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

by David Greene

  “You get used to knowing nothing about your future here,” Olga said. “Everybody knows something about their future.”

  “Except Russians?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why?”

  “History. We get used to changes and transformations and not being aware of the future. We are the lost generation, the broken generation, the generation of changes and transformations. We get used to it.” (Unbelievably, the soundtrack to our conversation, coming from the kitchen radio, is “Another Day in Paradise,” by Phil Collins.)

  “Why do you call it a lost generation?”

  “Because we grew up in a different country, with different values. We didn’t know we had to buy anything or make money to be successful. We weren’t linked to any markets. We believed—or our teachers told us—we would always live in a communist society.

  But then our society became capitalist—a wild capitalist society. Different country, different system. It’s strange. So our generation is lost, I think. It is not easy.”

  I ask Olga again if I caused any problems by coming last time, drawing a phone call to Dmitry’s father-in-law from the FSB.

  “Pffft!” Dmitry says, as in, “Like we care!”

  “We are not afraid of anything,” Olga says. “They can do nothing bad to me.”

  Olga, Dmitry, and I spend several more hours polishing off the pizza, sipping champagne, taking smoking breaks on the balcony. They tell me I’m welcome back anytime, and I promise to bring Rose back for a double date.

  Olga and I hug at the door, and Dmitry calls me a taxi. It’s a car, not a train, but Dmitry still walks me downstairs, outside, making sure I’m comfortable in the backseat before closing the door and waving in the cold as I drive off.

  My flight out of Vladivostok is early the next morning. Before going back to my hotel I stop for one last drink in town. I’m sitting at the bar, when a young, blond Russian woman walks up on stage. They turn down the DJ music for her to perform. A small crowd gathers around her—she’s clearly known locally. And she does have a beautiful voice as she sings her first tune—Mariah Carey’s “Hero”—with a thick Russian accent.

  21 • VITALY

  IT WAS MEANINGFUL for me to spend time with Dmitry and Olga again. They remind me of the assumptions I made about Russia. I assumed, as a young American watching the fall of the Soviet Union from afar, that Russians would immediately feel liberated and determined to grab onto my country’s system as fast as they could.

  The story is so different, and far more complicated. In an unfamiliar country, it can be easy to say, okay, that’s a point of view that seems foreign to me, but the person I’m listening to is so entirely different from me, I can’t empathize. But then there’re Olga and Dmitry—people I connect to, and empathize with, in so many ways. That makes their outlook more powerful to me personally. Olga and Dmitry appreciate Western countries like the United States. But they don’t long to live there. They don’t see some superior form of politics they wish Russia had. They have some nostalgia for Soviet times, seeing it as an era when the government provided some bedrock services and guarantees for its citizens. As for the future, they can’t see it clearly yet. Not a single person we met on this trip could. But no one said, I’m satisfied with the system in Russia—let’s leave it as is. As an American, sure, I’d love to make some tweaks. But all in all, if a Russian writer came and asked me, I would say I’m pretty proud of what I have. No one in Russia said that. Still, so many people want and expect change.

  But when? And what will it look like? Olga and Dmitry and so many other people showed an unimaginable willingness to wait—patience as long and hard as a crazy five-week train journey across all of Russia. Maybe that patience comes from learned endurance, a fatalism that anticipates difficult times, and a tendency to grab onto whatever feels safe, not wanting to shake things up and induce chaos too quickly. And so perhaps this will be a long but fruitful process. Perhaps the small battles we saw will go on. The young generation of Russians will learn about individual rights and freedoms, and ultimately that will lead them to deciding on a system that will make them proud.

  THE TROUBLING REALITY about Russia is that for any sense of optimism to arrive, for people to feel hope, inspiration and a drive to bring positive change would mean escaping years—generations—of history. History and culture matter. Everything I heard on this trip—the feeling that strength comes from endurance, the fear of chaos and thirst for any sense of stability, the lack of faith in the ability to shape the future—are emotions and feelings that may well be embedded in the Russian soul.

  The Decembrists are remembered as some of the rare few in Russia’s history to rise up and try to break apart the system that ruled the day. They failed, and faced punishment and exile. Yet, amazingly, not all of them felt unjustly treated, or felt that the chance to change the course of history had slipped through their hands. Mikhail Zetlin quotes one of the Decembrists, Yakubovich, who was writing in a journal in 1843, two decades after the failed revolution.

  The 20th year of exile, of persecution, poverty and hard work is about to begin. Oh God! Give me the strength to do my duty as a citizen and a man and to add my contribution to the annals of sorrow of the Fatherland. Do not let this contribution be sullied by pride and egoism, but let it find its expression in love and truth. I am a very sick man. I am 59 years old . . . the end is approaching, the end that heralds the dawn.

  But what is the dawn in a place where someone believes it is his “duty” to contribute to the “annals of sorrow” in his country?

  Mikhail Shishkin, the great modern-day Russian novelist, struggles to see the dawn.

  “To call people to the barricades in Russia is beautiful, but senseless,” he said in a 2012 interview with the Web site Russia Beyond the Headlines. “We lived through all this already in the early ’90s. All revolutions take place in the same way—the best people rise up to fight for honor and dignity, and they die. On their corpses, thieves and bandits come to power, and everything comes full circle. The same thing happened during the Orange Revolution in Kiev. The same thing is happening right before our eyes in the Arab world. Apparently, in Russia a new generation has grown up who want to experience the barricades. All right. They will experience them. And they will be disappointed.”

  But Andrei Grachev, a longtime adviser to former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, isn’t so sure. When I asked him about Russia’s future, he pointed to August 1991. Hard-liners in the Communist Party had carried out a coup, forcing Gorbachev from power. Thousands of people took to the streets outside parliament, waving anti-Communist flags in support of reformer Boris Yeltsin. Tanks were on the streets, but the military refused to fire at the protesters—some soldiers placed flowers in the barrels of their guns.

  Yeltsin came to power. But his efforts at reform are seen in Russia not only as a failure, but as a big reason why people have such little faith in democracy. And yet, when I spoke to Grachev recently, he refused to believe that what those protesters fought for is dead. As he put it, “There is fire under the ashes.”

  Whatever the future holds, I am grateful to have had the chance to experience this country, to be touched by so many lives and stories, to have learned so much. I can’t believe, looking back twenty years, that I saw Russia as a cold, oppressed, backward country, emerging from decades of terror and on the cusp of enjoying the wisdom of America’s way of life and system of government. If nothing else, I for one, now understand that Russians may well want—and get—something else. They’re taking time to figure that out. I can’t predict what will happen, but I’ll certainly be thinking about and rooting for the people I’ve met.

  Suffice it to say, the story of Russia is far from finished. So perhaps it’s fitting that while Vladivostok is the obvious last stop on this journey—the end of the train line, the window on the Pacific—my thoughts tend to wander back to the middle, where the trip was far from complete.

  After our detour to Ch
elyabinsk to follow the meteorite, and our realization that we could not travel east, since that would require a visa for Kazakhstar, we took the train north to Ekaterinburg, east to the city of Tyumen, where we stopped for the day, then on to Ishim. During that stop in Tyumen, Sergei and I took a ninety-minute drive through a raging snowstorm to find a rehabilitation center for drug addicts. Russia loses tens of thousands citizens each year to heroin addiction, and there are believed to be more than two million people actively using. It’s a devastating epidemic and a big reason Russia was eager to work with the United States in Afghanistan—that’s where much of the poppy that flows into Russia is produced, and Russia’s government has been desperate to curtail it.

  Sergei and I walk through knee-deep snow into a ramshackle building and a living room with old rugs and couches. On the wall, there’s a painting of the sun, shining over a pasture covered with flowers. A sign on the wall, translated into English, reads, “If pain today, look ahead to tomorrow.”

  Nine of the people in the rehab program have agreed to meet with us—six men, three women. They’re in comfortable sweats and T-shirts, sitting before us on couches. They talk about how they got here.

  “I started smoking dope when I was fourteen,” says a young man named Vitaly. “When I was fifteen, I started using heroin. And I was diagnosed HIV-positive.”

  “I was selling drugs at seventeen,” says a nineteen-year-old named Paulina. “I could see I was dying.”

  “I started smoking when I was fourteen,” says Kate. “It was the only thing that made me happy.”

  Drug addictions aren’t unique to Russia, of course. But the director of the program, a thirty-three-year-old named Natalya—a recovering heroin addict herself who is HIV-positive—says that when people reach for help in Russia, it’s nearly impossible to find:

  “When it comes to disabilities, when it comes to drug addictions, in our society, it’s simpler to put a fence around these people than to help them. I travel to other countries. I ask people about the drug problem, and people will say how sad and awful it is. Here? People think it’s better to just take addicts to an island to execute them. And the government is really not guilty. It’s the Russian mentality. A Russian starts thinking about how to help a disabled person, or an addict, only if the person appears in his family.”

  Another young man, on the couch directly in front of me, is also named Vitaly. He’s noticeably thin, though not in an unhealthy way—he almost looks like a ballerina. As I speak to the others he keeps staring at me, listening intently, until it’s his turn.

  “Since my childhood, I danced. I traveled and performed in the U.S.—in Florida. Miami and Orlando.”

  Sergei translates, then asks him, “You speak English?”

  “A little.”

  Vitaly gives it a try. “I start drugs in fifteen years old. I lose everything.” He pauses. “May I speak Russian?”

  Of course, we tell him.

  He explains that after his trips abroad as a child dancer he performed around Russia—but began trying drugs in the dressing rooms. He couldn’t stop and ended up on the streets instead of in performance halls.

  “What was the drug, Vitaly?”

  “Heroin. My mother wanted the police to lock me up. She didn’t know what to do with me.”

  He finally found this rehab center but escaped from the program. Twice.

  Now he’s back for a third time, at this cold outpost, miles from anything, with every excuse in the world to feel hopeless. But he doesn’t. He says he’s going to see the program through this time. He’s determined the world hasn’t seen the last of his Russian dance moves.

  “After rehab, you’re going to dance again?”

  He goes back to English.

  “I really hope. Really hope and trust in this.”

  “What kind of dancing?”

  “Ballroom.”

  “You know, my wife, Rose, really wants us to learn ballroom dancing. Maybe you can teach me sometime?”

  He wiggles his hips and arms on the couch. “Cha-cha-cha,” he says. The room erupts in laughter. “It’s easy,” he says.

  “Maybe for you, not for me!”

  The two of us exchange smiles and agree to stay in touch about scheduling that first lesson.

  Illustrations

  End of the line. This statue occupies a nondescript spot on the train platform in Vladkvostok. But the number is significant: 9288, the number of kilometers traveled from Moscow, where there’s a statue marking the zero-kilometer mark. In between, gallons of tea and dozens of boxes of instant noodles consumed, new friendships formed, and a vast country better understood. (David Gilkey/NPR)

  Sergei and Liubov Klyukin lost their son at age twenty-one when a plane carrying Yaroslavl’s pro hockey team went down in a fiery crash. The couple built a shrine to their son in his bedroom. “There is this belief in our country that tragedy is a test for people who are supposed to be strong,” the mother told me. “And Sergei and I are strong. That is why we will get through this.”

  This stone, easy to miss fifty yards off a small road in the city of Rybinsk (outside of Yaroslavl), honors those who died in a Soviet gulag here. The fresher bouquet sitting in the snow had six roses—notable because in Russia an even number of flowers is given to people who are still grieving.

  Third-class accommodations are not unlike a cramped college dormitory room. Sergei is on his bunk, researching our next stop on his tablet, jumping on faint cell signals that appear occasionally. There is a bunk across from Sergei, two upper bunks above, and two more across the aisle, where the man is peering out the window (his table converts into one.)

  Sergei’s family in Nizhny Novgorod could not have treated me more warmly. Aunt Nina is at the center, with Sergei to her left.

  Alexei Mikheyev, with his mother, Lyudmila, in Nizhny Novgorod. Alexei was a police officer in the city. After top officials in the Russian government began a campaign to root out bad actors in the police forces, Alexei was falsely accused of kidnapping while off duty. During a horrific interrogation, he escaped and fell from a window, shattering his spine. He was quickly cleared of all charges but is now confined to a wheelchair.

  Boarding a Russian train is no small thing—especially when passengers are saying good-bye to family they see rarely. Sergei had not seen his cousins in several years. As our visit ended, they followed tradition: They escorted us to the station, carried our luggage to the train, boarded with us to get us settled, then stood on the platform, blowing kisses as our train pulled out.

  A truly memorable evening in the forest near Uva, Russia. We strolled at sunset with the Buranovo Babushkas, an elderly singing group who made Russia proud by finishing as runner-up in the Eurovision international music competition. Many of these women lost their husbands years ago and have turned to music (and to each other) for companionship.

  Viktor Kalashnikov, at a museum in Izhevsk that honors the legacy of his father, Mikhail, who invented a killing machine, the AK-47. Viktor said his dad thought a lot about the stunning number of deaths his invention caused but believed that “the constructor is not guilty in that—politicians are.”

  I spent a lot of time quietly looking out the train window, often seeing villages like this breeze past. Many of these communities are isolated and impoverished, with aging populations. I would imagine families inside those homes cooking over wood on an evening like this, struggling to get by.

  Andrei Gorodilov in Sagra with (from left to right) his friend Andrei, father Viktor, and the attorney who helped villagers avoid prosecution after a skirmish with a criminal gang. The episode, Andrei said, was a reminder that Russia remains dysfunctional and unpredictable. “It’s the worst thing to be born into a time of change,” he said. “We were children of perestroika. Born in one country, grew up in another, and now live in a third. And who knows what’s next?”

  A true space souvenir! A week after a meteorite buzzed the city of Chelyabinsk, and plunked into a nearby lake, reside
nts discovered small black pebbles—presumably, galactic debris. A teenager in the village of Yemanzhelinka pulled this pebble from his pocket and let me hold it, a powerful moment for a Star Wars nut like myself.

  These apartment buildings in Chelyabinsk are pretty typical in Russia. They appear decrepit on the outside, but inside, many families take pride in making their flats warm and welcoming, with tea always available for visitors.

  This shot was taken after a long night at the banya in Uva, Russia. I hit the bathhouse with a doctor named Vasily. We steamed, drank vodka, ate horse sausage, and tackled the world’s problems. As he put it, “If you and I ran the two countries, there would have been no Cold War!” (This may have been the vodka talking more than Vasily.)

  Ivan Kichilin, flashing the peace sign, with his friend Evgeni Barandin. Ivan was orphaned as a teenager when both parents died from illness. He begged the Russian government to defer his mandatory year of military service, but they refused. That tough training, Ivan says, “makes Russians.” You find many young men return from the service hardened.