On his last visit to Moscow in 2011, classical pianist was showered with gifts from people who remembered his genius

It was one of those endless summer nights that grace northern Russia when my mother grabbed two friends to occupy a square outside Leningrad's philharmonic. The year was 1965 and the world was awash in Beatlemania. My mother, Ella, and her friends loved them like most other 20-year-olds, but secretly, in hiding – the Soviet Union strictly forbade the hedonistic foreign musicians and their corrupting ways.

So when the authorities announced that Van Cliburn, the American pianist who has died at the age of 78, would be performing in Leningrad – openly! officially! – it was truly as if a rock star were coming to town.

"He was adored, he was a kumir," my mother said, using the Russian word for idol. "He was the one that we wanted to hear."

Seven years earlier, in 1958, Cliburn won first place in the Soviet Union's first ever International Tchaikovsky Competition. It was the height of the cold war. The Soviet Union had just launched Sputnik, the world's first satellite, sending the US into a spiral of inferiority and self-doubt. The competition was set to further boost the empire's glory. An American wasn't supposed to win.

Yet no one could deny the 23-year-old's genius, expressed through humongous hands whose fingers skipped across the keyboard with rapid ease, and eyes that would close in seeming awe at the power of the music he was playing.

"We knew he must be extraordinarily brilliant, because they wouldn't let foreigners win otherwise," my mother said. Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier at the time, is said to have personally blessed Cliburn's victory.

And so she waited overnight, on the square in front of Leningrad's philharmonic, for hours and hours until the ticket office opened.

Hundreds waited alongside her. "The square was filled. It was a snake of people."

She doesn't remember now, nearly 50 years later, what Cliburn played. She is just left with the feeling of seeing something extraordinary – the beautiful impression of the music and the sense that the vast world beyond the Soviet Union's tightly sealed borders could sometimes seep through.

Cliburn's star never faded in Russia, even as he disappeared from the world stage. Describing what would become his last visit to Russia in 2011, Ellen Barry of the New York Times wrote: "when Mr. Cliburn steps into a concert hall, the whole room seems to twitch and move toward him like a living organism". Women showered him with gifts; one couldn't stop crying.

And Cliburn loved them back – as an artist loves a true appreciator.

New York City threw him a ticker tape parade upon his return from winning the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow. He was held up as an ambassador of American greatness, a cultural diplomat. In Russia, he was – and remains – the lanky pianist genius who unexpectedly wowed a nation.

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