Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia (20 page)

Our train pulls out of Izhevsk, and I am already settled into the humdrum routine. I make some tea, make my bed, and smile at the woman in the berth across from me. She is already tucked under her blanket, reading.

My first solid night of sleep in a while ends with shouting. The
provodnik
is yelling “the bathroom will be closed in five minutes for cleaning. Thirty minutes to Perm!” I crawl out of bed, and run to the lavatory to brush my teeth and throw cold water at my face. Then Sergei and I gather our belongings and disembark in Perm, where we have a few hours to burn. This is by far the most ramshackle train station we’ve visited so far. In a dingy basement Sergei and I find a luggage storage room to leave our suitcases. Then we walk upstairs to a small café.

“Sergei, I’m starved—you want any food?”

“Just tea, David.”

I walk up to a buffet line and take two hard-boiled eggs, some kasha, and two teas—all for a whopping sixty-nine rubles (two dollars). I am peeling my first egg when a thought occurs to me. Maybe total paranoia, maybe not, but I ponder one way our “friends” could bring an abrupt end to my trip: If they planted drugs or something else in my suitcase. I scarf down the food, and we return to the basement to grab our luggage from the storage room. Then we find a taxi.

One potential stop that interested me in Perm was the local office of Memorial, a nationwide organization that highlights the repressions of Soviet times and helps modern-day citizens fight for civil liberties. The group is often a thorn in the Kremlin’s side, exposing how protesters are jailed and intimidated, hurting Russia’s image abroad. Sergei had made a few calls and was told some of their leaders would be available today if we stopped by.

Our taxi pulls up on the side of a busy street, where there is no obvious sign of Memorial, just a gray cement block of apartment buildings, with storefronts on the ground floor. Then I see it—next to a manicure/pedicure shop, beneath an advertisement with a woman in a bikini is a small sign—“Memorial”—near a brown metal door. Sergei and I swing the creaky door open and walk into a dank cement corridor with signs for lawyers, travel agents, and business advice plastering the walls. On another metal door at the opposite end of the corridor, there’s another sign for Memorial, mentioning “alternatives to military service and questions about human rights.” We knock, and a pleasant young woman invites us inside. The floor is wooden, covered with dried mud. There are several wooden desks, an aging photocopier, a coffeemaker, an electric teakettle, and the telltale Memorial flag with a red flame draped on the wall.

“The people you want to see will be here shortly,” the young woman says.

Sergei and I sit, and I can’t help but think how this shabby office next door to a mani/pedi shop says a lot about the battle for civil rights here. The organization fights a lack of money and lots of government pressure to achieve a respected place in Russian society.

Several minutes pass, and an older woman walks through the door, gives us a look, and motions to a table in the corner, where the teakettle and cookies are located.

“Ochen priyatno—David,” I say.

“Angelina.”

She turns the switch on the teakettle, munches on a cookie, and waits for the water to heat. Sergei and I sit in the second and third wooden chairs at the table.

“What would you like to know?” she says. Sergei briefly tells her about my book, and how he was told that she had a painful story from Soviet times that caught Memorial’s interest.

“You know they wrote a book about me?”

Angelina reaches into her bag and pulls it out. It’s called
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia
. The book, which I mentioned earlier, is by British historian Orlando Figues. She pages through and finds a black-and-white photo of a baby girl. “That’s me. That was the last photo my father took of me.”

Angelina Bushueva has red-dyed hair tied in a pony tail. She’s wearing a black blouse and purple scarf. She squints a bit through her glasses when she speaks.

“You’re young,” she says to me, smiling. “You don’t know these stories.”

She puts a tea bag into a cup and pours hot water in. She motions with her head to some other teacups. Sergei and I each take one, along with a tea bag, and we pour.

“My father was head of a technology bureau. One day, just like that, he was arrested on his lunch break. And after he was arrested we were evicted from our house. We were told we were ‘enemies of the people.’” That was the fall of 1937. To this day she doesn’t know why her father was taken. But in Stalinist times this was common. He ordered arrests and executions of people because they were academics, or in the sciences, or of certain religions, or because Stalin and his cohorts just acted on whims.

“My mother saw him in prison. This photo, she brought it to him. Then he was sent to be executed.”

Angelina is speaking smoothly and quietly in Russian, with little outward emotion.

“It was impossible to talk about any of this. Only in 1986 did my mother begin telling us all the details. At eighty years old, my mother starts talking. You know, she was pregnant when my father was executed.”

It was a baby boy. And after the birth, Angelina’s mother and baby brother were sent to a gulag—a “camp for wives of betrayers of the motherland,” Angelina recalls.

She was two and had a sister who was four. “My sister and I were sent to an orphanage. My grandmother found us when I was six.”

Angelina and her sister went to live with her grandmother. Other families were there, including a man from Leningrad who ran a printing house. “And he is the reason I learned to read.”

She and her sister started receiving letters from their mother, from a gulag in Kazakhstan. Finally the two girls were allowed to travel to be with their mother—and they attended school in the camp settlement.

I can’t stop thinking about my morning—my anger at being followed by a few thugs, my worry about our luggage, my impatience and desire to just get through this layover in Perm so we could be on our way to Sagra. I never expected to meet this woman and get such a vivid portrait of tragedy.

After the Allies won World War II—“Victory Day,” as it’s remembered in Russia—Angelina and her family were freed from the gulag and returned to Russia. Her mother’s movements were restricted. She wasn’t allowed to live in big cities, and the work she could do was limited. But she took illegal jobs and got by.

“I came to Perm and started school,” Angelina says. “When Stalin died in 1953, my mother came to Perm and was able to rent an apartment. She received papers confirming her ‘rehabilitation’—she was no longer an enemy of the people.”

She pauses here and shakes her head.

“There were no real crimes. Stalin wanted there to be enemies everywhere. You know my brother went to the army? He served west of Moscow and studied to work in the Interior Ministry. He died with a very high rank. What an irony, given that’s the agency that arrested his family.”

Angelina worked as an elementary school teacher, then moved to a factory for twenty-nine years. Then she settled at Memorial, trying to raise awareness about what happened in Soviet times. Trying to confront the past so Russia can move into a new future.

“For years people have been afraid. Worried about their children, worried that history could one day repeat itself. The way I talk now? It’s difficult to get other people to do that. They are still afraid.”

She looks directly at me: “There has never been an apology for Stalin’s crimes. But the time will come. The time will come when they apologize.”

It was no apology, but the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev did stun the world in 1956, famously denouncing Stalin in a speech. The general trend in modern Russia is a growing nostalgia for Stalin. Putin has spoken almost fondly—rarely critically—of him. And while there is no organized campaign of fear and terror in today’s Russia, Putin’s regime has increasingly clamped down on democracy, rounding up protesters and targeting human rights groups like Memorial. Not to mention, of course, the corrupt and flawed system of justice that sends innocent people to jail—maybe not at the hands of Stalin but at the hands of an overzealous judge under pressure to rack up convictions. Russians today live in some state of purgatory—told by their leaders that they live in a democracy, encouraged to go to the polls and vote. But meanwhile, Russians can never be sure when the authorities might act in a wholly undemocratic way—bringing terrifying memories of this country’s past back to the surface.

Angelina finishes her tea, and we say good-bye.

As she puts on her coat, a young man walks swiftly into the office, hangs his coat on the coatrack, and positions himself at his desk.

“I’m Robert,” he announces to us across the room.

“Ah, David,” Sergei says quietly. “This is the gentleman we are supposed to talk to.”

He’s Memorial’s local director.

We walk over to Robert’s desk.

“Please. Please sit,” he says.

I ask Robert about the situation for Memorial since Putin returned to the presidency in 2012. He removes a letter from the top of a pile on his desk and holds it in front of me.

“You see this? We received this today from a prosecutor informing us of a ‘checkup.’ They are looking for evidence of extremism. So I have to fill this out, confirming that I am authorized to lead this group, how we spend money, and how we use foreign grants.”

Indeed, Putin angered the United States and other western governments by threatening to scrutinize human rights organizations, forcing them to register as “foreign agents.” The move was seen as a not-so-subtle effort by Putin to intimidate the groups and begin the process of shutting them down. In March 2013, the government raided some of Memorial’s offices as well as the offices of other rights organizations. Pavel Chikov, who leads Agora, an umbrella group for human rights organizations, told my NPR colleague, Corey Flintoff, that groups were deeply worried about bowing to Putin’s demand and registering as “agents” because, as he put it, “this means that we are spies of foreign government.”

Robert tells me he received the threatening letter because he gets charitable contributions from the United States.

“The situation in our country is constantly worsening,” Robert says. “I have this game. Whenever I hear about some new initiative like this”—he shakes the letter—“I hold it in one hand. Then I take a copy of the Russian constitution in the other. And I read that. And I’m surprised to learn about the country I’m
supposed
to live in.”

The thirty-first of any month is an important one for democracy activists in Russia. Often people hold unsanctioned antigovernment protests. Often they get arrested. It is a symbolic display, because article 31 of the Russian constitution guarantees citizens’ rights to public assembly.

“What we have,” Robert tells us, “is not democracy. It is imitative democracy. We have all the external signs. We have elections. We have a parliament. We have legislation. All the accessories of democracy. But anyone with common sense here knows we live in an authoritarian state. Putin has learned that if he offers the accessories of democracy, his regime can be very hard to accuse. The regime does one thing very well: It doesn’t listen. So there can be free speech, channels of communication. But normally in a democracy, those voices affect decision making. In this country that doesn’t happen.”

“But why do the
people
allow this to go on?”

“It’s in the genes, David. Do you deal with power? Or do you live in a parallel world? Two-thirds of our society was shaped in Soviet times. And young people? There are young people who agree with Stalin’s ideology. So for them it’s not fear driving them, but something else.”

Two people have walked into the office, waiting to sit down with Robert. The last thing I want to do is take his time away from people who truly need it.

“Just another question or two, Robert?”

“Sure.”

“Where do things go from here?”

“I see several options. The first—there’s a slow process where people, very slowly, develop a better understanding of the country they want to live in, what kind of power they want. I am confident this can happen, if there’s no war or catastrophe.”

“And other options?”

“Option two is the one many experts predict: confrontation. Different groups competing for the best way to overcome their disappointment. Not necessarily with guns. But a revolution. The thing is, any revolution leads to tragedy. Ties are broken. One set of rules is gone. Another set of rules is established.”

Robert is getting eager now to attend to his other guests. As we stand up, I ask him if he feels that better days may be coming.

“I used to answer that question by saying I would not be working for this organization if I were not an optimist. I would like to believe those words. In truth, what makes me optimistic is my wife, my daughter, and knowing they have a bright future.”

“Do you have trouble keeping that faith?”

“We’ll manage that.”

With that we shake hands, and Robert is already offering his next guest tea and a seat. Sergei and I quietly gather our things and walk outside onto the street to look for a taxi.

Talking to Robert makes me even more eager to return to Sagra, and to reconnect with Andrei. He and his family have tested democracy in Russia, whatever it is. And I wonder if he feels that he has overcome the barrier Robert mentioned between people and power—the feeling that as a citizen you can’t interact with power in this country. It just exists and does its thing. And you do yours.

I
T’S THE MIDDLE
of the afternoon, and the sun is setting in Perm as Sergei and I arrive back at the train station—dragging all our luggage, since we didn’t want to leave it in the storage room. Oddly enough there are no “friends” in sight. Maybe they have finally decided that an American writer riding the rails is no real threat.

Sergei and I are ravenous. We find a food stand outside the train station. I wait with our suitcases. The weather has turned bitterly cold—I desperately dig out my gloves, as my hands are already feeling numb. Sergei buys four beers, a bag of
piroshki
(the same pastries I tried to buy on the train—this time they have their filling), and
chechel
(a stringy, salty cheese from the former Soviet republic of Georgia). We board our train, chow down, and relax, taking in the scene out the window.