Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia (11 page)

Sergei and I walked out of the arena, into a light snow. I looked back at the arena, where a huge portrait of the fallen players hung on the outside wall. I had not seen it going in, since we were in such a rush. Under the portraits were the words “Our team. Forever.” One of those portraits was of a young fallen star, Nikita Klyukin.

S
ERGEI AND I
leave our indulgent digs at the Hotel Rybinsk and find a taxi to go visit Nikita’s parents. Like many Russian cities Rybinsk is a factory town, built around its industrial fortress—an aging behemoth that for years has produced jet engines. The buildings lining the city’s boulevards are beige or gray, the snow is abundant but not fresh, so it’s turned gray, and all this paints a depressing backdrop interrupted every so often by flower kiosks bursting with color. Bland, dark, and cold as Russia can feel, no society has a deeper love of flowers, or
tsvety
. At the end of a workday, on the streets or on the subway, in any Russian city, you will find men and women carrying bouquets. For any occasion—birthdays, retirements, office parties—flowers are nothing short of a requirement. And so without even mentioning it to each other, Sergei and I know that visiting Nikita’s parents means bringing flowers. We ask our driver to stop by a kiosk near our destination.

“Maybe a half-dozen roses for Nikita’s mom?” I say to Sergei.

“No,” he says, almost sternly. “Even numbers of flowers are only for funerals, for mourning a death.”

After several years in Russia, this is the first I’ve heard of this particular tradition. (And it is no small realization, having brought Rose even numbers of roses on many occasions. Oops?)

“Sergei, they lost their son a little more than a year ago. Are they
still
in mourning?”

The two of us are perplexed. When does a parent close the door on such a tragedy? Never, of course. But when it is time to move on? More to the point, when does a person not want to be reminded of a tragedy anymore? I lost my own mother in 2006. Her sudden and unexpected death, from a blood clot, was easily the hardest day of my life. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about her. But within months I began the hard process of moving forward, unshackling myself from that awful day in the past. I want to believe Nikita’s parents are well on their way down that road.

“Odd. Let’s go odd. Five roses.” Sergei thinks about this for a moment, then nods his head approvingly. “I think this is the right decision.”

Our decision reached, the woman at the flower kiosk delicately pulls five roses—three red and two yellow—from her gorgeous stash, dresses them with white baby’s breath, trims the stems with scissors, wraps it all in plastic, and ties the bouquet neatly with yellow ribbon. I hand her seven hundred rubles (twenty-three dollars), and we are on our way up the street.

Nikita’s parents live upstairs in a tan-brick apartment complex that’s as drab and uninteresting as so many buildings in Russia. But I learned a rule very quickly in this country: Don’t judge a building by its structure. Many a time I have trudged through a trash-strewn courtyard, opened a rusting metal door, climbed a dark, cracked-concrete staircase only to find a person’s apartment beautifully decorated and welcoming. Many landlords could care less about the outside. Tenants care deeply about what’s inside.

Nikita’s mom, Liubov, opens the door of her
kvartira
, or “apartment,” and waves her right arm in a sweeping motion for us to come in. I hand her the flowers. She nods and quietly says “
Spasibo
,” thank you. She looks down at them for a moment, perhaps counting, and smiles, the only hint that we made the right call. Following another tradition, I remove my snow-covered boots, since we are in someone’s home. Liubov points to a pile of slippers, which families always have on hand for guests, but Sergei and I both just stay in our socks—one of two acceptable options. Nikita’s mom is a short, tough-looking woman with cropped dark hair, a square-ish face, and a gap between her two front teeth. At first the tension is difficult to endure. She isn’t sure whether to detour into small talk or go right into talking about her son. Sergei and I aren’t sure where to go either.

She quietly walks us into a room that I immediately identify as Nikita’s old bedroom.

“This is my museum,” she says.

It’s full of medals, photos, hockey sticks, and other memorabilia. The centerpiece on the wall is a photo of Nikita, in his red-and-white Lokomotiv uniform and red helmet. He looks as if he belonged in the NHL, with long black hair, stubble on his face, and a cool, confident stare that could say to a defender, I’m ready to finesse around you for a goal, or maybe instead I’ll body-check you into the boards. Nikita’s hockey gloves are sitting on a ledge beneath the photo, facing outward from the wall, arranged perfectly so you see this young man’s face above, then you look down to see two hands that could be part of the same body.

“He was born a big baby,” Liubov tells us. We have now moved to the living room, Sergei and I on a couch, with her to my left. “It was written on his birth that he would be a famous person.”

There is a sudden crash from the other room. “Ah, the vase, the vase, excuse me!” The flowers were too big for whatever vase she had placed them in, and our gift had fallen over. She is back within moments, and picks up where she left off. She’s told this story before.

“Nikita started studying hockey when he was six. He worked hard. But we never saw tears. I had a rule: If we ever see tears or bad grades, you come home. It was hard on him. But he never complained.”

By age twelve, he was at a boarding school in Yaroslavl, a couple of hours away. Nikita’s parents thought about moving to be close to him, but his dad has a reliable job at the jet engine factory in Rybinsk.

“At age twelve he’s captain of his youth team. At fourteen he’s selected to the national team. At age eighteen, he has a bronze medal in the hockey world championships. And he became the youngest player ever in the KHL.”

“Can you tell me when you last spoke to him?”

“Ten minutes before the plane crashed. He called me to say he was ready for the season. In a very good mood, but as always, he was a little afraid to fly. I said good-bye, and he made that sound of a kiss. And we said good-bye.”

A door opens and closes out in the hallway, and Nikita’s dad walks into the room. “Sergei,” he says, introducing himself, before shaking my hand and the other Sergei’s hand. Now I know where Nikita got his size. Sergei is broad and tall, with thinning blond hair and his son’s eyes. He quietly sits down, sensing that his wife was in the middle of answering my questions.

“So when did you learn about the crash?”

“An hour later,” Liubov says. “My mother called and said, ‘Where is Nikita?’ She had seen the news on television. I had to tell her he was on the plane.”

She and Sergei drove as quickly as they could to Yaroslavl. “The team didn’t call. No one called. We didn’t know whom to ask. And there was security everywhere. Finally they told us to go to the—”

Sergei, translating as quickly as he can, now pauses, looking for the right word in English. “Morgue,” he says.

Liubov continues.

“And so we were at the morgue, for almost a day until . . . we recognized him.”

We sit for a few moments in silence. And then I ask the couple if there is anything, perhaps a lesson, I can learn from this tragedy.

“We live in a very dangerous country.” And it’s not just one thing, Liubov says. Infrastructure is simply not safe. There are plane crashes, ferryboat accidents, fatal collisions on the roads, all far more often than in other countries as developed as Russia. Life is even dangerous just walking from one place to another. Each year in Moscow there are as many as a dozen deaths caused when an oversize icicle falls like a dagger from a building and impales a pedestrian. Because of this threat Rose and I spent much of our time in the winter looking up, while walking on sidewalks.

But what strikes Liubov most is the uncanny attitude of public officials, and other people in power, when tragedy strikes.

“When it comes to ordinary people, we felt support from everywhere. The entire community. We felt everyone was with us, and shared this with us. But as for the other category? The government? Team management? The attitude from their side to those who suffered—it is a situation impossible to find in any other country. No one from the team ever called us to ask how we were doing.”

I wonder if some part of that is a sense that tragedy is just part of life—a way to make people stronger. Liubov nods.

“There is this belief in our country that tragedy is a test for people who are supposed to be strong. And Sergei and I are strong. That is why we will get through this. I still have both my parents alive. Sergei has his parents. Nikita loved his grandparents very much. So we can’t be weak. We have our old people to take care of. They need our support.”

“We’ve always needed revolutions and wars,” says Nikita’s dad, “because after each of those tragedies, we rise and are reborn again.”

“But why do people in Russia believe that?”

Liubov thinks for a moment. “We probably don’t know how to live any other way.”

This couple has suspicions. They’ve never accepted the determination that the plane crash was simply pilot error. Maybe it’s a conspiracy theory born in anger and loss, but Sergei Klyukin says Putin was gearing up for an election run, and certainly needed something, anything, to turn citizens’ attention away from their living conditions.

“Tragedies distract people from their other struggles,” Sergei says.

“Are you saying this plane crash was planned?”

“I don’t think this was human error. This was ordered not by God but by our leaders. But we have the ability to forgive. That’s how we live on.”

His wife agrees.

“Love exists in this country. And it is impossible to be without it.”

I am not sure what to make of this couple’s range of emotions. Sergei’s allegations seem far-fetched. But this
is
Russia. This is the country where a former KGB spy, Aleksandr Litvinenko, said allies of Putin indeed carried out terrorist plots in the country to rally support behind him. He also accused Putin of arranging for a well-known journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, to be assassinated. Shortly after making that claim in 2006, Litvinenko was fatally poisoned in Britain.

I am not convinced that Russian officials planned to crash that plane. I do think Sergei and Liubov Klyukin speak for many in their country. They view their leaders with great suspicion. But they feel a sense of duty to endure, and believe that every difficulty makes you stronger. And in times of hardship the impulse is not to turn your anger into action, but to turn inside, protect the people close to you, and feel the warmth and strength from the people you
do
trust.

Sergei and I walk to the door and begin putting our shoes back on. “David, this is for you.” Nikita’s father has a red scarf in his hand. It says, in Russian, “Lokomotiv. Our team, forever.” The names of all the players are there. Sergei begins to cry as he points to his son’s name. “Thank you,” I tell him, putting my hand on his right shoulder. “I will treasure this and display it proudly in America.”

After leaving this apartment, there is one more stop I want to make in Rybinsk. It is not in any guidebook, but there is a small memorial just outside town, honoring victims of one of Stalin’s gulags. The infamous labor camps were primarily located farther east, in remote Siberia. But a few were here in western Russia, including the Volgolag camp near Rybinsk. It was first opened in 1935 and housed one hundred thousand prisoners at a time, many of them convicted of political crimes. That’s according to Dmitri Macmillen, who recently did a student research project called, “In Search of the Rybinsk Gulag.” The camp apparently provided laborers to build the dam that flooded Mologa. Nearly nine hundred thousand prisoners died from “hunger, hard labor, abuse and failed escapes” over eighteen years, Macmillen wrote. “The production of a mere megawatt of power in the first years of the camp’s existence came at the expense of forty human lives, a futile sacrifice, only exacerbated by the realization that the hydroelectric station achieved a minimal level of electric production.”

Sergei and I wave down a taxi. Our driver, a young guy in a black leather jacket, has never heard of this place. “Gulag,” Sergei keeps saying. My colleague finally makes a phone call to a local museum, hands the phone to our driver to hear the directions, and we are on our way.

The driver is blasting techno music, with English lyrics that in no way align with my mood. “I like sexy, sexy. I like to roll in king-sized beds.” Neither Sergei nor I are speaking. I am in the backseat, watching Rybinsk pass by. There is the jet engine factory where Nikita’s dad works, a sprawling, dirty complex that probably hasn’t changed much since Soviet times. We continue through the center of town, past a snow statue of Russia’s Santa Claus—Ded Moroz. Weeks after Orthodox Christmas, it’s probably time for Santa to be relieved of his duties—the red paint from his hat is bleeding into the muddy snow—but no one has taken him down yet. And just outside town we pull over, and our driver points across a field to what appears to be nothing more than a clump of snow. Sergei and I tromp about fifty yards, and as we approach, we see that the mound of snow is actually covering a rock. There is a plaque on the front of the rock that Sergei translates for me.

“This is the beginning of remembering victims of the Volga camps.”

“It says ‘beginning,’” Sergei points out. I can see his breath in the frigid cold. “Because, David, we could not talk about this for many, many years. We could not see monuments like this. We could not see anything.”

In other words, in this country some tragedies happened long ago. But there is a reality that outsiders may struggle to understand. Since public displays of emotion were frowned upon for years, many Russians are just now coming to terms with their history, and the pain. They are only now beginning to mourn what was lost. In the snow, beside the rock, just below and to the left of the plaque, there is a bunch of flowers. They’re red roses, fresh, as if put here within the past day or so. And I can’t help but count the number.