Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia (31 page)

“Stalin?”

“Yes, Stalin.”

I’m unsure where she’s heading.

“In this moment, now, now I’m not saying we
need
Stalin—”

“Okay.”

“I’m not saying that. But we need a person
like
Stalin. So people don’t steal. So people aren’t corrupt.”

“Taisiya, it is worth having the bad sides of Stalin to get whatever good there may be?”

“I’m not talking about having repressions. That was not right. It was very bad.”

“So, maybe there’s a better option for Russia besides—another Stalin?”

“I’m not saying we need Stalin. But we need discipline. We need order.”

I came to visit Taisiya expecting to get a vision toward Russia’s future. Here is a woman who has been inspired to take on the government, to challenge power. I am stunned to hear that she—of all people—has Stalin nostalgia. What a reminder of how complicated this Russian puzzle really is.

I
N HIS 2007 BOOK
,
The Whisperers
, Orlando Figes wrote how nostalgia for Stalin was steadily growing, especially among older people, who remember a time when “their lives were organized and given meaning” and “everything was clear, in black and white, because Stalin did the thinking for them and told them what to do. . . . Nostalgia for ‘the good old days’ of Stalin reflects the uncertainty of their lives.” For Putin, Stalin nostalgia is a useful tool, and according to analysts he’s manipulated it to his advantage. Lev Gudkov, director of the Levada Center—perhaps the only respected independent polling firm in Russia—wrote in a 2013 report cited by Reuters that Putin, after coming to power in 2000, “launched a comprehensive program to ideologically reeducate society. Putin’s spin doctors did not deny that Stalin’s regime had conducted mass arrests and executions but tried to minimize these events while emphasizing as far as possible the merits of Stalin as a military commander and statesman who modernized the country and turned it into one of the world’s superpowers.” (In 2013, Putin’s government threatened to close the Levada Center, saying the polling firm was violating the law by not registering as a “foreign agent.”)

Today there seems to be less fear than in Stalin’s time, but still fear. The safety net is gone—people certainly struggle more for jobs. Corruption is rampant. There’s no system of justice. A democratic experiment in the 1990s was seen as a disaster. And democracy seems like a risk—a big change. So many people have told me they’ve had enough chaos in their lives already—so they crave stability. And so what’s left? Stalin?

Well, Stalin without the repressions, Taisiya emphasizes. She truly believes that’s possible.

19
•
IGOR

W
OMEN WERE CARRYING
their babies up to a barbed-wire fence, staring longingly into a place where there was no killing.

It was the summer of 2010. Sergei and I flew from Moscow to the border between two former Soviet republics—Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan—to report on an ethnic killing spree. There were clashes between ethnic Kyrgyz citizens and the ethnic Uzbek minority in southern Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbeks by the thousands fled to villages along the border, hoping to cross into Uzbekistan. But the Uzbek government, seeking to avoid a refugee crisis, sealed off the border.

The images were appalling. Mothers, children, the elderly packed into border villages. Makeshift hospitals were set up in churches to treat those wounded in the violence—they could not be transferred to hospitals because the hospitals were run by the Kyrgyz government, and they feared being harmed rather than treated. In one stunning scene Sergei and I witnessed, several residents of an Uzbek village took the corners of a blanket and carried a badly injured man—he had multiple gunshot wounds—up to the border fence. An ambulance arrived on the Uzbek side, and a medical team got out and approached a hole in the fence. They stared down the Uzbek border guards who were supposed to keep that border closed. Those guards stood motionless as the villagers passed the injured man through the hole in the fence to the Uzbek medical team. They rushed him to the ambulance and sped away.

Hundreds of people were killed in the violence, and thousands were displaced and to think—it may be Josef Stalin’s fault.

In the 1920s Stalin drew the borders of the Soviet Central Asian republics, and the lines made little sense. They looked haphazard and divided people. For one, a sizable population of ethnic Uzbeks was left over the border in southern Kyrgyzstan. The most generous theory is that Stalin was careless. But academics have often wondered if Stalin hoped to foment chaos—to reduce the chance that a republic could ever come together as one unified people and challenge Soviet authority. What’s more, chaos meant the republics might often need help to bring stability—they would have to turn to Moscow.

That legacy may still exist. Even though these are now independent countries, even though they have relationships with Western countries like the United States (the United States, over Russian objections, has an air base in Kyrgyzstan that it uses to move troops into Afghanistan), they still look to Russia—in an almost paternal way—to come to the rescue. Indeed, Kyrgyzstan’s president asked Moscow to send peacekeeping forces to quell the violence in 2010.

The terrible ethnic conflict came to mind when Sergei and I made the stop in Baikalsk, when Taisiya, the local activist, grabbed the Stalin biography from her bookcase and said
he
is the kind of leader Russia needs today. She’s not alone. Especially among older Russians—and as Taisiya demonstrated, even among those who criticize the government and push for change—Stalin nostalgia is growing.

Andrei, in Sagra, looks at socialist countries today with envy. Ivan, the young man with the meteor pebbles, says if he’d lost both his parents in Soviet times, the government would have done so much more to help him. For seventy years this was a country where the government could come to your rescue. But rescue from what? Maybe that was Stalin’s magic. He created the feeling of chaos, fear, and confusion so people—from Central Asia to the streets of Moscow—needed him, needed government. They had no other choice.

And today people
do
speak of a sense of loss. When Sergei and I rode the train in 2011, we stopped briefly on the train platform in the Siberian city of Amazar and met a sixty-two-year-old woman named Inna Khariv. She was receiving a small government pension—three hundred dollars a month—after working on a mink farm in the Soviet Union. She looks back fondly to Soviet times, when she felt cared for by a government that provided education, jobs, and health care, and also felt a sense of national purpose.

“You can argue with me, but this is what we had—we lived with it—we had one faith, one goal,” she said, adding that in today’s Russia “nothing holds us together.”

Now she is no fan of Putin. But she hasn’t seen anyone come forward since Soviet times showing promise to take the country in a positive direction: “I lost my faith in this government, and I lost my faith in our youth. We do not have a replacement, [there’s] no worthy replacement for us.”

After the Soviet Union fell, Boris Yeltsin took a stab at more Western-style democracy, and Russians saw nothing but economic disaster. Putin came to power and amassed huge support. Russians saw a strong leader who could restore order, end the chaos. And for a time he succeeded. Putin made many Russians wealthy and gave the economy a huge boost, using the country’s vast energy resources. But now the forward march of Russia—wherever it was going—seems to have stalled. Putin has slowly been losing support, and something is stirring—the protests in December 2011 showed there are people, a minority, ready to take to the streets and fight for broad change. In reaction Putin clamped down on dissent, targeted human rights organizations, and brought more fear back into society. So what now?

People are frustrated, angry, and not satisfied with life. But that isn’t driving all that many people to the streets with protest banners. For many the reaction is to turn inward, and protect the people around them—family. Andrei protected his father, and in doing so learned that “publicity was our protection.” Nadezhda has fought to run a successful business, to make money to raise her daughters, and in doing so has learned to call the bluff of local authorities who try to earn bribes by creating more confusion than people can handle. These fights matter. The more people like Andrei and Nadezhda realize their individual rights, their power in the face of authority, the more Russia may change.

I think about the history of the United States. To imagine people elsewhere in the world checking in on us in 1796 and wondering why we hadn’t fully developed our system of government yet seems ludicrous. It’s been twenty-one years since the Soviet collapse—any criticism we lodge at Russians could be a tad premature. There are dangers, of course. Much of what we’ve heard from people could play into Putin’s hands. He loves to talk about how Russians are not
ready
for true democracy. Maybe that’s true, in a way. But if so, it’s not because they are ignorant or naïve or unsophisticated. It is that they need time—and deserve it—to figure out their own path. The danger is that a leader, like Putin, uses that to justify anti-democratic policies, which he has already done in some cases.

On our first train trip Sergei and I sat down in Ekaterinburg with Yekaterina Stepanova, a professor of law and philosophy who had closely followed Andrei Gorodilov’s fight in Sagra. She said that what we witnessed there was a small step in a long process. The key was not just for people like Andrei to realize their individual rights, but for the younger generation—people born after the Soviet collapse—to learn the power of the individual. The more that happens, she said, the more an authoritarian system becomes obsolete. “What we have now,” she said, “is not the history of a new Russia. It’s still the history of the Soviet Union.”

I have not gotten any clear sense of what the younger generation wants or will fight for. None of the young people we met—Zhenia in Nizhny Novgorod, Dima in Yaroslavl, Ivan in Chelyabinsk—are clamoring for Western-style democracy. They love their country, love Russian traditions and don’t seem rushed to sort out the future. And Alexei in Novosibirsk, thirty-five years old, running a family carpet business and making videos on ski slopes, says he would clamor more urgently for a different political system in his country only if things got a lot worse. Sergei and I carry on our journey east from Lake Baikal, which is the last major milepost in Russia, before reaching the Far East and, ultimately, the port city of Vladivostok. We are in the dining car of the train, a place with brightly colored curtains hanging on the windows and Western techno music blaring from a radio at the bar. We find a seat at a table with fellow traveler, Igor Zakharov. He’s forty-four and runs a company in Irkutsk that builds electric boards for power stations. Igor tells us the government can be a major impediment for him. He desperately needs a specific part made in the United States by General Electric. Even though that part has been approved for use by countries around the world, the Russian government is still working through the bureaucracy to approve it. This has set Igor back. What he says he
does
need his government to spend time on is helping Russian-owned businesses like his succeed by keeping out competition from Chinese firms.

“But that they won’t do,” he tells us.

Igor has brown hair, slightly graying, and a rotund figure. He is eating
solyanka
—Russian soup made with beef—a crab salad with mayonnaise, and some vodka. He treats us to some of the vodka, and we raise our shot glasses: “To a new friendship,” he says. Clink.

Igor is wearing a long-sleeved shirt that catches my attention. Written in black letters, in vertical top-to-bottom rows, in English, it says: “The past is now part of my future. The present is well out of hand.”

We all smile.

The shirt was a gift from his twenty-two-year-old daughter, who liked the message, though she had to translate it for her dad when she gave it to him.

“What does the message mean?” I ask.

He takes a long pause. “It means, there is my grandfather, my father, and me. And my daughter.”

He stops there, a man of few words. The shirt seems to remind him that different generations of his family have lived through different times. Whatever past generations have seen and learned will shape his daughter’s life. As for him, there is little work that can be done.

“Why is the present out of hand?”

“The present—it’s me.”

“And you have no control?”

“It is possible to control oneself. But nowadays it is difficult to control the overall situation because it has been constantly changing.”

Intimidated by the change all around, clinging to any small sense of control that can be found. This is not the first we’ve heard of this.

Our next stop is Birobidzhan, a Far East city not far from the Pacific coast. Sergei and I planned an eight-hour stop there before getting on our final train.

Birobidzhan is the capital of Russia’s “Jewish Autonomous Region”—yes, it’s still called that. It was one of Stalin’s other geographic creations in the 1920s, a place to both relocate Russia’s Jewish population and, he hoped, draw Jewish communities from outside the country. Hoping to attract the masses, the government had a gorgeous train station constructed—the work of forced laborers. The masses never came, but the Jewish population became modest for a time. Yet the place was an embodiment of Stalin’s cruel whims. As the BBC described, “The first Jewish settlers arrived in 1928—20 years before Israel was created. They had come to the virgin lands of the Far East to build a new city, and set up a national homeland for Soviet Jewry with Yiddish as the official language. But less than 10 years after the creation of the Jewish Autonomous Region, Stalin began to crack down on Jewish culture. The government head was executed, Yiddish books were burnt, and Jewish schools and the synagogue closed down.”

Once Israel was created, many Soviet Jews fled there, and the Jewish population of Birobidzhan became all but nonexistent, making the name of the region almost laughable.