Tright here was no place Mikhail Voskresensky cherished greater than the Moscow Conservatory. He graduated from the college in 1958. For many years, he was the venerable chair of the piano division, specializing within the masters of Nineteenth-century romanticism. His granddaughter served as his assistant, educating alongside him. His younger spouse, a proficient pianist from Vietnam, had studied there. In February, two days earlier than Russian troops started flowing throughout the Ukrainian border, Voskresensky performed a live performance for lots of within the Conservatory’s Grand Hall, an beautiful artifact of the imperial age, with hovering partitions lined by portraits of the nation’s nice composers.
Voskresensky wasn’t ethnically Ukrainian. But, in a narrative typical of the imposed multiculturalism of Soviet occasions, he was born in what’s now Ukraine, within the metropolis of Berdyansk, on the banks of the Azov Sea. More to the purpose, his mom was buried there. Whatever the propagandists proclaimed, he couldn’t consider Ukraine as enemy territory. Well earlier than the invention of mass graves in Bucha and Irpin, he thought-about the struggle not only a strategic blunder, however an expression of barbaric cruelty.
But he was an outlier. Even within the hallways of the comparatively cosmopolitan conservatory, he overheard jingoistic speak. The invasion of Ukraine was generally described as a protection of Russian territory. “What part of Russian territory was attacked?” he would retort.
One day, a fellow pianist approached him, and the dialog turned to Ukraine. No profound distinction of opinion separated them. The pianist agreed that struggle was folly. But he added, “Since we started it, we have no choice but to win it.”
By the requirements of Russian political discourse, this was hardly provocative. Still, it triggered Voskresensky. As he left the dialog, he thought to himself: How can I dwell with clever individuals who assume like this? The thought of fleeing into exile had been stirring in his head for weeks. Now it was changing into extra like a conviction.
He couldn’t shake the sensation of his personal complicity. “I’m guilty if I live in this society,” he instructed me, many months later. “I had this feeling that was ethically hard to live with.” Although he was 87 years previous, he had a 4-year-old son, and he wished his youngest baby “to grow up free of this feeling.” His spouse, who shared his distaste for Moscow’s wartime oppressiveness, agreed.
To put it within the parlance of one other time: Voskresensky—a beloved determine who had received lots of his nation’s highest honors, together with the People’s Artist of Russia—was able to defect.
The final time Voskresensky engaged in a political act was in 1963. He was a charismatic prodigy, on the cusp of stardom. He had performed Dmitri Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto on the Prague Spring International Music Festival, its first efficiency outdoors the Soviet Union, and within the presence of the good composer himself, who overcame his concern of flying to attend. He had medaled on the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Texas.
The Soviet cultural equipment wished to indicate him off to the world. Arrangements have been made for a tour of the United States. But earlier than plans have been finalized, Voskresensky acquired a name from a KGB agent who requested him to hold letters to American contacts on the group’s behalf.
That night time, Voskresensky couldn’t sleep. He dreaded the project and grasped for a approach to keep away from it. The subsequent day he referred to as the agent and instructed him, “I’m a man of art. People of art are extremely emotional and easily agitated. I’m afraid if I accept your offer, I’ll inadvertently make a mistake that will reflect poorly on our state.” Immediately, the road went lifeless—and so did his worldwide profession. The authorities canceled his tour. It took 13 years for the state to forgive his reticence and allow him a tour of the West.
Being a classical pianist in Moscow within the Soviet period got here with cultural cachet, but additionally limitations. It wasn’t simply that Voskresensky couldn’t carry out overseas. He would embark on epic tasks—comparable to taking part in each Chopin piano piece in chronological order—however as a result of the Soviets didn’t have a vibrant recording trade, his best performances disappeared as quickly as they ended.
Voskresensky by no means acquired the worldwide status he deserved—and plenty of many years later, this reality might have difficult his try to defect. When he despatched emails to colleagues throughout the West asking for assist leaving, none provided help. Many of the West’s cultural establishments hesitated to host Russian performers, irrespective of their politics. He wished to take a stand in opposition to a horrible struggle, however he was given the chilly shoulder.
Voskresensky acquired only one heat response, in late May. It got here from Veda Kaplinsky, a professor at Juilliard, promising assist. Two days later, she organized a pretext for him to depart Russia: She requested colleagues on the Aspen Music Festival to ship him an invite to show grasp courses in July. It was his solely alternative to flee—however he couldn’t go with out the permission of assorted slow-moving bureaucracies. And so started a interval of painful uncertainty.
Defecting within the time of pandemic and struggle got here with peculiar challenges. The first was the COVID vaccine. Russia had distributed its personal vaccine, Sputnik V, which the State Department declared insufficient for the needs of coming into the United States. So Voskresensky began looking for jabs of Pfizer or Moderna.
Serendipitously, he acquired an invite to show and play at a music pageant in Ankara, Turkey, in June. He might journey there with out a visa, and he was positive that he and his spouse might discover pictures within the metropolis.
But that solely half-solved his downside, as a result of they wanted two pictures, separated by not less than three weeks. He instructed the conservatory that he would take a household trip in Turkey a month earlier than he attended the music pageant there, after which would return for the occasion. Voskresensky nervous that his plans sounded suspiciously inconceivable—and that authorities may take discover. But he would not uncover that till he reached passport management, when he tried to depart his motherland.
In the meantime, it was finest that he saved his intentions to himself. He instructed the conservatory that his journey to Turkey was going to be the beginning of a protracted sabbatical, and that he would return in a 12 months’s time. He took his “vacation” and acquired the shot, and waited. It pained him that he couldn’t reveal his plans to his granddaughter, the kid of his son from his first marriage. And he dreaded that his departure from Russia, when it will definitely grew to become public, may someway show catastrophic for his relations who remained.
As he plotted his escape, he might see that this complete journey would rapidly exhaust his financial savings, so he and his spouse organized to promote an condo that she owned in Moscow. Sanctions prevented them from transferring the proceeds of the sale to the West, so she deposited the money in Vietnam, the place it might theoretically stay accessible to him in exile.
Next, he wanted a visa—and he wanted it to materialize by the top of July. But on the onset of the struggle, the U.S. State Department had largely shut down its operations in Russia. To get a visa, he would wish to journey to a different nation. He discovered that there have been huge backlogs of visa purposes in every of Russia’s neighboring nations. The shortest wait was supposedly in Naples, Italy. That was helpful intelligence—but additionally one other impediment in his path. The visa in his passport permitting him to journey to Europe had simply expired.
He now wanted to use for a visa to the European Union in order that he might apply for a visa to the U.S. Everything about his escape felt precarious. But on the final enterprise day earlier than he left for Turkey, the Italian embassy instructed him that his visa was prepared.
As Alan Fletcher, the president of the Aspen Music Festival, tracked Voskresensky’s progress from afar, he distracted himself by watching The Third Man, as a result of he felt as if he had been transported right into a Cold War noir. Through a member of his board, Fletcher enlisted the assistance of Senator John Hickenlooper, who phoned prime officers on the State Department to impress on them the significance of serving to Voskresensky make his approach to the pageant.
Their efforts labored. Voskresensky spent per week educating in Ankara, then flew to Naples, the place he swam within the Mediterranean along with his son and stalked the American consulate till his paperwork arrived. Nearly two months after he’d left Moscow, Voskresensky, his spouse, and their son boarded a aircraft to Aspen, which he prayed would turn out to be his sanctuary.
Earlier this month, I met Voskresensky and his spouse for espresso at an condo within the Bronx, simply off West Kingsbridge Road. When I arrived, he bounded down the steps with an athleticism that appeared inconceivable for a near-nonagenarian.
I seen that he appreciated to tout his vigor. He talked about that he might nonetheless play Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, a famously technical piece that required vitality and precision. “I should be in the Guinness Book,” he joked. None of the greats, he famous, might play it at his age—the virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz hadn’t even lived that lengthy. (Horowitz, I remembered, was additionally from Ukraine; born in Kyiv, he died in New York City.)
Voskresensky provided me a seat at a small spherical desk flush in opposition to an open window, and his spouse introduced me with a plate piled excessive with cream-filled pastries that she had baked. As he waved his arm on the naked white partitions, he instructed me, “I found out that Aspen was not within my budget.”
Searching for a house in New York City, Voskresensky had visited seven totally different flats, however was rejected at every cease as a result of he lacked a Social Security quantity and didn’t have a dependable paycheck. The unit within the Bronx solely tumbled into his arms because of a good friend in Moscow, who knew somebody who knew somebody who owned a constructing and smiled kindly at his plight.
Voskresensky wished to be in New York due to its density of musical conservatories. Indeed, Juilliard had already provided its college students the prospect to take a grasp class with him. Forty-nine college students signed up in three hours. But his immigration paperwork hadn’t totally arrived—and his lawyer couldn’t get anybody on the cellphone within the workplace in Nebraska that was speculated to ship his promised work allow—which meant he didn’t have permission to show.
He laughed at this plot level in his picaresque escape from authoritarianism, which he referred to as “my Mark Twain story.”
Every week earlier, he had visited the Steinway manufacturing facility, the place he placed on an unscheduled recital. At the top of his tour, the president of Steinway made an look and provided to mortgage him one of many firm’s most interesting devices. But when the piano movers arrived with it within the Bronx, they found that the stairway within the constructing was too slim.
This was the one reality about his new American life that prompted him palpable ache. Back in his Moscow condo, he had three pianos. Here he had solely a Yamaha electrical keyboard, loaned to him by the mom of considered one of his former college students. “It feels like my arm has been cut off,” he instructed me.
As he started to recount the comforts of the life he cherished in Moscow, he paused, as if he wanted to remind himself of why he left. “If I meet a person who supports murder, I can’t talk to that person,” he stated. But then he appeared a little bit stunned by his personal fervor. He leaned towards me, his studying glasses jangling round his neck. “I never wanted to be a political person. I’m a man of the arts.”