Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia (15 page)

He once went after some hunters who were illegally shooting fox and deer in a wildlife preserve. When he gave chase, they came after the officer on their snowmobiles. Grigoryev told me he was knocked down as he fired his rifle in the air.

One of the hunters was a powerful local politician. Not coincidentally, Grigoryev was quickly charged with abuse of power, facing up to ten years in prison—basically for doing his job.

Russia’s justice system allows for Grigoryev to be wrongly accused. It allows Alexei to be beaten and tortured. It allows high-profile figures like Mikhail Khodokorsky, the former oil tycoon, to serve time in a Russian penal colony for crimes that still remain unproved.

It is easy to blame Russia’s leaders. I also struggle over why Russia’s citizens aren’t
demanding
something better. Whatever is holding them back may well be the same thing that keeps Sergei from asking tougher questions when he’s setting up an interview. It could be why that man in Kaliningrad lectures his wife for being too vocal about the Holocaust and why Russian train passengers go through the motions at the security checkpoint—assuming it just has to be this way.

Sergei and I have been sitting with Alexei and Lyudmila for two hours. I have one more question: “Did you ever see or talk to Ilya again?”

“Never. And we were best friends. But I never want to see him again after what he did to me.”

“You want to know how sad it is?” asks Lyudmila. “When Alexei was growing up there were maybe thirty or so boys in the neighborhood who were friends. So many of them have died—of drugs. Or serving in the wars in Chechnya. Really there were only two left, Ilya and Alexei. And now they never speak.”

Sergei and I begin to get our equipment together. “Thank you for your time, Alexei. Good luck to you. I will be thinking of you a lot.”

“Spasibo,” he says, before resting his head back on his pillow.

Lyudmila walks me and Sergei to the door. We are putting our shoes back on. “Please, if there is any way you can find a doctor who can treat him, will you let me know? We are always looking.”

“Konechno [of course],” Sergei says.

As we walk out into the hall and begin walking down, I imagine Alexei on these very stairs, in a sitting position, his mom helping him down each step, one by one. I look back up, and Lyudmila, with her dyed red hair and watery eyes, is watching our every step as we walk away. She doesn’t want to close that door just yet, because it will once again seal off that desperate world within.

8
•
VASILY

N
OW
I get to enjoy the Russian tradition.

During our trip so far, I’ve seen so many made-for-the-movies scenes of families dropping loved ones off to catch a train, or greeting them with hugs and love as they arrive. It happens everywhere, at every stop the train makes. It’s hard to find that kind of poetry on Amtrak.

I got a small taste when Zhenia and Ira picked us up two days ago. But this evening I am getting the full treatment.

Zhenia and her friend drove to the station separately, just to make sure they’re able to say good-bye.

“David, this is for you,” Zhenia says. She hands me a magnet, with an artist’s rendering of Nizhny’s rivers and landscape. I’ll cherish it—this city that looks so much like my home, Pittsburgh.

We hug, as Pavel reaches behind me and grabs my roll-aboard suitcase from my hands. “David, let’s go, we have to board.”

Yes,
we
.

Pavel walks, dragging my suitcase along, boards the train with us, finds our seats with us, and gets us settled until it becomes clear our departure is imminent. He and Sergei share an extended hug, and Pavel kisses Sergei on the cheek: “Sergei, you come back soon. David, very nice to meet you.”

He gets off the train and positions himself on the platform, with the entire family, waving and waving as our train begins to move. I still have a photo of the scene on my iPhone—the flash off the window distorts it some, but there is Pavel, in his black leather hat in the cold, pressing his face against our window, and Ira, bundled in a black jacket and hood, smiling warmly at me and Sergei, posing as I snap the shot.

Russia can be so maddening. The day before, I listened to Alexei describe the horror of being tortured at a police station, then ignored after being fully exonerated, living his life without the use of his legs and with no one seeming to care but his sweet mother. This country’s system of justice—this
country
—is so deeply flawed.

And then there are these poetic moments—a poetry that grabs you and touches your heart in ways I rarely experience at home, or in any other country.

“Russia giveth. Then so quickly, she taketh away.” That’s how my best friend and college roommate, Chandler Arnold, summed up his vacation when he came to visit me and Rose during our time in Moscow. Each day, each hour, seemed to bring dramatic emotional swings.

I remember one day in Moscow that especially struck me. I waited for a city bus outside my office in the bitter cold. The bus arrived and creaked to a stop. The door opened, I boarded, and reached into my pocket for rubles to pay the driver. He was in an angry mood and kept speaking to me sternly in Russian. I used the little Russian I knew at the time—“Ne ponimayu [I don’t understand].” He was cold and mean and aggravated with my lack of Russian, or my being American, or both. I finally found the change, but he refused to give me a ticket, which you need to scan in order to pass through a turnstile and reach the seats. I was trapped there, with him, at the front of the bus. He pulled to the next stop and opened the door, fully expecting me to surrender and disembark. That’s when a voice came from the back of the bus. “Malchik!” (I had just been addressed as a “young boy.”) A large woman, bundled up in a maroon overcoat and maroon fur hat, was approaching me holding up a card with a bar code. I saw two other older women, babushkas, in their seats, also holding up cards. They were monthly bus passes. The first woman handed me her card. I scanned it at the turnstile and walked through as the driver grunted. The woman then yelled at the driver in Russian (I don’t know what she said, but I liked it). Her generosity, and the generosity of the other women who were ready to lend me their passes, filled my eyes with tears. I returned the pass and held out the change from my pocket, but the woman refused to take it. “Nyet, sadeet-yuh [No, just sit down]!”

It’s just my own small taste of how Russians live their lives. Difficult things happen, and you pray for the moment or day when things turn brighter. It’s as if Russians can’t appreciate something beautiful without first experiencing something hideous. This is where Russians seem to find their strength. Our train is now heading from Nizhny Novgorod to Izhevsk, in the Ural Mountains, so we can visit some babushkas who define finding strength in tragedy.

When we were planning the trip, Sergei called to set up an interview with Mikhail Kalashnikov. Yes,
that
Kalashnikov. He’s ninety-three years old, lives in Izhevsk, and invented one of the world deadliest weapons. To reach Kalashnikov, Sergei had to go through the public affairs department of the Kalashnikov factory and museum. That’s where our trouble may have begun. “I’ll need passport information for you and the American correspondent,” the woman told Sergei on the phone. “Well, this is not for journalism, it’s for a book,” Sergei said. “Well,” the woman said, “the FSB may still want it—I need it in case they ask.” The FSB is Russia’s modern-day domestic security service—today’s KGB. The new agency is still based at Lubyanka, a menacing building in central Moscow that long housed the KGB—it has a small clock on the top floor that the British novelist Tom Robb Smith once described as gazing over the city like a beady eye.

Any inconvenience seemed worth it, as I did want to meet Kalashnikov if possible (The inventor died following this trip at age ninety-four). And in any case the authorities were sure to find out at some point that I was poking around the country. But after Sergei’s phone call, I had a sinking feeling Izhevsk would be the spot where I’d encounter “friends”—my code word for the thuggish guys who would occasionally follow us.

M
Y FIRST EXPERIENCE
with Russia’s shadowy security services came shortly after I arrived in Moscow. I hadn’t even begun reporting yet, and was taking three intensive months of Russian-language training. I was sitting at a coffee shop in central Moscow, sipping tea while studying Russian verbs of motion, when I noticed that I didn’t feel my briefcase touching my leg anymore. Sure enough, it was gone. I asked the security guard at the café if he saw anything, and he said no, but that he was willing to call the police. I then called Sergei and Boris, who urged me not to call the police—it would only mean paperwork, hassle, hours at a police station. In Russia, often, involving the police is far more trouble than it’s worth—especially for an American journalist who may have just been had by one of their sister agencies.

“David, is there anything important in there?” Sergei said over the phone.

“Not really—my iPod, my digital recorder for work, and two Russian-language books.”

“Boris and I both feel you should just let it be.”

That evening, the phone rang in our apartment. Rose picked it up. It was a woman, speaking broken English.

“My father. He found a bag on street. Maybe your husband’s?”

I was delighted. Rose and I told the woman that we would meet her father the next day in front of the puppet theater, across the street from our apartment building. The man, in his fifties with a mustache, pulled up in a silver car right on time and handed me my briefcase. I handed him flowers and a box of chocolates, as a thank-you.

“Gde, gde? [Where, where]?”I said, pointing to the bag, wondering where he found it.

“Na ulitse [On the street],” he said. He hastily waved good-bye, returned to his car, and drove off with the flowers and chocolates.

I inspected the bag. Everything was there—that is, except for anything electronic. No iPod, no recorder. Rose and I returned to our building and both went upstairs to tell Boris and Sergei what had happened. Boris looked at me, shaking his head back and forth. Sergei looked suspicious as well.

“David, did you have any identification in the bag—ID, business cards?”

“No.”

“How do you think they found the number to call your apartment?”

I felt queasy. I had just gotten my little reminder from the FSB that their beady eye was watching me. I didn’t want to be paranoid. But a friend who worked for the U.S. Embassy in Moscow said many Western journalists and diplomats get just such a nudge. A fellow American radio reporter in Moscow described how after she arrived in Russia and received her press credential, she returned to her apartment—which she had locked and closed up in the morning—and found her bedroom light on, her computer turned on, and her e-mail open.

Luke Harding, a correspondent with the
Guardian
, was hounded more than any other Western journalist, even briefly expelled from the country. He described a break-in in his apartment that left the window to his son’s room open:

Nothing had been stolen; nothing damaged. The intruders’ apparent aim had been merely to demonstrate that they had been there, and presumably to show that they could come back. The dark symbolism of the open window in the child’s bedroom was not hard to decipher: take care, or your kids might just fall out. The men—I assume it was men—had vanished like ghosts.

Alas, all the work of “friends.”

O
N SEVERAL
reporting assignments, Sergei and I were obviously trailed by a car. In the volatile region of Dagestan—where the FSB often targets and rounds up people they suspect of having ties to radical groups—we were almost happy to be followed. Better to be fully transparent about who we are and what we’re doing if it reduces the risk of the authorities mistaking our identity and doing something stupid.

In Minsk, Belarus, Rose was with me when we spotted a thuggish-looking dude—dressed in black, hair slicked back—watching us at a café, then trailing us on the sidewalks, following us into our hotel, even joining us on the elevator. Rose, never hesitant to push buttons, waved good night down the hall to the man as we entered our room to turn in.

These memories weigh on my mind as our train pulls into the station in Izhevsk. At the ticket window, as we’re paying for our next two legs, to Perm and then Ekaterinburg, I catch the eye of a young man at the adjacent window. He is acting as though he’s in a dialogue with the agent, but is paying way too much attention to the details we’re providing about our travel plans. The young man has a shaved head and is wearing a red, blue, and white athletic warm-up suit. When we’re done at our window, he cuts his conversation off—never buying a ticket to go anywhere—and abruptly walks away.

“Our friend,” I mutter under my breath.

Sure enough, as we walk out of the station, we see that young man and another look at us, then quickly look away, then get into a car and wait. Sergei and I find a taxi and are on our way, and we can spot the guys in the car following a good distance behind us.

We try to ignore them as best we can and enjoy the drive out of Izhevsk and into rural Udmurtia. Russia is predominantly Slavic, but there is a dizzying mix of clans and ethnicities, large and small. The Udmurts are a people who live in this leafy part of southern-central Russia, on the western edge of the Ural Mountains, which divide European from Asian Russia. The Udmurts are known for their red hair and round faces, their own distinct language, and their traditional clothing that, for women, often includes colorful patterned head scarves.

We are en route to Uva, a resort town of sorts in the forest. There is a famous
sanatoriy
, a health complex that probably compares best, though not perfectly, to the old resorts in the Catskills beloved by Jewish families from New York and immortalized in the movie
Dirty Dancing
. We heard that the “babushkas of Buranovo,” an inspiring female singing group, were on a five-day vacation here, and they agreed to let us drop by the next morning.