Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia (13 page)

Sergei and I find our spots in the third-class car, one upper berth and one lower berth in the section of four by the window. As we are removing our heavy coats, a woman with short blond hair and glasses enters our space, greets us with a nod, then pushes her way past us to the window. Outside, on the snow-covered train platform, her family is scanning the windows of the train car until they spot her looking out. “Do svidaniya, do svidaniya!”—good-bye, good-bye—she yells, blowing kisses to her family, who jump and wave back.

Having learned the lesson on that first train trip, I have come somewhat more prepared to share food this time, opening a bag of chocolate croissants and motioning to our blond traveler that she should have some. “No, thank you—I brought my own food from home.” She is friendly but clearly determined to prepare for bed, as it’s approaching midnight. Our train begins slowly pulling out of Yaroslavl.

I’m a big fan of lower berths, and Sergei agrees to let me have it on this trip. After a quick stop in the lavatory, Sergei is ready for bed and, like a gold-medal gymnast, he puts his forearms in place, lifts himself up, smoothly transitions his body over toward his berth, and delicately lands. I half expect him to raise his arms for the judges and await his score. He simply smiles and says good night. I open the plastic packet of sheets, make my bed, and settle in. The lights are now off in the cabin. Sergei is asleep above, and our blond neighbor is asleep, facing me in the other lower bed. In the quiet darkness I am having trouble dozing, at which point the concert begins. The blond woman begins to snore, a lower tenor sound, smooth notes, perhaps one every two seconds. Then a lower baritone sound comes from a few sections away. These notes are deeper, louder, and more frequent. And finally, a brassy, higher-pitched, squeaky snore emerges from a bit farther down the aisle. No one around me seems to notice—perhaps more acclimated to life in such close quarters—but my own sleep on this eight-hour night train to Nizhny Novgorod is limited.

N
IZHNY NOVGOROD
IS
a tree-lined city of a million people in central Russia, situated around two important rivers, the Volga and the Oka. The landscape reminds me of my hometown, Pittsburgh, with crisscrossing bridges, linking neighborhoods that are close in proximity but feel distinctly different because they’re on opposite banks. Arriving in Nizhny, I feel like a real Russian traveler, because we have a family waiting excitedly to greet us. As soon as we descend the metal stairs of the train car, two women waiting on the platform leap at Sergei and bury him with hugs.

“David, this is my cousin Ira and her daughter, Zhenia.”

“Ochen priatno paznakomnitsa [It’s nice to meet you],” I say, shaking their hands.

Ira has short red hair and Sergei’s facial features. Zhenia is twenty-three, with long, shiny black hair and is wearing the uniform of many young Russian women—skin-tight jeans and wedge-style shoes that extend her height by a good four inches. Rose liked to offer commentary on the clothing choices of Russian women, often focusing on their determination to wear high heels or uncomfortable wedges no matter how much ice or snow was impeding sidewalks. Zhenia leads us, uncomfortably, over chunks of ice and snow to her car, and we pile in and head for Aunt Nina’s apartment. Again, on the outside, a gray, drab building. We go up a cramped, old elevator the size of a broom closet, enter the flat itself, and it could not be a warmer place.

While Sergei is saying hello to other family members, Aunt Nina and I are having one of those conversations with no speaking because of the language barrier. I hand her a box of chocolates, and say (motion, really), Thank you for having me. She takes my suitcase, motions for me to open it, and points to a small room with a shower. I now get the point. As her travel-weary foreign guest, I am meant to have the first crack at a shower, and who am I to refuse?

Aunt Nina and her late husband were given this flat during Soviet times. They lived modestly by Soviet standards. She was a schoolteacher who later worked a desk job at a local prison, where Sergei’s late uncle Peter was a top official. Those jobs, along with other murky considerations the Soviet authorities never divulged, determined their status and living situation. The apartment has a tiny kitchen with a stove and fridge, a closetlike room with a sink, a bathroom with a toilet and shower, a small bedroom, a larger bedroom, and a spacious room that serves as living and dining room. For one or two people, the space would feel plentiful. But as with many Russian families, generations live under the same roof, trying to maximize whatever they can get from housing that was allocated for free during Soviet times. Aunt Nina sleeps on the couch in the small bedroom. She has given the master bedroom to Zhenia and her boyfriend, who are both out of school and beginning new careers that don’t pay much.

When I emerge from the shower, it is late afternoon. Irresistible smells are already wafting from Aunt Nina’s kitchen. She and other family members are arranging the dining room—pulling up the couch to provide seating on one side, adding chairs in other places. I can already tell we are going to spend some serious time here.

At five o’clock I am instructed to sit and ten family members join. Aunt Nina is bringing out dish after dish, one more delicious than the next—homemade borscht with a dollop of sour cream, stewed chicken, pickled vegetables, soft brown Russian bread (with as much butter as I want!), and—vodka.

“David, vodka. You like?” says Pavel, one of Sergei’s cousins. I can’t tell if my smile reveals the fear or not. But he takes it as yes. And so it begins. I
am
eager to get to know Sergei’s family a bit before entering a drunken stupor.

This is Sergei’s mother’s side of the family. She died several years ago and is buried in the cemetery we visited in Ukraine. Sergei and I both lost our mothers when they were relatively young, and we often talk of that shared pain and about the positive influences our mothers had on us.

Sergei is not close to many people on his father’s side. His grandfather died fighting with the Red Army in World War II. That was a reality faced by far too many families. Russia lost millions of men in that war, more than any other country. After his grandfather’s death, Sergei’s grandmother immediately remarried. “And my father never forgave her for that and never wanted to see her,” Sergei once told me. This unwillingness to forgive always struck Sergei as odd, coming from a man who needed forgiveness himself. Like so many Russian men, Sergei’s dad struggled with alcohol and abused his wife. “I once asked my mother if dad ever beat her. Twice, she told me. David, I can’t relate to a man who does that. I have never raised an arm, or even raised my voice at Tania.”

Sergei could not have been more excited to see his mother’s family in Nizhny. He hadn’t seen them in six years—even though it’s only a six-hour train trip from Moscow, he and Tania have just been too busy. On his last visit he had not even begun working for NPR. On this visit, at the table, Sergei hands out his NPR business cards, and explains he works for an
Amerikanskaya radiokompaniya
. They pass the cards around the table, studying every detail, a moment that makes Sergei proud and me proud for him.

I am on my second bowl of borscht when Zhenia, trying her limited English, declares: “I am going to come to America and write a book!”

I ask if she’s serious, and she says a stern “Nyet,” then smiles. Zhenia is happy to have a job at a small automobile company, and her dream is to travel with her boyfriend, Albert, to some of the Russian cities near Nizhny, if they can save enough money. Life isn’t easy—she and Albert are cramped living with Aunt Nina, and there’s little extra money for travel. But the couple is happy, satisfied to live and eventually raise a family in Nizhny.

Meeting Zhenia makes me eager to meet more young people. In Moscow, people in their twenties and thirties are on average wealthier and more educated, often in well-paid jobs at energy companies or law firms. Many of them were part of the middle class that rose up in those December 2011 protests. The image the world saw was Russia’s young generation rising up. It was an attractive narrative for Western journalists who spent years watching and waiting for Russia to see its own Arab Spring. In truth, though, Zhenia may better fit the mold of a more prevalent young Russian—struggling to get by, satisfied to be near family, educated and familiar with the West but not clamoring to see or be part of it.

Aunt Nina is to my left at the table, keeping constant watch over my plate to make sure it’s never empty. Her insistence that I keep consuming food gives me ample time to pick her brain about the time she and Sergei’s uncle spent working at the local prison colony in the 1970s. “And Peter had the rank of major,” she says. “But he was never promoted, because of an incident at the camp.” She explains that the camp dentist needed an assistant and designated a prisoner, who enjoyed the freedom that came with working for a prison staff member. He used that freedom to go on a killing spree, hanging a woman who worked in the prison pharmacy and fatally stabbing a prisoner.

“The man’s name was Grom,” Aunt Nina remembers. “He fled to the woods near the camp. The dogs found him. They wanted to take him alive, but Grom yelled there was no way they would get him. So they shot and killed him.”

Uncle Peter was not directly involved, but he was in charge that day. The local Communist central committee investigated “and needed someone to blame. So they put a reprimand in Peter’s file, and it stayed there forever.”

“So, Aunt Nina,” I say, pausing for a quick sip of tea “
Was
this one of the gulags we in the U.S. heard about?”

“No, I don’t think so. There was respect here for prisoners. They had new uniforms that were replaced often. I do remember different classifications for prisoners, which determined their treatment: 5-A was the code for sick prisoners who needed food often and got better treatment; 9-A meant you received bread and broth once a day; 9-B meant you had violated a rule and received bread and broth every other day.”

I ask if people died at the camp.

“There were death-penalty prisoners, but people were not killed there—at least I don’t know of any.”

“Were there people there for political crimes? Do you think anyone was innocent?”

“Well, Peter said he saw innocent people who were there. He tried to help them. He helped them prepare their appeals. He was an honest person.”

GULAG
is an acronym that essentially translates into English as the main department of labor camps. Sergei suggests that Western historians have used the term more broadly than Russians have. The colony where Aunt Nina worked was something different, a place for thieves and murderers—not for political prisoners. Aunt Nina tells me she knows little about the “gulag” system we in the West heard so much about, which seems revealing. Here was a system that under Stalin, and after his death, killed millions of people, often for political crimes. Aunt Nina and her husband did not work in a gulag—their prison colony was wholly separate. And yet I’m struck that she seems sincerely unfamiliar with the larger picture of violence—and not so eager to speculate about it. From what I know of Soviet times, it would make sense for a person to have his or her job, do it dutifully, and collect paychecks, with little curiosity about the broader picture in the country, no concept of Stalin’s cruelty, unless a friend or family member was a victim of it. It’s clear Aunt Nina doesn’t talk much about this. Not many Russians do.

In my imagination, those six flowers at the gulag memorial near Yaroslavl were left by someone only now confronting the horror of the past. In many ways Russians were trained to put painful things out of their minds and just move on to the next day, and the next day’s duties and tasks, without even asking “Why?”

. . .

I
’LL NEVER FORGET
a reporting trip I made to Kaliningrad, a seemingly misplaced chunk of Russia that is separated from the rest of the country, bordering Germany and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea. I went to visit a Holocaust memorial that had recently opened, revealing a long-kept secret.

In January 1945, days after Auschwitz was liberated and the Holocaust was nearly over, the Nazis, in one of their final cruel acts, marched seven thousand Jewish prisoners north from Poland to a beach in east Prussia. Scores of prisoners died on the march. Those who survived were slaughtered on the beach—according to some accounts, the Jewish prisoners were shot while standing ankle-deep in the ocean and facing the horizon.

After the war Germans who had memories of the atrocity were sent away and the region was repopulated by Russians and became known as Kaliningrad. For fifty-five years little was spoken about the mass killing. The Soviet government, meanwhile, didn’t even single out Jews as special victims of the Holocaust—grouping them as “heroes” with everyone who died in the war. It was not the Communist way to single out certain religions or ethnicities for any reason. For people who live in this coastal village, Yantarny, in Kaliningrad, it was as if the atrocity never took place—until a small stone was placed in 2000, amid restaurants, to memorialize the victims. I spoke to the director of the Yantarny History Museum, Lyudmila Kirpinyova, when I visited in 2010.

“In those days everyone kept silent,” she said of Soviet times. “They didn’t reveal anything. Even nowadays my husband tells me if I had a shorter tongue, I would be of greater value. But since I couldn’t speak much in the past, now it is my time to speak—a lot, at last.”

In 2010—
2010
—her husband was
lecturing
her about being more “valuable” if she would just keep her mouth shut about the Holocaust!

This is a country where, for years, people were taught that if they had a mundane problem—the electricity or water service went out—they could call the local Soviet authorities and the problem might be promptly fixed. But if they saw something unjust or awful, the wisest choice could be to simply ignore it or move past it. People were not taught to raise questions—because doing so could be dangerous, and really there was nowhere to turn for answers anyway. A foundation of Communist ideology and Soviet power was keeping people convinced that they had to accept their fate as it was—and that, in the end, this would be better for everyone. But this philosophy remains in the DNA, passed from one generation to the next, including to a younger one that so far shows little sign of extinguishing it.