by David Greene
I THANK VIKTOR KALASHNIKOV for his time and bid him farewell. I can’t stop thinking about how Russia is chock-full of characters. I just think about the babushkas and their tragic but inspiring stories, Marina in her over-the-top ski pants that fit her personality, Vasily serving up horse sausage in his banya-soaked boxer shorts and this quiet, peaceful soul in a black suit whose father invented the AK-47.
In the parking lot Sergei and I say a final good-bye to Marina. I realize, in all the chaos and haste, I never asked about her story. I do, briefly, and she says very little other than that she lives alone—no husband—raised two daughters alone, and now has three grandchildren.
“I don’t like to talk about myself much,” she says. “But maybe you can find me a husband in America.”
I’m suddenly overcome by warmth and guilt. She’s loud, bossy, and quirky. Actually, I’ve never liked someone so much who annoyed me so much. I think about the babushkas, and somehow Marina makes more sense. She’s lonely, looking for connections, and proud of the job she does. In her own way she saw it as her duty to go above and beyond for me and Sergei—as our tour guide during our stay here. And for that I am grateful.
“Thank you again, Marina.”
“You’re welcome.” And then she drives off.
We have a few hours to kill, so Sergei and I find a nice table in a hotel restaurant to grab a bite and write some notes from the day.
And there they are. Our “friends.”
The same guys who followed us out of the train station when we arrived in the city walk into the restaurant, pretend not to see us, but grab a table in our section. I am sure they’ll trail us to the train station in a few hours. I just hope they are local and let us go on our way once we are off their turf.
11 • ANGELINA
THE RUSSIAN VILLAGE of Sagra is where I nearly lost my wife.
When we stopped there on our Trans-Siberian trip in 2011, a man named Andrei Gorodilov took a liking to her. (Okay, that’s at least the way I saw it at first). I had to stomach this, because Andrei, thirty-nine, and his family were people I was eager to get to know.
If anyplace in Russia seems to be experimenting with democracy, it is this tiny village in the Ural Mountains. I had read the colorful story of how villagers in Sagra, including Andrei’s family, took up hunting rifles and pitchforks on a summer night in July 2011 and defended the community against an approaching criminal gang. As the story goes, the gang had been in skirmishes with residents of the poor village in the past, and on this night was approaching in cars just before midnight to terrorize the place. Residents clashed with the gang, and one of the intruders was killed. A New York Times story a month after the attack said villagers tried to alert authorities but got nowhere. “For nearly five minutes, by her count, a resident named Tatyana Gordeyeva tried to persuade a police dispatcher on the telephone to connect her to a station. When help finally came, she said, the battle had been over for two hours.” At first local officials interrogated residents of Sagra and, according to villagers, charged some with hooliganism. That included Andrei’s father, Viktor. In response, villagers did the unthinkable: They took to the Internet to fight the local authorities. They found a lawyer to fight for their rights against a local government that seemed to have decided the case before it began.
And they won.
Arriving in Sagra that first time, I immediately noticed (perceived, at least) Andrei’s fascination with Rose. Perhaps this threw me off my game—or maybe Andrei used Russian voodoo to put a curse on me—because for whatever reason, I couldn’t walk a block on Sagra’s snowy streets without falling flat on my face. One fall was especially troublesome—I was carrying two bottles of vodka, gifts for a family we were to interview, and I slipped, saving myself but shattering the vodka bottles.
Unofficial Russian law says one never sacrifices vodka to save himself.
This event earned me the nickname Lokh (dope) among Andrei and his friends. But Rose, as she so often does, came to the rescue. After my brutal fall, she could tell I was humiliated and swung into action. Andrei and Viktor had brought us to a neighbor’s house in Sagra for lunch—brown bread, homemade vegetable spread, and six jars, each containing a different variety of pickle. Rose befriended the woman hosting us, telling her she bore a striking resemblance to Angelina Jolie. Then she befriended Viktor and before I knew it, Viktor had Rose doing shots of pepper-flavored vodka with him. He had her convinced it was an elixir, as she had been battling a cold.
Andrei, seeing Rose hanging out with his dad as if they were old-time friends, seemed unthreatened by me and (mercifully) no longer called me Lokh.
Andrei, thirty-nine, has a graduate degree in economics. More than anyone else I somehow expected him to believe in democracy the same way I do, especially after the experience his village had just been through to protect its legal rights. But Andrei didn’t draw a connection between the battle his village waged and some broader fight for a different future for Russia. He watched the news. He knew all about the Arab Spring. But what happened in Egypt and Libya only scared him. Andrei had lived through the Soviet collapse and then suffered as boasts of democracy were followed by economic crisis.
“I can see what’s happening in Libya,” he told me. “That was our path in 1991. The Libyan people will live much worse than they used to live. They had social programs, they got apartments for free. Now this will stop. I already lived through those kinds of changes.”
What Andrei and the villagers of Sagra did was fight when they were pushed to the brink—they fought on the streets because they believed lives were at stake. They took to the Internet to fight because otherwise family members might have gone to jail. But there is no broader confidence in free expression and public activism. In fact there’s still a fear that those things, when used too often, can make life worse.
Meeting Andrei gave a face to some polling that stunned me. The Pew Research Center polled Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, and people in other neighboring countries. They asked questions like “would you prefer a strong leader or democratic values?” When they asked the question in 1991, majorities wanted democratic values. Today the opposite is true—people prefer a strong leader. Those early poll results came amid the Soviet fall, when there was a desperate plea for a new system to restore order. But there has never been any deep or lasting commitment to democracy.
Sagra is in the Ural Mountains, the window onto Asian Russia and the vast region known as Siberia. Often late at night aboard the train, Russian passengers stand along the corridors, gazing out at the dark, empty landscape, often glancing at that list of stops to see when the train would next be pulling into a station. The stops often last fifteen or twenty minutes, just enough time to jump off on an icy platform and buy some potato chips or, when we are lucky, dried fish from women selling from baskets outside. The conductors shovel in more coal to heat the train cars, chop ice loudly from beneath them, and then call for us to board. And the train sets off again.
One night in 2011, I had my iPhone plugged into a wall socket in the hallway to charge it. As we pulled out of a city I saw the single bar of phone coverage disappear, and I didn’t have service for hours. I just stood there, gazing out into this vast, white Siberian landscape that was lit by the moon at midnight. I felt melancholy, this feeling that Russians are living in some sad darkness, unable to see the future that could await them if they only fought harder. And yet something about the poetry of the place, the pain people have been through, the laughter and strength and kindness from so many I’ve met, all made me want to smile.
Before leaving Sagra back in 2011, Rose and I gave Andrei our phone numbers, and promised to stay in touch. I bought three new bottles of vodka and asked Andrei to give two of them to the neighbors (who were supposed to receive the ones I broke) and to keep one for his family. I told Sergei and Rose that I had to return to Sagra, to learn more.
. . .
WE FINISH UP dinner and tea at the hotel restaurant in
the center of Izhevsk, and cab to the train station. Our FSB friends are still with us. We saw them ask for their check at the restaurant as soon as we did. We saw them leave the lobby of the hotel just after us. Now we see them on the platform. Since we have no family to bid us farewell here, this almost makes me feel special, that a couple of thuggish strangers are seeing us off!
To reach Izhevsk we had to detour off the Trans-Siberian main line. Tonight we are heading north to the Russian city of Perm, on the western edge of the Ural Mountains. We have to lay over there for a few hours, then rejoin the main line, cross the Ural Mountains, and reach Ekaterinburg where Andrei is picking us up for our trip to Sagra.
The trip has been grueling, frustrating, exciting, with unexpected twists at every step—but you fall into a routine that gets you by. Often I’m especially in the dark because I don’t know the language. It strikes me—what a metaphor for how Russians approach their lives. In a way I feel that’s how the Russian government keeps citizens in the dark—laws are never clear, courts are unreliable, punishments are arbitrary—it’s like living in a place where the people in charge are speaking a language you never understand. And consider what that does to any impulse to speak up.
I remember on one Russian Trans-Siberian train a pleasant young woman with dyed blond hair stumbled into my compartment and seemed delighted to have found a foreigner. She was holding a plate of pirozhki, little stuffed pies—these had cabbage—and said in very broken English, “You get all, twelve hundred rubles. Deal good, very good.” I wasn’t understanding, so I asked if I could find my translator. “No, no. No. good deal. Pay, please.” I wasn’t inclined to fight with an employee with whom I would be sharing a train for days, so I handed over twelve hundred rubles—roughly forty dollars. The woman left the plate of cabbage pies and scurried away. They turned out to be stale and lacking in cabbage. Sergei came by, saw the plate, and burst out laughing. I had apparently fallen for the oldest trick in the book, handing over a fistful of money for day-old dough that was the end of the batch after the cook ran out of cabbage. Humorous as that was, in truth, I feel that Russians lead their lives in a chaotic and confused world, protecting themselves as best they can but with little incentive to make waves. I could have gone to find the vendor to get my money back—but I didn’t.
Our train pulls out of Izhevsk, and I am already settled into the humdrum routine. I make some tea, make my bed, and smile at the woman in the berth across from me. She is already tucked under her blanket, reading.
My first solid night of sleep in a while ends with shouting. The provodnik is yelling “the bathroom will be closed in five minutes for cleaning. Thirty minutes to Perm!” I crawl out of bed, and run to the lavatory to brush my teeth and throw cold water at my face. Then Sergei and I gather our belongings and disembark in Perm, where we have a few hours to burn. This is by far the most ramshackle train station we’ve visited so far. In a dingy basement Sergei and I find a luggage storage room to leave our suitcases. Then we walk upstairs to a small café.
“Sergei, I’m starved—you want any food?”
“Just tea, David.”
I walk up to a buffet line and take two hard-boiled eggs, some kasha, and two teas—all for a whopping sixty-nine rubles (two dollars). I am peeling my first egg when a thought occurs to me. Maybe total paranoia, maybe not, but I ponder one way our “friends” could bring an abrupt end to my trip: If they planted drugs or something else in my suitcase. I scarf down the food, and we return to the basement to grab our luggage from the storage room. Then we find a taxi.
One potential stop that interested me in Perm was the local office of Memorial, a nationwide organization that highlights the repressions of Soviet times and helps modern-day citizens fight for civil liberties. The group is often a thorn in the Kremlin’s side, exposing how protesters are jailed and intimidated, hurting Russia’s image abroad. Sergei had made a few calls and was told some of their leaders would be available today if we stopped by.
Our taxi pulls up on the side of a busy street, where there is no obvious sign of Memorial, just a gray cement block of apartment buildings, with storefronts on the ground floor. Then I see it—next to a manicure/pedicure shop, beneath an advertisement with a woman in a bikini is a small sign—“Memorial”—near a brown metal door. Sergei and I swing the creaky door open and walk into a dank cement corridor with signs for lawyers, travel agents, and business advice plastering the walls. On another metal door at the opposite end of the corridor, there’s another sign for Memorial, mentioning “alternatives to military service and questions about human rights.” We knock, and a pleasant young woman invites us inside. The floor is wooden, covered with dried mud. There are several wooden desks, an aging photocopier, a coffeemaker, an electric teakettle, and the telltale Memorial flag with a red flame draped on the wall.
“The people you want to see will be here shortly,” the young woman says.
Sergei and I sit, and I can’t help but think how this shabby office next door to a mani/pedi shop says a lot about the battle for civil rights here. The organization fights a lack of money and lots of government pressure to achieve a respected place in Russian society.
Several minutes pass, and an older woman walks through the door, gives us a look, and motions to a table in the corner, where the teakettle and cookies are located.
“Ochen priyatno—David,” I say.
“Angelina.”
She turns the switch on the teakettle, munches on a cookie, and waits for the water to heat. Sergei and I sit in the second and third wooden chairs at the table.
“What would you like to know?” she says. Sergei briefly tells her about my book, and how he was told that she had a painful story from Soviet times that caught Memorial’s interest.
“You know they wrote a book about me?”
Angelina reaches into her bag and pulls it out. It’s called The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia. The book, which I mentioned earlier, is by British historian Orlando Figues. She pages through and finds a black-and-white photo of a baby girl. “That’s me. That was the last photo my father took of me.”
Angelina Bushueva has red-dyed hair tied in a pony tail. She’s wearing a black blouse and purple scarf. She squints a bit through her glasses when she speaks.
“You’re young,” she says to me, smiling. “You don’t know these stories.”
She puts a tea bag into a cup and pours hot water in. She motions with her head to some other teacups. Sergei and I each take one, along with a tea bag, and we pour.
“My father was head of a technology bureau. One day, just like that, he was arrested on his lunch break. And after he was arrested we were evicted from our house. We were told we were ‘enemies of the people.’” That was the fall of 1937. To this day she doesn’t know why her father was taken. But in Stalinist times this was common. He ordered arrests and executions of people because they were academics, or in the sciences, or of certain religions, or because Stalin and his cohorts just acted on whims.
“My mother saw him in prison. This photo, she brought it to him. Then he was sent to be executed.”
Angelina is speaking smoothly and quietly in Russian, with little outward emotion.
“It was impossible to talk about any of this. Only in 1986 did my mother begin telling us all the details. At eighty years old, my mother starts talking. You know, she was pregnant when my father was executed.”
It was a baby boy. And after the birth, Angelina’s mother and baby brother were sent to a gulag—a “camp for wives of betrayers of the motherland,” Angelina recalls.
She was two and had a sister who was four. “My sister and I were sent to an orphanage. My grandmother found us when I was six.”
Angelina and her sister went to live with her grandmother. Other families were there, including a man from Leningrad who ran a printing house. “And he is the reason I learned to read.”
She and her sister started receiving letters from their mother, from a gulag in
Kazakhstan. Finally the two girls were allowed to travel to be with their mother—and they attended school in the camp settlement.
I can’t stop thinking about my morning—my anger at being followed by a few thugs, my worry about our luggage, my impatience and desire to just get through this layover in Perm so we could be on our way to Sagra. I never expected to meet this woman and get such a vivid portrait of tragedy.
After the Allies won World War II—“Victory Day,” as it’s remembered in Russia—Angelina and her family were freed from the gulag and returned to Russia. Her mother’s movements were restricted. She wasn’t allowed to live in big cities, and the work she could do was limited. But she took illegal jobs and got by.
“I came to Perm and started school,” Angelina says. “When Stalin died in 1953, my mother came to Perm and was able to rent an apartment. She received papers confirming her ‘rehabilitation’—she was no longer an enemy of the people.”
She pauses here and shakes her head.
“There were no real crimes. Stalin wanted there to be enemies everywhere. You know my brother went to the army? He served west of Moscow and studied to work in the Interior Ministry. He died with a very high rank. What an irony, given that’s the agency that arrested his family.”
Angelina worked as an elementary school teacher, then moved to a factory for twenty-nine years. Then she settled at Memorial, trying to raise awareness about what happened in Soviet times. Trying to confront the past so Russia can move into a new future.
“For years people have been afraid. Worried about their children, worried that history could one day repeat itself. The way I talk now? It’s difficult to get other people to do that. They are still afraid.”
She looks directly at me: “There has never been an apology for Stalin’s crimes. But the time will come. The time will come when they apologize.”
It was no apology, but the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev did stun the world in 1956, famously denouncing Stalin in a speech. The general trend in modern Russia is a growing nostalgia for Stalin. Putin has spoken almost fondly—rarely critically—of him. And while there is no organized campaign of fear and terror in today’s Russia, Putin’s regime has increasingly clamped down on democracy, rounding up protesters and targeting human rights groups like Memorial. Not to mention, of course, the corrupt and flawed system of justice that sends innocent people to jail—maybe not at the hands of Stalin but at the hands of an overzealous judge under pressure to rack up convictions. Russians today live in some state of purgatory—told by their leaders that they live in a democracy, encouraged to go to the polls and vote. But meanwhile, Russians can never be sure when the authorities might act in a wholly undemocratic way—bringing terrifying memories of this country’s past back to the surface.
