Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia (10 page)

The rigidity of the typical restaurant experience can be mind-boggling. Once, Rose, Sergei, and I were out for lunch and Rose wanted some butter for her bread. Sergei kindly asked the server if they had butter. The answer: yes. So, Sergei asked, could she bring Rose a pat or two of butter?

“Nyet.”

Butter, the server explained, is for cooking. There is no established price on the menu for butter “to serve.” So Rose was out of luck.

As astonished as I was by the server’s response, Sergei translated it to us without cracking a smile or noticing anything odd—at the end of the day this was just part of his culture.

Some Russians crave a more relaxed experience—which explains why McDonald’s has become a stunningly popular dining option for Russians of all ages and socioeconomic classes. My Russian tutor, an educated language professor at Moscow State University, told me how she and her family would take monthly trips into the center of Moscow to attend the ballet or opera—and one of her favorite parts of the experience was stopping at McCafe, the coffee shop attached to McDonald’s. It’s the best coffee she’s ever tasted, and she very much looks forward to her monthly taste. I was at first flabbergasted—an educated college professor sounding as excited about McDonald’s coffee as she was about the ballet? But her exuberance makes sense. It’s not a tidy narrative of Russians taking a liking to Western culture, as American media have reported. It’s about desperately wanting a quick, casual bite and some coffee instead of an hours-long sit-down meal that, in the case of my tutor, would make her late for the ballet. The first McDonald’s in the Soviet Union opened in central Moscow in 1990. The grand opening came after American teams were sent in to train newly hired Russian cashiers to smile when taking orders (sadly, not kidding). And here’s a statistic: That McDonald’s, off Pushkin Square, remains today the busiest in the world.

I am not late for any ballet, but I am damn hungry, and I could not be happier as I walk up to the counter and order eggs, pancakes, and coffee. Sitting here, in a booth at the McDonald’s in Yaroslavl, I won’t argue that I’m learning anything deep about local culture. The place is empty. The booths, tables, and menu above the registers look like those in any McDonald’s from Boston to Bakersfield. The eggs taste like eggs. And I’m the only customer—no real chance for sociological research. But I don’t regret this. Not for a second.

I trek back across the street to the train station, and find Sergei fighting off a nap. He and I decide to take turns snoozing, the person awake being responsible for keeping watch of our belongings. Finally, 7:00 a.m. comes and we board a local train to Rybinsk, arriving just as the sun is coming up. We take a five-minute taxi ride to the Hotel Rybinsk, a pink cement-block structure that hasn’t seen a fresh coat of paint in the post-Soviet era. In Russia there are hotels—especially Western chains like Radisson and Marriott—that are beginning to shed the old Soviet “charm.” The Hotel Rybinsk is only shedding old paint.

Sergei and I walk into the building. The floor is bland, gray concrete. To the right there is a tiny elevator, and in front of that, a desk, where a man in uniform is seated, watching an old television with a rabbit-ear antenna. He pays no attention to us. Sergei and I turn to the left and enter a slightly more welcoming space, a room with threadbare red carpeting, a plant perched on an old coffee table, and a woman seated at a desk where a small sign says
Registratsiya
, or “Registration.” Just in case Sergei and I have some other purpose for being here, the woman looks at us sternly and says, “Registratsiya?”

“Da,” Sergei and I say in unison.

“Dokumenty, pasporta,” she says.

Sergei hands over his passport, and she glances at it quickly and hands it back. My U.S. passport is a different story, requiring a far more serious level of registratsiya. She takes my passport, walks briskly to a photocopy machine, copies far more pages than she should really have to (is she interested in my Belarus visa and Estonian entry stamps?), returns to the desk, searches page after page for my current Russian visa, shakes her head when I offer to help her find it, looks for it for a while longer, finds it, runs back to the photocopier to copy that page, returns, asks for my immigration card, grunts when I politely point out that it’s inside the passport, back to photocopier, back to desk. Now she asks me to fill out a card with my passport information—details already in her possession, but I’m not about to remind her of that. “Tysyacha shestsot rublei,” she announces. That’s our bill—sixteen hundred rubles, or fifty-four dollars—for two rooms for one night. And we are not getting any keys until we pay. I pay in cash. Then we still don’t get keys but documents—little cards that evidently give us eventual access to keys. This is where the guard at the elevator comes in. We walk back into the lobby and hand these small cards to the guard, who is not all that happy about being distracted from his movie but nevertheless puts the cards in two wooden slots behind him, and removes from those slots two keys. “Lift,” he says, motioning to the elevator and returning as quickly as he can to the TV. Sergei and I arrive on the third floor and agree to meet in an hour, after freshening up. My room is roughly eight feet by eight feet, with a narrow bed, single window, and scarred wooden floor partially covered by a fraying Afghan rug. The tiny bathroom is minimalist—a long faucet protrudes out over a yellowing tub, and the faucet is dual-use, able to swing to the left on demand and serve as the water supply for the tiny sink. I make use of the amenities to shower and change, and meet Sergei to begin our day—or resume one that began hours ago in Moscow. We have a late-morning appointment with the parents of Nikita Klyukin, who fulfilled his dream of playing professional hockey as a member of Yaroslavl Lokomotiv. He died in the team’s plane crash, at age twenty-one. Nikita was born and raised in Rybinsk, and his parents still live there.

T
HIS ENTIRE REGION
of Russia—the city of Yaroslavl, outer cities like Rybinsk—is still mourning the loss of the hockey team but trying to move on. During our three-day stop in this area, Sergei and I wanted to attend a Lokomotiv game. The team obviously has all new faces but is competitive again. The Kontinental Hockey League—Russia’s equivalent of the NHL—helped by asking other teams in the league to send a great player or two from their rosters to play in Yaroslavl, which the teams were happy to do. Some local fans did not support that, wishing instead that Yaroslavl would take just a break from competition for a few years, develop new talent, honor the dead, and ponder the future more slowly. But, like after the airport bombing, there was a rush to just cover up the tragedy and get back to it.

The evening hockey game, we were told, was sold out, and we had no idea how we would get tickets. We figured we would grab a taxi to the arena and keep our fingers crossed. As soon as we got into the cab, we knew we had found a man who could help. Our driver, a chatty Russian in his late forties with trimmed brown hair, had a little doll hanging from his rearview mirror. It was a hockey player in a Lokomotiv uniform, No. 79, with “Orlov” written across the back. Sergei was in the front seat, listening as the driver explained that Dima Orlov was his son, who plays for the Lokomotiv youth team, the cauldron of talent expected one day to play with the big guys. The next twenty minutes were a rush. Our driver was excited to have an American journalist on board, and he frantically called his son, Dima, who was already at the arena. He unloaded a mouthful of Russian into his cell phone, and the only words I could pick up were “
Amerikanets
. . .
journaleest
. . .
nuzhno
. . .
bilety?
. . .
davaite!
” which translates roughly into “Got some American journalists here and they want tickets to the game—let’s help them!” And help this generous man did. We pulled up to the arena, and his son, Dima, ran up to the car to greet us. The tall, well-built teenager was soft-spoken, but there was little time to say anything anyway. We were in a rush to get inside. Dima told Sergei that we had no physical tickets—nothing but ominous, I had learned—but that if anyone asked, we should just say, “We are with Yuri Vladimirovich.” I never did find out who Yuri was. But boy, was his name well-known at the arena! Sergei and I rushed behind Dima, passing throngs of people waiting to go through security. At the metal detectors Sergei yelled out “Yuri Vladimirovich!” and we were waved through like dignitaries. Turnstyles where people were collecting tickets? We strolled right on through, as Sergei kept saying, to anyone willing to listen, “Yuri Vladimirovich.” Here, I thought, was a window into the shadier side of Russian life—know the right people and the sky is the limit. Ethical quandary—yes—but I comforted myself because Dima seemed to be doing something so very generous for us.

In many ways the arena was familiar to me. I love professional hockey. My team is the Pittsburgh Penguins, and I go to as many games as I can. There was a concession stand, where I bought a beer. Same as at home. What was different were some of the food offerings. To go with beer? The best-selling option was bags of dried, salted fish strips that resembled worms but tasted far better. I washed some down with beer; then Dima, Sergei, and I settled into seats, never having shown a physical ticket to anyone (victory!). We were behind one of the goals. The ice, nets, general vibe—same as at home. A difference, however: cheerleaders. The Pittsburgh Penguins have no cheerleaders. Here, in the aisle next to me, cheerleaders, one on each step, in orange tops and silver miniskirts. The young Russian women did not look older than teenagers, twenty-one at most. And this was just the beginning. Across the arena, on a huge platform situated above fans below, were more young women, dancers dressed in tight-fitting outfits with black and white stripes. The theme of their attire seemed, at least vaguely, to be related to the railroad. As unfair a comparison as it may be, I could not help but think of the book and movie
The Hunger Games
, where each region of an oppressed, postapocalyptic country represents a different industry, and where the young “tributes” are dressed in costumes representing the industry of their homeland. In Soviet times Russian sports teams were sponsored by different industries—and Yaroslavl’s team, Lokomotiv, was and still is sponsored by the Russian Railway. As dance music blared, the girls danced in front of a sign that read, translated, “Russian Rails: main sponsor for Lokomotiv.” All over the arena was the familiar acronym “pzd.” On the scoreboard, ad after ad: “Russian Railways: We’re making our future.”

But then the past took center stage. Players from both teams—Yaroslavl Lokomotiv and the visiting Magnitigorsk Metallurg (this team, sponsored by Russia’s steel industry, makes a Pittsburgh Steelers fan like me proud)—began skating around the ice as the arena fell silent. This quiet “skate” took place at the beginning of every Lokomotiv home game, to honor the fallen team. Then a ballad began to play, and images of the dead players flashed across the Jumbotron with a message: “The team that will always be in our hearts.”

. . .

T
HE CIRCUMSTANCES
surrounding that 2011 plane crash remain murky. The season was just beginning, and Lokomotiv was ready to fly out of town for its first game of the season. Shortly after take-off in Yaroslavl, the plane went down, killing all but one aboard. Officially pilot error was blamed. But the timing was odd. There was an international economic summit taking place in the city, and Russian prime minister (now president) Vladimir Putin was in town. Many local residents refuse to believe that his presence was not somehow related. Was Putin actually the target of a terrorist plot that somehow went awry? Did Putin actually order the crash to bring the nation together after a tragedy, just as he was running to become president again? These seem like far-fetched conspiracy theories, but they do point to the deep suspicions many Russians have about their leadership—and in particular, Putin.

More than twenty thousand fans were silent during the emotional tribute. Then came the cue that it was okay to start cheering. A loud train whistle blasted in the arena, and the new Lokomotiv team took the ice, to the delight of their wild fans. The game was close and intense, as fans urged the hometown team on, yelling, “
Shaibu! Shaibu!
” which translates literally as “Puck! Puck!” but translates among hockey devotees as “Goal! Goal!”

Lokomotiv lost in the end, but that may have been because they had already clinched a spot in the upcoming playoffs and weren’t playing their hardest.

After the game Sergei and I caught up with Dima, who agreed to chat for a few minutes before going to meet his girlfriend—who, it turns out, was one of the cheerleaders dancing near our seats. Dima, Sergei, and I stood near one of the concession stands as fans streamed out of the arena behind us. He explained that the plane crash was especially hard for him, since he knew all the players. “I trained with them. I grew up and lived with them.” He dismissed all the theories about how the crash was anything but an accident. “Only God decided that something like that would happen.” Dima spoke quietly, thinking about every question I asked. Sergei somberly translated for me. I asked Dima about his plans for the future, and he revealed an inner conflict I found in many younger, more educated Russians with enough money to consider their options. “I live in this city, and I love this city,” he explained. “But I want to play in the NHL. It’s my dream. Because life is better in countries like the USA and Canada. My girlfriend, she is twenty-one. I am twenty-one. And we will be married in two months. The laws are better in those other countries. People are more helpful. Everything is more comfortable. Why can’t we have that here?”

For many young Russians like Dima, there is a desire to leave and see the world, but it comes with guilt and a nagging sense that a Russian should stay and endure rather than escape. This view of the world was summed up perfectly by a woman named Ella Stroganova, the curator of the Yaroslavl City Museum, whom I met on my first train trip across the country. I had asked her why Russians responded to harsh experiences with determined fortitude and a feeling of inevitability, rather than being spurred into action to find solutions and make things better. Looking for answers, or
doing
something, she explained, was simply un-Russian. It was an admission of vulnerability that Russians see elsewhere in the world. “Progress makes a person absolutely weak,” she told me. “He loses his strength because he no longer needs to think how to survive.” Some in Russia’s younger generation, like Dima, are escaping this thinking and dreaming of new things and different places. But as I would learn on this trip, not all young people feel as Dima does.