by David Greene
“Na pososhok?” Sergei asked as he passed me a plastic cup filled with two fingers of vodka.
I smiled: “One for the road.”
The two of us did love traveling together. I knew Sergei’s idiosyncrasies, he knew mine. I knew he got stressed about money, wanting to make sure we had cash out to pay a cab driver when he asked, to avoid any delay or perceived impoliteness. He knew I got frustrated when we were trying to set up an interview and a person posed an endless stream of bureaucratic questions about our intentions, stealing valuable time from actual journalism. We knew how to calm each other down—but rarely was it necessary. We were always just itching for our next trip.
For Sergei, train travel is especially meaningful because it’s where he met his wife. During his third year of college in Moscow, Sergei was invited by his sister on a short vacation to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) with a group of employees from her factory, including several young single women. How could Sergei say no? Just before the trip, Sergei’s sister bowed out—likely strategically, to lessen the distraction, because she wanted Sergei to get to know her friend Maria.
Sergei didn’t like Maria much. The two other women in the cabin were Olga and Tania, his future wife. “And Olga liked me more than Tania,” Sergei once told me.
“Wait! Your sister stuck you on vacation in a train cabin with three girls who all had a thing for you?”
“You could say that,” Sergei said. “Nice ride!”
Sergei and Tania soon married and now have a twenty-four-year-old son named Anton, who’s doing a medical residency in Moscow. As with so many families in Russia, the winds of change dictated their planning. Anton was born in the waning days of the Soviet Union, and with so much uncertainty ahead, Sergei and Tania decided to stop with one child at that point. Many of their friends decided a decade later—when Putin first became president and there were hints of prosperity—to have a second child. But Sergei and Tania decided it felt too late.
Now Sergei and I are beginning our latest journey together, aboard the Trans-Siberian. And for the next month or so he and I will be one another’s family.
IT IS NEARING midnight in Moscow, and Sergei and I have escaped the ticket office and are sitting in the waiting hall on the second floor at Yaroslavsky station. At a plastic bench nearby, a police officer has paused, menacingly. He reaches down and jostles a young man from his slumber, angrily demanding to see some documents.
“Passport, passport,” he says, using a word that’s equivalent in Russian and English.
The sleeping man, dressed in black pants, holding the leather jacket that was his pillow, wearily reaches into the jacket pocket to find his passport and dutifully presents it. With black hair and a darker complexion, the man appears to be from the Caucasus—which means he is sadly accustomed to visits like this. After a string of terrorist attacks in recent years, Russia’s uniformly unpleasant police spend much of their time interrogating people, mostly men, who have darker skin, suspecting they come from the North Caucasus region, a hotbed of Islamist radicalism. In the United States this kind of profiling is illegal, or in the rarest cases allowed but hugely controversial. In Russia, it carries on unencumbered by laws or debate.
A crackly march begins to blare from the station’s old speakers. This moment of ceremony seems lost on the majority of people in the vast station—many of whom are asleep on benches. But this is an important ritual: the most famous Trans-Siberian train, the No. 2 Rossiya, is boarding to begin its six-day journey to Vladivostok. Russian train stations play music to mark the departure and arrival of the most famous trains. The Red Arrow, the best-known overnight train between Moscow and St. Petersburg, pulls out of St. Petersburg to the tune of “The Hymn to the Great City.” That train is also known for its departure time. It leaves both cities moments before midnight. That allowed businessmen during Soviet times to claim an extra full day of work during a business trip—which they would not have been able to do if their tickets showed a departure at 12:01 a.m.
Our own train is leaving in about an hour. That means one thing: chai (Russian for tea). Having lived in this country for a few years, I can honestly say that the United States missed a golden opportunity to win the Cold War. Forget nuclear negotiations. Depriving this place of its tea would have brought an immediate cry for mercy from the Kremlin. Russians love tea and can’t live without it. Hell, within months of moving to the country, I loved tea and couldn’t live without it. I don’t know if it’s the cold chaos of the place that makes you crave a warm soothing drink, or if it’s an old-fashioned follow-the-crowd syndrome that stuck, but the manic scene at the ticket office has left me in need of . . . tea.
“Chai?” I say.
“Chai,” Sergei says, clearly already thinking the same thing.
We find the best Yaroslavsky Voksal has to offer at this hour—a woman at a kiosk with Lipton tea bags, small brown plastic cups, a rusty electric tea kettle and a bowl full of sugar cubes.
Sergei and I inspect the spread and have the same reaction: “Perfect.”
3 • BORIS
THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY is intertwined in Russian history. After years of struggle, mismanagement, and vicious battles with the land and elements, the railroad—at first, from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok—was completed in 1916 and quickly became a symbol of Russian ingenuity. Russians marveled at how they were able to build a six-thousand-mile-long railroad that held the vast country together and opened up the Asian frontier. The railroad crossed forbidden landscapes and required complicated bridges—one of which shared a prize with the Eiffel Tower for world-class design. Today, “Trans-Siberian” is a catchword for a number of routes. If you travel from St. Petersburg or Moscow to Vladivostok, or from Moscow to Beijing, you are definitely on a “Trans-Siberian” journey. But long trips between cities that are far apart, and that take you a good distance from west to east or east to west, can also safely be called “Trans-Siberian.”
There is a haunting past. The rails were constructed largely by migrant workers and prison laborers, many of whom, in the words of American Paul E. Richardson, who writes about Russian culture, died “from exposure and from infectious disease, from typhoid to the bubonic plague.” The railroad, once built, was also convenient for Joseph Stalin, who used it to transport exiles to Siberia. By the hundreds of thousands, the Kremlin could send government critics, lawyers, doctors, religious leaders—really anyone it chose—to the dreaded gulags in some of the harshest conditions on earth. Stanley Kowalski was a gulag survivor. His daughter described the tortures of the train her father experienced in her 2009 book, No Place to Call Home. The Polish army officer was captured by the Soviets in 1939, and transported by train between prisons several times—one journey took him across nearly all of Russia on the Trans-Siberian, in a red boxcar with little light:
The train . . . made unscheduled stops in deserted stations or empty fields where, if lucky, [prisoners] might be allotted their daily ration of food: a piece of bread and fish. Water, on the other hand, was becoming a rare commodity. At some stations, the inmates would pound upon the barred doors, demanding something to quench their thirst, but often their pleading was to no avail. Amidst these surroundings, the weak had little chance of survival.
Especially striking was how in the midst of all this cruelty, Kowalski remembered peeking out cracks in the wooden walls of the boxcar to marvel at Russia’s landscape. Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia, he recalled, “could take one’s breath away. At first glance, all one noticed was the unadulterated beauty of the blue-green water reflecting the majesty of the mountain peaks beyond. The scent of pines completed the exhilarating experience.”
Even as Stalin used the Trans-Siberian as a veritable death train, he was hard at work punishing other people by making them construct new railroads. In 2012 Lucy Ash, a reporter for Britain’s Guardian newspaper, unearthed remnants of Stalin’s “deadly railway to nowhere,” a thousand-mile Arctic route connecting western and eastern Siberia. “
The labor force was almost entirely made up of ‘enemies of the people’—prisoners convicted of ‘political’ offenses.” Gulags were created every six to eight miles solely to house construction crews. “Prisoners built their own wooden barracks but the unlucky ones in the front units had to take shelter in canvas tents.” Ash estimated three hundred thousand people were “enslaved” to build the project and nearly a third of them died doing it. Many of the slave laborers thought that by building a railroad they were contributing to something important, thus experiencing that elevated sense of purpose Shishkin wrote about. Therefore the cruelest part? The project was abandoned. The Russian woman showing the Guardian reporter around the remnants of the rail line put it this way:
Of course it was wrong to build the railway with slave labor. But once they’d started it and there were so many victims, I think abandoning the project was also criminal. I lead excursions and tell people about what happened. One man, a former prisoner, made a special trip up here and he just started crying when he saw the rusty engines and old tracks. Many of the prisoners believed they were fulfilling a useful and necessary deed, and all of it was just destroyed. It’s heartbreaking.
Amazingly, the Trans-Siberian route that saw so much hardship and death is now traversed by some of the world’s best-off people. One of the trains that speeds along the track is the Golden Eagle, a luxury liner offering the best caviar and cabins outfitted with flat-screen TVs and heated floors. A one-way ticket from Moscow to the eastern port of Vladivostok costs close to twenty thousand dollars. And there are Russians who can afford that. This is a country with some of the wealthiest people in the world, the so-called oligarchs. They are often shrewd, politically connected individuals who swooped in and grabbed ownership of state enterprises as Soviet times ended. When those state-run businesses—mining, oil, and natural gas companies among them—privatized seemingly overnight, the people in charge became instant tycoons. And yet, fortunes under this new regime can be taken away as quickly as they are made. Just ask Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who once owned a giant energy company, Yukos, and was the richest man in Russia. After he began funding and supporting political parties in opposition to Vladimir Putin, Khodorkovsky was arrested in 2003 on charges of tax evasion and sent to a Siberian prison camp. I interviewed Khodorkovsky, by way of letters from prison, in 2010, and he urged Westerners to see Russia “beyond the window dressing.” Russia is a country, he said, “where a political opponent can be sent to prison for many years and have his property taken from him. You have to see Russia as a country where society views all this with indifference, where the elite keep silent.” Khodorkovsky speaks to Russia’s modern-day identity crisis. The “window dressing”—a nation with elections and foreign investment that’s eager to welcome tourists—hides a nation with all the repression of Soviet times, made even worse by corruption and a race for money.
IT’S COMPLICATED to consider the Trans-Siberian’s impact on Russia’s economy. In the early days critics saw building the railroad as wasteful. But closer to completion, others thought pouring money into the project was driving economic growth. What’s more, it made it easier for the Soviet government to transport people and resources and industrialize Siberia. But that may now be part of Russia’s problem. In their 2003 book, The Siberian Curse, scholars Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy describe how many remote cities are all but cut off: “They have no railways or major highways linking them to the rest of the country, while airline tickets remain prohibitively expensive.” Riding the Trans-Siberian, you meet passengers who need to reach isolated places—for work, or to see family or friends—and the Trans-Siberian is their only option. They may get off the train in a large city, then drive hundreds of miles to reach their destination. But the question Hill and Gaddy ask: Should so many people be living in these places? They argue that the Soviet government, by relocating people and industries to some of the coldest, harshest, and most remote places on the planet, made “monumental errors” that now explain many of Russia’s economic struggles. In a way, traveling the railway can feel as if you are riding down Russia’s spine, seeing the link that connects so many disparate places. Deeper considerations notwithstanding, today a Trans-Siberian train adventure is a dream destination for travelers all over the world, mentioned in the same breath as the Orient Express and the Queen Elizabeth II.
Sergei and I are headed for Vladivostok—but not on a famous Trans-Siberian train. We chose train No. 240 because it makes a stop in Yaroslavl, a hockey-obsessed city several hours east of Moscow. Midnight has passed, but our train doesn’t board for another forty minutes. Holding his plastic cup of tea, Sergei is a bit nervous. He purchased our tickets for this first leg from NPR’s travel agent, and for the first time, she offered “electronic” tickets. We have no formal tickets—just a printed-out itinerary. Elsewhere in the world, this would be a welcome, modern convenience. Russia being Russia, the thought of a train attendant happily welcoming us onto a train without a fancy ticket with a pretty stamp—an official document she can review, contemplate, massage in her hands—seems inconceivable. The intense love of documents is a thoroughly annoying relic of Soviet bureaucracy. Russians themselves will complain about it and laugh at it, even as they keep on producing and signing more documents. In an essay called “Political History of Russian Bureaucracy and Roots of Its Power,” Maryanne Ozernoy and Tatiana Samsonova explain how ingrained bureaucracy is in Russian culture. For one thing, a massive bureaucracy provided jobs—a ton of them—and gave people a sense of “stability and predictability,” the feeling they had found “their positions in the political system.” As much as various Soviet leaders abused the bureaucracy, the institution was also respected, in its most ideal incarnation, as a check on autocratic power. The thinking was, if all these agencies are in place, and documents are signed and delivered to record everything that’s done, how could a single leader at the top manipulate society? Belief in bureaucracy goes back centuries, Ozernoy and Samsonova say. And “national mentalities and psychological stereotypes” have become as “fully integrated” in Russian culture as the bureaucratic institutions themselves. But this can play out in truly absurd ways. A friend and fellow American journalist who was based in Moscow, Miriam Elder, once wrote an account of her experience at a Russian dry-cleaning business:
You put your six items of clothing on the counter. Oksana Alexandrovna lets out a sigh. This would be the point where you would normally get your receipt and go. But this is Russia. It’s time to get to work. A huge stack of forms emerges. Oksana Alexandrovna takes a cursory look at your clothes. Then the examination—and the detailed documentation—begins. This black H&M sweater is not a black H&M sweater. It is, in her detailed notes on a paper titled “Receipt-Contract Series KA for the Services of Dry and Wet Cleaning” a “black women’s sweater with quarter sleeves made by H&M in Cambodia.” Next, there are 20 boxes that could be ticked. Is the sweater soiled? Is it mildly soiled? Very soiled? Perhaps it is corroded? Yellowed? Marred by catches in the thread? All this, and more, is possible. The appropriate boxes are ticked. But that is not all—a further line leaves room for “Other Defects and Notes.” By now, you have spent less time wearing the sweater than Oksana Alexandrovna has spent examining it.
I wish Miriam were exaggerating. She’s not. And so without physical tickets, Sergei wants to leave extra time to navigate any potential inconvenience, which was impressive foresight. We walk outside, onto a train platform that’s a sea of chaos and smoke, as Russians are dragging roll-aboard suitcases with one hand and using the other to take desperate final puffs of cigarettes before boarding. We find car No. 8. The train conductor—or provodnik—for our car is standing outside, dressed neatly in her Russian Railways uniform, which includes white gloves and a fur shapka, or hat. Russians take their trains seriously, and those who operate them are always dressed impeccably. Provodniks stand almost at attention, waiting for passengers to arrive. Our provodnik is a woman in her thirties. Her hat and overcoat are emblazo
ned with three Cyrillic letters that—to an eye accustomed to Latin letters—most closely resemble PZD. In Russian, they are the acronym for “Rossiiskie Zheleznye Dorogi,” or Russian Railways, the massive government conglomerate that operates the rails. The woman is holding a flashlight, ready to inspect tickets. Tickets. Not itineraries. Sergei hands over our printout, reaching out gingerly, expecting rejection.
“Electronnye bilety, nyet.” (Electronic tickets. No.)
Sergei and I are immediately directed to a place where three other passengers are standing—after-school detention for people who dared purchase electronic tickets. The provodnik addresses our failing in greater detail.
“We can’t accept these types of tickets until we verify your names on the passenger list. Someone is bringing it over soon. It won’t be long. And anyway, the air is fresh.” With this, she inhales through her nose, quite dramatically, almost mocking our weakness if we are somehow intimidated by the cold. She smiles.
“Breath it in. Enjoy. Wait.”
The temperature has dipped to nineteen degrees Fahrenheit. And the air, whatever she thinks, is actually a blend of smoke from cigarettes and smoke from the train’s burning coal. After ten minutes, another provodnik brings our provodnik a list that seems to satisfy her and exonerate us, and we’re waved onto the train. Immediately we walk from the frigid outside into a train car doing double duty as a sauna.
Russian trains tend to be cramped, sweaty, and chaotic. Most, like ours tonight, have fading carpeting and matching fading curtains. We walk into our car and enter a long hallway, with a clock at each end displaying the date and time. The clocks are modern and digital. But the list showing the various cities we’ll pass through is on yellowed paper and looks like it was printed in Gorbachev’s time. Many of the engines pulling cars across the Trans-Siberian route are powered by electricity. But trains on long journeys are often heated by coal, and each time the train stops, conductors shovel fresh coal into a hole, an arrangement that causes temperatures to rise and fall unpredictably—usually they rise, leaving passengers sweating profusely. It’s an astonishing paradox that you can be traversing a forbidding landscape with howling winds, horizontal snow, and unimaginable cold and yet be inclined to force the window of your train compartment open for relief from the sweltering heat inside.