghis Khan, von Ungern wanted to reinstate Mongolia’s old Buddhist theocracy. To achieve his goal, he enacted a reign of terror against the Bolsheviks, which eventually brought him back to the Russia–Mongolia border territory. In the Mongolian town abutting Kiakhta, a suspected ‘Red’ met his death in a baker’s oven. In Kiakhta, the Baron’s enemies were locked into a room, and cold water sprayed on to their naked bodies. They were frozen to death rather than shot, so as not to waste bullets, the Baron’s capacity for murder said to be so bottomless that he was constantly inventing new ways of killing. One of his methods of execution was to tie his victim to two trees bent to the ground, which, when released, split the body in two.
Baron von Ungern-Sternberg, photographed in Mongolia in the early 1920s.
The currents of history swirled among the cathedral ruins – the story about the Bestuzhev drawings which went missing in the post, the trunk full of Decembrist secrets, the merchants’ pianos the tuner from Kiev came to fix. If none of this had happened – no 1917 Revolution, no White Baron, no Russian Civil War – what would Kiakhta have become? Would Siberia have flourished differently? Would it have spun off and become its own independent state as Potanin had once advocated?
The Kiakhta Bechstein, photographed in the town’s museum in 2016.
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