by David Greene
THIS ENTIRE REGION of Russia—the city of Yaroslavl, outer cities like Rybinsk—is still mourning the loss of the hockey team but trying to move on. During our three-day stop in this area, Sergei and I wanted to attend a Lokomotiv game. The team obviously has all new faces but is competitive again. The Kontinental Hockey League—Russia’s equivalent of the NHL—helped by asking other teams in the league to send a great player or two from their rosters to play in Yaroslavl, which the teams were happy to do. Some local fans did not support that, wishing instead that Yaroslavl would take just a break from competition for a few years, develop new talent, honor the dead, and ponder the future more slowly. But, like after the airport bombing, there was a rush to just cover up the tragedy and get back to it.
The evening hockey game, we were told, was sold out, and we had no idea how we would get tickets. We figured we would grab a taxi to the arena and keep our fingers crossed. As soon as we got into the cab, we knew we had found a man who could help. Our driver, a chatty Russian in his late forties with trimmed brown hair, had a little doll hanging from his rearview mirror. It was a hockey player in a Lokomotiv uniform, No. 79, with “Orlov” written across the back. Sergei was in the front seat, listening as the driver explained that Dima Orlov was his son, who plays for the Lokomotiv youth team, the cauldron of talent expected one day to play with the big guys. The next twenty minutes were a rush. Our driver was excited to have an American journalist on board, and he frantically called his son, Dima, who was already at the arena. He unloaded a mouthful of Russian into his cell phone, and the only words I could pick up were “Amerikanets . . . journaleest . . . nuzhno . . . bilety? . . . davaite!” which translates roughly into “Got some American journalists here and they want tickets to the game—let’s help them!” And help this generous man did. We pulled up to the arena, and his son, Dima, ran up to the car to greet us. The tall, well-built teenager was soft-spoken, but there was little time to say anything anyway. We were in a rush to get inside. Dima told Sergei that we had no physical tickets—nothing but ominous, I had learned—but that if anyone asked, we should just say, “We are with Yuri Vladimirovich.” I never did find out who Yuri was. But boy, was his name well-known at the arena! Sergei and I rushed behind Dima, passing throngs of people waiting to go through security. At the metal detectors Sergei yelled out “Yuri Vladimirovich!” and we were waved through like dignitaries. Turnstyles where people were collecting tickets? We strolled right on through, as Sergei kept saying, to anyone willing to listen, “Yuri Vladimirovich.” Here, I thought, was a window into the shadier side of Russian life—know the right people and the sky is the limit. Ethical quandary—yes—but I comforted myself because Dima seemed to be doing something so very generous for us.
In many ways the arena was familiar to me. I love professional hockey. My team is the Pittsburgh Penguins, and I go to as many games as I can. There was a concession stand, where I bought a beer. Same as at home. What was different were some of the food offerings. To go with beer? The best-selling option was bags of dried, salted fish strips that resembled worms but tasted far better. I washed some down with beer; then Dima, Sergei, and I settled into seats, never having shown a physical ticket to anyone (victory!). We were behind one of the goals. The ice, nets, general vibe—same as at home. A difference, however: cheerleaders. The Pittsburgh Penguins have no cheerleaders. Here, in the aisle next to me, cheerleaders, one on each step, in orange tops and silver miniskirts. The young Russian women did not look older than teenagers, twenty-one at most. And this was just the beginning. Across the arena, on a huge platform situated above fans below, were more young women, dancers dressed in tight-fitting outfits with black and white stripes. The theme of their attire seemed, at least vaguely, to be related to the railroad. As unfair a comparison as it may be, I could not help but think of the book and movie The Hunger Games, where each region of an oppressed, postapocalyptic country represents a different industry, and where the young “tributes” are dressed in costumes representing the industry of their homeland. In Soviet times Russian sports teams were sponsored by different industries—and Yaroslavl’s team, Lokomotiv, was and still is sponsored by the Russian Railway. As dance music blared, the girls danced in front of a sign that read, translated, “Russian Rails: main sponsor for Lokomotiv.” All over the arena was the familiar acronym “pzd.” On the scoreboard, ad after ad: “Russian Railways: We’re making our future.”
But then the past took center stage. Players from both teams—Yaroslavl Lokomotiv and the visiting Magnitigorsk Metallurg (this team, sponsored by Russia’s steel industry, makes a Pittsburgh Steelers fan like me proud)—began skating around the ice as the arena fell silent. This quiet “skate” took place at the beginning of every Lokomotiv home game, to honor the fallen team. Then a ballad began to play, and images of the dead players flashed across the Jumbotron with a message: “The team that will always be in our hearts.”
. . .
THE CIRCUMSTANCES surrounding that 2011 plane crash remain murky. The season was just beginning, and Lokomotiv was ready to fly out of town for its first game of the season. Shortly after take-off in Yaroslavl, the plane went down, killing all but one aboard. Officially pilot error was blamed. But the timing was odd. There was an international economic summit taking place in the city, and Russian prime minister (now president) Vladimir Putin was in town. Many local residents refuse to believe that his presence was not somehow related. Was Putin actually the target of a terrorist plot that somehow went awry? Did Putin actually order the crash to bring the nation together after a tragedy, just as he was running to become president again? These seem like far-fetched conspiracy theories, but they do point to the deep suspicions many Russians have about their leadership—and in particular, Putin.
More than twenty thousand fans were silent during the emotional tribute. Then came the cue that it was okay to start cheering. A loud train whistle blasted in the arena, and the new Lokomotiv team took the ice, to the delight of their wild fans. The game was close and intense, as fans urged the hometown team on, yelling, “Shaibu! Shaibu!” which translates literally as “Puck! Puck!” but translates among hockey devotees as “Goal! Goal!”
Lokomotiv lost in the end, but that may have been because they had already clinched a spot in the upcoming playoffs and weren’t playing their hardest.
After the game Sergei and I caught up with Dima, who agreed to chat for a few minutes before going to meet his girlfriend—who, it turns out, was one of the cheerleaders dancing near our seats. Dima, Sergei, and I stood near one of the concession stands as fans streamed out of the arena behind us. He explained that the plane crash was especially hard for him, since he knew all the players. “I trained with them. I grew up and lived with them.” He dismissed all the theories about how the crash was anything but an accident. “Only God decided that something like that would happen.” Dima spoke quietly, thinking about every question I asked. Sergei somberly translated for me. I asked Dima about his plans for the future, and he revealed an inner conflict I found in many younger, more educated Russians with enough money to consider their options. “I live in this city, and I love this city,” he explained. “But I want to play in the NHL. It’s my dream. Because life is better in countries like the USA and Canada. My girlfriend, she is twenty-one. I am twenty-one. And we will be married in two months. The laws are better in those other countries. People are more helpful. Everything is more comfortable. Why can’t we have that here?”
For many young Russians like Dima, there is a desire to leave and see the world, but it comes with guilt and a nagging sense that a Russian should stay and endure rather than escape. This view of the world was summed up perfectly by a woman named Ella Stroganova, the curator of the Yaroslavl City Museum, whom I met on my first train trip across the country. I had asked her why Russians responded to harsh experiences with determined fortitude and a feeling of inevitability, rather than being spurred into action to find solutions and make things better. Looking for answ
ers, or doing something, she explained, was simply un-Russian. It was an admission of vulnerability that Russians see elsewhere in the world. “Progress makes a person absolutely weak,” she told me. “He loses his strength because he no longer needs to think how to survive.” Some in Russia’s younger generation, like Dima, are escaping this thinking and dreaming of new things and different places. But as I would learn on this trip, not all young people feel as Dima does.
Sergei and I walked out of the arena, into a light snow. I looked back at the arena, where a huge portrait of the fallen players hung on the outside wall. I had not seen it going in, since we were in such a rush. Under the portraits were the words “Our team. Forever.” One of those portraits was of a young fallen star, Nikita Klyukin.
SERGEI AND I leave our indulgent digs at the Hotel Rybinsk and find a taxi to go visit Nikita’s parents. Like many Russian cities Rybinsk is a factory town, built around its industrial fortress—an aging behemoth that for years has produced jet engines. The buildings lining the city’s boulevards are beige or gray, the snow is abundant but not fresh, so it’s turned gray, and all this paints a depressing backdrop interrupted every so often by flower kiosks bursting with color. Bland, dark, and cold as Russia can feel, no society has a deeper love of flowers, or tsvety. At the end of a workday, on the streets or on the subway, in any Russian city, you will find men and women carrying bouquets. For any occasion—birthdays, retirements, office parties—flowers are nothing short of a requirement. And so without even mentioning it to each other, Sergei and I know that visiting Nikita’s parents means bringing flowers. We ask our driver to stop by a kiosk near our destination.
“Maybe a half-dozen roses for Nikita’s mom?” I say to Sergei.
“No,” he says, almost sternly. “Even numbers of flowers are only for funerals, for mourning a death.”
After several years in Russia, this is the first I’ve heard of this particular tradition. (And it is no small realization, having brought Rose even numbers of roses on many occasions. Oops?)
“Sergei, they lost their son a little more than a year ago. Are they still in mourning?”
The two of us are perplexed. When does a parent close the door on such a tragedy? Never, of course. But when it is time to move on? More to the point, when does a person not want to be reminded of a tragedy anymore? I lost my own mother in 2006. Her sudden and unexpected death, from a blood clot, was easily the hardest day of my life. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about her. But within months I began the hard process of moving forward, unshackling myself from that awful day in the past. I want to believe Nikita’s parents are well on their way down that road.
“Odd. Let’s go odd. Five roses.” Sergei thinks about this for a moment, then nods his head approvingly. “I think this is the right decision.”
Our decision reached, the woman at the flower kiosk delicately pulls five roses—three red and two yellow—from her gorgeous stash, dresses them with white baby’s breath, trims the stems with scissors, wraps it all in plastic, and ties the bouquet neatly with yellow ribbon. I hand her seven hundred rubles (twenty-three dollars), and we are on our way up the street.
Nikita’s parents live upstairs in a tan-brick apartment complex that’s as drab and uninteresting as so many buildings in Russia. But I learned a rule very quickly in this country: Don’t judge a building by its structure. Many a time I have trudged through a trash-strewn courtyard, opened a rusting metal door, climbed a dark, cracked-concrete staircase only to find a person’s apartment beautifully decorated and welcoming. Many landlords could care less about the outside. Tenants care deeply about what’s inside.
Nikita’s mom, Liubov, opens the door of her kvartira, or “apartment,” and waves her right arm in a sweeping motion for us to come in. I hand her the flowers. She nods and quietly says “Spasibo,” thank you. She looks down at them for a moment, perhaps counting, and smiles, the only hint that we made the right call. Following another tradition, I remove my snow-covered boots, since we are in someone’s home. Liubov points to a pile of slippers, which families always have on hand for guests, but Sergei and I both just stay in our socks—one of two acceptable options. Nikita’s mom is a short, tough-looking woman with cropped dark hair, a square-ish face, and a gap between her two front teeth. At first the tension is difficult to endure. She isn’t sure whether to detour into small talk or go right into talking about her son. Sergei and I aren’t sure where to go either.
She quietly walks us into a room that I immediately identify as Nikita’s old bedroom.
“This is my museum,” she says.
It’s full of medals, photos, hockey sticks, and other memorabilia. The centerpiece on the wall is a photo of Nikita, in his red-and-white Lokomotiv uniform and red helmet. He looks as if he belonged in the NHL, with long black hair, stubble on his face, and a cool, confident stare that could say to a defender, I’m ready to finesse around you for a goal, or maybe instead I’ll body-check you into the boards. Nikita’s hockey gloves are sitting on a ledge beneath the photo, facing outward from the wall, arranged perfectly so you see this young man’s face above, then you look down to see two hands that could be part of the same body.
“He was born a big baby,” Liubov tells us. We have now moved to the living room, Sergei and I on a couch, with her to my left. “It was written on his birth that he would be a famous person.”
There is a sudden crash from the other room. “Ah, the vase, the vase, excuse me!” The flowers were too big for whatever vase she had placed them in, and our gift had fallen over. She is back within moments, and picks up where she left off. She’s told this story before.
“Nikita started studying hockey when he was six. He worked hard. But we never saw tears. I had a rule: If we ever see tears or bad grades, you come home. It was hard on him. But he never complained.”
By age twelve, he was at a boarding school in Yaroslavl, a couple of hours away. Nikita’s parents thought about moving to be close to him, but his dad has a reliable job at the jet engine factory in Rybinsk.
“At age twelve he’s captain of his youth team. At fourteen he’s selected to the national team. At age eighteen, he has a bronze medal in the hockey world championships. And he became the youngest player ever in the KHL.”
“Can you tell me when you last spoke to him?”
“Ten minutes before the plane crashed. He called me to say he was ready for the season. In a very good mood, but as always, he was a little afraid to fly. I said good-bye, and he made that sound of a kiss. And we said good-bye.”
A door opens and closes out in the hallway, and Nikita’s dad walks into the room. “Sergei,” he says, introducing himself, before shaking my hand and the other Sergei’s hand. Now I know where Nikita got his size. Sergei is broad and tall, with thinning blond hair and his son’s eyes. He quietly sits down, sensing that his wife was in the middle of answering my questions.
“So when did you learn about the crash?”
“An hour later,” Liubov says. “My mother called and said, ‘Where is Nikita?’ She had seen the news on television. I had to tell her he was on the plane.”
She and Sergei drove as quickly as they could to Yaroslavl. “The team didn’t call. No one called. We didn’t know whom to ask. And there was security everywhere. Finally they told us to go to the—”
Sergei, translating as quickly as he can, now pauses, looking for the right word in English. “Morgue,” he says.
Liubov continues.
“And so we were at the morgue, for almost a day until . . . we recognized him.”
We sit for a few moments in silence. And then I ask the couple if there is anything, perhaps a lesson, I can learn from this tragedy.
“We live in a very dangerous country.” And it’s not just one thing, Liubov says. Infrastructure is simply not safe. There are plane crashes, ferryboat accidents, fatal collisions on the roads, all far more often than in other countries as developed as Russia. Life is even dangerous just walking fro
m one place to another. Each year in Moscow there are as many as a dozen deaths caused when an oversize icicle falls like a dagger from a building and impales a pedestrian. Because of this threat Rose and I spent much of our time in the winter looking up, while walking on sidewalks.
