Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia (19 page)

Sergei is all business.

I ask about how his father came to invent such a weapon.

“In 1941 my dad was wounded in the war,” Viktor says. “In the hospital he spoke about the kinds of armaments he saw on the battlefield. The kinds of guns the Germans had, and the kinds of guns the Russians had.”

While serving as director of the weapons factory in Izhevsk after the war, he set out to design an automatic rifle that could be produced en masse and match the automatic weapons the Germans had been deploying. And so the Kalashnikov, as it’s also known, was born. The AK-47 has gone through many iterations and been used on battlefields and also by gangsters and terrorists around the world.

“My father’s slogan was to create a weapon that could protect the motherland,” Viktor tells me.

I ask if his father has any regrets, given how many people have been killed—including countless numbers at the hands of criminals.

“Sure, it has been used by criminals. It is a reliable weapon. But I would like to emphasize, the constructor is not guilty in that—politicians are.” He says his father does tell himself that a lot, because there
are
moments when he thinks about the impact of what he invented. “Yes, Dad thinks about it and talks about it.”

He sure should. The gun he invented is used by armies, child soldiers, criminals, terrorists. And it’s available everywhere. According to C. J. Chivers of the
New York Times
, who wrote a book about the Kalashnikov called
The Gun
, so many of the guns have been produced that there is one for every seventy humans on earth. “The Kalashnikov is the most common weapon you will see,” he told my colleague Terry Gross on NPR’s program
Fresh Air
, suggesting that if you find yourself anywhere in the world that’s unstable or unsafe, chances are these weapons are not far away. The AK-47 “gets used in those places in the commissions of crimes, in the commission of human-rights violations. It is often used by governments as a tool of repression. It’s the weapon of the crackdown and has been for more than half a century.” But the market has become so flooded with the guns that orders are beginning to fall off—and that’s bad for Izhevsk, Chivers said in another NPR interview.

This is, in the simplest sense, a struggling factory town that’s looking for more orders so it can keep more people at work. There’s also sort of something psychological at work here. The Kalashnikov is, in many ways, Russia’s Coca-Cola. It’s their brand. It’s the one thing that they made that we all know of and that has had global saturation. You know, we don’t buy Russian pacemakers, or Russian watches, or Russian perfumes, or Russian automobiles in any significant numbers. But the Kalashnikov is the thing.

There’s something melancholy about this—not exactly the fact that gun orders are down, which is a good thing, but that Russia is so desperate for its brand to be respected again. There was a time when Russian citizens felt an enormous sense of pride—like when the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space.

“America could not do that, okay?” Yuri Karash once told me. The Russian commentator often writes about the space industry. “Western Europe could not do it. No other country in the world could do it. But the Soviet state could.”

That was then. Today, there’s far less pride—even at moments when there should be more. When the U.S. Space Shuttle program ended, NASA began paying Russia to carry Americans into space for an undetermined period of years. Like many Russians I spoke with, Karash was less than impressed. He described the moment as similar to a Mercedes breaking down in the middle of the desert. “So you suddenly see a Bedouin riding a camel on the shoulder and you ask him, ‘Hey, guy, do me a favor, give me a lift to someplace?’ And he says, ‘No problem. Pay me $63 million and I’ll take you there.’ Does it mean camel is better than Mercedes?”

For a country whose people are already prone to fatalism, you can imagine a loss of pride only piling on.

I
THANK
V
IKTOR
K
ALASHNIKOV
for his time and bid him farewell. I can’t stop thinking about how Russia is chock-full of characters. I just think about the babushkas and their tragic but inspiring stories, Marina in her over-the-top ski pants that fit her personality, Vasily serving up horse sausage in his
banya
-soaked boxer shorts and this quiet, peaceful soul in a black suit whose father invented the AK-47.

In the parking lot Sergei and I say a final good-bye to Marina. I realize, in all the chaos and haste, I never asked about her story. I do, briefly, and she says very little other than that she lives alone—no husband—raised two daughters alone, and now has three grandchildren.

“I don’t like to talk about myself much,” she says. “But maybe you can find me a husband in America.”

I’m suddenly overcome by warmth and guilt. She’s loud, bossy, and quirky. Actually, I’ve never liked someone so much who annoyed me so much. I think about the babushkas, and somehow Marina makes more sense. She’s lonely, looking for connections, and proud of the job she does. In her own way she saw it as her duty to go above and beyond for me and Sergei—as our tour guide during our stay here. And for that I am grateful.

“Thank you again, Marina.”

“You’re welcome.” And then she drives off.

We have a few hours to kill, so Sergei and I find a nice table in a hotel restaurant to grab a bite and write some notes from the day.

And there they are. Our “friends.”

The same guys who followed us out of the train station when we arrived in the city walk into the restaurant, pretend not to see us, but grab a table in our section. I am sure they’ll trail us to the train station in a few hours. I just hope they are local and let us go on our way once we are off their turf.

11
•
ANGELINA

T
HE
R
USSIAN VILLAGE
of Sagra is where I nearly lost my wife.

When we stopped there on our Trans-Siberian trip in 2011, a man named Andrei Gorodilov took a liking to her. (Okay, that’s at least the way I saw it at first). I had to stomach this, because Andrei, thirty-nine, and his family were people I was eager to get to know.

If anyplace in Russia seems to be experimenting with democracy, it is this tiny village in the Ural Mountains. I had read the colorful story of how villagers in Sagra, including Andrei’s family, took up hunting rifles and pitchforks on a summer night in July 2011 and defended the community against an approaching criminal gang. As the story goes, the gang had been in skirmishes with residents of the poor village in the past, and on this night was approaching in cars just before midnight to terrorize the place. Residents clashed with the gang, and one of the intruders was killed. A
New York Times
story a month after the attack said villagers tried to alert authorities but got nowhere. “For nearly five minutes, by her count, a resident named Tatyana Gordeyeva tried to persuade a police dispatcher on the telephone to connect her to a station. When help finally came, she said, the battle had been over for two hours.” At first local officials interrogated residents of Sagra and, according to villagers, charged some with hooliganism. That included Andrei’s father, Viktor. In response, villagers did the unthinkable: They took to the Internet to fight the local authorities. They found a lawyer to fight for their rights against a local government that seemed to have decided the case before it began.

And they won.

Arriving in Sagra that first time, I immediately noticed (perceived, at least) Andrei’s fascination with Rose. Perhaps this threw me off my game—or maybe Andrei used Russian voodoo to put a curse on me—because for whatever reason, I couldn’t walk a block on Sagra’s snowy streets without falling flat on my face. One fall was especially troublesome—I was carrying two bottles of vodka, gifts for a family we were to interview, and I slipped, saving myself but shattering the vodka bottles.

Unofficial Russian law says one never sacrifices vodka to save himself.

This event earned me the nickname
Lokh
(dope) among Andrei and his friends. But Rose, as she so often does, came to the rescue. After my brutal fall, she could tell I was humiliated and swung into action. Andrei and Viktor had brought us to a neighbor’s house in Sagra for lunch—brown bread, homemade vegetable spread, and six jars, each containing a different variety of pickle. Rose befriended the woman hosting us, telling her she bore a striking resemblance to Angelina Jolie. Then she befriended Viktor and before I knew it, Viktor had Rose doing shots of pepper-flavored vodka with him. He had her convinced it was an elixir, as she had been battling a cold.

Andrei, seeing Rose hanging out with his dad as if they were old-time friends, seemed unthreatened by me and (mercifully) no longer called me
Lokh
.

Andrei, thirty-nine, has a graduate degree in economics. More than anyone else I somehow expected him to believe in democracy the same way I do, especially after the experience his village had just been through to protect its legal rights. But Andrei didn’t draw a connection between the battle his village waged and some broader fight for a different future for Russia. He watched the news. He knew all about the Arab Spring. But what happened in Egypt and Libya only scared him. Andrei had lived through the Soviet collapse and then suffered as boasts of democracy were followed by economic crisis.

“I can see what’s happening in Libya,” he told me. “That was our path in 1991. The Libyan people will live much worse than they used to live. They had social programs, they got apartments for free. Now this will stop. I already lived through those kinds of changes.”

What Andrei and the villagers of Sagra did was fight when they were pushed to the brink—they fought on the streets because they believed lives were at stake. They took to the Internet to fight because otherwise family members might have gone to jail. But there is no broader confidence in free expression and public activism. In fact there’s still a fear that those things, when used too often, can make life worse.

Meeting Andrei gave a face to some polling that stunned me. The Pew Research Center polled Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, and people in other neighboring countries. They asked questions like “would you prefer a strong leader or democratic values?” When they asked the question in 1991, majorities wanted democratic values. Today the opposite is true—people prefer a strong leader. Those early poll results came amid the Soviet fall, when there was a desperate plea for a new system to restore order. But there has never been any deep or lasting commitment to democracy.

Sagra is in the Ural Mountains, the window onto Asian Russia and the vast region known as Siberia. Often late at night aboard the train, Russian passengers stand along the corridors, gazing out at the dark, empty landscape, often glancing at that list of stops to see when the train would next be pulling into a station. The stops often last fifteen or twenty minutes, just enough time to jump off on an icy platform and buy some potato chips or, when we are lucky, dried fish from women selling from baskets outside. The conductors shovel in more coal to heat the train cars, chop ice loudly from beneath them, and then call for us to board. And the train sets off again.

One night in 2011, I had my iPhone plugged into a wall socket in the hallway to charge it. As we pulled out of a city I saw the single bar of phone coverage disappear, and I didn’t have service for hours. I just stood there, gazing out into this vast, white Siberian landscape that was lit by the moon at midnight. I felt melancholy, this feeling that Russians are living in some sad darkness, unable to see the future that could await them if they only fought harder. And yet something about the poetry of the place, the pain people have been through, the laughter and strength and kindness from so many I’ve met, all made me want to smile.

Before leaving Sagra back in 2011, Rose and I gave Andrei our phone numbers, and promised to stay in touch. I bought three new bottles of vodka and asked Andrei to give two of them to the neighbors (who were supposed to receive the ones I broke) and to keep one for his family. I told Sergei and Rose that I had to return to Sagra, to learn more.

. . .

W
E FINISH UP
dinner and tea at the hotel restaurant in the center of Izhevsk, and cab to the train station. Our FSB friends are still with us. We saw them ask for their check at the restaurant as soon as we did. We saw them leave the lobby of the hotel just after us. Now we see them on the platform. Since we have no family to bid us farewell here, this almost makes me feel special, that a couple of thuggish strangers are seeing us off!

To reach Izhevsk we had to detour off the Trans-Siberian main line. Tonight we are heading north to the Russian city of Perm, on the western edge of the Ural Mountains. We have to lay over there for a few hours, then rejoin the main line, cross the Ural Mountains, and reach Ekaterinburg where Andrei is picking us up for our trip to Sagra.

The trip has been grueling, frustrating, exciting, with unexpected twists at every step—but you fall into a routine that gets you by. Often I’m especially in the dark because I don’t know the language. It strikes me—what a metaphor for how Russians approach their lives. In a way I feel that’s how the Russian government keeps citizens in the dark—laws are never clear, courts are unreliable, punishments are arbitrary—it’s like living in a place where the people in charge are speaking a language you never understand. And consider what that does to any impulse to speak up.

I remember on one Russian Trans-Siberian train a pleasant young woman with dyed blond hair stumbled into my compartment and seemed delighted to have found a foreigner. She was holding a plate of pirozhki, little stuffed pies—these had cabbage—and said in very broken English, “You get all, twelve hundred rubles. Deal good, very good.” I wasn’t understanding, so I asked if I could find my translator. “No, no. No. good deal. Pay, please.” I wasn’t inclined to fight with an employee with whom I would be sharing a train for days, so I handed over twelve hundred rubles—roughly forty dollars. The woman left the plate of cabbage pies and scurried away. They turned out to be stale and lacking in cabbage. Sergei came by, saw the plate, and burst out laughing. I had apparently fallen for the oldest trick in the book, handing over a fistful of money for day-old dough that was the end of the batch after the cook ran out of cabbage. Humorous as that was, in truth, I feel that Russians lead their lives in a chaotic and confused world, protecting themselves as best they can but with little incentive to make waves. I could have gone to find the vendor to get my money back—but I didn’t.