Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia (30 page)

“I guess you said the right thing in that interview.”

He nods, taking a bite of cake.

Hours pass. Rose and I do some reading and napping. Sergei is on his laptop, picking up faint Internet signals here and there.

Finally our train pulls into Irkutsk. I am so excited to get in a taxi and get to Lake Baikal. It’s truly one of the world’s natural treasures. Nestled in the mountains, the lake is the deepest body of fresh water in the world. It resembles Lake Tahoe—in fact, the two are considered sister lakes—but to my mind Baikal is even more breathtaking. In the summertime the lake reflects the green mountains and blue skies “like a mirror,” Chekhov wrote. In the winter it’s majestic in a different way—near the shorelines the surface of the lake is frozen, a clear, reflective blue-green surface that looks like an abstract painting. Farther out on the lake, snow—fresh, brilliantly white, untouched snow—extends like a quilt to the tree-covered mountains that shoot up at the horizon. As I wrote earlier, seeing Baikal was enough to lift the spirits—albeit briefly—of a gulag prisoner trapped in a boxcar, peeing through a wooden crack. And the legacy of the Decembrists runs deep here. Local legend has it that on their journey to exile some of the Decembrists stopped on the shores of Baikal, waited for the lake to freeze, then rode across on horseback. Even today the freezing of Baikal is a significant event. Once solid, the lake becomes a playground. People take hovercraft across the ice—or even cars and trucks. The bravest ride across on bicycles.

We pile into a taxi in Irkutsk and head for the lake. History is on Rose’s mind.

“Don’t forget I always told you I’m like a Decembrist wife,” she says.

She did always tell me—half-jokingly—that escorting me to Russia for several years and making the best of it was not unlike the women in the nineteenth century who, rather than leave their husbands, followed them to their Siberian exile.

I just nod, accepting Rose’s point.

The shore of Baikal—the village of Listvyanka—is an hour’s drive from Irkutsk. And we arrive on a cold, sun-splashed weekend afternoon that could not be more welcoming. There is a festival on the ice. Families are grilling fish, playing music, and frolicking. Kids are running around ice sculptures and coming down ice slides. All over, people are selling
omul
, a delicious local fish caught in the lake. You can buy the fish raw or smoked.

And then there are the
nerpa
. These pudgy freshwater seals—they look like fat black torpedoes with whiskers and eyes on one end—are Baikal’s mascot.

One attraction in Listvyanka is a “nerpinarium”—a Sea World for nerpas. Parents and their kids are piling in for the show—along with me, Sergei, and Rose. In a large swimming pool—ringed by tourists—nerpas are doing tricks. One paints. Another plays the saxophone. They even do math (the trainer yells out “Three plus one!” and a nerpa claps its flippers together four times.)

Afterward, like a family after a full day at Disney World, we sit for beer and kebabs, grilled outside, and talk about the warm feelings. “This really is Russia at its best,” Rose says. “All those cold days in Moscow, all the frustration, nobody smiling: it’s so easy to forget all that here. Look at these families, these cute kids all bundled up running around. It’s so sweet.”

“I know how short this trip was for you—and a shitload of flying. But it meant a lot to have you here, to experience this place together one more time.”

“I’m glad I came—really. I always told you I didn’t spend enough time out of Moscow when I was here. It’s like a different world.”

“I know.”

“You know what strikes me here?” she says. “I just look at these families here on the lake—and it’s damn warm here for February. It’s just pure joy. I don’t think anyone appreciates a nice day like Russian do, honestly. I feel like they don’t expect the day to be nice. And when it’s nice, they don’t expect it to last. That what we’re looking at out here in the sun—joy.”

It’s not all joy here on Baikal.

There have been fierce environmental debates about this lake. UNESCO has Baikal on its World Heritage list, for its natural beauty and unique habitat. But across the lake from where we are standing, in the village of Baikalsk an old paper mill is still operating, pouring gallons of dirty chemicals into the pristine waters every day. Environmental groups pushed for years to close down the plant—and it did close for a time—but Putin insisted on keeping it open. At one point Putin visited Baikal for quite a stunt. He plunged into the depths of the lake in a minisubmarine and said over the radio from underwater that everything looked clear to him—“I could see with my own eyes . . . there is practically no pollution” (as if pollution lurking in the water is visible to the naked eye).

There was another side to the debate. The paper mill is the major employer in the region. Nearly 10 percent of people in the city of Baikalsk work there. When Sergei and I visited to do a story, we met an elderly woman on the street. I asked what the factory means to her, and she just kept saying, “Food . . . food . . . food.” The city’s mayor, Valery Pintayev, said that when the plant was shut down for a stint, he saw a dead community. “There were no lights on in houses. People ruined themselves drinking. They stood at my window demanding jobs. Now the social tension is gone.”

But the World Heritage program continues to threaten Russia, saying if they don’t close the plant and stop polluting Baikal, it will take the lake off its list of World Heritage sites.

On this day, in this spot, Baikal seems beautiful, reminding me of the warmth and poetry I felt on many days living here. We find our hired driver and make the drive back to Irkutsk, then call it an early night. At 5:00 a.m. the next morning, I take Rose to the Irkutsk airport, kiss her good-bye and send her on her way to the United States, to get back to work on her restaurant. It’s just Sergei and me again, and I taxi back to the hotel to meet him. We have an afternoon interview with a woman named Taisiya. She’s a local activist in Baikalsk who, we’re told, has been fighting for the paper mill to close, as well as needling the local authorities in other ways.

Sergei has reserved a hovercraft—yes, a hovercraft—to take us from Listvyanka across to Baikalsk. I’m not sure what to expect. In our taxi Sergei is on the phone with Andrei—our hovercraft captain—who is explaining where along the lake shore we should have our taxi driver take us. We pull up to a little restaurant with what appears to be a dock—of sorts—frozen into the ice.

My only previous hovercraft experience was on the English Channel—from the slower boat I was on, I watched a sturdy vessel, carrying hundreds of passengers, flying slightly above the unfrozen water from Boulogne, France, to Dover, England. This is a different kind of hovercraft. I hear what sounds like a motorcycle engine roaring closer, and Andrei pulls up on the ice behind the restaurant. He’s in a small blue-and-white vessel just slightly larger than your average station wagon. This thing is definitely jury-rigged. There is a massive fan on the back, with what looks like an automobile muffler hanging off it. The steering wheel inside is straight off a Lada. There are eight seats inside, with fading orange seat covers. All in all this looks like a minivan someone drove to Woodstock, superglued on top of a pontoon.

Andrei motions for us to get in, so we load our suitcases and ourselves on board and settle into the orange seats. And away we go. Andrei is all business, in aviator glasses and a camouflage snowsuit.

The ride is surreal. Closer to the shore the ice really is like glass—with cracks—and I can literally see plant life through the surface, making me wonder about the ability of the surface to hold an object as heavy as ours. Then we speed farther out onto the lake—with mountains rising on both sides—and the ice is covered with more snow. Andrei is at full throttle, and we’re bumping over snowdrifts, with the back of the craft occasionally thrusting back and forth like a violently wagging tail.

I can only imagine the Decembrists—some of whom were princes—going from their royal surroundings in St. Petersburg to crossing this remote snowscape on horseback. If anything drove home that they were beginning a new way of life—this, along with the stinging cold, probably did the job.

After ninety minutes Andrei slows things down and pulls up to—well, not much. He leaves us at an empty spot on the shore, promising that we are close to Baikalsk. We pay him five hundred dollars, deciding his fee was enough without any additional tip. Maybe this was a mistake. As he leaves us Andrei spins the rear of his hovercraft around, and the big spinning wheel blows our luggage about ten feet into the air and into a snowbank.

We collect our things, and Sergei uses his cell phone to find a driver willing to pick us up. It takes a while for them to locate us. Then we’re on our way to meet our activist.

Taisiya Baryshenko is sixty-nine. She has short blond hair, bright red lipstick, tinted glasses, and is wearing a blue sweatshirt and sweatpants as she brings us into her apartment. It’s a comfortable place, full of plants and stacks of books. She raised two daughters and a son after she and her husband divorced.

“He started to drink. So I asked him to just leave us alone.”

Taisiya is quite a talker—the kind who picks up speed as she goes on, making it increasingly harder to get a question in. But I’m impressed by her energy.

“Putin is the enemy of Baikal,” she says, insisting that the paper mill must close. “I’ve lived here for five years now. And there are just few people who care.”

And apathy angers Taisiya as much as anything the government has or hasn’t done.

She pulls us over to her computer and begins playing a video. It’s her and a local television reporter entering an apartment that’s in horrendous condition—trash and old plates of food are littered everywhere. “A two-year-old child died in here—he had been sleeping on a board,” she says. No one in the community has held the family responsible, nor has anyone shown much interest in the case.

“And so I made a video about it.”

Her Internet is slow. She says the authorities have hacked into her accounts, following her activities, and things have moved slowly since.

“I’m trying to bring people around in some way. But many people aren’t interested. They are just waiting, waiting for something readymade to happen.”

W
HEN
I
HEAR
Russians vent about apathy, I always wonder what exactly they wish people would fight for. And often the conversation turns nostalgic, revealing a determination not to fight for something new but to preserve what made Russia special in the past. In Moscow I met a thirty-three-year-old activist who leads the Baikal program at Greenpeace. He scoffed at Putin’s submarine stunt: “It’s just plain stupid. You cannot see chemical substances in the water, like you can’t see radiation. It’s the same thing as standing near a nuclear bomb and saying, ‘Well, I don’t see anything.’” I expected the activist, Roman, to be most emphatic about the environmental damage the plant was causing and how he sees this kind of pollution as immoral in our day—not that he doesn’t believe that—but Roman was most passionate about something else: how Russia may be letting go of something that makes people proud. He remembered his teachers in the 1980s preaching about symbols of Soviet pride, “And Baikal was one of them,” he said. He was disappointed that Russia was not taking better care of a national treasure. Vassily Zabello, who worked at the polluting paper mill for twenty-six years, told me he desperately wanted it to close. Like Roman, he told me he was devastated by the idea that Russia might fail to safeguard a national treasure. If the government can’t find a way to bring jobs and support to a city—and if polluting Baikal is the only answer—then a “great, enormous country [is] acknowledging its helplessness.” (At the time of this writing the plant had just been closed again. That, of course, had happened in the past before the place was brought back online. A union boss from the plant told the French Press Agency that the closing would create an “abyss of poverty and unemployment.”)

S
CIENCE
was also always a source of Soviet pride. And I was moved by a story about protecting that legacy in St. Petersburg. Amid all the horrors of World War II, one of the worst was the German blockade of the city—then known as Leningrad—which cut off food and supplies and starved hundreds of thousands of people. At a place called the Vavilov Institute, a dozen scientists were holed up with a large supply of grain that was important for research into food supplies. Rather than eat any of the grain, they starved to death protecting it. Seven decades later, when I visited, there was a new and
seemingly
less potent threat: The importance of these plants was emphasized to me by scientists in Britain and the United States. And yet, under a law that allows the government to sell off neglected property, local officials were considering selling the property to wealthy real estate developers. The head of the institute’s gardens, Fyodor Mikhovich, got wistful when I interviewed him, focusing not just on the potential loss for science but on what it said about the country. “What will we, the Russian nation, have to be proud of if we ourselves destroy this?” Then he got nostalgic, saying that Communist leaders in the Soviet era would never have let this collection come under threat.

As for Taisiya’s frustrations, she’s speaking at lightning speed, bemoaning how Russians today favor apathy over activism because, she says, there’s far less pride: “They don’t want to struggle. And many people say to me—aren’t you
afraid
? You’ll be
killed
. But I won’t change my convictions or principles.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about the Decembrists being on Baikal. Does their spirit live on in you?”

“I’ve always been proud of them.
They
were not afraid. They were sent to exile because they cared about freedom for their country.”

“Well, what’s the solution for today’s Russia?”

For once Taisiya pauses. She walks over to her bookcase and pulls out a book. It’s called
Generalissimo
, by Vladimir Karpov. It’s a biography of a man whose face is unmistakable on the cover. “Do you know who this is?” she asks.