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

by David Greene

  Evgeni is still holding on to my protest question.

  “In our family” Ivan’s friend says, “it works like this. Husband comes home, wife gets angry, husband gets up and goes to work; then it repeats. That is the only kind of ‘protest’ we have. You just think about the hard life we have. You think there’s time to think about revolutions? You think anybody’s worried about a revolution?”

  Ivan is starting to tear up, and I’m not sure why. It doesn’t seem that the conversation about politics took him here. Maybe he was holding it in when he spoke about his parents. But this tough young man is suddenly vulnerable in a way I never expected.

  “Our government oppresses us,” he says. “But we love it. Our country—we love it.”

  There is desperation in his voice. Maybe desperation to hold onto something: His friends, his grandmother, his village, his image of a Russia that protects him.

  It’s easy to forget he’s only twenty-one.

  “From childhood we decided that we would stay together in life,” Evgeni says.

  I ask Ivan what he dreams about.

  “I have a great wish to travel. But it’s not possible.”

  There’s no money left. Ivan rents his own place. He and Evgeni do odd jobs around the village to get by.

  “I would love to own my own business,” Ivan says. “It would take a certain sum of money—maybe five hundred thousand rubles [seventeen thousand dollar] to get started, rent a van. I have a driver’s license.” He pauses. “With all the difficulties in life? Will never happen.”

  We have been sitting for more than two hours. Our tea is cold. I ask if anyone wants more, but everyone declines. The woman behind the counter has been watching an old Soviet movie on the television all this time.

  “So what do Americans think of Russians?” Ivan asks.

  First impression, I explain, is a country full of people who don’t smile much. But when you spend time, as I tell him, you see the warmth and friendship on the inside. Both young men smile. But Ivan presses on. (Who’s the journalist here anyway?)

  “What was your worst moment living here?”

  “My wife and I were used to living in a country where you can rely on the police if anything happens. I didn’t have that confidence here if, god forbid, anything happened to me or my wife.”

  Now it’s Evgeni’s turn. “Okay, so was there a worst moment?”

  “Fortunately nothing happened to either of us.”

  “So,” Ivan says proudly, “your worst fear about Russia never came true.”

  “I guess not.”

  Ivan smiles. “In our country we don’t assume anything about our police. If something happens on the streets, better not to call anyone. Because it’s better to keep your record clean.”

  I tell these young men how grateful I am to have met them. All thanks to a meteorite.

  “There has been a joke on the local radio,” Ivan says: “We are never happier than when a meteorite lands in the morning.”

  I don’t even know how to respond to that.

  “I was so curious to meet a foreigner,” Evgeni says. “And you know we joked about how maybe you and this meteorite were not accident.”

  “Oh, like somehow I rode on this meteor—”

  “Konechno [of course]!” Evgeni says, laughing.

  He stands up, and so does Ivan. I ask if I can snap a photo of them. Ivan drapes his right arm around his friend’s neck and with his left hand, makes a peace sign for the camera.

  That photo is never being erased.

  Sergei and I exchange hugs with the two young men, and say good-bye. Then Ivan Kichilin and Evgeni Barandin walk out of the café as they came in—with a tough-guy strut, marching back into their world.

  Sergei and I lean back in our chairs, both moved by the last few hours. For Sergei, I know that hearing about Ivan’s military service was not easy. His son, Anton, has such big dreams of being a physician and traveling the world. He doesn’t know yet if he can go directly to a residency, or has to do his year in the military first. Clearly that year can change a young man.

  The Russian army makes Russians.

  Maybe it’s true, in a way. I have no idea how Ivan’s life might have been different if he had not lost his parents. But he’s a smart, personable, creative young man. Suffering the tragedy of being orphaned—then being beaten down and rebuilt in the army—hardened him. He self-imposes limits on his dreams, accepts his place, and wants to believe his country—his motherland—for all its flaws will protect him. It’s hard to bemoan such genuine faith.

  There are millions of young men in Russia, each with a different story. But I would hazard a guess that many share something with Ivan—difficult upbringing, maybe the loss of a father at a young age, economic hardship, and a year in the military. Through all that, young men emerge stoic. I imagine many, like Ivan, see no other way.

  Sergei and I pay for the tea and go outside, where Oleg has been waiting in his car, probably by now on his thirtieth cigarette. Despite our invitation to join us, he said he preferred to wait outside.

  Sergei and I decide to take a night off from serious conversation. Oleg drops us off on the main promenade in downtown Chelyabinsk. It is a welcoming pedestrian mall, especially welcoming for a city known for being so dark and dirty. As is the case often on cold nights in Russia, there are no pedestrians to be seen. Usually it’s just that everyone is keeping warm inside. And that is what Sergei and I find as we wander into an Irish pub called the Fox and Goose.

  I head directly to the bar, but notice that Sergei is still at the hostess stand. I had forgotten, since moving away from this country, how Russians generally dislike sitting at bars. Sure enough, the bar here is empty. It’s too casual, I guess. And the restaurant experience should be a serious affair, involving a table with seats.

  I digress: Rose, the former bartender, did a guest stint at a Moscow restaurant. The goal was to encourage members of the American Women’s Organization to try the place. Rose was a big draw. The bar area was overrun with customers. People filled the barstools, and others stood behind. This left the Russian staff at the bar totally confused. They kept serving drinks to people standing, and asking Rose, “Where is that person sitting?” Rose would say they weren’t sitting. The staff member would say, “Then we cannot serve them—there is no way to put their order in the computer.” Just like Rose’s butter.

  I cave to Sergei’s wishes and we take a table beside three Russian men who are so drunk on beer and cognac they’re barely conscious. Sergei and I don’t quite get to that point, but after a few beers, we take our own crack at Russian politics. Sergei has listened closely to my line of questioning. He knows that in Moscow there is an impression that Russians are antigovernment, ready to take to the streets. That’s not the case in the country at large.

  “You know, David, I have a friend who likes Putin. He always says to me, if you want to meet nice people, go to a rally in Moscow. But nothing’s gonna change.”

  We’re on our third beers.

  “But what kind of government do we have? Capitalism? No. Socialism? No.”

  I do wonder what it’s like to live in a country in such a state of uncertainty.

  “Stalin, I would never support him. But he was the right man for the job in his time. No one stole anything.”

  Sergei, like me, is looking deeply at a country—its people, its problems, its future. The difference is, this is his own country. We talk about the people we’ve met—Nikita’s parents mourning the loss of their hockey-star son, Alexei’s mom staring at us as we walked down the stairs away from her apartment, and tough Ivan, tearing up out of the blue.

  It is almost lights out for me and Sergei. We wave down a cab in the bitter cold and return to our hotel. In the morning we need to buy train tickets for our onward journey, which becomes a freshly complicated affair. I check out a map and notice that the southern route of the Trans-Siberian Railway goes west to east through Chelyabinsk—good news—except tha
t when it heads east from here, it passes through a small section of Kazakhstan. We have two choices: visit the Kazakh consulate here, apply for a transit visa and wait who knows how long. Or take a circuitous route back up to Ekaterinburg, then eastward again. We choose option two.

  The train station in Chelyabinsk the next morning is far less welcoming than the city’s pedestrian mall. It is a concrete block of place with no signs to tell you anything—where you buy tickets, where you catch trains, what time it is.

  “This is strange,” Sergei says, as we walk around outside.

  It’s actually not. This kind of disorder no longer surprises me here. I’ve just come to live with it. Accept it. God, I sound Russian.

  15 • TATIANA

  HAVING NO VISA for Kazakhstan means an extra twelve hours of train travel.

  Through the night we straddle the Ural Mountains, from Chelyabinsk back up to Ekaterinburg. Then we bend southeast, emerge from the Urals, stop for a long layover in Tyumen, then move deeper into Siberia. The train stops less frequently. The landscape is more rugged and picturesque. As hours pass the scenes become more captivating—maybe just because you need something to do. There is endless snow stretching to the horizon. Then forest. At sunrise and sunset, streaks of light cut through the trees and the snow glows in orange. We pass villages with little wooden homes. Some look abandoned—not rare in a country where many villages are losing population and dying. Some have smoke rising from the chimneys, and I imagine Viktor Gorodilov inside, in his plaid shirt and hunting pants, warming his hands by the wood fire. Or Ivan, orphaned as a teenager, alone in the small house he rents.

  Deep in these thoughts, I suddenly feel a burst of pressure from the chilly window that my head is resting on and a loud hacking sound as another train flies by in the other direction. Within seconds the train is gone and peace is restored.

  “I am driving across the plain of Siberia,” Anton Chekhov wrote during a trip—by carriage—in May 1890:

  I have been transformed from head to foot into a great martyr. This morning, a keen cold wind began blowing, and it began drizzling with the most detestable rain. I must observe that there is no spring yet in Siberia. The earth is brown, the trees are bare, and there are white patches of snow wherever one looks; I wear my fur coat and felt overboots day and night. . . . Well, the wind has been blowing since early morning . . . heavy, leaden clouds, dull brown earth, mud, rain, wind . . . brrrrr.

  Siberia, this vast and forbidding geographic expanse, has been the fascination of Russian writers, the torture chamber for Russian exiles, the gold mine for Russian energy companies, and the savior for Russia at large. Paradoxically, cold and forbidding lands have helped this country survive. As Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy write in their book The Siberian Curse, Germany lost its first major battle in World War II because thousands of its men were starving and freezing. Napoleon in 1812 fled Moscow, then faced an impenetrable enemy: the Russian winter:

  Winter and snow are particularly Russian phenomena, captured in poems and novels and in the broadly-recognized images on lacquer boxes—of fur-clad figures bundled against the elements, troikas or sleighs drawn by three horses, expansive stretches of birch or pine forest laden with snow, and squat wooden peasant huts around a stove to beat back the elements. ‘Russia’ conjures up associations with Siberia, permafrost, and vodka to warm the flesh and boost the spirits on long winter nights. Winter (Zima) is even a place in Siberia, a small town and stopping point along the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Vladivostok.

  But myth and poetry are one thing. Reality is another. And Hill and Gaddy argue that the Soviet Union’s obsession with moving people to Siberia, building up cities and industrializing in harsh and isolated places, is at the core of Russia’s economic problems today: “If Russia is to be governable and economically viable, it needs to ‘shrink’ itself. Not by divesting territory but by organizing its economy differently. The objective is to reduce distance and create new connections. People will need to migrate westward on a large scale, and large cities in the coldest and most remote regions will have to downsize.”

  Moscow seems so very far away as we push eastward. The feeling of disconnect grows, making it seem unsurprising that having people scattered in such remote places is a drag on a nation’s economy. Politically the disconnect works in different ways. Many people in Siberia feel little if any relationship to Moscow and the Kremlin, and throughout history, people have felt relatively more free to think for themselves. And yet, distance is also an impediment for any serious opposition movement to grow and thrive.

  Sergei and I are still in third class. On this train we both have top berths. I am still horizontal, quietly resting my head against the window. Sergei is up. He has climbed down and made tea. He is sitting on the lower berth. The man there is still sleeping but has shifted his legs to give Sergei a corner to sit on and enjoy his tea. Sergei has his hand on the spoon in his glass so it doesn’t rattle. He is worried it might wake me up.

  I OFTEN WONDER how many gallons of tea are consumed daily on a Russian train. Every car has a big cauldron of water, in Russian, a titan. It’s like a modern-day samovar, a traditional device in Russia—usually ornately made of brass—that heats water with wood chips and churns out damn good tea. The samovar on the train runs on electricity—as does the train itself. Which raises the question: What is all the coal for? At many stops the provodniks shovel coal into a storage cabinet located on each train car. As I’ve learned, coal heats the train. And it makes sense. Look outside. The landscape is rugged, empty, and cold—at times twenty or thirty degrees below zero Fahrenheit. If a train breaks down and the electricity goes out in a place this remote, passengers could freeze to death. Except that the heaters would keep working—on coal. But I’ve noticed a downside: The heating in train cars is not easily controlled. To keep things remotely close to a certain temperature, provodniks will add more or less coal to the heating system. I have a guess this is why the trains get oppressively hot overnight—hot as in you rip off your sheets and begin using them to wipe sweat off your face. I imagine the provodnik getting ready for bed herself, not wanting to disturb herself overnight by having to add more coal. So she loads as much as possible before going to bed. Yes, she probably thinks, that will take care of things.

  Sergei and I have been traveling for about two weeks now.

  Passengers have gotten on and off, and Sergei and I are now joined by a pleasant, older couple, Tatiana and Oleg. They are two of the thinnest people I’ve ever met—but bursting with personality. He has wavy gray hair, she has short hair—dyed bright red.

  “You are David? From America?” Tatiana says, trying her limited English.

  “Yes.”

  “It is funny. I ride the train in 1972. And there was an American David with me. A student. Harvard. He was coming from Japan. With his visa he had to stay on train the whole time crossing Soviet Union. We talked about America, about Soviet Union.”

  “This is crazy, but I went to Harvard.”

  Tatiana laughs. “This is crazy! You know he gave me gift for Oleg. Two packs of cigarettes. Marlboro.”

  What a reminder about how this train, and this famous train route, have endured for so long. It has been the spine of this country, even as the body around it transformed and evolved. The train has seen a lot.

  “Where are you going?” Tatiana asks.

  “Ishim.”

  I wish I could say that Sergei and I had a good reason for planning a stop there. In truth I had told Sergei we had seen enough big cities—I wanted to choose one of the smaller Trans-Siberian stops, a town where the train pulls in, dumps a few passengers, and continues on its way within minutes. The challenge if you’re disembarking is to get your stuff and yourself off in time, before the train is on its way again.

  “We are going to Ishim too!”

  “Really? We thought this would be a good place to stop.”

  “I am going to give you a phone number for a friend of ours
who works at a museum—her name is Tatiana,” this Tatiana says. Sergei takes down the number, and we tell her we’re grateful.

  “Tatiana, I hope in another forty years you meet another David from Harvard.”

  “Yes!”

  The weather has taken a turn as we pull into Ishim. The wind is whipping around in all directions and heavy snow is falling. Tatiana, Oleg, Sergei, and I climb down the metal stairs into this mess, feeling as if we are skydivers who just stepped out of a plane into a powerful jet stream. “Good-bye!” I yell, waving to the lovely couple as they march off into the meteorological abyss.

  Sergei and I find a rusty red car with a taxi light taped on top and a man sitting inside. We open the door and dive in. The driver revs his engine, spins his tires a bit, and we’re off, at high speed. The driver does not seem to be respecting the weather conditions. In fact, everywhere I look, people seem unfazed by this blizzard. At home, in Washington or New York—even in winter-proof cities like Boston and Chicago—I swear conditions like this would have schools closed, drivers warned to stay off the roads, power down, and people in an all-out panic about whether they bought enough bread, milk, and toilet paper. There are probably three feet on the ground already in Ishim and more snow is piling up.

  Totally routine.

  Sergei turns back to me from the front passenger seat.

  “David, what’s the name of the hotel you found?”

  I look down at my notepad. “Hotel Tranquility.”

  16 • NADEZHDA

  WE DRIVE perhaps fifteen minutes out from the center of Ishim—which didn’t look like much of a center, as it was—and suddenly pull off the two-lane road onto a bumpy path. Our driver is swerving around what appear to be small factory buildings and abandoned trailers, then pulls to a stop in front of what resembles a farmhouse. It’s a small building with an A-frame roof.

  “David, we’re here.”

  “Okay, Sergei.”