how an historic piano would sound different in the steppe – an instrument which still resonated with the gentler timbre of the nineteenth century: the moody nocturnes of John Field, the sparkling elegance of Chopin’s Ballades, the earthy texture of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Russian Rustic Scene’.* You don’t need a thundering concert piano in a space as intimate as a Mongolian ger. An interesting European instrument with a mellow voice would duet well with the plaintive morin khuur, the Mongolian horsehead fiddle. The combination was something Odgerel was also beginning to champion as a unique Eurasian style.
Odgerel Sampilnorov’s family. Her Buryat ancestors, originally from near Lake Baikal in Siberia, are pictured in the first image.
We talked a little about the difficulties that might lie ahead, and our mixed motivations. If I were to go and look in Siberia, I would need to understand the story of pianos in Russian culture and how and why these instruments had travelled east in the first place. I love nothing more than listening to people talk, whether in the pages of books, or across a table sharing a meal. Odgerel loves music; she wanted a piano with good sound. Giercke loves all of these things too, but above all, the spirit of adventure. Offering to help pay for the endeavour, he said that only in trying to take on something difficult would something interesting ever happen.
‘We made our plans in this way: If we could do it, it would be good, and a good story. And if we couldn’t do it, we would have a story, too, the story of not being able to do it.’ This is how John Steinbeck described his trip to the USSR in the aftermath of the Second World War with the photographer Robert Capa. Steinbeck’s approach appealed to me. So did Anton Chekhov’s, who declared his intention to travel across Siberia in a letter to his publisher in 1890: ‘Even assuming my excursion is an utter triviality, a piece of obstinacy and caprice, yet just you consider and then tell me what I’m losing by going. Time? Money? Will I undergo hardships? My time costs nothing. I never have any money anyway.’ In a fug of piano music, Mongolian vodka and late nights talking under a starry sky, a trip to Siberia sounded almost implausibly exciting. Then summer turned to autumn, and back home in England my mood darkened with the leaves and the seasonal malaise. I moved on from the idea of undertaking any Siberian piano hunt until eight months later, when I flew to the Russian Far East. Only when I started travelling deep into the Russian forest did I realize I could no more unsnag the idea of Siberia’s lost pianos than set out coatless into cold so extreme it makes your tears freeze into the lines around your eyes.
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* The clock can still be found encased in a protective glass box in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. The birds lie still for most of the week, but every so often their two-hundred-year-old mechanisms are carefully wound to give visitors a glimpse of the performance that captivated the Empress.
* ‘It is thought that by the end of her reign well over half the population of the Russian Empire had become a slave class, every bit as subjugated as the Negro slaves of America.’ A. N. Wilson, Tolstoy (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988).
* ‘Polish’ is a simplification of the cultural nuances of the time, but is generally used to discuss the various ethnicities – Polish, Lithuanian, Belarusian, among others – sharing a region on Russia’s western edge with constantly shifting borders during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
* Confusingly, most non-Russian readers will know this as ‘the Eastern Front’, where the Allies fought Germany for control of Eastern Europe. For the Soviet Union, however, this was most definitely a Western Front. The Soviets’ Eastern Front centred around the invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria in 1945.
* Dumka, op. 59.
Traces in the Snow: Khabarovsk
IF YOU MEASURE SIBERIA’S width from the Urals in the west to the last spit of land that makes up the Chukotka Peninsula on Russia’s Arctic seaboard, then Siberia is wider than Australia, its Pacific edge just fifty miles shy of North America to the east. In Siberia, there are lakes that are called seas, with some parts so thinly populated that travellers past and present have frequently compared Siberia to the moon.* This analogy would work if it weren’t for the animal life that thrives in Siberia’s icy vaults. Once upon a time, when Eurasia wasn’t such a mighty, contiguous landmass, the Urals formed the shore of an epicontinental sea dividing Europe from Asia. Flora and fauna migrated across the land when sea levels fell, except for one species that managed to more or less respect the borders of this long-forgotten biogeographical divide: a plucky little Siberian newt you seldom find west of the Urals. A fierce swimmer and evolutionary hero, the pencil-long Salamandrella keyserlingii can live for many years inside the permafrost, in temperatures hitting fifty degrees below. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn describes how in Stalin’s labour camps, higher thoughts of ichthyology would be cast aside for a mouthful of the prehistoric flesh. If famished convicts were ever to chance upon such a thing, he pictured the scene: the salamander would be frantically thawed on the bonfire and devoured ‘with relish’ by hungry convicts elbowing each other out of the way.
On a cold winter morning in March 2016, I landed in the city of Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East, an eight-hour flight from Moscow and about a day’s drive from the Pacific, where the coast is so choked with ice you can walk out on to a frozen ocean. It felt about as far from home as I could get while remaining on this planet. With the idea of Siberia’s lost pianos nagging at my conscience, I had made a couple of cursory attempts to see if my quest had legs, but the real purpose of my trip wasn’t to find an instrument for the Mongolian pianist I had befriended. I had come to track something far rarer – to write about the Siberian, or Amur, tiger. If there were a decent story to tell, I would sell it to a British newspaper. In winter, when the forest is covered in snow, it is easier to see a tiger’s footprints.
Panthera tigris altaica, an icon of the Russian wilderness under heavy federal protection, is on a fragile edge. There are only an estimated five hundred of these creatures surviving in the wild, their rarity almost on a par with the few snow leopards left in Siberia’s Altai Mountains close to Mongolia, and the Amur leopard, which is down to eighty or so animals where Russia borders China and North Korea. For centuries, the Chinese came foraging for ginseng roots in these eastern forests, and to poach tigers for traditional medicine. Then in the late nineteenth century, big-game hunters shot them for trophy pelts until tiger hunting was banned in Russia in 1947. These days, professional conservationists are lucky to encounter a wild tiger more than once or twice in a lifetime. Before the Korean tiger researcher and filmmaker Sooyong Park started his work in 1995, less than an hour’s footage had ever been recorded of Siberian tigers in the wild.
I arrived in Khabarovsk expecting everything to be dead and infirm, unbearably cruel and devoid of enchantment. Siberia had functioned for more than three centuries as a prison. It had been shredded by revolution, civil war, Stalin’s reign of terror and the impact of the Great Patriotic War. I turned eighteen in 1991, the year the USSR collapsed. Twenty-five years later and numerous post-Soviet images were seared into my mind: a factory here, an abandoned tank there, and a sickly forest eaten away by industrial pollution.
Not that I was unique in my preconceptions. In 1770, Catherine the Great complained to the French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire: ‘When this nation becomes better known in Europe, people
