Russia before the Revolution. I use the New Style thereafter.
Sometimes I am the one out of synch. Although this book is written as a continuous journey for narrative coherence, my various research trips were not all taken in the order they are documented. Sometimes I had to return to a location to deepen my research. I also had to work with opportunistic leads, inclement weather and unpredictable scrutiny from Russia’s FSB, the state security and surveillance apparatus and a direct descendant of the KGB. I mostly travelled Siberia in winter, not summer. The main reason for this was a dangerous allergic response to the region’s mosquitoes – as vicious as the Siberian legend suggests, that they were born from the ashes of a cannibal.
The Great Patriotic War is a term widely used by Russians to refer to the Soviet experience of the Second World War. I have used the most familiar, Western version of people’s names. I have tended to avoid patronymics, as well as the feminine forms of a surname customarily used for Russian women. Nicholas II is the common name by which most readers will know the last Tsar. The other Nikolais I met, along with the Alekseis, Marias and Lidiyas, I don’t anglicize. I like the sound of their Russianness, though these decisions are idiosyncratic. The transliteration of Russian to English follows the Library of Congress system in the Source Notes and the Selected Bibliography only.
All interviews have relied on interpreters, who have stuck as close as possible to the spirit of intention, as per the advice of the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt about transcribing orchestral works to the piano: ‘In matters of translation there are some exactitudes which are the equivalent of infidelities.’ Many of my interviews were digitally recorded. Original direct quotes were re-checked with sources, and sometimes subsequently amended to refine meaning.
I relied on one interpreter more than any other: Elena Voytenko, whose fortitude helped me through many a black hole in Siberia. On a number of my trips to Russia, I was also joined by the American photographer Michael Turek. I picked up all manner of local guides, from music teachers to mountain-rescue specialists. I travelled ‘on the hoof’ wherever a lead might take me, by plane, train, helicopter, snowmobile, reindeer, amphibious truck, ship, hovercraft and taxi. I also hitched lifts with oil and gas workers. False leads induced a certain amount of backtracking, which was another reason for return visits.
Siberia’s Altai Region (capital, Barnaul) is contiguous with the Altai Republic (capital, Gorno-Altaysk); the latter is the more remote and mountainous. For simplicity, I use the term Altai to cover both. I have gone by the modern designation of Russian place names (since 1991, cities have generally gone back to their pre-Revolution names). St Petersburg I refer to by its current name as well as Petrograd (from 1914 to 1924) and Leningrad (the name from Lenin’s death until the end of the Soviet Union in 1991). Again, my decision is idiosyncratic. The events that took place in this city during the Leningrad Siege from 1941 to 1944 were so monumental, the name is hard to cleave from specific historical incidents. This is not so true of Novonikolaevsk, now known as Novosibirsk. Before starting this book, I hadn’t heard of either.
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* GULAG is an acronym for the Main Administration of Camps – in Russian, Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei – which is now more commonly used as a proper noun to describe the whole horrifying system of Soviet penal labour.
† At the time of this book’s first publication: 2020.
‡ Numbers relating to Tsarist exile are taken from Daniel Beer’s The House of the Dead (London: Allen Lane, 2016). Anne Applebaum’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag: A History (London: Penguin, 2004) hesitantly cites the Gulag death toll. Both books are critically important to an understanding of the statistics, while both also acknowledge the unreliability of any final number.
‘Liszt. It is only noon. Where are those brilliant carriages travelling from every direction going with such speed at this unusual hour? Probably to some celebration? Not at all. But what is the reason for such haste? A very small notice, brief and simple. Here’s what it says. A virtuoso announces that on a certain day, at two o’clock, in the Hall of the Assembly of the Nobles, he will play on his piano, without the accompaniment of the orchestra, without the usual prestige of a concert . . . five or six pieces. Upon hearing this news, the entire city rushed. Look! An immense crowd gathers, people squeeze together, elbow each other and enter.’
– Journal de St-Pétersbourg, August 1842
Music in a Sleeping Land: Sibir
EARLY ON IN MY travels in Siberia, I was sent a photograph from a musician living in Kamchatka, a remote peninsula which juts out of the eastern edge of Russia into the fog of the North Pacific. In the photograph, volcanoes rise out of the flatness, the scoops and hollows dominated by an A-shaped cone. Ice loiters in pockets of the landscape. In the foreground stands an upright piano. The focus belongs to the music, which has attracted an audience of ten.
A young man wearing an American ice-hockey shirt crouches at the pianist’s feet. With his face turned from the camera, it is difficult to tell what he is thinking, if it is the pianist’s music he finds engaging or the strangeness of the location where the instrument has appeared. The young man listens as if he might belong to an intimate gathering around a drawing-room piano, a scene that pops up like a motif in Russia’s nineteenth-century literature, rather than a common upright marooned in a lava field in one of the world’s most savage landscapes. There is no supporting dialogue to the photograph, no thickening romance, as happens around the instruments in Leo Tolstoy’s epic novels. Nor is there any explanation about how or why the piano ended up here in the first place. The image has arrived with no mention of what is being played, which is music the picture can’t capture anyway. Yet all sorts of intonations fill the word ‘Siberia’ written in the subject line of the email.
Siberia. The word makes everything it touches vibrate at a different pitch. Early Arab traders called Siberia Ibis-Shibir, Sibir-i-Abir and Abir-i-Sabir. Modern etymology suggests its roots lie in the Tatar word sibir, meaning ‘the sleeping land’. Others contend that ‘Siberia’ is derived from the mythical mountain Sumbyr found in Siberian-Turkic folklore. Sumbyr, like ‘slumber’. Or Wissibur, like ‘whisper’, which was the name the Bavarian traveller Johann Schiltberger bestowed upon this enigmatic hole in fifteenth-century cartography. Whatever the word’s ancestry, the sound is right. ‘Siberia’ rolls off the tongue with a sibilant chill. It is a word full of poetry and alliterative suggestion. But by inferring sleep, the etymology also undersells Siberia’s scope, both real and imagined.
Siberia is far more significant than a place on the map: it is a feeling which sticks like a burr, a temperature, the sound of sleepy flakes falling on snowy pillows and the crunch of uneven footsteps coming from behind. Siberia is a wardrobe problem – too cold in winter, and too hot in summer – with wooden cabins and chimney stacks belching corpse-grey smoke into wide white skies. It is a melancholy, a cinematic romance dipped
