A year or so later Natalya hired eighty-five of the best musicians in Moscow.  After a season of rehearsals Mr. Koussevitzky took his band on tour aboard a steamer—­a little gift from his father-in-law.

They rode up and down the Volga.  Every evening the vessel—­a sort of musical showboat—­tied up at a different city, town or village and the orchestra gave a concert, often before peasants and small-town folk who had never heard symphony music before.  In seven years Mr. Koussevitzky and his men traveled some 3,000 miles.

Came the revolution.  Kerensky ordered Koussevitzy and his men:  “Keep up with your music.”  They did, but it wasn’t easy.  It was a terribly severe winter; the country was in the killing grip of cold and famine.

Koussevitzky and his players starved for weeks on end.  The boss conducted in mittens.  The men wore mittens, too, but they had holes in them, so they could finger the strings and keys of their instruments.

The Bolsheviks made Mr. Koussevitzky director of the state orchestras which, in those early Soviet days, were at low musical ebb.  He labored in that job for three years, from 1917 to 1920, but he was out of sympathy with the Lenin-Trotzky regime and asked permission to leave the country.  It was refused because officials said, “Russia needs your music.”

The fiery Koussevitzky told the Government that, unless he were allowed to travel abroad, he’d never play or conduct another note in Russia.  They let him go.

Mr. Koussevitzky says that the Bolsheviks robbed him of about a million in money, land and other property.  In illustration of the state of things that impelled him to leave his native land, he likes to tell this story: 

A minor Bolshevik official came in one day to check up on the affairs of the orchestra.  “Who are those people?” he asked, pointing to a group of players at the conductor’s left.  “Those,” said Koussevitzky, “are the first violins.”

“And those over there?” asked the inspector, indicating a group at the conductor’s right.  “The second violins,” was the reply.

“What!” yelled the official.  “Second violins in a Soviet state orchestra?  Clear them out!”

Mr. Koussevitzky went to Paris, where he conducted a series of orchestral concerts and performances of Moussorgsky’s “Boris Godounoff” and Tschaikowsky’s “Pique Dame” at the Opera.  Between 1921 and 1924 he also appeared in Barcelona, Rome and Berlin.  In Paris he established a music publishing house (still in existence), which issued the works of such modern Russian composers as Stravinsky, Scriabine, Medtner, Prokofieff and Rachmaninoff.

In 1924, the offer of a $50,000 salary and the opportunity of rebuilding the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which had sadly deteriorated since the days of Dr. Karl Muck, lured him to this country.

American customs, he now admits, at first appalled him.  He was amazed to find musicians smoking in intermissions at rehearsals and concert.  This he called “an insult to art.”  He forbade smoking.  The players raised an unholy rumpus, but Koussevitzky persisted.  The men haven’t taken a puff in Symphony Hall since that time.