The Defection of Mikhail Voskresensky

There was no place Mikhail Voskresensky loved more than the Moscow ​​Conservatory. He graduated from the school in 1958. For decades, he was the venerable chair of the piano department, specializing in the masters of 19th-century romanticism. His granddaughter served as his assistant, teaching alongside him. His young wife, a talented pianist from Vietnam, had studied there. In February, two days before Russian troops began flowing across the Ukrainian border, Voskresensky played a concert for hundreds in the Conservatory’s Grand Hall, an exquisite artifact of the imperial age, with soaring walls lined by portraits of the nation’s great composers.

Voskresensky wasn’t ethnically Ukrainian. But, in a story typical of the imposed multiculturalism of Soviet times, he was born in what is now Ukraine, in the city of Berdyansk, on the banks of the Azov Sea. More to the point, his mother was buried there. Whatever the propagandists proclaimed, he couldn’t think of Ukraine as enemy territory. Well before the discovery of mass graves in Bucha and Irpin, he considered the war not just a strategic blunder, but an expression of barbaric cruelty.

But he was an outlier. Even in the hallways of the relatively cosmopolitan conservatory,