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

by David Greene

  It’s just my own small taste of how Russians live their lives. Difficult things happen, and you pray for the moment or day when things turn brighter. It’s as if Russians can’t appreciate something beautiful without first experiencing something hideous. This is where Russians seem to find their strength. Our train is now heading from Nizhny Novgorod to Izhevsk, in the Ural Mountains, so we can visit some babushkas who define finding strength in tragedy.

  When we were planning the trip, Sergei called to set up an interview with Mikhail Kalashnikov. Yes, that Kalashnikov. He’s ninety-three years old, lives in Izhevsk, and invented one of the world deadliest weapons. To reach Kalashnikov, Sergei had to go through the public affairs department of the Kalashnikov factory and museum. That’s where our trouble may have begun. “I’ll need passport information for you and the American correspondent,” the woman told Sergei on the phone. “Well, this is not for journalism, it’s for a book,” Sergei said. “Well,” the woman said, “the FSB may still want it—I need it in case they ask.” The FSB is Russia’s modern-day domestic security service—today’s KGB. The new agency is still based at Lubyanka, a menacing building in central Moscow that long housed the KGB—it has a small clock on the top floor that the British novelist Tom Robb Smith once described as gazing over the city like a beady eye.

  Any inconvenience seemed worth it, as I did want to meet Kalashnikov if possible (The inventor died following this trip at age ninety-four). And in any case the authorities were sure to find out at some point that I was poking around the country. But after Sergei’s phone call, I had a sinking feeling Izhevsk would be the spot where I’d encounter “friends”—my code word for the thuggish guys who would occasionally follow us.

  MY FIRST EXPERIENCE with Russia’s shadowy security services came shortly after I arrived in Moscow. I hadn’t even begun reporting yet, and was taking three intensive months of Russian-language training. I was sitting at a coffee shop in central Moscow, sipping tea while studying Russian verbs of motion, when I noticed that I didn’t feel my briefcase touching my leg anymore. Sure enough, it was gone. I asked the security guard at the café if he saw anything, and he said no, but that he was willing to call the police. I then called Sergei and Boris, who urged me not to call the police—it would only mean paperwork, hassle, hours at a police station. In Russia, often, involving the police is far more trouble than it’s worth—especially for an American journalist who may have just been had by one of their sister agencies.

  “David, is there anything important in there?” Sergei said over the phone.

  “Not really—my iPod, my digital recorder for work, and two Russian-language books.”

  “Boris and I both feel you should just let it be.”

  That evening, the phone rang in our apartment. Rose picked it up. It was a woman, speaking broken English.

  “My father. He found a bag on street. Maybe your husband’s?”

  I was delighted. Rose and I told the woman that we would meet her father the next day in front of the puppet theater, across the street from our apartment building. The man, in his fifties with a mustache, pulled up in a silver car right on time and handed me my briefcase. I handed him flowers and a box of chocolates, as a thank-you.

  “Gde, gde? [Where, where]?”I said, pointing to the bag, wondering where he found it.

  “Na ulitse [On the street],” he said. He hastily waved good-bye, returned to his car, and drove off with the flowers and chocolates.

  I inspected the bag. Everything was there—that is, except for anything electronic. No iPod, no recorder. Rose and I returned to our building and both went upstairs to tell Boris and Sergei what had happened. Boris looked at me, shaking his head back and forth. Sergei looked suspicious as well.

  “David, did you have any identification in the bag—ID, business cards?”

  “No.”

  “How do you think they found the number to call your apartment?”

  I felt queasy. I had just gotten my little reminder from the FSB that their beady eye was watching me. I didn’t want to be paranoid. But a friend who worked for the U.S. Embassy in Moscow said many Western journalists and diplomats get just such a nudge. A fellow American radio reporter in Moscow described how after she arrived in Russia and received her press credential, she returned to her apartment—which she had locked and closed up in the morning—and found her bedroom light on, her computer turned on, and her e-mail open.

  Luke Harding, a correspondent with the Guardian, was hounded more than any other Western journalist, even briefly expelled from the country. He described a break-in in his apartment that left the window to his son’s room open:

  Nothing had been stolen; nothing damaged. The intruders’ apparent aim had been merely to demonstrate that they had been there, and presumably to show that they could come back. The dark symbolism of the open window in the child’s bedroom was not hard to decipher: take care, or your kids might just fall out. The men—I assume it was men—had vanished like ghosts.

  Alas, all the work of “friends.”

  ON SEVERAL reporting assignments, Sergei and I were obviously trailed by a car. In the volatile region of Dagestan—where the FSB often targets and rounds up people they suspect of having ties to radical groups—we were almost happy to be followed. Better to be fully transparent about who we are and what we’re doing if it reduces the risk of the authorities mistaking our identity and doing something stupid.

  In Minsk, Belarus, Rose was with me when we spotted a thuggish-looking dude—dressed in black, hair slicked back—watching us at a café, then trailing us on the sidewalks, following us into our hotel, even joining us on the elevator. Rose, never hesitant to push buttons, waved good night down the hall to the man as we entered our room to turn in.

  These memories weigh on my mind as our train pulls into the station in Izhevsk. At the ticket window, as we’re paying for our next two legs, to Perm and then Ekaterinburg, I catch the eye of a young man at the adjacent window. He is acting as though he’s in a dialogue with the agent, but is paying way too much attention to the details we’re providing about our travel plans. The young man has a shaved head and is wearing a red, blue, and white athletic warm-up suit. When we’re done at our window, he cuts his conversation off—never buying a ticket to go anywhere—and abruptly walks away.

  “Our friend,” I mutter under my breath.

  Sure enough, as we walk out of the station, we see that young man and another look at us, then quickly look away, then get into a car and wait. Sergei and I find a taxi and are on our way, and we can spot the guys in the car following a good distance behind us.

  We try to ignore them as best we can and enjoy the drive out of Izhevsk and into rural Udmurtia. Russia is predominantly Slavic, but there is a dizzying mix of clans and ethnicities, large and small. The Udmurts are a people who live in this leafy part of southern-central Russia, on the western edge of the Ural Mountains, which divide European from Asian Russia. The Udmurts are known for their red hair and round faces, their own distinct language, and their traditional clothing that, for women, often includes colorful patterned head scarves.

  We are en route to Uva, a resort town of sorts in the forest. There is a famous sanatoriy, a health complex that probably compares best, though not perfectly, to the old resorts in the Catskills beloved by Jewish families from New York and immortalized in the movie Dirty Dancing. We heard that the “babushkas of Buranovo,” an inspiring female singing group, were on a five-day vacation here, and they agreed to let us drop by the next morning.

  Being followed by people can get into your head and make you paranoid. Sergei and I find a hotel a short walk from the sanatoriy and check in. The place is small, wooden, and drab, with just six small rooms. It seems entirely empty, but as we walk across the creaky wooden floors and back toward our rooms, a man walks out of another room and immediately introduces himself.

  “My name Vasily,” he says in broken English.

  I extend a hand to shake.
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  “Ochen priatno, menia sovut David [Nice to meet you, my name is David].”

  We carry on a simple conversation in a mix of basic Russian and English. Vasily learns that I am a journalist from America working on a book. I learn that Vasily is a doctor on business in Uva. Vasily says we are the only people staying at the hotel.

  “Banya!” he suddenly says, motioning outside. There is evidently a banya, a traditional Russian bathhouse, attached to the hotel. Vasily is proposing we join him there.

  “Sevodgnia vecherom [Tonight]?” he says. I give a nod that I hope agrees to nothing more than maybe.

  Here is a moment when I want to believe this is Russia giveth but fear it’s taketh, and I am caught in between.

  Vasily seems as unthreatening as you can imagine—a short, unassuming friendly guy in his fifties with thinning hair and a bushy little mustache. He probably just wants a few friends to drink and steam the night away with. Then again, isn’t it odd that he is the only other person staying in this hotel with us?

  Isn’t it odd that he happened to be coming out of his room just as we checked in?

  Could he actually be working with the FSB?

  I wrestle with whether I should let my paranoia and suspicion stand in the way of meeting a fellow traveler. I want to go to the banya—but feel like precautions are in order. Maybe its going overboard, but I decide that we should be on guard, especially so if there is food or drink presented by Vasily (I prefer that Sergei and I never both consume the same item) in case he’s laced it with poison and intends to rob us.

  The banya is a truly Russian experience, and Vasily does it up. We meet him after dinnertime in the small wooden building next to the hotel. He has brought beers, a bottle of vodka, glasses for both, pickles and homemade horse sausage (right, horse sausage) from his hometown, a few hours away. All this is spread out over a wooden table. Vasily is banya-ready in a green tank top and shorts. We have agreed that I’ll partake of the bathing itself. Unlike most Russian men, Sergei isn’t all that fond of the banya anyway, and he can stand guard over all our things.

  Vasily tells us he is in fact the chairman of his local banya society, so I’m presumably in good hands. He instructs me to remove my clothing—as much as I would like. Some men go full monty. I typically hang onto the boxer shorts. I’m pretty happy when Vasily does the same.

  I’ve been to a banya a half dozen times, and while I always feel cleansed and rejuvenated afterward, I can’t totally disagree with Daniel Rancour-Laferriere who, in his book The Slave Soul of Russia drew a parallel between the bathhouse and the pride Russians feel from enduring something difficult. The author called the banya a “favorite theater of pain” for Russians.

  The idea may seem strange to the Westerner who is accustomed to the lonely pleasure of a tepid bathtub, or the bracing spray of a shower. A proper Russian bath, however, is not just relaxing, or bracing. It truly hurts. The Russian does not merely soap up and rinse off, but endures additional quotas of suffering. The water . . . thrown onto the stones or bricks atop a special bathhouse stove . . . produces steam which is so hot as to bring out a profuse sweat in the bathers. The eyes and nostrils sting from the heat. Moreover, the naked bathers flail one another (or themselves) with a bundle of leafy birch twigs (termed a venik). This mild flagellation supposedly assists the steam in flushing out the pores of the skin, and leaves behind the pleasant fragrance of the birch. Sometimes the hot portion of the bath is followed up with a roll in the snow, or a dip in a nearby river or lake, or a cold shower.

  “Sergei, you good?” I say, looking at my colleague seated before a spread of horsemeat and beer. “I’m good, David, enjoy.”

  Vasily walks me through a thick wooden door into the next chamber, where he tends to some mechanics. He opens the metal door to a compartment and ensures that a burning fire has the pile of stones good and hot. We then move to the third room of the wooden cabin, the bathhouse itself. There are wooden benches, and I sit comfortably on one as Vasily opens another metal door—accessing the same compartment but from this other room—and douses the hot stones with water. There is a sizzling sound, and the heat in the bathhouse goes immediately from really, really hot to unbearable.

  I am sweating profusely. “Aaarrrhhh.” Vasily is making an animal sound, suggesting he’s enjoying the heat. I would not call it enjoyable, but I do feel and appreciate the therapeutic nature of all this. I take a deep breath—the air is hot and clean as it runs into my lungs.

  “David.”

  He’s trying to get my attention. This isn’t my first rodeo, so I know what’s about to happen. As per tradition, Vasily has taken a birch branch—the venik—out of a bucket where it was soaking, and he is motioning for me to lie down. I do, and he begins whacking me violently with the branch, while making that animal noise: “Aaarrrhhh.”

  I really can appreciate most banya traditions. But the idea that violent contact with birch somehow adds to the experience seems like a stretch. After a few whacks Vasily lies down, and I return the favor.

  After ten minutes of this, we both return to the middle chamber, where the next tradition awaits. There is a bucket of ice-cold water, and I dump it over myself, screaming bloody murder but knowing this is somehow making me a healthier and happier person, because why would generations of Russian men have done it otherwise?

  Vasily does his dunk. Both dripping wet and shivering, we return to Sergei and sit at the table.

  “How was it?”

  “Great, Sergei, thanks. You sure you don’t want a turn?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sausage?” Vasily is holding a chunk of horsemeat in his right hand, and a large sharp knife in his right. By this point Sergei and I have concluded that Vasily seems genuinely harmless—though Sergei still decides not to drink the beer or vodka (I take one for the team here).

  Vasily and I are sharing a small bench in boxer shorts, our wet bodies all but touching.

  “So you’re a doctor,” I ask, with Sergei generously translating.

  “I’m a doctor of alternative medicine. For animals. I’m here to treat cattle around Uva. They’ve been having infections in their hooves.” He then cuts two hunks of horse sausage. We both chew them and wash them down with beer.

  “I have a special honey that I invented that treats ailments. I’ll give you some when we go back to the hotel.”

  Vasily and I talk into the night about our jobs, our professions, our countries. “You know, David, if you and I ran the two countries, there would have been no Cold War!” We find this funnier than Sergei does, perhaps helped by the beer and vodka. When the three of us return to our rooms and say good night, I am happy that Sergei and I were careful with a stranger. I am also happy we kept that banya date, because the memory of that night remains special. (The same cannot be said for the photo Sergei snapped of me and Vasily, dripping on each other on that cramped bench.)

  The next morning Sergei and I walk up a snow-covered dirt street to the entrance to the sanatoriy. It’s a sprawling two-story tan-brick complex set in front of a frozen lake, with forest extending to the horizon behind it. Soft music is playing from a set of outdoor speakers, interrupted every few minutes by a woman’s voice announcing the day’s activities (Karaoke! Skiing! Excursion to a museum!), or meal hours at the cafeteria or just general messages of warmth (“Welcome to our sanatoriy. Have a nice trip, for those leaving. We wish everyone a cozy atmosphere, love, and happy days until our next meeting.”)

  Personally, this kind of place would be my worst nightmare as a vacation spot. But my favorite babushkas are here, and I’m anxious to reconnect with them.

  9 • GALINA

  THE BURANOVO BABUSHKAS live in the tiny Udmurt village of Buranovo, just outside Izhevsk. After many of them lost their husbands, they turned to music for comfort. Somehow a Beatles cover they performed at a local concert made it onto YouTube and went viral.

  On my first visit to see them I was overwhelmed by their charm and courage—such big
personalities in such tiny bodies. Most of them barely reach five feet. I sat at a dining room table next to the oldest member of the group, eighty-four-year-old Elizaveta Zarbatova, whose head barely reached above the table. But her high-pitched, crackly voice carried authority. She was widowed in 1957, when her husband was electrocuted. She was sitting next to a woman who lost her husband in 2004 to drinking and diabetes. Another fellow babushka lost her husband in 1984 to alcoholism, and shortly after his death, she lost her own right arm trying to use an electric saw. But Zarbatova, like her friends, was in no mood to complain.

  “After I lost my husband, I received some kind of gift—the ability to compose music,” she told me. “The music comes from the heart. The suffering comes right from my heart.”