Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia

by David Greene

  Aunt Nina has brought out tea and dessert—delicious little chocolates. And Pavel is pouring the next shot of vodka. He passes a plate of pickles to me, and I grab one. He raises his glass, and dedicates the toast to me: “To our visitor from America.”

  “Spasibo,” I say. We all hold up our glasses and down the shot. The rest of the evening is hazy.

  After a few more shots here, Zhenia, who does not drink, agrees to take us on a drive. We end up at one of Sergei’s cousins’ homes. Everyone is friendly, offering plates of sausage . . . and cheese . . . fruit . . . and more vodka. Sergei is talking about the interview we have tomorrow (well, now it’s later today). We are meeting a man named Alexei who, Sergei explains, was a former traffic cop, falsely accused of killing a woman, tortured to force a confession. Pavel, who has moved on with us to this next stop, gives me a don’t-believe-what-you’re-hearing glance. He has worked for the local police.

  “And I will tell you—I have never, ever, heard of such a thing happening.”

  Around three in the morning Sergei and I stumble into Aunt Nina’s flat. She is awake, watching TV, and says something sternly in Russian about too much vodka. I have been assigned Zhenia and Albert’s bedroom (they generously agreed to stay elsewhere), where I immediately pass out. The last memory I have is Sergei and Aunt Nina on the couch out in the living room, chatting about . . . well, something.

  7 • ALEXEI

  THE RUSSIAN WORD for “hangover” is pokhmelye. To truly capture the strength of the word and the condition, say the first syllable as if you are clearing your throat. “Pokhkhkh. . . .”Put the major emphasis on the middle syllable, “MAY,” then bring the word to a gentle end with a quiet “leh.”

  Now, imagine Sergei’s family—each and every member who encountered me—looking at me and immediately saying this word in the form of a question: “Pokhmelye?”

  It becomes the running joke of the day. Sergei, joining Aunt Nina to deliver water to my bedroom: “Pokhmelye?”

  Pavel, more of a statement of fact than a question: “Pokhmelye. Ya tozhe [Me, too].”

  By late in the day, say 6:00 p.m., the joke extends to how long my pokhmelye seems to be lasting. “Yeah, evening is not so much pokhmelye time, huh?” I say, which Sergei translates, sending Zhenia and her mother into convulsive laughter.

  I have emerged from my therapeutic shower, consumed a good dozen of Aunt Nina’s pancakes, gulped down several cups of water and coffee, and informed Sergei that I am now human enough to get on with our day.

  Zhenia drives us to a bland-looking brick apartment building about ten minutes from Aunt Nina’s place and tells us to call whenever we wrap up our meeting.

  Sergei and I enter the building, climb four flights of stairs, and locate the home of Alexei Mikheyev and his mother, Lyudmila.

  She opens the door and eagerly says “Zdrastvuyte, zakhodite [Hello, come in].” I already have the sense that a visit from a journalist offers some glimmer of hope that she and her son rarely see.

  Lyudmila has a round, haggard-looking face. Her age and fatigue are not disguised much by the bright red she’s used to color her chin-length hair. Sergei and I remove our shoes, and Lyudmila guides us through a door to the right and into a bedroom where her son is lying flat on a queen-size bed, his head propped on a pillow. “Dobry den [Good day],” he says quietly.

  Lyudmila pulls up a few chairs around the bed, and we all sit to chat. Alexia is thirty-seven. From head to waist he’s built like a wrestler—shaved head, broad square shoulders, muscular arms. Then you notice his legs, stretching out on the bed toward me. They’re thin, frail, and useless.

  “I do my best for my son,” Lyudmila says, almost apologetically. She points to the wheelchair in the corner of the room. “He can’t walk. The doorways in our flat are too narrow for the wheelchair. It doesn’t fit in the bathroom, so I lift him up and put him on the toilet. It’s not easy.” She’s smiling. “He’s a big guy.”

  We are sitting in awkward silence. “Alexei, may I hear your story?”

  He’s told it before and is happy to tell it again, grateful for as many people in the world as possible to know what happened—because, he says, too many in Russia just look the other way.

  “I used to be a traffic cop. One night in 1998 I was off duty, driving home with a friend, and two girls on the side of the road needed a ride.”

  As we know, it’s fairly common in this country for strangers to pick up people who want a lift.

  “One of the girls asked to be dropped off at one spot. Then I dropped my friend off. Then I drove the other girl a bit farther and dropped her off. The next day I got a call from a colleague who said there was a girl missing in the city. He asked if I would come in to the office to give any information I could. Turns out it was one of the girls, and the other girl remembered my car and told the police about the ride. I put on my uniform and went to the office to help in any way I could.”

  He could tell immediately something was wrong: “An officer said I was being charged with a crime. He said that fact that I gave this girl a ride meant I must have kidnapped her. They said the fact that I asked the girls to fasten their seat belts was evidence that I was restricting their freedom.”

  Alexei was detained, and then things only got worse: “Soon, they charged me with rape and murder.”

  Lyudmila is giving her son a look of proud determination, hoping his strength grows each time he recounts this. Alexei uses his powerful forearms to lift himself higher up, so his back is more upright and he can look more easily at me and Sergei. He is now sitting up, in a gray T-shirt, the wall behind him covered by an oversize Afghan-style rug.

  Alexei says his friend in the car with him, Ilya, was interrogated about the night: “We were questioned separately. And they brought me a written statement from Ilya detailing how I raped and murdered this girl. There were details about how I tied up her hands, and where I dumped her body.”

  Ilya was Alexei’s best friend growing up, and as an adult.

  “Why do you think he said these things about you?”

  “I have no idea. He was probably scared about what the police would accuse him of.”

  Alexei says they were determined to convict a fellow cop: “This was 1998, in the middle of an anticorruption campaign in Russia. I’m sure this seemed like an ideal case. They could convict, and everyone involved would get promoted. I was told later that the missing girl’s uncle was in the federal correctional service—a colonel. He ordered everyone to pay close attention to this case. So very high-ranking officials from the region got involved. The uncle ordered that they wrap this case up in ten days.”

  I ask what happened next.

  “I was held for several days. They kept saying, ‘This is your friend. He is telling us everything. And you are lying. They tried to get me to confess. I refused. And they began torturing me. They beat me up. They attached metal things to my ears and electrocuted me. They kept increasing the intensity. I couldn’t take it. So I confessed. I said, ‘Yes, give me the papers, I’ll sign them. I raped and killed this girl.’”

  But Alexei tried to roll that back.

  “After I confessed, two other people came in—some top officials—and started asking me for more details about what I did. I told them, ‘I didn’t kill anybody.’ I thought maybe they could help me. The deputy prosecutor was there. I thought maybe he would help. But I finally realized there was nobody to complain to. I was brought back to the room and handcuffed. Then they started torturing me again. The electricity. They threatened to attach the things to my testicles. I thought I would die, honestly. And they would just tell everyone I had suffered a heart attack in prison. I don’t know how I did it—I thought my handcuffs had me attached to the chair—but I just jumped as hard as I could. There was a window two meters away. I crashed through the glass.”

  Alexei fell three stories, landing on top of a motorcycle in an internal courtyard of the police station. “I felt my body just draped over the bik
e, with glass everywhere.”

  His spine was shattered.

  “An ambulance came and drove me to a hospital. But nobody treated me for days. I think doctors were told not to approach me because I was a maniac. Five days after I got there, the guards suddenly left my room. They took me in and operated on my spine. I was told that the charges were all dropped. The missing girl had been found.”

  Lyudmila came to the hospital and saw her son for the first time. She did not know yet that he would never walk again, that she would become his full-time nurse.

  For fifteen years mother and son have been largely shunned in the community. It is as if they were responsible for causing some dust-up with the authorities that people prefer to ignore—as if mentioning it, or asking questions, or being in any way associated with this mother and son, might somehow get them into trouble.

  “To this day,” Alexei says, “not a single person has apologized to me.”

  Nearly a dozen investigations were opened into the case, but all were quickly closed. Finally a local group called the Committee Against Torture took up Alexei’s case and brought it before the European Court of Human Rights in the Hague. In 2006 the international body, ordered the Russian government to pay Alexei 250,000 euros ($400,000).

  Two other things happened, seemingly as a result of the European court taking on the case. Two local police officers were sentenced to four years in jail for their treatment of Alexei. And the Russian domestic security services began pressuring the Committee Against Torture in Nizhny Novgorod, suggesting they might be receiving money from British intelligence.

  Alexei leans his head back against the rug on the wall behind him. His mother is smiling at him but also quietly sobbing. The money from the European court was drained quickly by medical bills—Alexei once traveled to Norway to see a spine injury specialist. Now he and his mother live on a small government pension that barely covers their living costs. There is no money to upgrade to an apartment that’s wheelchair accessible. Here there is no elevator, so Alexei must crawl down four flights of stairs to go outdoors. Lyudmila says they have asked local agencies if there’s public money to help a disabled person, and have been told there’s just nothing available.

  “You know, in Soviet times, people helped each other,” Lyudmila says.

  Many Russians say this—that in Soviet times perhaps strangers didn’t help strangers on the streets, perhaps people generally looked the other way when others were treated unfairly, but among family, friends, and trusted close neighbors there was a sense of shared sacrifice and survival.

  Today feels colder and more lonely to people. In Soviet times people did not ask questions or challenge the authorities, but if something went wrong, you could turn to your small community for warmth and safety. Boris had Gia in the communal apartment, and it felt like the best time in his life. Lyudmila once felt that same closeness and believes neighbors or local officials would have helped her and her son in the past.

  Maybe in those days she could have persuaded those in charge of communal housing to move her to a first-floor flat.

  ACROSS RUSSIA TODAY there are countless stories of people being falsely accused, beaten in prison, blamed and convicted for something they never did because the person opposing them in the case had more money or better connections in the local courts. I did some reporting on Russia’s justice system during my assignment in Moscow, focusing on statistics for the first nine months of the year 2010. During that time eight hundred thousand criminal defendants faced charges in the nation’s federal court system. Of them, 99.3 percent were found guilty, according to the Russian Supreme Court.

  That’s mind-boggling. There is no way nearly every person charged with a crime and brought into federal court is guilty, unless the system itself makes that assumption. And a former federal judge I interviewed, Aleksandr Melikov, told me that’s just it. There is a “mind-set that a court is a law-enforcement body,” he told me, “not an institution there to protect citizens.” Melikov lost his job after his superiors began complaining that he was being too lenient with defendants.

  There are victims of this system everywhere. I met one, Andrei Grigoryev, in 2011. He was forty-three, married with an eleven-year-old daughter, and worked as a forest ranger in a rural area a few hours east of Moscow.

  He once went after some hunters who were illegally shooting fox and deer in a wildlife preserve. When he gave chase, they came after the officer on their snowmobiles. Grigoryev told me he was knocked down as he fired his rifle in the air.

  One of the hunters was a powerful local politician. Not coincidentally, Grigoryev was quickly charged with abuse of power, facing up to ten years in prison—basically for doing his job.

  Russia’s justice system allows for Grigoryev to be wrongly accused. It allows Alexei to be beaten and tortured. It allows high-profile figures like Mikhail Khodokorsky, the former oil tycoon, to serve time in a Russian penal colony for crimes that still remain unproved.

  It is easy to blame Russia’s leaders. I also struggle over why Russia’s citizens aren’t demanding something better. Whatever is holding them back may well be the same thing that keeps Sergei from asking tougher questions when he’s setting up an interview. It could be why that man in Kaliningrad lectures his wife for being too vocal about the Holocaust and why Russian train passengers go through the motions at the security checkpoint—assuming it just has to be this way.

  Sergei and I have been sitting with Alexei and Lyudmila for two hours. I have one more question: “Did you ever see or talk to Ilya again?”

  “Never. And we were best friends. But I never want to see him again after what he did to me.”

  “You want to know how sad it is?” asks Lyudmila. “When Alexei was growing up there were maybe thirty or so boys in the neighborhood who were friends. So many of them have died—of drugs. Or serving in the wars in Chechnya. Really there were only two left, Ilya and Alexei. And now they never speak.”

  Sergei and I begin to get our equipment together. “Thank you for your time, Alexei. Good luck to you. I will be thinking of you a lot.”

  “Spasibo,” he says, before resting his head back on his pillow.

  Lyudmila walks me and Sergei to the door. We are putting our shoes back on. “Please, if there is any way you can find a doctor who can treat him, will you let me know? We are always looking.”

  “Konechno [of course],” Sergei says.

  As we walk out into the hall and begin walking down, I imagine Alexei on these very stairs, in a sitting position, his mom helping him down each step, one by one. I look back up, and Lyudmila, with her dyed red hair and watery eyes, is watching our every step as we walk away. She doesn’t want to close that door just yet, because it will once again seal off that desperate world within.

  8 • VASILY

  NOW I get to enjoy the Russian tradition.

  During our trip so far, I’ve seen so many made-for-the-movies scenes of families dropping loved ones off to catch a train, or greeting them with hugs and love as they arrive. It happens everywhere, at every stop the train makes. It’s hard to find that kind of poetry on Amtrak.

  I got a small taste when Zhenia and Ira picked us up two days ago. But this evening I am getting the full treatment.

  Zhenia and her friend drove to the station separately, just to make sure they’re able to say good-bye.

  “David, this is for you,” Zhenia says. She hands me a magnet, with an artist’s rendering of Nizhny’s rivers and landscape. I’ll cherish it—this city that looks so much like my home, Pittsburgh.

  We hug, as Pavel reaches behind me and grabs my roll-aboard suitcase from my hands. “David, let’s go, we have to board.”

  Yes, we.

  Pavel walks, dragging my suitcase along, boards the train with us, finds our seats with us, and gets us settled until it becomes clear our departure is imminent. He and Sergei share an extended hug, and Pavel kisses Sergei on the cheek: “Sergei, you come back soon. David, very nice to meet
you.”

  He gets off the train and positions himself on the platform, with the entire family, waving and waving as our train begins to move. I still have a photo of the scene on my iPhone—the flash off the window distorts it some, but there is Pavel, in his black leather hat in the cold, pressing his face against our window, and Ira, bundled in a black jacket and hood, smiling warmly at me and Sergei, posing as I snap the shot.

  Russia can be so maddening. The day before, I listened to Alexei describe the horror of being tortured at a police station, then ignored after being fully exonerated, living his life without the use of his legs and with no one seeming to care but his sweet mother. This country’s system of justice—this country—is so deeply flawed.

  And then there are these poetic moments—a poetry that grabs you and touches your heart in ways I rarely experience at home, or in any other country.

  “Russia giveth. Then so quickly, she taketh away.” That’s how my best friend and college roommate, Chandler Arnold, summed up his vacation when he came to visit me and Rose during our time in Moscow. Each day, each hour, seemed to bring dramatic emotional swings.

  I remember one day in Moscow that especially struck me. I waited for a city bus outside my office in the bitter cold. The bus arrived and creaked to a stop. The door opened, I boarded, and reached into my pocket for rubles to pay the driver. He was in an angry mood and kept speaking to me sternly in Russian. I used the little Russian I knew at the time—“Ne ponimayu [I don’t understand].” He was cold and mean and aggravated with my lack of Russian, or my being American, or both. I finally found the change, but he refused to give me a ticket, which you need to scan in order to pass through a turnstile and reach the seats. I was trapped there, with him, at the front of the bus. He pulled to the next stop and opened the door, fully expecting me to surrender and disembark. That’s when a voice came from the back of the bus. “Malchik!” (I had just been addressed as a “young boy.”) A large woman, bundled up in a maroon overcoat and maroon fur hat, was approaching me holding up a card with a bar code. I saw two other older women, babushkas, in their seats, also holding up cards. They were monthly bus passes. The first woman handed me her card. I scanned it at the turnstile and walked through as the driver grunted. The woman then yelled at the driver in Russian (I don’t know what she said, but I liked it). Her generosity, and the generosity of the other women who were ready to lend me their passes, filled my eyes with tears. I returned the pass and held out the change from my pocket, but the woman refused to take it. “Nyet, sadeet-yuh [No, just sit down]!”