Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia (7 page)

Even as Stalin used the Trans-Siberian as a veritable death train, he was hard at work punishing other people by making them construct new railroads. In 2012 Lucy Ash, a reporter for Britain’s
Guardian
newspaper, unearthed remnants of Stalin’s “deadly railway to nowhere,” a thousand-mile Arctic route connecting western and eastern Siberia. “The labor force was almost entirely made up of ‘enemies of the people’—prisoners convicted of ‘political’ offenses.” Gulags were created every six to eight miles solely to house construction crews. “Prisoners built their own wooden barracks but the unlucky ones in the front units had to take shelter in canvas tents.” Ash estimated three hundred thousand people were “enslaved” to build the project and nearly a third of them died doing it. Many of the slave laborers thought that by building a railroad they were contributing to something important, thus experiencing that elevated sense of purpose Shishkin wrote about. Therefore the cruelest part? The project was abandoned. The Russian woman showing the
Guardian
reporter around the remnants of the rail line put it this way:

Of course it was wrong to build the railway with slave labor. But once they’d started it and there were so many victims, I think abandoning the project was also criminal. I lead excursions and tell people about what happened. One man, a former prisoner, made a special trip up here and he just started crying when he saw the rusty engines and old tracks. Many of the prisoners believed they were fulfilling a useful and necessary deed, and all of it was just destroyed. It’s heartbreaking.

Amazingly, the Trans-Siberian route that saw so much hardship and death is now traversed by some of the world’s best-off people. One of the trains that speeds along the track is the Golden Eagle, a luxury liner offering the best caviar and cabins outfitted with flat-screen TVs and heated floors. A one-way ticket from Moscow to the eastern port of Vladivostok costs close to twenty thousand dollars. And there are Russians who can afford that. This is a country with some of the wealthiest people in the world, the so-called oligarchs. They are often shrewd, politically connected individuals who swooped in and grabbed ownership of state enterprises as Soviet times ended. When those state-run businesses—mining, oil, and natural gas companies among them—privatized seemingly overnight, the people in charge became instant tycoons. And yet, fortunes under this new regime can be taken away as quickly as they are made. Just ask Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who once owned a giant energy company, Yukos, and was the richest man in Russia. After he began funding and supporting political parties in opposition to Vladimir Putin, Khodorkovsky was arrested in 2003 on charges of tax evasion and sent to a Siberian prison camp. I interviewed Khodorkovsky, by way of letters from prison, in 2010, and he urged Westerners to see Russia “beyond the window dressing.” Russia is a country, he said, “where a political opponent can be sent to prison for many years and have his property taken from him. You have to see Russia as a country where society views all this with indifference, where the elite keep silent.” Khodorkovsky speaks to Russia’s modern-day identity crisis. The “window dressing”—a nation with elections and foreign investment that’s eager to welcome tourists—hides a nation with all the repression of Soviet times, made even worse by corruption and a race for money.

I
T’S COMPLICATED
to consider the Trans-Siberian’s impact on Russia’s economy. In the early days critics saw building the railroad as wasteful. But closer to completion, others thought pouring money into the project was driving economic growth. What’s more, it made it easier for the Soviet government to transport people and resources and industrialize Siberia. But that may now be part of Russia’s problem. In their 2003 book,
The Siberian Curse
, scholars Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy describe how many remote cities are all but cut off: “They have no railways or major highways linking them to the rest of the country, while airline tickets remain prohibitively expensive.” Riding the Trans-Siberian, you meet passengers who need to reach isolated places—for work, or to see family or friends—and the Trans-Siberian is their only option. They may get off the train in a large city, then drive hundreds of miles to reach their destination. But the question Hill and Gaddy ask: Should so many people be living in these places? They argue that the Soviet government, by relocating people and industries to some of the coldest, harshest, and most remote places on the planet, made “monumental errors” that now explain many of Russia’s economic struggles. In a way, traveling the railway can feel as if you are riding down Russia’s spine, seeing the link that connects so many disparate places. Deeper considerations notwithstanding, today a Trans-Siberian train adventure is a dream destination for travelers all over the world, mentioned in the same breath as the Orient Express and the
Queen Elizabeth II
.

Sergei and I are headed for Vladivostok—but not on a famous Trans-Siberian train. We chose train No. 240 because it makes a stop in Yaroslavl, a hockey-obsessed city several hours east of Moscow. Midnight has passed, but our train doesn’t board for another forty minutes. Holding his plastic cup of tea, Sergei is a bit nervous. He purchased our tickets for this first leg from NPR’s travel agent, and for the first time, she offered “electronic” tickets. We have no formal tickets—just a printed-out itinerary. Elsewhere in the world, this would be a welcome, modern convenience. Russia being Russia, the thought of a train attendant happily welcoming us onto a train without a fancy ticket with a pretty stamp—an official
document
she can review, contemplate, massage in her hands—seems inconceivable. The intense love of documents is a thoroughly annoying relic of Soviet bureaucracy. Russians themselves will complain about it and laugh at it, even as they keep on producing and signing more documents. In an essay called “Political History of Russian Bureaucracy and Roots of Its Power,” Maryanne Ozernoy and Tatiana Samsonova explain how ingrained bureaucracy is in Russian culture. For one thing, a massive bureaucracy provided jobs—a ton of them—and gave people a sense of “stability and predictability,” the feeling they had found “their positions in the political system.” As much as various Soviet leaders abused the bureaucracy, the institution was also respected, in its most ideal incarnation, as a check on autocratic power. The thinking was, if all these agencies are in place, and documents are signed and delivered to record everything that’s done, how could a single leader at the top manipulate society? Belief in bureaucracy goes back centuries, Ozernoy and Samsonova say. And “national mentalities and psychological stereotypes” have become as “fully integrated” in Russian culture as the bureaucratic institutions themselves. But this can play out in truly absurd ways. A friend and fellow American journalist who was based in Moscow, Miriam Elder, once wrote an account of her experience at a Russian dry-cleaning business:

You put your six items of clothing on the counter. Oksana Alexandrovna lets out a sigh. This would be the point where you would normally get your receipt and go. But this is Russia. It’s time to get to work. A huge stack of forms emerges. Oksana Alexandrovna takes a cursory look at your clothes. Then the examination—and the detailed documentation—begins. This black H&M sweater is not a black H&M sweater. It is, in her detailed notes on a paper titled “Receipt-Contract Series KA for the Services of Dry and Wet Cleaning” a “black women’s sweater with quarter sleeves made by H&M in Cambodia.” Next, there are 20 boxes that could be ticked. Is the sweater soiled? Is it mildly soiled? Very soiled? Perhaps it is corroded? Yellowed? Marred by catches in the thread? All this, and more, is possible. The appropriate boxes are ticked. But that is not all—a further line leaves room for “Other Defects and Notes.” By now, you have spent less time wearing the sweater than Oksana Alexandrovna has spent examining it
.

I wish Miriam were exaggerating. She’s not. And so without physical tickets, Sergei wants to leave extra time to navigate any potential inconvenience, which was impressive foresight. We walk outside, onto a train platform that’s a sea of chaos and smoke, as Russians are dragging roll-aboard suitcases with one hand and using the other to take desperate final puffs of cigarettes before boarding. We find car No. 8. The train conductor—or
provodnik
—for our car is standing outside, dressed neatly in her Russian Railways uniform, which includes white gloves and a fur
shapka
, or hat. Russians take their trains seriously, and those who operate them are always dressed impeccably.
Provodniks
stand almost at attention, waiting for passengers to arrive. Our
provodnik
is a woman in her thirties. Her hat and overcoat are emblazoned with three Cyrillic letters that—to an eye accustomed to Latin letters—most closely resemble PZD. In Russian, they are the acronym for “Rossiiskie Zheleznye Dorogi,” or Russian Railways, the massive government conglomerate that operates the rails. The woman is holding a flashlight, ready to inspect tickets.
Tickets.
Not itineraries. Sergei hands over our printout, reaching out gingerly, expecting rejection.

“Electronnye bilety, nyet.” (Electronic tickets. No.)

Sergei and I are immediately directed to a place where three other passengers are standing—after-school detention for people who dared purchase electronic tickets. The
provodnik
addresses our failing in greater detail.

“We can’t accept these types of tickets until we verify your names on the passenger list. Someone is bringing it over soon. It won’t be long. And anyway, the air is fresh.” With this, she inhales through her nose, quite dramatically, almost mocking our weakness if we are somehow intimidated by the cold. She smiles.

“Breath it in. Enjoy. Wait.”

The temperature has dipped to nineteen degrees Fahrenheit. And the air, whatever she thinks, is actually a blend of smoke from cigarettes and smoke from the train’s burning coal. After ten minutes, another
provodnik
brings our
provodnik
a list that seems to satisfy her and exonerate us, and we’re waved onto the train. Immediately we walk from the frigid outside into a train car doing double duty as a sauna.

Russian trains tend to be cramped, sweaty, and chaotic. Most, like ours tonight, have fading carpeting and matching fading curtains. We walk into our car and enter a long hallway, with a clock at each end displaying the date and time. The clocks are modern and digital. But the list showing the various cities we’ll pass through is on yellowed paper and looks like it was printed in Gorbachev’s time. Many of the engines pulling cars across the Trans-Siberian route are powered by electricity. But trains on long journeys are often heated by coal, and each time the train stops, conductors shovel fresh coal into a hole, an arrangement that causes temperatures to rise and fall unpredictably—usually they rise, leaving passengers sweating profusely. It’s an astonishing paradox that you can be traversing a forbidding landscape with howling winds, horizontal snow, and unimaginable cold and yet be inclined to force the window of your train compartment open for relief from the sweltering heat inside.

The train’s lavatories, located at the end of each train car, contain metal toilets, and flushing involves pushing down on a pedal that opens a metal flap, revealing the tracks—the receptacle area for whatever you’re flushing. Walk past the lavatory, out a door, and you find yourself in a loud, semi-outdoor space equipped with metal cups that serve as ashtrays for smokers—in Russia, that’s just about every passenger. The rules of the train govern that smoking must be done in these spaces between cars—but that rule seems to change with the weather. When it’s too cold to smoke outside, many Russians hang in the indoor corridors puffing away. In the evenings, Russian passengers seem too desperate for a cigarette to care much about appearance, and you routinely find people lingering with cigarettes in the hallway wearing nightgowns or, in the case of men, boxer shorts and tank tops.

None of this seems, on its face, all that pleasant. Yet, I would take it over a ride on Amtrak any day of the week. There’s nothing boring about riding the Trans-Siberian. It’s hard yet poetic, perplexing yet entertaining. And you develop a routine. Morning, wake up, attempt to wash off in the cramped lavatory with the metal sink and toilet bowl. Use the hot water canister at the front of the train car to make instant coffee and instant oatmeal. Return for more hot water at lunchtime to make tea and instant noodles. Read, chat with passengers. In the evening, venture to the dining car for borscht or make more instant noodles. Visit a neighbor in his or her compartment and wash the night away with vodka.

Many Russians pass the time reading. In the budget-class cars, where there are no separate compartments—just bunks and tables, creating the feel of a wall-less hostel—younger Russians are reading tattered books. In the second- and first-class cabins, passengers are reading literature on Kindles and iPads. Seeing passengers dressed in little more than their underwear, smoking obsessively into the night, drinking vodka until they pass out, makes it easy to dismiss them as backward. But this is a mistake. Russia remains one of the most educated and literate societies on earth. I can see that in the Kindles being read, and sense it in the conversations.

Tonight, Sergei and I have a second-class compartment for four people. The doors to the compartments are lining the hallway to our left. Recalling the urgency with which our fellow passenger begged for lower beds back at the ticket office, Sergei and I feel fortunate to have the two lower beds on this trip. We enter our compartment, store our suitcases beneath the two lower berths, and sit down, knowing two strangers should be arriving soon.

S
HARING CLOSE QUARTERS
is second nature to many Russians, something I learned from Boris. He, Sergei, and I were once having dinner at a restaurant called Delicatessen, not far from NPR’s office in central Moscow. Conversation among the three of us can be difficult—hardest on Sergei, because as much as he wants to engage in casual chatter, he’s also translating. Boris knew enough English and I knew enough Russian for the two of us to get by—often with the help of hand gestures, noises, and second and third chances—but when we were all together we leaned on Sergei.