by David Greene
Once Israel was created, many Soviet Jews fled there, and the Jewish population of Birobidzhan became all but nonexistent, making the name of the region almost laughable.
But today, still, when you arrive at the train station in Birobidzhan, the first thing you notice is a gigantic menorah outside. And, a few blocks away, a statue commemorating the play Fiddler on the Roof. There are several synagogues in town, and the leaders swear that the region’s Jewish population is slowly growing today.
We stop by one synagogue, and sit down with the young rabbi, Eli Riss. He’s Russian-born, but spent some years in the United States, in an orthodox congregation in Brooklyn. He returned to Birobidzhan and feels he is serving a population of not just Jews.
“There was an older guy in town who started coming by recently,” Riss says, as we sip tea together in the meeting-and-activities room of the synagogue. “He said, ‘Well. I live in Birobidzhan. So I should think like I’m Jewish.”
So I should think like I’m Jewish.
Inna, on that train platform, felt nothing holding Russians together. Igor, with his T-shirt, felt part of a generation that has no control. And this man, clinging to whatever identity is locally available. What a sense of emptiness, of wandering.
20 • OLGA
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON, we drag our suitcases past the snow-draped jumbo menorah outside the station in Birobidzhan and board the train for the last time.
It’s train No. 002, the Rossiya, the train that leaves Yaroslavsky Station in Moscow as an old Soviet march echoes through the hall. Sergei and I were not able to take that train out of Moscow, but we make sure to ride it on our final leg. The train is decorated, on the outside, like Russia’s flag—a light shade of blue, red, and white. The provodnik seems a little more formal—and a little more friendly. We splurge a bit on this leg, because there is no third class—just closed cabins.
This overnight leg of the journey flies by—perhaps because the digs are so comfortable, I sleep peacefully for hours. After heading east from Birobidzhan, our train makes a hard right turn southward, down a narrow patch of Russia that lies between China and the Pacific Ocean. Early in the morning, as the sun rises, we pull into Vladivostok. The station sits right alongside the city’s bustling harbor, which flows into a bay and out to the Pacific. It’s a cold morning, but bearable, with an ocean breeze pulling in some moist, warmer air. Sergei and I walk down the platform and pay our second visit to a special monument.
It reads “9288”—the number of kilometers you travel on the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to this point. I feel pretty lucky to have completed this journey—twice.
Sergei and I walk up a hill from the station, dragging our suitcases over ice clumps, to a hotel and rent a room. He quickly showers and calls a taxi to go to the airport. He has to catch a flight to Moscow to get back to work—with NPR’s new correspondent there.
“Sergei, what else can I say but thank you? I know this won’t be our last adventure together, though.”
“No, no way, David. Please, please tell Rose I send my best again. And wish her good luck with the business. This is very, very exciting.”
Sergei went above and beyond to make me and Rose comfortable, secure, and fulfilled in our years in Russia. He took enormous pride in doing that. He would truly do anything for me. What’s more, he was genuinely interested, personally, in the reporting we did—all the stories, including those on this train trip.
I consider him one of my closest friends in the world. But I often do think about how, in some ways, he is an enigma to me, surely as I am to him. There’s a distance—some of it, surely, because of the language barrier. Near-perfect as Sergei’s English is, I know he misses some of the nuance in my random thoughts and bad jokes. But when he and Boris would gossip or talk about how and why we were reporting a story the way we did, I could sense a puzzled curiosity on their part, not unlike feelings I sometimes had toward them. Close as I am to Sergei, I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand him in the way I do friends from home. To me, it’s a reminder that culture matters—everywhere, but especially in Russia, a place I’ll also never fully understand.
And I do worry about Sergei. He has a stable job with NPR, but Tania works at a sock factory, and we know how uncertain manufacturing jobs are everywhere in the world, especially in Russia. And Anton’s bright future in the medical field could be halted at any moment if the government swoops in and forces him to go into the military.
“Sergei, tell Tania and Anton hello—and please, please keep me updated on Anton and the military service. I am keeping my fingers crossed.”
“Thank you, David.”
We hug in the lobby.
“Fly safely,” I tell him.
With that, Sergei pushes the silver handle down on his roll-aboard suitcase, lifts it up to carry it down the stairs outside, and climbs into the backseat of a waiting taxi.
I spend the afternoon walking around the city, which has the feel of San Francisco. Hills packed densely with houses and buildings overlook a harbor with several attractive bridges. The city streets are full of cheap Chinese goods. The main hotel is the Hyundai, a headquarters for South Korean businessmen who come through in droves. There is a direct ferry from here to Seoul, but it takes hours more than it should, because the ferry has to bypass North Korean waters.
There is, however, the Pyongyang Café. I’ve been before, and decide to return on this night for dinner. The restaurant, I have come to learn, is owned by the North Korean government and operated as a form of propaganda (and profit making). It is an irony that I am heading here to dine—and support the regime in Pyongyang—on the very day the North Koreans unleashed rhetoric threatening to nuke my home country.
The place is attached to a hotel, decorated with pastoral scenes of the mountains in North Korea. There is a bar area, with a large television used for karaoke, but right now, to play bizarre scenes from a recent concert in Pyongyang—the audience is clapping as men in military uniforms march around a stage with Disney-like characters (no sign of Dennis Rodman so far.)
My server is named Elena. She has fashion-model looks and is dressed in a traditional North Korean flowing gown. In limited Russian I ask where she’s from. “Pyongyang,” she says. In limited English she asks if I’m British. After a dinner of kimchi and Korean barbecue, Elena and two other servers do some karaoke. They sing several songs in Korean, and several in Russian, all while dancing and gesturing in unison.
A Russian couple—actually, the only other diners left in the place—make the bar area their dance floor as the women keep up their singing. The guy, I come to learn, is Mikhail, a plump gentleman, perhaps in his fifties, wearing a white sweater and brown scarf. His wife, Sveta, is becoming increasingly annoyed with Mikhail, who is drunk and becoming increasingly interested in the North Korean women singing. He is dancing around them with one hand in the air, and they are doing their best politely not to notice.
“Beeeauuutiful, right beeeauuutiful!!!” Mikhail yells to me in English, knowing I’m American and also hoping I might join in his appreciation for our entertainers. I quietly nod and applaud.
The manager of the restaurant—who, I imagine, is in charge of limiting her staff’s movements during their temporary employment outside North Korea, not to mention limiting their contact with drunk Russian men like Mikhail—is moving herself closer and closer to the scene.
Mikhail orders a bottle of champagne and a bottle of whiskey from the bar. He opens the bottle of whiskey and pours shots for me and for himself. Then he opens the bottle of champagne and pours glasses for the manager as well as the three servers.
“Korea, America, Russia!” he cries out, noting the diplomatic success we seem to have achieved by sharing a dance floor. “So interesting. Cheese!” (I believe he meant “Cheers,” but he’s trying English, so I’ve got to give him a pass.)
We all clink—the North Korean servers raise their glasses to their lips but seem to have gotten a “don’t d
rink it” look from the manager.
This does wrap up one of the more unusual nights of the trip. Then again, I think back. During this journey I chased a meteorite and touched a piece of it, baked in a banya with a drunk veterinarian, watched fat seals do math, and financially supported a regime that’s a sworn enemy of my country.
My friend Chandler once asked me if I love Russia, or if it fascinates me? “I think I’m fascinated,” I told him. “I may love it. I do like the chaos. Anything can happen. But I can’t imagine what all that means for people who live here—especially people who don’t have money.”
I do believe all that. This is a wild, entertaining place full of culture, creativity, and craziness. I understand why Russians go to the United States and find it boring and too controlled. Here, it’s the Wild West, for better or worse. Worse, surely, if you have to live here with little means. For those with wealth the place must feel like an electrifying vacation where any amount of adventure or luxury is possible. For people without money, the chaos must be a cruel existence, because life can feel so uncertain. Little is possible, and little seems fair. I have kept that in mind at every stop on this journey, tempering the fun and wild moments with a dose of reality.
IN VLADIVOSTOK in 2011, Sergei, Rose, and I met Olga and Dmitry Granovsky, married and both thirty-nine years old. They each had previous marriages that ended in divorce. He’s a musician, a fashionable, confident guy who wears rock-star–looking sunglasses. Olga is a professor of political philosophy at the local university, a warm, generous middle-aged young woman with an easy smile. Last time we spoke, Olga told me she was disappointed in Russia’s government. She and Dmitry thought often about taking their four children to live in another country. “Our society is sick,” she said. “It’s ill. It’s not healthy. We have no society.” Still, she said, her family loves life in Vladivostok—the coast is beautiful, they enjoy vacationing to some of the islands to the north, they certainly felt no impulse whatsoever to join the antigovernment protests raging in Moscow around the time we spoke.
Rose and I felt a close connection with this couple—akin to what I felt with Andrei in Sagra. We could see ourselves in them—in our thirties, happy with our jobs, enjoying our friends, the local music scene, and vacations together. The difference, of course, is that Rose and I don’t live in a society we see as “ill.”
Dmitry picks me up my hotel in the afternoon. He’s wearing the sunglasses I remember. “It’s great to see you again,” I say, climbing into the passenger seat—on the left side in his Japanese-made car.
“Olga is at home,” he says, speaking impeccable English like his wife. “She hurt her foot. But we can bring you over, and we can all have dinner?”
“Sounds great.”
I know that in Russia, going to a friend’s house doesn’t mean just dinner—it often means hours of eating, drinking, and socializing. And I’m fine with that.
We stop by a takeout place, and Andrei runs in and grabs some sushi and a Hawaiian pizza. “I’m also going to cook some meat—but want to make sure we have enough.”
Then we drive outside the city to a massive apartment complex that is one strange stepchild of Russian bureaucracy. Dmitri explains that the government built this new complex of skyscrapers as housing for military veterans. But far fewer veterans than expected actually took advantage. Of those who did, and received units for dramatically cheap prices, many decided to make an extra buck by renting to nonmilitary families. This is how Olga and Dmitry got their place—not exactly what the government intended. But decisions were made somewhere in the government, forms were signed, a program was set in motion, money was passed, Olga and Dmitry got a nice flat for their family and a military vet somewhere got some extra dough. Who’s asking questions?
As we walk from the car to the building, Dmitry tells me not to say anything too critical of the government in the corridors, as there are some former military guys who may get too interested in my visit. But once we walk into the apartment, and remove our shoes, it is an entirely free environment. Olga limps over on crutches to hug me. I feel as welcome here as I do in friends’ homes in the United States.
We sit around the table. A radio next to the refrigerator is blaring American pop music. Olga and I are digging into some sushi and pizza, washing it down with champagne, as Dmitry stands at the stove cooking pork.
“Smells amazing,” I say.
“It’s some Asian spices. Spanish pork”
“You eat pork?” Olga asks me.
“Yeah!”
“Ahh, but you’re Jewish.” Dmitry has a good memory.
“I guess not a really good Jew.”
I fill them in on my trip across their country—Moscow, Yaroslavl, Nizhny Novgorod, Izhevsk, Perm, Ekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, Ishim, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Baikal, Birobidzhan and finally here to Vladivostok.
“Did you hear about the meteor?” Olga asks.
“I chased the meteor.”
“You know, a friend of mine at Stanford University wrote me and said, ‘I hope you haven’t been hit by the meteor.’ I laughed, thinking, you know how far we are from Chelyabinsk?”
“Like five thousand miles,” I say, from experience.
Dmitri says Americans often ask where he’s from. “And I would say, you won’t be able to guess. And they’d say try me. And I’d say I live less than 500 miles from Japan, less than 150 miles from North Korea, and less than 50 miles from China. Now tell me where I’m from.” No one ever guessed Russia.
Dmitri was actually going to school in Alaska when the Soviet Union fell: “I was seventeen.”
He heard about the news in his country, and was so optimistic about going back that he declined the chance to apply for an American green card. He says a lot about his country today has turned out worse than in Soviet times.
“Back then, everyone had the ability to get an education. It was no problem for a family to have two kids, or five kids. Didn’t matter. There were free schools, free medical service, everything. So to some extent, it was easier. Now you may be able to get everything, you just have to overpay—twice as much as in the U.S. for the same medical services, same insurance.”
“Do you wish you had gone for that green card in 1991?”
“I guess not. I know a few people from my age group who moved there as green card holders, or got citizenship. Lived there five or ten years. And I don’t hear a lot of cool stories. Often, they’re not smart enough or wealthy enough to integrate into your society.”
It reminds me of one of the first conversations on this trip—with the passenger who had just gotten back from Thailand. As a Russian he felt different, and out of place. And Dmitry is painting such a sad picture. He’s saying there are Russians who can’t afford a comfortable lifestyle at home—but also don’t feel like they have the money or smarts to adjust to a Western society.
Dmitry, knowing English, having spent time in the United States, would have as good a chance as any Russian fitting in and finding happiness in a country like the United States. But even he doesn’t have some strong pull to make such a move.
“We love Vladivostok,” Olga explains. And her life isn’t easy. The shrinking population in Russia has meant fewer students at universities. Her school has been desperately trying to recruit foreign students, from China and elsewhere. But they’ve also had to squeeze budgets. She gets paid 26,000 rubles ($880) a month in salary as an assistant professor. She can get an additional 10,000 rubles ($330) for every thirty-two hours of special lecturing—but says she doesn’t get that payment until the administration confirms that her students have completed all required homework for the course—added bureaucracy, added delays.
She spent a semester in 2012 teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, and loved every minute of the experience.
“Were you feeling, I wish I could be a professor in the U.S.? Were you conflicted about that at all?”
“I don’t know. I know I want opportunities to go there wh
enever I want to. Really, I just want to write my book and become a full professor and have enough salary to travel when I wish. I’m not sure I want to be a professor at an American university. But it was an interesting experience.”
Olga’s book, and her research, focus on Western political philosophy.
“How do you explain the current Russian government in the context of political philosophy? What is the political philosophy Russia has in place?”
Olga smiles, and gives this some thought.
“They are trying to separate people.”
“Why is that a good strategy for the government?
“Because when people are separated, they don’t care deeply for anything—except for themselves.”
Whether it’s some premeditated strategy by Russian leaders, or a product of history, Russians do seem to struggle to unify behind a vision, to share a sense of hope for something.
I think about Stalin dividing Central Asia, fomenting chaos and division, forcing ethnic groups to plead to Moscow for help. I think of Boris and Gia, the warmest friendship, strained when Gia’s family moved to a different part of the Soviet Union, further complicated when Georgia became its own country. I think about Alexei, crippled, alone, and helpless with his mother in that apartment in Nizhny Novgorod, ignored by the state. Igor, with his T-shirt advertising the lost generation he feels a part of. Inna, on the train platform in Amazar, and Taisiya in Baikalsk, remembering Soviet times as a period when people believed in something. Ivan, in that hardscrabble village, praising the state for making him a soldier, loving a government that also drives him to tears. The people we’ve encountered have so much depth, their lives are full of poetry, pain, and laughter, and yet in so many cases something is just missing. When it comes to the future, there’s just no faith.
