Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia (9 page)

I was sitting beside Sergei Yovlev, and Sergei my translator was facing us. (This seems an appropriate moment to point out that Russia’s limited supply of first names makes storytelling a special challenge.) Our conversation turned to a tragedy in Yovlev’s hometown, Yaroslavl, an awful story that made the news worldwide. The industrial city, in 2011, lost its entire professional hockey team in a fiery plane crash. It was an accident eerily reminiscent of the tragedy in 1970 in which Marshall University in West Virginia lost its football team when the team plane went down. I remember the scenes of carnage described in the news stories from Yaroslavl—the plane took off and quickly crashed to the ground near the Volga River in “flames as high as a nine-story building,” one police officer told the BBC. A resident said she “saw them pulling bodies to the shore, some still in their seats with seatbelts on.”

Yovlev was a fan—
is
a fan—of the team. He sat in his train compartment, looking at me, speaking in a hushed tone.

“Vashichek.”

One by one, he named the dead players. To honor them. And to show me how deep his love for the team ran.

“Marek.”

He paused.

“Demitra.”

Painful as the memories remain, Yovlev has no doubt that the city’s hockey tradition will come back because, he said, surviving tragedy is “the way the soul of a Russian person is built.” His deep stare as he said those words was briefly hypnotizing and sent a powerful message: I was not supposed to feel sad for him. In a country where today there is little to be proud of or believe in, hockey had become Sergei’s faith. And disappointment had made his belief even stronger.

Our conversation brought to mind a 2011 suicide bombing at Moscow’s Domodedevo Airport that I covered. The Islamist insurgency had been growing ever bolder in Russia’s North Caucasus, and terrorist leaders vowed to redouble their efforts to carry out attacks on Russian soil. It’s the same simmering radicalism that some believe influenced Tamerlan Tsarnayev, the older of the two brothers who carried out the bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013. Tamerlan is ethnically from Chechnya and spent time in Dagestan—both regions in the North Caucasus. On January 24, 2011, a twenty-year-old from another region, Ingushetia, set off an explosion in the international arrivals hall at the airport in Moscow, killing several dozen people. The attack set off an old debate over Putin’s antiterrorism tactics. Putin supporters said the deadly airport attack was a reminder of why the Russian government must aggressively target anyone suspected of terrorist ties in the North Caucasus. Putin’s critics said he has led a fierce campaign—often to score political points at home—that has backfired. Their thinking is Putin has been too aggressive, ordering Russian forces to round up young Muslim men in droves, which has actually helped the Islamist insurgency recruit in larger numbers.

Covering the aftermath of the airport attack stunned me. Even as body bags were still being removed from the international terminal, the airport was up and running again. Check-in desks were open for business. Newsstands were selling magazines and gum. Planes were taking off and landing. The cab driver who drove me back into the city after my night of reporting told me that his jacket, laid out in the back of his station wagon behind my seat, was covered with blood and pieces of flesh. He had been in the room when the explosion detonated. “One man, he fell down. His leg was torn off,” he said in Russian to Sergei, who was sitting shotgun and translating.

“There were all these pieces of flesh,” the driver said. “I am in shock. I still can’t get myself together.” I could not understand how this man was back to work, driving a cab, hours after witnessing such a scene. His explanation was matter-of-fact: “I have a schedule that I have to keep to. There’s no way I can call my boss and say I’m not working anymore today.” Duty called, a job called, and neither chaos nor anger nor pain was going to be a disruption. It was simply about moving on, fighting through.

It’s the way the soul of a Russian person is built.

The historian Orlando Figes captured this in his 2007 book
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia
. After tragedy, he wrote, Russians have long sought out a “different type of consolation.” Even gulag laborers, he found, believed they “had made a contribution to the Soviet economy. Many of these people later looked back with enormous pride at the factories, dams and cities they had built. This pride stemmed in part from their continued belief in the Soviet system and its ideology, despite the injustices they had been dealt and in part, perhaps, from their need to find a larger meaning in their suffering.” Steven Lee Meyers of the
New York Times
wrote in 2005 that “it would be wrong to stereotype, to say that Russians are fatalistic or heartless. They are, however, not only resigned to tragedy but inured to it in a way that to many raises alarms about the country’s future. They are not just helpless in the face of disaster; they could be called complicit, ever beckoning the next one by their actions or lack of action.” His point was that if you believe tragedies will just happen, you don’t work as hard to prevent them.

After pulling into Yaroslavl on our first train trip, Sergei and I took a daylong excursion to find a haunted village named Mologa. It’s under water—Russia’s own bizarre Atlantis. For years, occasionally, when the water level of a sprawling reservoir dips low enough, the dome of an Orthodox church peeks out of the water: a stunning reminder of an awful time. In 1939, Stalin demanded more hydroelectric power as he prepared the country for World War II. He ordered that the Volga River be dammed near the city of Rybinsk, creating a massive reservoir. He was undeterred by the fact that dozens of communities—including the village of Mologa—would be flooded and destroyed. Nikolai Novotelnov was a boy at the time. He and his mother watched their home taken apart, log by log, by prisoners and loaded onto a wooden raft to be shipped downriver. Novotelnov and his mother were homeless for a year and alone because his father was in one of Stalin’s gulags—having been accused of telling a joke about the Kremlin in public. “They took him on September 10, 1936,” Novotelnov remembered. “He was sentenced to six years.” He died before he had served his time.

Novotelnov, now in his late eighties, recounted all this, sitting proudly upright in the living room of his home—the same one that was deconstructed to get out of the way of Stalin’s floodwaters six decades ago. The home was rebuilt in 1940 and has been situated since in Rybinsk, not far from Yaroslavl. These days Novotelnov is angry. He’s ashamed of Russia. “This county is divided between rich and poor,” he said, “and money has become the most important thing.” He also hates Vladimir Putin. To feel proud, he looks to the past: “Nothing good has happened in Russia during Putin’s time. I am his opponent because if we look at our life before 1991, it was more quiet, more measured. Labor and people were valued.” Novotelnov seems to say a great deal about Russia today. Here is a man who harbors so much anger at both Stalin and Putin. Yet he would never take his complaints to the streets—that would be beneath him. It would feel to Novotelnov like an act of weakness rather than one of survival. Grit and survival are the emotions he wants and likes to feel, because they give all his sacrifice a purpose. He has nothing to hold on to but a vague nostalgia for later Soviet times when—hard as things were—basic survival seemed more assured than it does today.

I began to think about how some Americans see Russians as weak, because they don’t
fight
harder for democracy. In fact, Russians don’t seem sold on democracy yet. Like Ukraine’s democratic experiment from 2005 to 2010, Russia’s experience with democracy under Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s was miserable—the economy collapsed and people went hungry. Russians take pride in enduring—certainly until they believe, without any doubt, that there is something worth fighting for. When I watch Russians go through the motions of daily life, the question I always imagine on their minds is, “Why take the risk?” Hardship, upheaval, and a feeling of having no control over anything combine to shape the Russian soul. And the latest difficulty just girds many Russians to endure the next.

I
N FOUR HOURS
,
Sergei and I will be back in Yaroslavl. We are seated, sharing one lower berth, facing our roommates, Ilona and Viktor. Ilona is by the window peering outside quietly, I imagine, already missing her boyfriend back in Moscow. Viktor is returning from vacation in Thailand, but he seems melancholy about the trip. As a Russian on the beaches of Thailand, he felt like an outcast. At one point he had to exchange some Russian money, but the Thai clerk spoke only Thai and English. He asked several fellow Russian tourists if they knew English to help, and none did. “Young Russians today have to start learning English and other foreign languages,” he says. He bemoans how, for decades during Soviet times, Russia was locked away from the world. Two decades after the Soviet collapse, Russians are just beginning to travel. But it is taking some adjusting—both for Russians and for fellow tourists who are often turned off by the Russians they meet. Speaking to Viktor reminds me of when the antigovernment riots broke out in Egypt, in the early days of the Arab Spring. Tourists fled from Egypt—except for Russians. Interviewed on the beaches of Sharm-el-Sheikh, they asked reporters why anyone in their right minds would pick up and evacuate. They paid for a vacation, desperate for some sunshine. You think just an outbreak of
violence
would cause them to change their plans? Russians
are
a different breed. But speaking with Viktor was the first time I realized that maybe some don’t want to be and are feeling some discomfort and shame as they try to fit in.

Ilona uses the ladder to climb up onto her bed above Viktor. She reaches to remove her sweater. Without having to be asked, we men look away—awkwardly and politely—to give her an ounce of privacy. She curls up beneath the covers. This was the opening we all needed to politely disengage. Viktor climbs up and prepares himself for bed above me. I turn the lights off, shut the door, and lock it securely. I am the last to crawl under my sheets. I tell Sergei, “Spokoynoi nochi,” or good night. He says the same back. The two of us fall silent. As my eyes begin to close, I see Ilona’s face above, caught in the glow of her cell-phone screen, staring across at Viktor. They begin to whisper to each other quietly in Russian. I have no idea what they’re saying. But these strangers, brought together in close quarters by fate, are enjoying one another’s company.

5
•
LIUBOV

I
’M NOT SURE
if our train has slammed into something on the tracks, but a loud bang wakes me up. Then another. And another. Half asleep, I realize our
provodnik
is waking us up as we are approaching our stop. “
Yaroslavl, tridtsat minut
[Yaroslavl in thirty minutes].” Sergei and I rustle ourselves out of bed as quietly as possible, as Viktor and Ilona are fast asleep, heading farther east. Neither of them wakes up amid our fuss—or at least they show no outward sign. I grab my toothbrush and deodorant and navigate the dark hallway to the lavatory. Hesitant to use the notoriously dirty train water, I use a bottle of mineral water to wet my toothbrush, quickly brush my teeth and wipe my face with the towel provided with my linens—it’s smaller then an average washcloth, and not nearly as plush. As I return to the compartment, Sergei has already bundled up in his black winter coat, winter hat, and gloves, and he’s ready to disembark. I quickly follow with my preparations, finishing as our train pulls into Yaroslavl. Sergei and I barely have time to drag our luggage and ourselves off the train and onto the platform as the train begins to pull away. At the last moment I catch the eye of our
provodnik,
who is smiling through a window, waving good-bye. So stern on first impression, as she refused our electronic-ticket itinerary, but with time I see her true warmth. I can’t say the same about Yaroslavl’s weather. Sergei and I are standing on a near-empty train platform in the bitter cold just after four in the morning. I am not sure why I had forgotten this would be our reality when we put together our itinerary: Overnight train from Moscow to Yaroslavl. Arrive 4:00 a.m. Wait three hours. Take local commuter train to the nearby smaller city of Rybinsk to meet the parents of a young hockey player killed in the team plane crash in 2011. I still stand by the plan. But the pressing question is what the hell to do with ourselves for the next three hours.

We wander into the station and are forced to walk through a metal detector. Both Sergei and I set it off, but no one is manning it, raising the question of its usefulness. The machine bursts to life with loud beeps that echo through an otherwise quiet station, where five or six tired passengers are—were—sleeping soundly in a waiting area. Sergei and I sit on a bench, and he brings out his laptop and begins to surf the Internet. I am too fidgety for this, and tell him I am going to wander outside to explore. There are about three feet of snow on the ground, and the cold is so bitter you can’t keep your gloves off for more than a few seconds. But as I walk away from the front doors of the station, there is a familiar beacon of light beckoning: Bright . . . yellow . . .
arches
.

I travel. A lot. And as a rule, I avoid McDonald’s. Why in the world would I choose an American cheeseburger or “Happy Meal” over local cuisine, which, whether tasty or not, is worth sampling if you want to understand a new place. But in the middle of the night in Yaroslavl, I offer myself excuses for making an exception. It is the only business that appears open for a mile in either direction, I am cold and hungry, and the waiting area in the train station was doing nothing for me. What’s more, McDonald’s experiences
are
a window into life in this country (or I’m telling myself that to rationalize my yearning for a McDonald’s “Big Breaksfast”).

In Russia there’s nothing casual about restaurants. Dining out was so rare in Soviet times that when it happened, families took the experience very seriously. That seriousness remains part of the culture. Russian families will peruse a menu for minutes upon minutes—even if the server is just standing there waiting—as if menu reading is truly a rare treat. I recall my first experience with this. Sergei and I went out to report a story in Moscow shortly after I arrived on the new job, and I suggested we grab tea in a café near our bureau before heading off to the subway—like a quick Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts stop on the way to work in the United States. We walked into the coffeehouse, and Sergei immediately told the hostess, “Table for two.” Before I knew what was happening we were seated, and Sergei was looking over the menu, about to order a pot of tea and some food to go with it. Grabbing a quick tea—or quick anything—is just not the drill.