Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia (28 page)

A
ND YET, FOR
better or worse, Rose and I spent our three years living our daily lives in the “Moscow” Russia, the world of trendy cafés and fat paychecks. My reporting took me to speck-on-the-map villages and brought me in touch with people living on the brink. But living in central Moscow, socializing in journalism and diplomatic circles, we generally met Russians who were part of the urban elite, people working as lawyers, bankers, or executives in energy companies, many of whom benefited from Putin’s economy but were out on the streets protesting his authoritarian leadership style. And that’s a paradox you discover in many younger, more well-off Russians. They are educated, have traveled the world, and find democratic principles and values appealing. Then again, they’re still pulled by the cultural forces in their country that have defined their thinking and who they are. And what’s more, at the end of the day, any complaints they have about the state of Russian society must be weighed against the fact that they themselves are doing quite well.

And so Rose and I cursed the piles of wealth in Moscow and scoffed at Russians who loved to strut out of designer boutiques showing off stunningly expensive new fur coats or order seven-hundred-dollar bottles of champagne just to say they did. And while I’m happy to say we didn’t live in that world, we probably intersected with it more often than we did with, say, Ivan’s existence in his village outside Chelyabinsk. I remember Rose once returning from shopping at one of the fancy grocery stores in Moscow to report that she had made her “first Russian friend!” She and Natalya met in the checkout line. Natalya, like Rose, is in her thirties. She speaks flawless English, went to college in the United States, works for a technology company and is often on the road, shuttling from Moscow to her home city of Novosibirsk, to spots around Europe, or to the United States. Rose often had lunch or dinner with Natalya, and she would come to parties with us at the homes of journalists and diplomats. When Rose told Natalya that she was flying into Novosibirsk to meet me for part of this train trip, she told Rose we had to meet her friend Alexei.

A few hours after Rose lands, she and I walk into a palatial café near Novosibirsk’s train station. Suddenly, nothing says you’re in Russia—this could be some trendy hotspot in London, New York, or Buenos Aires. The walls are artistically-distressed gray stone, the ceiling is corrugated metal, with rows of bright light bulbs hanging from wires. At a wooden table near the back, we see the man Natalya described—her friend Alexei Kamerzan—waiting for us. He gets up to greet us and shake our hands, a Bluetooth earpiece still firmly in his left ear, where it would remain planted throughout our conversation. Alexei is thirty-five, with thinning brown hair and some deliberate style choices: perfectly trimmed five o’clock shadow and a button-down opened just so to display some chest hair. His story is a reminder that Russia has produced its share of winners. Alexei’s mother worked for a state carpet company during Soviet times. When the Soviet Union collapsed, many people who were either smart or lucky—or both—rushed to start private companies in their areas of expertise. His mother opened Carpet World, which Alexei helps run today, putting his business degree from the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota to good use. He was in the United States from 1999 to 2001. Now, back home in Novosibirsk, he spends days in meetings with big shots who are buying his family’s carpeting—their big new contract is with the recently opened Marriott hotel in the city.

“I’d say my mother is officially the head of the company,” Alexei says, pushing his lips into a half-joking smile. “But I do all the work.”

He is sitting facing Rose and me. We settle in for a few cups of coffee as the café begins playing the Tears for Fears tune “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”

“I just traveled to Lebanon,” Alexei tells us. “In my childhood, I watched the terrible news saying Beirut is hell. I was just deeply impressed and surprised when I saw it because we only hear about Lebanon when it’s in trouble.”

And he feels like Russia gets a bad rap abroad as well. I tell him the impression among Americans is that doing business in Russia means constantly bribing, assuming you have the connections to get in the game at all. He tells me only roughly half of the business transactions in Russia are dirty, involving some kind of bribes.

“To an American, that sounds like a lot,” I say.

“I know, I knooow,” he groans. He explains that
his
family’s business is on the up-and-up, and he wishes more businesses were following suit. “Russia—it’s not as clean as the United States. But I’d say not as dirty as Asia or Africa. Somewhere in between. But we don’t pay much attention to this. I know it’s not really good. But it’s part of a long heritage—not just from Soviet times, but even earlier. Look, I know how American society built itself. I know how Russian society built itself. It’s a different culture and different philosophy here. It’s not like, ‘Hey, let’s just build democracy.’”

Alexei calls himself a fan of democracy, not so much a fan of Putin. “Some days I like him, some days I don’t.” A day he didn’t came in 2012 when Putin signed a temporary ban on the adoption of Russian children by American families. Alexei didn’t see how it made sense to prevent Russian babies from finding loving homes. “That’s like saying, ‘Let me cut off my finger to try and make you uncomfortable.’”

“And on days when you like him,” I wonder, “why do you like him?”

“He’s a strong leader. This is the first thing people like about him because they’re so tired of weak, stupid people. Like Khrushchev, a real village guy. Brezhnev was vulgar, just an old crumbling person. And Gorbachev? He said too much and did almost nothing.”

On balance, Alexei would rather Putin be gone. He voted against him in the last election “just to show that we’re not satisfied with some of the stupid politics,” he says. Alexei’s pretty sure the election was rigged. He agrees with critics who said Putin and his allies made sure—by forgery, or pressuring voters in some districts—that he had enough votes in a first round to avoid a run-off.

“It was an issue of image. He didn’t want it to look like he wasn’t strong enough to win [in the first round]. So they forged the results at least 10 percent. Anyway, he would have been President. But we were deceived by fake results, so it was unpleasant.”

Unpleasant. If, Alexei added, there had been two candidates running and votes were forged to actually change who was elected, he may have taken to the streets. But this didn’t rise to that level. He wasn’t stirred up.

“It’s not such a big deal. Unpleasant, but not such a big deal.”

There’s a window into what Putin is managing: something resembling a democracy, a system that keeps him in power and makes people such as Alexei—educated, and potentially influential if made angry enough—satisfied, happy, and so far, quiet. This makes me think that if Putin oversteps—if he outright steals an election, say—people like Alexei would join forces of protest in Moscow, and the government could have a problem on its hands. It would be not just the middle class of Moscow rising up but also the middle class elsewhere in Russia, people with means and embarrassed and chagrined to live in a country where freedoms are restricted. That could bring the clash of ideas—potentially violent—that Robert, the Memorial activist in Perm, predicted as a possibility. But if Putin keeps his authoritarian ways in check—enough—he may have latitude. And it may be years before Russia sees any true political change, depending on the wishes of the younger generation.

For now, Alexei spends as much time as he can on the road. He and his grad school friends have met up in Colorado a few times, taking on the slopes at Aspen and Vail. He also has a videography business on the side—a recent video, shot on a snowy mountain, had young Russian women flying down a slope on skis and snowboards, wearing nothing but bikinis. Alexei himself made a cameo—shirtless. Last check, his video had gotten over seven million hits on YouTube. “I’m not a fan of skiing, tried it once and that was it,” Rose tells him. “Even the hot instructor couldn’t get me to like it.”

“You just have to keep trying,” Alexei says, putting both hands out, palms up, for emphasis, “until it gets fun. The whole thing is fun. You have the skiing. Then the spa, the sauna, the swimming pool in the open air. Recently, I started snowboarding too. I’m still dreaming of trying heli-skiing.” (That would be when a helicopter drops you and your skis off in a remote spot on the mountain.)

At the moment, he’s gearing up for his next adventure with some friends—a road trip from Russia, through Central Asia, into China, across Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia, and eventually to Malaysia. “We are driving to the most southern tip of continental Eurasia,” he declares. It is tempting to frown on his excessive lifestyle, especially in a country where wealth is concentrated at the top and so many people scrape by. But as Rose and I would remind ourselves, Alexei, Natalya, and other Russians like them are in many ways success stories, discovering the fruits of personal ambition in a place where that wasn’t really possible not so long ago.

It seems the only thing Alexei’s starving for is children. His sister, who lives in Dubai, has a son. “My mom adores him and spends a lot of time there.” Alexei pauses. “And I’m thinking about this because it’s time. You know, whenever I see my grandmother she’s like, ‘I have to talk to you!’ And I did watch this Russian comedy recently, where the guy was saying ‘I don’t want to get to my son’s prom in a wheelchair.’ And this is what I’m saying . . . if I have children when I’m forty.”

Right now, he lives alone in an apartment his mother bought in 1995, shortly after she started the carpet business.

“There are so many girls to choose from in this country,” Rose says. “They’re beautiful. Come on.”

Alexei smiles, pausing for a few seconds before abruptly changing the subject. “Okay, you can type my name in YouTube and find all my videos. And you can follow me on Twitter.”

He has to run. His phone rang twice already, but he didn’t want to interrupt our conversation to answer it. “Okay guys, it was real fun,” he says, shaking my hand, hugging Rose then heading outside.

Leaving the café a few minutes later, I tell Rose about the people she’s missed on the trip: Nadezhda and her struggles running a business, Ivan in Chelyabinsk, the babushkas, and the ominous e-mail from Olga in Vladivostok.

“Do you think seeing her again is dangerous?” Rose asks me.

“For me or for her?”

“Either, I guess.”

Rose has always been level-headed about these things—more street smart than I am. I can sometimes take more risks, thinking it’s worth it for the sake of the story. But I never want to put anyone else at risk.

“Well, I remember the guys who followed us in Vladivostok,” Rose says. “They were idiots. Harmless. If that’s who is calling Olga’s family, it’s probably okay. Just be careful, Greene.” Arriving at our hotel, we stop by Sergei’s room, and Sergei literally jumps. “Rooose! It is so good to see you.” They hug. We really were a family for our time in Russia, and now the family is back together.

We do a bit of exploring together in Novosibirsk, then head in the evening for the train station, where I break the news to my wife.

“So, one difference I haven’t told you about yet. Sergei and I have been traveling third class. And, um, we have third-class seats on this train. I don’t think you’ve been in third class yet.”

“No, I haven’t,” Rose says, smiling.

It is honestly not my imagination—the train experience with Rose on board, coincidentally or not, seems far worse than anything Sergei and I have experienced so far.

Our third-class car on this train is No. 19, the last car of the train and a solid ten-minute walk down an icy platform. As we arrive at the steps of the car, a passenger is rushing out carrying a mangy-looking dog in need of a potty break. We step into the car and its passengers are predominantly young men from Central Asia. In many ways Central Asia is to Russia what Central America is to the United States—scores of young men pour across the border looking for reliable construction work or other jobs to make money for families back home.

I would say of the dozens of people on this car, all are men, except perhaps one or two.

“It’s all going to be Okay” I tell Rose unconvincingly.

“You don’t have a guy staring at your breasts.” I think she’s overreacting until, indeed, I see one man on his upper berth laughing and motioning to his seatmate as he cups his hands over his chest.

Rose brings out a bag of jelly beans and offers it to the man who’s sharing the four-berth space with us. He declines, but Sergei takes a few—his first jelly bean experience. “Do I chew?”

“Yes—you’ll like them,” Rose says. “Sergei, can you take a photo of me and David? Because, if we get divorced, this is going in the file.” She’s not done. She pulls out her iPhone, clicks Record on the video function and points the thing at the two of us, with her arm around me. “Hi, future children. If David remains married to me long enough for you to be conceived, then this is for you. Your father made me ride third class on an overnight train in the winter in Siberia. Who does that?”

We eventually settle in. Rose takes an upper berth to sleep, and I do feel guilty, noticing a lot of eyes pointed at her—harmlessly, I believe, but probably annoying.

I wake up last—Rose and Sergei are up, looking out the window as we approach Krasnoyarsk. The great Russian writer Anton Chekhov called this Siberia’s most gorgeous city, and you understand why. The city is tucked into a river valley, surrounded by gorges and snowy mountains rising in all directions. We have only a day here, and we were told the one thing not to miss is the Stolby Nature Reserve just outside the city.

And here I emphasize again—try not to ask why in this country. In this case, why would it be so difficult to arrange a visit to the area’s number-one tourist destination?

Rose and I are in the backseat of a taxi as Sergei negotiates with the driver.

“David, you said Stolby Nature Reserve?”