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 crown, gossiped contemporary chroniclers, was being passed around the family like a cup of tea nobody wanted to drink. Constantine, the elder of Alexander’s siblings, had already run off to Poland, where he had fallen in love with a Catholic pianist (after Constantine first heard the ten-year-old prodigy play, his wife often invited Chopin to their Polish residence, convinced his music calmed Constantine’s difficult nerves). Alexander’s youngest brother, Nicholas, was also slow to act and take up the vacant throne; he needed to be cautious lest any advances he made be considered a coup. For the Decembrist revolutionaries, this messy two-week interregnum therefore presented the perfect opportunity to advance their plans for revolt.
But while the Decembrists’ motives were impassioned, their regiments were not. When the men began to assemble in Senate Square, there was a smaller force of rebel soldiers than the Decembrists had hoped. In addition, one of the main leaders deserted. Despite these setbacks, the Decembrists refused to disperse, so Nicholas ordered a cavalry squad to break up the rabble. Only with the whine of cannon fire did the men eventually retreat to a frozen River Neva, where Nicholas’s soldiers blitzed the ice with artillery. By nightfall, the revolt was quashed. The perpetrators were rounded up. On the same day as the Decembrist Revolt, also referred to as the First Russian Revolution, Nicholas I declared himself Tsar.
Close to six hundred suspects were put on trial. Five men were hanged, including the poet and publisher Kondraty Ryleev, who was executed holding a book by Byron in his hand. When the rope snapped on the first attempt, one of the prisoners reportedly quipped: ‘What a wretched country! They don’t even know how to hang properly.’ Another of the condemned men remarked on the privilege of dying not once but twice for his country. Whether any of these remarks are true is beside the point: the myth of the Decembrists’ martyrdom took root when Tsar Nicholas I ordered the execution to continue, and the gallows were strung with new rope.
With the hangings complete, a core of more than a hundred men were identified as coup leaders and sent to Siberia for hard labour, some for life.* They were stripped of their wealth and privileges. As they were members of some of the grandest, most decorated families in Russia, this was the high-society scandal of the time. It was talked about all over Europe, with the vengeance in Nicholas’s response also changing Russians’ perception of banishment forever. Prior to 1825, very little compassion had existed for the men, women and children sent to Siberia. After 1825, political exiles were regarded with far greater sympathy. As for the eleven women who elected to follow their Decembrist husbands and lovers into exile, they were revered as living saints. Under the rules of banishment, the women had to leave their children behind in European Russia. Any offspring conceived in exile would be forbidden from inheriting their family’s titles or estates.
The five Decembrists hanging from the gallows, sketched in Pushkin’s notepad. Pushkin was closely linked to the revolt, having gone to school with some leading Decembrists. His 1817 poem ‘Ode to Liberty’ was also cited by some conspirators as an influence. As a result, Pushkin was brought before the Tsar and restrictions placed on his freedom of movement and expression.
One of the most high-profile Decembrists banished for life was Prince Sergei Volkonsky – a childhood playmate of the Tsar’s, whose mother was a principal lady-in-waiting to the Dowager Empress. Sergei’s wife, Maria, came from an equally elite family. Her father, General Raevsky, was one of the heroes of Napoleon’s defeat in 1812. With her knowledge of literature, music and foreign languages, Maria was a descendant of Catherine’s ‘Enlightened’ Russia. She was also a well-known beauty, her abundant black curls and olive skin earning her the nickname la fille du Ganges.*
Maria decided to abandon her enchanted circle – as well as her infant son, who would die aged two – and follow her husband into exile. It became one of the most talked about tragedies of a feverishly romantic century. ‘All her life was this one unconscious weaving of invisible roses in the lives of those with whom she came in contact’ is how Tolstoy described the heroine, modelled on Maria, in his unfinished mid-nineteenth-century novel The Decembrists. Maria’s actions inspired paintings, music and Pushkin’s poetry, as well as a love of the piano on the other side of the Urals, when she took a clavichord some four thousand miles from Moscow to join her husband deep in the Siberian taiga.
The instrument, kept close at hand throughout Maria’s exile, was a gift from her