Semyon Kaspé was young, handsome, dapper, talented, and full of joie de vivre. In the summer of 1933, the world was at his feet. A promising career as a concert pianist lay ahead of him. A recent graduate of the Paris Conservatory, he had pleased the French music critics, who had praised the vigor in his fingers and wrists and the “frankness of pace and brashness in movement” of his technique. In the few months since he had returned to Asia, he had performed to great acclaim in the bustling cities of Shanghai and Tokyo and delighted audiences in his hometown of Harbin, a city with a robust music scene, with his interpretations of Mussorgsky and Chopin. And on the horizon, a rare opportunity beckoned: a concert tour of the United States.

Semyon had grown up in privilege in Harbin, a major city in northeastern China, a region known to foreigners as Manchuria. His Russian-born father, Josef, like many veterans of the Russo-Japanese War, had settled there in the first years of the century. A pillar of the local Jewish community, Josef Kaspé had built several businesses there. The crown jewel of his holdings was the fashionable Hotel Moderne at 113 Kitaiskaya Street in the city’s waterfront Pristan district. It included an opulent jewelry store that dealt in Fabergé eggs and other Russian valuables. He and his wife, Marie, had given Semyon and his brother, Vladimir, the best primary and secondary education the city had to offer. In 1926 their mother had packed the two boys up and taken them to Paris to complete their studies.

Since his return in mid-1933, Semyon, twenty-four, an eligible bachelor, had been the toast of the town. Although the bulk of Harbin’s population was Chinese and Semyon had studied their language, he spent little time among them. His life was lived within the expatriate community, replete with its concerts, recitals, dinners, parties, and romance. And he had taken up with a young woman whose background was similar to his own.

He had probably known Lydia Chernetskaya in childhood, as she was, like him, the child of a local Jewish businessman and a talented musician. Four years older than he, she had also lived in Europe. But unlike him, Lydia, now Lydia Shapiro, was married, and she was already the mother of four. However, she had recently left her husband, which had occasioned her return to her father’s home in Harbin.

But the Harbin of 1933 was not the city they had known in their youth. Much had changed since Lydia’s departure in 1921 and Semyon’s five years later. Whether Manchuria was even a part of China anymore was now very much in doubt. On a pretext, the Japanese Army had seized control in 1931 and, after taking Harbin the following year, proclaimed the establishment of the independent republic of Manchukuo. Japanese troops occupied the country and Japanese officials controlled the levers of government. Corruption was rampant and so was crime.

Among Harbin’s sizable Russian population were tens of thousands of White Russians, sworn opponents of the Bolsheviks, the lion’s share of whom had fled Russia for their lives after the October Revolution. Some among them had established the Russian Fascist Party. Well organized though underfunded, it was deeply antisemitic, its members blaming Jews for fomenting the revolution that had led to their enforced exile from Mother Russia and their impoverishment. They had become especially belligerent under the new Japanese administration, were strongly suspected of torching Harbin’s main synagogue, and were almost certainly behind several recent kidnappings of local Jews. The Jewish community had begun to feel especially vulnerable.

Semyon was surely aware of the danger; his father certainly was. The elder Kaspé knew he was a target. He had been excoriated in a right-wing Russian-language newspaper for supposedly dealing in “ill-gotten” goods; it was even alleged, preposterously, that these included the Romanov family jewels. The paper had also improbably branded this successful businessman a Communist, an accusation for which it provided no evidence. He now seldom left the Moderne, where he and his son were living, and when he did venture out, it was with a posse of bodyguards in tow.

Semyon didn’t share his father’s sense of vulnerability. He often went out to friends’ nighttime parties and regularly drank at the American Bar on Konnaya Street, often in the company of Lydia. But although he wasn’t willing to forgo social life, he did accept his father’s offer of a car
with an armed chauffeur.

Not that it did him much good.