Photo: Left: The mysterious ‘Sidney’, by Richard Kilbey. Courtesy of Norfolk and Waveney Area Meeting. Centre: Concert poster © The Moscow State Archive of Literature and Art. Right: Alexander Gavrilovich Sitnikov. Courtesy of the Sitnikovs’ private archive.
What’s in a name? Sergei Nikitin uncovers a nourishing story
‘The mystery was solved!’
In 2010, at the Samara Diocese headquarters, Viktor Moiseyevich Poletkin, the Russian Orthodox archbishop of Samara and Syzran, opened an exhibition of watercolours and drawings by the British Quaker Richard Kilby. ‘Our brothers in faith, Quakers’, said the Russian clergyman at the opening, ‘saved hundreds of thousands of Russians from starving to death.’
During the Russian famine of 1921–1923, Richard Kilby, aged twenty-four, worked with the English unit of the Friends’ War Victims Relief Committee in Buzuluk. An amateur artist, he filled his album with watercolours of Buzuluk landscapes and pencil portraits of those who worked alongside him. Some of the portraits had explanatory inscriptions, including the names of those depicted.
One such pencil sketch portrayed a balding man in glasses, wearing a suit and tie. The inscription on the back read: ‘Sidney Koff, a well-known violinist who worked in one of Buzuluk’s warehouses.’ I worked in Quaker and Russian archives and never came across a Quaker worker by that name. Who was this mysterious violinist?
The answer came from Andrey Mitin, a Russian enthusiast, who, together with his wife Nadezhda Fedotova, had been researching the history of the Buzuluk region for many years. He kindly shared with me a correspondence between a Buzuluk musician and a Moscow composer, Boris Sergeyevich Shenshin. Several letters from 1922 and 1923 were signed: ‘A.G. Sitnikov.’
The mystery was solved! Kilby had phonetically transcribed the surname Sitnikov as it sounded to him. Sitnikov and Sidney Koff were the same person!
These letters, which lay in the Moscow State Archive of Literature and Art for over a hundred years, revealed yet another page in Buzuluk’s history. This is a story of the spiritual and cultural revival of the local community, aided by the Quakers. As Sitnikov wrote then: ‘The Society of Friends (Quakers) in Buzuluk provides the population with not only material but also spiritual nourishment.’
Alexander Gavrilovich Sitnikov, a native of Buzuluk, was a musician and educator. In 1912, he graduated from the Kazan Music School. During the famine years, he found himself in Buzuluk. In 1922, at age thirty-eight, he worked as a loader in a Friends’ War Victims Relief Committee warehouse, where he hauled heavy sacks of rice and beans, unloading food supplies from railway cars into the Quaker warehouse.
It was there that he met the Quakers, who gave him the opportunity to return to music. The warehouse manager was another Englishman, John Hubert Brocklesby, known in Buzuluk as Ivan Ivanovich. John was not a Quaker, but he was a conscientious objector and refused to take up arms when world war one began. After serving a term in prison, he joined the Society of Friends, which was providing humanitarian aid to civilians in war-torn Europe. John arrived in Buzuluk with his younger brother, Harold, and they served in the Quaker unit there. Both played musical instruments, which delighted Sitnikov, the warehouse worker-violinist.
There were other Quakers at the warehouse who were amateur musicians, and Sitnikov, an enthusiastic music educator, successfully interested them in a new endeavour. He decided to organise a series of musical evenings as part of an educational initiative. These started with private music gatherings at the Quaker headquarters in Buzuluk, and they soon grew into public events, initially for students.
At the first public concert, Sitnikov delivered a short lecture on the origins and development of music. He included extensive quotations from Aristotle, Goethe, Beethoven, Luther, Tolstoy, and others. The event was well received, but not by everyone. The local newspaper attacked Sitnikov for a ‘non-Marxist explanation of music development’, calling him a ‘reactionary, an ignoramus, and a corrupter of youth’. This criticism led to an official order halting the concerts.
‘This is a story of the spiritual and cultural revival of the local community.’
But Sitnikov and his supporters did not give up. They decided to hold concerts for the wider public, now ticketed, with minimal prices to cover expenses for posters, tickets, and lighting. Fortunately, the Buzuluk authorities provided a hall with good acoustics and a Blüthner grand piano. Proceeds from these concerts were donated to Buzuluk’s orphanages.
To avoid further accusations of deviating from Marxist ideology, Sitnikov adjusted his lectures. He limited his explanations to ‘brief biographical information about composers, descriptions of their works, and explanations of the performed pieces – both in terms of technical structure and, where possible, content – to help the audience better appreciate the music, much of which was being heard in Buzuluk for the first time’.
Three Quakers participated in the performances: John and Harold Brocklesby, and Ernest Kilby, the younger brother of artist Richard Kilby. Being the sole food provider in the city, the Quakers held a respected position in Buzuluk, even among local communist authorities.
A new challenge soon arose. The head of the local Department of Public Education told Sitnikov that he considered the musical evenings ‘an unnecessary luxury’. The official began actively obstructing the concerts – he even forbade the local library from lending sheet music to Sitnikov.
To obtain sheet music, therefore, Sitnikov had to seek help from the executive committee through the Friends’ War Victims Relief Committee. But the educational department persisted, eventually banning the concerts altogether, claiming that ‘only teachers attend them. Where are the working class people?!’
Help came from the Buzuluk Workers’ Club, but the club’s venue looked like a shed and the piano was ‘barely better than a balalaika’. It was freezing cold, too.
Despite these challenges, things worked out. The piano was repaired, and the concerts resumed. The program expanded to include Wagner, Liszt and Brahms, as well as French, Scandinavian, and contemporary Russian composers. The club director became so enthusiastic that he requested concerts ‘at least once a week!’ So from October 1922 to March 1923, Sitnikov and his colleagues held twelve instrumental music evenings in Buzuluk, each attended by 150 to 320 listeners.
As a local historian said later: ‘These years were exceptionally musically rich for Buzuluk. Neither before nor after did the city have such a highly qualified musical ensemble, such an abundance of fine good music.’ Thus, along with the famine relief of rice, beans and chocolate, Sitnikov and the Quaker relief workers fed Russians with spiritual nourishment. It was a combination that might be worth remembering.
