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

by David Greene

  “You know, we had our chance in perestroika. The setup of our society changed. That was our moment to develop some kind of democracy. Instead our economy was converted in a way that just put bribes in the hands of officials—right into their pockets.”

  Bribes are a way of life, he says. If you’re recovering from surgery in the hospital and want your bedsheets changed? Bribe. Want an appointment with your kids’ teacher? Bribe. Need your car inspected sooner? Bribe. Want the paperwork to open a new business actually processed by the local authorities? Bribe.

  “They began a new society, just not with the right people,” Sergei says. “We need to start from scratch. Putin lost his moment to establish a national idea. The idea was going to be to fight corruption.”

  “So now you’re looking for a new national idea?”

  “Who’s looking for it?” Sergei says, throwing his hands up—briefly—before returning them to the wheel. “We won’t be able to get out of this. We have a cancer.”

  We have a cancer.

  I’m now really into this conversation. Sergei seems tired, but is dutifully translating for me, which I appreciate, especially after I told him I wanted to avoid any deep interviews for a day or two. Rose—victimized by jet lag—is asleep on my shoulder.

  “So you want your daughter to leave this country because you think there’s a cancer?”

  “Yeah, she says no way she is going to live here. We are trying to get her to study in Prague. She can’t see herself in Russia. She can see what is happening.”

  “Sergei, why is this resignation so deep—why can’t there be another revolution, some kind of change?”

  He takes a long pause.

  “Don’t you forget—it’s not like Putin taught economics or something. He was a spy. He was taught to handle spies in other countries. You don’t play chess with him. Groups who tried to organize in this country—many of them are now behind bars.”

  And so the path of our winding conversations takes us here—fear.

  We drive down a long hill, make a turn, and there it is—the hydroelectric dam. I’ll admit it’s damn impressive. A hulking structure not unlike Hoover Dam in Nevada. Rose wakes up, and we all trudge outside for a few photos. Then we are back in the car, heading back to the city.

  “Sergei, it was hard for me to see all those wedding parties having such fun, feeling so free, and then be talking to you about the difficult situation in the country.”

  “Yes, it’s complicated. We have a saying, actually. Have a drink in the morning, and the whole day ahead of you can be free. Have something to drink in the morning, and the whole day can feel like a holiday.”

  “Drinking helps you forget reality?”

  “I am just saying everything is brighter colors for a person when he is drunk.”

  Sergei takes us for a drive around his city, then drops us off at a restaurant so we can grab dinner before our evening train.

  We pay Sergei for his services. Then I ask if I can write down his last name for the book. He stiffens up, and declines.

  “You never know what tomorrow will bring,” he says.

  I say thanks anyway, and we start to get out of the car. But then Sergei says something else.

  “Chort poberi [Oh damn]!”

  He pauses.

  “Sergei Komarov,” he says. “Let the world know me.”

  Let the world know me.

  Those words carry power. The power of a man who, before my eyes, overcame fear.

  Sergei Komarov felt an instinctive reaction—fear—that many Russians feel every day at different moments. And he decided to take the risk.

  He decided to play chess this time.

  18 • TAISIYA

  SERGEI, ROSE, AND I board train No. 44 in Krasnoyarsk just after 1:00 a.m.

  It is packed full, but thankfully with a more balanced male-female ratio than our last train. We have a twenty-one-hour ride to Irkutsk, the gateway to Russia’s romantic Lake Baikal.

  Many passengers are asleep, so the three of us are as quiet and unobtrusive as possible, trying not to bang our roll-aboards and backpacks into anyone’s feet. All our efforts are spoiled when a mousy little blond provodnik decides to come yell at us.

  “You come from a plane? Too much luggage! You must have a document to bring so much luggage!”

  Sergei screams back at her in Russian. Then she walks away, grumbling to herself.

  “What does she want, a bribe, Sergei?”

  “Probably.”

  “Should we pay something?”

  “No.”

  This is not the end of her.

  As we are preparing our berths, a woman across the aisle from us is desperately looking for her lost pillow. This is no small thing. On a Russian train anything lost can be the responsibility of the provodnik. Once she takes your ticket and hands you a pillow and sheets, it is your responsibility to hand them back to her before you leave the train. Or she could be held responsible.

  The provodnik is summoned and immediately zeroes in on us as possible culprits. She begins to tear into our unwieldy pile of luggage to see if a pillow happens to be buried somewhere. Not finding one, she yells at the woman and says she’ll just have to make do without one.

  And as if she has not made our night unpleasant enough, around 3:00 a.m., I happen to be awake to see her pass through the aisle in the darkness and trip on someone’s bedsheet. She curses and immediately turns all the lights on in the train car, leaving the place illuminated for the rest of our sleeping hours. Well, at least she won’t trip again.

  As the sun comes up I look across at Rose in the opposite upper berth. She’s awake and reading. Below me is Sergei, and below Rose is another passenger—a Central Asian man, sitting on his bed, looking out the window. The landscape has changed—less forest, more open landscape, shrubby, like the ranchlands of Texas. There are some distant mountains.

  “Honey,” Rose says.

  “Yeah.”

  “I think we should talk to him.” She motions to the guy below. “If he is on his way to Russia for work, it could be really interesting. Don’t you think you need to talk about immigration in your book?”

  “Why don’t you interview him? You can ask Sergei if he minds translating.”

  Rose climbs down, chats with Sergei, and the two of them begin chatting. I’m listening intently from above, with my notepad.

  “Where are you from?” Rose asks.

  “Uzbekistan.”

  He’s in black athletic pants and a black wool sweater with gray stripes. I would guess he’s in his forties, a peaceful, worn-down man with skin tough like leather and a thin mustache. In a rack above his berth are a pack of cigarettes, matches, and a tube of toothpaste.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Khabarovsk.” It’s a city in Russia’s Far East, the last big stop before Vladivostok.

  “How long are you going to stay there?”

  We may have reached the limits of his Russian.

  “He doesn’t understand,” Sergei says.

  “Does he speak just Uzbek?”

  “Yes,” Sergei says.

  “I’d like to see Uzbekistan sometime,” Rose says, to no avail. “Leave it to me to interview a person who doesn’t speak Russian or English.”

  The four of us sit peacefully.

  “Anyone want tea?” Sergei finally says.

  Rose and I say yes, and Sergei makes a trip to the samovar.

  “Do we have anything to go with tea?” Sergei says. I reach into a bag and pull out a chocolate cake we grabbed at some train station behind us. We motion to our seatmate that he is free to dig in. I begin to cut the cake with a spoon, and our friend pulls out a knife—a serious knife, a knife that’s a foot long and clearly designed not for food preparation but construction work, if not killing animals.

  I thank him and chop the cake into perfect pieces.

  We motion again for him to take a slice, and he holds up his empty teacup. The implication is clear: Who
in their right Russian mind would consume cake—or do much of anything—with no tea?

  I take it back. We all do share a language.

  “Sergei, how is your family—Tania? Anton?”

  “Really well. Thank you for asking, Rose.”

  Sergei tells her about Anton’s hope for a military draft deferment so he can complete his residency program.

  “Oh, Sergei. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for him. He worked so hard. When we were in Moscow, I feel like we never saw him sleep.”

  Anton’s future is clearly weighing on Sergei’s mind. He tells me and Rose about his own military service—which was a close call. In Soviet times the requirement was two years, not just one. Sergei interviewed with a unit that was seeing call-ups to Afghanistan. It was 1981, and the Soviets were beginning an invasion that would end in failure and thousands of casualties.

  “Some of the men from that unit were sent. Some said they would see fifty guys—then just five would be left.” Somehow Sergei was deployed instead to the Caucasus region as a Soviet border guard.

  “I guess you said the right thing in that interview.”

  He nods, taking a bite of cake.

  Hours pass. Rose and I do some reading and napping. Sergei is on his laptop, picking up faint Internet signals here and there.

  Finally our train pulls into Irkutsk. I am so excited to get in a taxi and get to Lake Baikal. It’s truly one of the world’s natural treasures. Nestled in the mountains, the lake is the deepest body of fresh water in the world. It resembles Lake Tahoe—in fact, the two are considered sister lakes—but to my mind Baikal is even more breathtaking. In the summertime the lake reflects the green mountains and blue skies “like a mirror,” Chekhov wrote. In the winter it’s majestic in a different way—near the shorelines the surface of the lake is frozen, a clear, reflective blue-green surface that looks like an abstract painting. Farther out on the lake, snow—fresh, brilliantly white, untouched snow—extends like a quilt to the tree-covered mountains that shoot up at the horizon. As I wrote earlier, seeing Baikal was enough to lift the spirits—albeit briefly—of a gulag prisoner trapped in a boxcar, peeing through a wooden crack. And the legacy of the Decembrists runs deep here. Local legend has it that on their journey to exile some of the Decembrists stopped on the shores of Baikal, waited for the lake to freeze, then rode across on horseback. Even today the freezing of Baikal is a significant event. Once solid, the lake becomes a playground. People take hovercraft across the ice—or even cars and trucks. The bravest ride across on bicycles.

  We pile into a taxi in Irkutsk and head for the lake. History is on Rose’s mind.

  “Don’t forget I always told you I’m like a Decembrist wife,” she says.

  She did always tell me—half-jokingly—that escorting me to Russia for several years and making the best of it was not unlike the women in the nineteenth century who, rather than leave their husbands, followed them to their Siberian exile.

  I just nod, accepting Rose’s point.

  The shore of Baikal—the village of Listvyanka—is an hour’s drive from Irkutsk. And we arrive on a cold, sun-splashed weekend afternoon that could not be more welcoming. There is a festival on the ice. Families are grilling fish, playing music, and frolicking. Kids are running around ice sculptures and coming down ice slides. All over, people are selling omul, a delicious local fish caught in the lake. You can buy the fish raw or smoked.

  And then there are the nerpa. These pudgy freshwater seals—they look like fat black torpedoes with whiskers and eyes on one end—are Baikal’s mascot.

  One attraction in Listvyanka is a “nerpinarium”—a Sea World for nerpas. Parents and their kids are piling in for the show—along with me, Sergei, and Rose. In a large swimming pool—ringed by tourists—nerpas are doing tricks. One paints. Another plays the saxophone. They even do math (the trainer yells out “Three plus one!” and a nerpa claps its flippers together four times.)

  Afterward, like a family after a full day at Disney World, we sit for beer and kebabs, grilled outside, and talk about the warm feelings. “This really is Russia at its best,” Rose says. “All those cold days in Moscow, all the frustration, nobody smiling: it’s so easy to forget all that here. Look at these families, these cute kids all bundled up running around. It’s so sweet.”

  “I know how short this trip was for you—and a shitload of flying. But it meant a lot to have you here, to experience this place together one more time.”

  “I’m glad I came—really. I always told you I didn’t spend enough time out of Moscow when I was here. It’s like a different world.”

  “I know.”

  “You know what strikes me here?” she says. “I just look at these families here on the lake—and it’s damn warm here for February. It’s just pure joy. I don’t think anyone appreciates a nice day like Russian do, honestly. I feel like they don’t expect the day to be nice. And when it’s nice, they don’t expect it to last. That what we’re looking at out here in the sun—joy.”

  It’s not all joy here on Baikal.

  There have been fierce environmental debates about this lake. UNESCO has Baikal on its World Heritage list, for its natural beauty and unique habitat. But across the lake from where we are standing, in the village of Baikalsk an old paper mill is still operating, pouring gallons of dirty chemicals into the pristine waters every day. Environmental groups pushed for years to close down the plant—and it did close for a time—but Putin insisted on keeping it open. At one point Putin visited Baikal for quite a stunt. He plunged into the depths of the lake in a minisubmarine and said over the radio from underwater that everything looked clear to him—“I could see with my own eyes . . . there is practically no pollution” (as if pollution lurking in the water is visible to the naked eye).

  There was another side to the debate. The paper mill is the major employer in the region. Nearly 10 percent of people in the city of Baikalsk work there. When Sergei and I visited to do a story, we met an elderly woman on the street. I asked what the factory means to her, and she just kept saying, “Food . . . food . . . food.” The city’s mayor, Valery Pintayev, said that when the plant was shut down for a stint, he saw a dead community. “There were no lights on in houses. People ruined themselves drinking. They stood at my window demanding jobs. Now the social tension is gone.”

  But the World Heritage program continues to threaten Russia, saying if they don’t close the plant and stop polluting Baikal, it will take the lake off its list of World Heritage sites.

  On this day, in this spot, Baikal seems beautiful, reminding me of the warmth and poetry I felt on many days living here. We find our hired driver and make the drive back to Irkutsk, then call it an early night. At 5:00 a.m. the next morning, I take Rose to the Irkutsk airport, kiss her good-bye and send her on her way to the United States, to get back to work on her restaurant. It’s just Sergei and me again, and I taxi back to the hotel to meet him. We have an afternoon interview with a woman named Taisiya. She’s a local activist in Baikalsk who, we’re told, has been fighting for the paper mill to close, as well as needling the local authorities in other ways.

  Sergei has reserved a hovercraft—yes, a hovercraft—to take us from Listvyanka across to Baikalsk. I’m not sure what to expect. In our taxi Sergei is on the phone with Andrei—our hovercraft captain—who is explaining where along the lake shore we should have our taxi driver take us. We pull up to a little restaurant with what appears to be a dock—of sorts—frozen into the ice.

  My only previous hovercraft experience was on the English Channel—from the slower boat I was on, I watched a sturdy vessel, carrying hundreds of passengers, flying slightly above the unfrozen water from Boulogne, France, to Dover, England. This is a different kind of hovercraft. I hear what sounds like a motorcycle engine roaring closer, and Andrei pulls up on the ice behind the restaurant. He’s in a small blue-and-white vessel just slightly larger than your average station wagon. This thing is definitely jury-rigged. There is a massive fan
on the back, with what looks like an automobile muffler hanging off it. The steering wheel inside is straight off a Lada. There are eight seats inside, with fading orange seat covers. All in all this looks like a minivan someone drove to Woodstock, superglued on top of a pontoon.

  Andrei motions for us to get in, so we load our suitcases and ourselves on board and settle into the orange seats. And away we go. Andrei is all business, in aviator glasses and a camouflage snowsuit.

  The ride is surreal. Closer to the shore the ice really is like glass—with cracks—and I can literally see plant life through the surface, making me wonder about the ability of the surface to hold an object as heavy as ours. Then we speed farther out onto the lake—with mountains rising on both sides—and the ice is covered with more snow. Andrei is at full throttle, and we’re bumping over snowdrifts, with the back of the craft occasionally thrusting back and forth like a violently wagging tail.

  I can only imagine the Decembrists—some of whom were princes—going from their royal surroundings in St. Petersburg to crossing this remote snowscape on horseback. If anything drove home that they were beginning a new way of life—this, along with the stinging cold, probably did the job.

  After ninety minutes Andrei slows things down and pulls up to—well, not much. He leaves us at an empty spot on the shore, promising that we are close to Baikalsk. We pay him five hundred dollars, deciding his fee was enough without any additional tip. Maybe this was a mistake. As he leaves us Andrei spins the rear of his hovercraft around, and the big spinning wheel blows our luggage about ten feet into the air and into a snowbank.

  We collect our things, and Sergei uses his cell phone to find a driver willing to pick us up. It takes a while for them to locate us. Then we’re on our way to meet our activist.

  Taisiya Baryshenko is sixty-nine. She has short blond hair, bright red lipstick, tinted glasses, and is wearing a blue sweatshirt and sweatpants as she brings us into her apartment. It’s a comfortable place, full of plants and stacks of books. She raised two daughters and a son after she and her husband divorced.