Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia (3 page)

The Russia I saw was very much as Gogol described it more than 150 years ago: careening down an uncertain path. On the Trans-Siberian Railway I began to see a thin line of constancy, connecting Russia’s cities and its steppes, its problems and its potential, its past and its future. Cultural heritage seems to pervade a nation that stretches from Europe to Pyongyang and Alaska, making some customs and ways of thinking feel the same through all of Russia’s extremities. And across this vast country the emotion that remained constant was an uneasy frustration: Here are millions of people across different landscapes, climates, and communities, all with families they love and ideas to offer, but almost universally unable to answer some simple questions: Where is your country going? And what do
you
want for its future?

I learned a lot from that trip in 2011, but not nearly enough. I wanted to see more, wanted to meet more people. I knew that even though my career had taken me back home, my time in Russia was far from finished. I would be getting back on that train.

. . .

I
LANDED BACK
in Washington in 2012, around the same time as a friend and colleague, Julia Ioffe. She was born in Russia, moved to the United States in grade school, went to Princeton for college but never got rid of the Russia bug. She returned as a journalist, writing for
Foreign Policy
and
The New Yorker
magazines while living with her grandmother in the family’s Soviet-era flat in Moscow. Our time as foreign correspondents overlapped, but Julia—having been born in the country and learned Russian before English—knew the place intimately. I took whatever work Julia produced seriously—and one of the first things she did after returning to the United States was to translate an essay by Mikhail Shishkin. His essay, published by Julia’s current employer, the
New Republic
, is called “Poets and Czars: From Pushkin to Putin, the Sad Tale of Democracy in Russia.”

In czarist times, Shishkin wrote, Russia was a “Holy Fatherland” surrounded “on all sides by an ocean of enemies.” And to live in Russia meant being a “child and soldier” of the czar. But the protection you received in return made all that worthwhile. As Shishkin put it, “the unconscious slavery was bitter for the body, but life-sustaining for the spirit.” This was a convenient arrangement for Russia’s all-powerful czars. People believed that in a dangerous and uncertain world, to be in Russia was the best one could hope for. But, “everything changed with Peter the Great,” Shishkin wrote. Czar Peter had worthy intentions. He wanted to throw open the doors to eighteenth-century Europe, with its new ideas and theories about science and technology. But Peter could not pick and choose who came through the door, and poets and thinkers entered as well, with European ideas about individual rights and human dignity. As Shishkin put it, Peter “wanted to ‘cut a window to Europe,’ but instead, he cut a hole in the Russian ark.” Suddenly Russian thinkers and writers were armed with progressive ideas.

The great poet Pushkin may have owed his literary genius to his Russian blood, but his ideas were shaped by the West. This led him to challenge the power vertical in Russia, writing in the poem
Exegi Monumentum
, “I’ve set up to myself a monument not wrought by hands. The public path to it will not grow weedy. Its unyielding head soars higher than the Alexandrine Column.” This was a direct challenge to the czar. Shishkin points to those words as Pushkin’s “declaration of independence.”

Then something funny happened.

The czar who ruled during Pushkin’s time courted the poet, realizing and fearing his influence. Nicholas I named Pushkin the country’s “First Poet,” and the poet obliged. Shishkin writes of a tragic calculation that Pushkin faced. He was convinced that democracy would never really flourish in Russia. Undermining the czar would only create a power vacuum, and the new reality would be uglier than what it replaced. “Pushkin saw that in Russia, the choice between dictatorship and democracy was beside the point: the only choice was between bloody chaos and ruthless order.” More specifically Pushkin “understood that in a Russian revolution, the first things to burn [would] be the libraries.”

Shishkin uses this history as an appetizer for his bitter main course: recognition that history in his country can’t stop repeating itself. Shishkin’s novels drill into universal human themes and questions—love, pain, decency—and he’s been compared to some of the great Russian writers of the past—Pushkin, Chekhov, Tolstoy. And in 2013 Shishkin himself faced an impossible calculation. His government helped arrange an annual trip to the United States for Russian literary moguls. Having gone the year before, Shishkin declined this time. A critic of Putin and the Kremlin, he refused to be showcased by a government he found unpalatable. I can’t help but see his predicament as comparable to Pushkin’s, facing the czar three centuries ago. Historical parallels are tenuous, but make no mistake: Russia today exists in a bizarre purgatory, not unlike the country Pushkin knew. Pushkin then, Shishkin now, faced a terrible choice: Stand for change that could be messy and unpredictable, or settle for and endorse a status quo that is unsavory but somehow safe?

In Shishkin’s time, after Soviet rule, Russia opened to the West and seemed on a path to democracy. But the dust has now settled, and Russia has an autocratic, power-hungry leader. What happened? In Shishkin’s mind the brief flirtation with democracy after Soviet times “ended with everyone returning to their barracks. We had to live, after all. And order returned on its own, the very same order, because no one in Russia knows a different one.”

If anything came through on my first train trip, and in my time in Russia, it’s that people in this country dream of change—in the abstract—but have little or no faith that they can contribute to it or control it. And that has been ingrained in the psychology for generations. I always turn back to an essay called “The Image of Dual Russia,” written more than five decades ago by the late Robert Tucker, a Princeton scholar who studied Russia and the Soviet Union. He writes that over centuries—from the 1400s straight up until the 1917 Bolshevik revolution that ushered in Soviet times—Russia became divided. On the one hand there was “official Russia”: the state, in Russian, the
gosudarstvo
. Quite separately there was “popular Russia”: the people, many of them peasants in far-flung communities, taught to make sacrifices Shishkin described in order to feel protection and a sense of purpose. Most strikingly, Tucker explained how there was no relationship between the two. They existed and lived in entirely separate worlds. Russian leaders and bureaucrats viewed the people as soldiers in some us-against-them war against the world, but didn’t value them as human beings. And the people saw the government as “alien”—a distant, conquering force whose vision, cruel as it seemed, was intractable, inevitable, and inescapable. And so popular apathy prevailed. In 1917 the Bolsheviks arrived and, in the eyes of the outside world, brought their Marxist vision into a fight on behalf of the
people
. But Tucker believed that the Russian people—most of them, at least—were apathetic and not really ever involved. The Bolsheviks were able to topple the czar fairly easily, he said, because in reality, the czar had little support from the uninvolved and apathetic masses. But neither did Lenin and the Bolsheviks. They took power and began a new chapter in Russian history, in large part by making themselves a “self-appointed organ of consciousness,” Tucker wrote. The Russian people themselves saw little if any personal stake in the way things played out—they were innocent and detached bystanders to history.

That’s alarming. But Tucker’s conclusions from decades ago, like Shishkin’s insights today, nevertheless paint a broad picture of the Russia I saw. At a moment when there could be a fight for change, history’s handcuffs remain on this proud country that’s full of warm, creative, strong people. At the very moment when countries in the Middle East—Tunisia, Egypt, Libya—were rising up and overthrowing leaders in the Arab Spring, Russians made a bit of noise and then settled down again. Why did they not see things through? How can Russians accept the harsh reality they live in—a country with low life expectancy, rampant health problems, gaping inequality, and a dwindling population? What is holding people back? Is it fear? Fatigue? Fatalism? Public apathy? An innocent but false belief in country? A paternalistic faith that leaders are there to protect you? Or, most likely, a recipe of all these ingredients—a recipe written by the czars, cooked for generations, and infused so deeply in Russians that they would struggle to exist without it.

A
LL THESE QUESTIONS
lingered when I finished my assignment in Russia and returned home in 2012, as did one more: How can I
love
such a maddening place? For all its troubles there’s an inner energy and warmth and unpredictability that make Russia as addictive as Aunt Nina’s stewed chicken. Spend enough time there, and for all the pain you witness, you don’t want to leave. I yearned to go back to Russia because of my love for the place and the unfinished business of understanding it. So, I returned in 2013 for another Trans-Siberian journey. This book is that journey.

1
•
ROSE

R
OSE WAS CONVINCED
it would be snowing when we landed.

It was September 2009, and the two of us were about to begin a new life in Russia.

Snowing? Sure, I thought. It’s
always
cold in Moscow. It even snows in September. What are the other clichés, honey? All Russians do is drink vodka, wear fur hats, and train for the Olympics?

It was snowing.

We could see it as our Delta 767 from JFK made its final descent into Moscow.

“You know I’m a warm-blooded Mediterranean, right, Greene?” I did. But this question wasn’t meant to offer new information, rather to underscore the meteorological sacrifice my Sicilian-Lebanese-American wife was making in beginning this new chapter.

In our
warm
apartment in New York City’s East Village, Rose and I had spent endless hours talking about the job that opened at NPR: Moscow bureau chief.

I had covered the White House for eight years, done some economic reporting in New York, and was hankering for a foreign assignment. Rose had gotten a master’s degree in public policy, launched into a great job as a policy adviser for the New York City Council, and was always hungry for a new adventure—she loves to explore and travel—but Russia?

Rose grew up in rural Ohio. Her Lebanese-American mom raised four kids, taught school, and opened a family restaurant in a small town along Interstate 75. Her Sicilian-American dad taught college law and pharmacy for four decades. I grew up in Pennsylvania. My late mom, another academic, was a beloved psychology professor. My dad is a physician in the pharmaceutical industry who shares my passion for late-night chats about politics or yesterday’s Pittsburgh Steelers game. Our parents all worked to make us worldly. Rose and I talked about current events growing up, we traveled, and we read the Dostoevsky and Tolstoy required in class.

Covering the White House, I certainly took my swims in foreign policy, attending numerous summits between Russia’s Vladimir Putin and America’s George W. Bush, who once famously remarked that he looked into Putin’s soul and liked what he saw (a moment when I could almost hear Putin, a former KGB spy, saying to himself, Got him!).

And yet neither Rose nor I could escape feeling this naive confusion about Russia, as if we were missing something. The summits we saw on television as kids, with Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev—weren’t they setting Russia on a path to becoming a Western democracy and true American ally? Why hasn’t Russia gotten there? Isn’t that what Russians
want
their country to be?

We talked about the risk of moving to a new country, especially one known for being cold and unwelcoming. And Rose was quick to remind me of the risks. She’s not a woman who holds much back or shies away from debate. (Her Lebanese-Sicilian good looks may have gotten her
into
beauty pageants in high school, but the event she always won was the interview.)

“Okay, so let’s get this straight here,” she said in one of our many conversations, sitting in our tiny Manhattan apartment. “We moved to New York for my job a year ago. Now you’re asking me to leave my new job, move to Russia, be cold for several years, and live in a country that may not even give me a visa to work?”

I felt she captured things pretty well. “Yes?”

“I like the idea of an adventure . . . especially before we have kids. But Greene? You understand you’re going to owe me.”

The decision wasn’t easy, and the two of us talk to this day about what might have been different had we turned Russia down. In the end it may have been our curiosity that won out. Rose put it best: “I don’t know a damn thing about Russia, except for its food and culture. But I . . . I have always thought that seeing a new place, experiencing it, learning about it as a couple—together—could be a fun adventure, and who knows if we’ll ever get this chance again?”

After walking off the plane, through a bitterly cold jetway that did nothing for marital peace, Rose and I were hit in the face by Russia. Russians, as it turns out, don’t like lining up for anything. It may come from a sympathetic place: During Soviet times the difference between being first or sixth in line at a poorly stocked store could be the difference between your family having bread on the table that night, or not. Lines became free-for-alls.

But I would love for someone to explain to me why this practice must endure at the immigration line at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport. Rose and I were bumped rudely, trampled on, yelled at in Russian, pushed aside, and frowned at until we just decided to let the whole horde of Russian passengers go ahead of us. Then we calmly walked up to the Russian immigration officer, a scowling woman dressed in a pale blue government uniform.

“Iz N’iu Iorka?” she seemed to grumble. We assumed it was Russian for “From New York?”