Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia (27 page)

Then there was the story of Viktor Kondrashov, a young developer in the Siberian city of Irkutsk. He’s a former fashion model with wavy blond hair, an infectious smile, and a knack for politics. He rose up in the Communist Party—the main opposition in today’s Russia to Putin’s United Russia Party—and stunned the establishment in 2010 by winning the mayoral race in Irkutsk. Putin’s party won a landslide victory overall in local and regional elections that year, but support was beginning to fade, and Kondrashov’s victory in a city so large was a blemish. I arrived in Irkutsk and spoke to residents who felt they had sent a loud message that democracy is alive in the country. “I do go to elections, but what’s the point?” one woman said. “They always have everything decided.” This time, she proudly declared, “We were mistaken!” In his office Kondrashov knew he had pulled off something special. “This never happened in the history of Irkutsk—so many cars at polling stations. I managed to stir up this part of the population, people who never went to elections, who were indifferent.” But something bothered me toward the end of our interview. I asked Kondrashov if he worried that the ruling party might retaliate somehow—perhaps threatening to cut off services or funding to his city, perhaps by intimidating him. “There are risks,” he said. “I’m simply going to observe the law, not going to steal, not going to take bribes.” I had one more question: If United Russia presented him with an invitation to join them, a not-so-subtle way of saying things would be better for the city if he joined Team Putin, would he accept? Putin’s party, after all, controls the levers of power, the money, the domestic security services—they can make offers that are hard to refuse and make life difficult for people who don’t accept. The mayor took a moment, and the smile left his face. Yes, he finally said, he would consider joining United Russia, if it was in the best interest of the city.

Within weeks, United Russia posted a message on its Web site that Viktor Kondrashov, the mayor of Irkutsk, had declared his support for the party and would be formally joining as a member soon.

I
T CAN BE
so tempting to look for the big battles in Russia—big elections, big rallies, an Arab Spring. And it can be deflating when you don’t see Russia rise up, when you see what looks like a citizenry that’s lazy or resigned. But maybe this is overlooking the smaller battles. Spending time with Nadezhda is leaving me with this feeling of hope. She and Andrei may be trailblazers. But over time, if more people feel as emboldened as they do to challenge power, even in small ways, maybe a corrupt government will begin to weaken, maybe their outdated strategies for clinging to power will become less relevant.

Nadezhda’s spirit of freedom and survival in this Siberian outpost has me more excited to head deeper into this region and meet more people. And to see Rose, who I know will love hearing about Nadezhda.

“You know, when we checked into your hotel last night, I never imagined we would feel so much warmth here.”

Nadezhda smiles.

She shows me photos of her daughters on her iPhone. Her seven-year-old is in a dress, ballroom dancing with a seven-year-old partner.

“He loves her. We are ready to make him her husband!”

I can tell she misses marriage.

“My daughters are truly what makes me happy.”

I show her a photo of Rose, and she immediately zeroes in on her wedding band, a silver ring with tiny diamonds that belonged to my grandmother. “Why do you wear silver wedding rings?”

I explain that in the United States, wedding rings can be of all sorts, not always gold, as is the case in Russia.

It’s time for our train. Nadezhda drives us to the station and—of course—walks us in to make sure our train is on time and we know where we are going. For both me and Sergei, this is the toughest good-bye so far. Sergei and I often talk about how, on our reporting trips, we so often pick up new members of an extended “family”—strangers so much more welcoming and friendly to us than they need to be. This makes us feel incredibly lucky.

“Ogromnoe spasibo [Thank you so much],” Nadezhda says, standing in the middle of the small train station.

“Spasibo, Nadezhda. Do vstrechi,” I say—until our next meeting.

She walks back outside, and Sergei and I quietly board our train.

We have two lower berths reserved on this night train to Novosibirsk. Two young guys are sitting on our berths, one just mixing hot water into a cup of instant soup. We tell them not to rush at all, stay seated, take your time.

Sergei and I sit down with them. Over in one of the berths across the aisle, an older man in black dress pants and a zipped gray jacket is snoring, on his side, beside an empty forty-ounce bottle of Russian beer. He rolls over, squints, looking perhaps at Sergei.

“
Hehhh
. What time is it?” he asks in Russian.

“Eight fifteen,” Sergei says.

“Where are we?”

“Ishim.”

He nods, moans, and returns to sleep.

The night seems so peaceful—which in Russia can only last so long.

As we speed along into the night, I hear an increasingly loud clanking next to my head. I’m worried about the structural integrity of the window. Especially given the severe cold outside, you do develop some sense of security that, if nothing else, this train will protect you from the elements—you know, like a pressurized airplane cabin protects you from altitude shock and instantly freezing to death thirty thousand feet in the air. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the wall of this train feels just as vital to your well-being. So you can understand my anxiety when the window rattles more, then develops a cold wet coating of water, then begins to release a stream of water onto my pillow. In darkness I see Sergei is experiencing the same problem. He has built a dam of blankets to stem the flow of the water on his side of the window. I do the same.

It’s not ideal. But it’s stable.

17
•
YET ANOTHER SERGEI

I
WAKE UP
on the train a half hour before arriving in Novosibirsk and can think of only one thing: how excited I am to see Rose. She has been working around the clock preparing to open her new restaurant but was able to escape for a week to join me. She lands in midafternoon.

The weather is ominous. There appears to be more snow piled up outside than there was in Ishim, far more than anywhere along the trip. And it looks bitterly cold. Rose will be just thrilled.

This trip has not been nearly as cold as in 2011, when I had a close encounter with frostbite. We were in the city of Ulan-Ude, near Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia. Sergei, Rose, and I hired a driver/guide named Yuri. The retired construction engineer was wearing no gloves with temperatures hovering around thirty below zero Fahrenheit and a stiff breeze blowing. I wanted to be as tough as Yuri.

The problem was not my hands, though, but my feet. Yuri’s van had odd amenities, including flowing green curtains and green fabric covering the dashboard, but it lacked reliable heat. During the drive, cold from the floor seeped through the soles of my boots, which were winterproof only by the standards of the department store in New York where I bought them.

At one stop Yuri looked at my boots and gasped. He then grabbed a spare pair of knee-high boots—
valenki
in Russian—made of tightly packed felt and noticeably lacking style. The word for this type of Russian boot—the singular form is
valenok
—is the same word used in Russian to describe a “hick” or “country bumpkin.” That did not dissuade me in the slightest. I wore Yuri’s
valenki
the rest of the day, and I can only imagine how much pain I was spared. Chekhov, on his travels, wrote of relying on these felt boots in Siberia—and that was in
May
. And so, here I was, in one sense—the only sense—walking in Chekhov’s shoes.

Even with that recovery, my feet were a dark shade of blue when we returned to the hotel, and I had to run hot water over them for a good half hour before normal color and the ability to feel returned. The way of life in Siberia is built around cold. Unimaginable cold. And many say that trading secrets for survival, helping one another, made people closer and formed the foundation of communities here.

All that said, I was hopeful Rose would arrive on a warmer day, for her sake and mine.

Novosibirsk is Russia’s third-biggest city, with more than 1.5 million people. Approaching it from the west reminds me of coming up to Denver from the east, passing miles of flat empty land until suddenly this frontier-feeling city pops up, with its urban sprawl and tall buildings.

One sign of hitting a major urban center is cell phone coverage, which kicks back in, and a parade of unread e-mails arrives. One is from Olga Granovskaya, a professor of political science I interviewed in 2011 in Vladivostok. I had a wonderful visit with her and her husband at the end of my last Trans-Siberian trip and I had been corresponding with Olga, eager to meet her again. She had written about how the radio piece I produced last time from Vladivostok generated a lot of discussion on local news sites, with many people suggesting that the comments Olga made criticizing her country were a figment of my imagination. I had asked Olga to send along the comments so I could read them. But in this new e-mail there was something surprising.

Dear David,
You can read all the comments here. But they are in Russian. I can help you to translate them when we meet. We had not any problems because of the interview. Putin is not Stalin, fortunately. But a man from the KGB called my father-in-law (who is a German and an honorary consul of Germany in Vladivostok) and told him that his wife gave an interview to American radio. My relative informed them that it was not his wife but his daughter-in-law. So, I know KGB is not sleeping. Do not think that your visit would be inconvenient or frustrating. If so, I would not invite you.

I always assumed after interviewing people in Russia that they might get a phone call, a subtle warning, from the FSB. But this is the first concrete evidence. It really bothers me. I reported from Tripoli, Libya’s capital, when Mu‘ammar Gadhafi was clinging to power as NATO bombs were falling on his city. Government spies were everywhere, tracking journalists, eavesdropping on interviews. Each time I spoke to a citizen—especially if he or she said anything critical of the regime—I honestly worried that that person would be hounded afterward—interrogated or worse, punished. That happened here in Soviet times.

In today’s Russia I worry less about a person’s well-being. People are generally free to speak their minds in public. Still, the element of fear remains. A follow-up call like this may not intimidate Olga’s father-in-law, a Western diplomat. (In fact I can’t help but smile thinking that the FSB really chose the wrong guy here!). But calls like this do intimidate many people. Without a fair and reliable system of justice, what’s your protection if you’re a citizen?

While the culture of fear in Russia today doesn’t compare to that of Soviet times, while there are far fewer victims, the threat is real. Oleg Kashin is a business reporter for a respected Russian newspaper,
Kommersant
. He often wrote critically of the government and in the fall of 2010, was beaten outside his home and nearly died. His attackers, among other things, severed one of Kashin’s fingers and broke several others—a clear message to a man who types words for a living. Doctor’s induced a coma following the attack, and fortunately Kashin survived. The government, outwardly at least, gave Kashin its full support and said his attackers would be found. But more than anything, it was another reminder to Russian journalists—and other citizens—that you can be in danger if you step out of line, and there may be no reliable place to turn for justice.

What a strange purgatory Russians live in. For so many years they could not travel freely and took a major risk if they wrote or said anything critical of the government or anyone well connected. There were severe limits on where people could work and who could own businesses or property. Today many of those restrictions are gone. Life is more free and open. And yet the fear remains. The risk remains. In a way, maybe clear limits of toleration are less fearsome than erratic limits of toleration. Uncertainty about being punished is more intimidating than certainty. You are always just left to wonder.

Sergei and I arrive in Novosibirsk, find a hotel and collapse for a nap. I awake in midafternoon and jump in a cab to meet Rose at the Novosibirsk airport. She walks out the International Arrivals door with a camping backpack on her back, looking stunningly energetic after traveling for the better part of two days. I’m feeling a tad guilty for begging her to come, since she only had a few days to spare. But I’ve missed her a ton.

She jumps into my arms and I grab her backpack. Then we walk toward the doors.

“You know how I told you it’s been warmer on this trip than I expected?”

“Greene?”

“Yeah, not today.”

We step into the cold, and it hits her like a ton of Russian bricks. The gush of wind blows her hair back, and she immediately reaches for her gloves. “Oh, it’s all here. It’s all still here. Good
God.
How did I know I’d arrive on the coldest day? If you don’t think Russia has it in for me! I’m already starting to not feel my lips. It’s already starting.”

We get in a cab, and I don’t even know where to begin: “I have so much to tell you.”

“I can imagine.”

“I really missed you in Sagra. Andrei
really
missed you in Sagra. He still has the boarding pass where you wrote your e-mail and phone number.”

“That is so sweet. You know, Sagra is where I realized that I don’t like Moscow—but I like Russia. Those are the people I was waiting for when we got to Russia. They invited us into their homes. They had no indoor plumbing but spared nothing to show us hospitality. They put vodka on the table, and food—pickles they pickled themselves. And they couldn’t care less about Moscow—the millionaires and the Bentleys. I knew Moscow wasn’t the real Russia.”