Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia (33 page)

“Do you wish you had gone for that green card in 1991?”

“I guess not. I know a few people from my age group who moved there as green card holders, or got citizenship. Lived there five or ten years. And I don’t hear a lot of cool stories. Often, they’re not smart enough or wealthy enough to integrate into your society.”

It reminds me of one of the first conversations on this trip—with the passenger who had just gotten back from Thailand. As a Russian he felt different, and out of place. And Dmitry is painting such a sad picture. He’s saying there are Russians who can’t afford a comfortable lifestyle at home—but also don’t feel like they have the money or smarts to adjust to a Western society.

Dmitry, knowing English, having spent time in the United States, would have as good a chance as any Russian fitting in and finding happiness in a country like the United States. But even he doesn’t have some strong pull to make such a move.

“We love Vladivostok,” Olga explains. And her life isn’t easy. The shrinking population in Russia has meant fewer students at universities. Her school has been desperately trying to recruit foreign students, from China and elsewhere. But they’ve also had to squeeze budgets. She gets paid 26,000 rubles ($880) a month in salary as an assistant professor. She can get an additional 10,000 rubles ($330) for every thirty-two hours of special lecturing—but says she doesn’t get that payment until the administration confirms that her students have completed all required homework for the course—added bureaucracy, added delays.

She spent a semester in 2012 teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, and loved every minute of the experience.

“Were you feeling, I wish I could be a professor in the U.S.? Were you conflicted about that at all?”

“I don’t know. I know I want opportunities to go there whenever I want to. Really, I just want to write my book and become a full professor and have enough salary to travel when I wish. I’m not sure I want to be a professor at an American university. But it was an interesting experience.”

Olga’s book, and her research, focus on Western political philosophy.

“How do you explain the current Russian government in the context of political philosophy? What
is
the political philosophy Russia has in place?”

Olga smiles, and gives this some thought.

“They are trying to separate people.”

“Why is that a good strategy for the government?

“Because when people are separated, they don’t care deeply for anything—except for themselves.”

Whether it’s some premeditated strategy by Russian leaders, or a product of history, Russians do seem to struggle to unify behind a vision, to share a sense of hope for something.

I think about Stalin dividing Central Asia, fomenting chaos and division, forcing ethnic groups to plead to Moscow for help. I think of Boris and Gia, the warmest friendship, strained when Gia’s family moved to a different part of the Soviet Union, further complicated when Georgia became its own country. I think about Alexei, crippled, alone, and helpless with his mother in that apartment in Nizhny Novgorod, ignored by the state. Igor, with his T-shirt advertising the lost generation he feels a part of. Inna, on the train platform in Amazar, and Taisiya in Baikalsk, remembering Soviet times as a period when people believed in
something
. Ivan, in that hardscrabble village, praising the state for making him a soldier, loving a government that also drives him to tears. The people we’ve encountered have so much depth, their lives are full of poetry, pain, and laughter, and yet in so many cases something is just missing. When it comes to the future, there’s just no faith.

“You get used to knowing nothing about your future here,” Olga said. “Everybody knows something about their future.”

“Except Russians?”

“Exactly.”

“Why?”

“History. We get used to changes and transformations and not being aware of the future. We are the lost generation, the broken generation, the generation of changes and transformations. We get used to it.” (Unbelievably, the soundtrack to our conversation, coming from the kitchen radio, is “Another Day in Paradise,” by Phil Collins.)

“Why do you call it a lost generation?”

“Because we grew up in a different country, with different values. We didn’t know we had to buy anything or make money to be successful. We weren’t linked to any markets. We believed—or our teachers told us—we would always live in a communist society.

But then our society became capitalist—a wild capitalist society. Different country, different system. It’s strange. So our generation is lost, I think. It is not easy.”

I ask Olga again if I caused any problems by coming last time, drawing a phone call to Dmitry’s father-in-law from the FSB.

“Pffft!” Dmitry says, as in, “Like we
care
!”

“We are not afraid of anything,” Olga says. “They can do nothing bad to me.”

Olga, Dmitry, and I spend several more hours polishing off the pizza, sipping champagne, taking smoking breaks on the balcony. They tell me I’m welcome back anytime, and I promise to bring Rose back for a double date.

Olga and I hug at the door, and Dmitry calls me a taxi. It’s a car, not a train, but Dmitry still walks me downstairs, outside, making sure I’m comfortable in the backseat before closing the door and waving in the cold as I drive off.

My flight out of Vladivostok is early the next morning. Before going back to my hotel I stop for one last drink in town. I’m sitting at the bar, when a young, blond Russian woman walks up on stage. They turn down the DJ music for her to perform. A small crowd gathers around her—she’s clearly known locally. And she does have a beautiful voice as she sings her first tune—Mariah Carey’s “Hero”—with a thick Russian accent.

21
•
VITALY

I
T WAS MEANINGFUL
for me to spend time with Dmitry and Olga again. They remind me of the assumptions I made about Russia. I assumed, as a young American watching the fall of the Soviet Union from afar, that Russians would immediately feel liberated and determined to grab onto my country’s system as fast as they could.

The story is so different, and far more complicated. In an unfamiliar country, it can be easy to say, okay, that’s a point of view that seems foreign to me, but the person I’m listening to is so entirely different from me, I can’t empathize. But then there’re Olga and Dmitry—people I connect to, and empathize with, in so many ways. That makes their outlook more powerful to me personally. Olga and Dmitry appreciate Western countries like the United States. But they don’t long to live there. They don’t see some superior form of politics they wish Russia had. They have some nostalgia for Soviet times, seeing it as an era when the government provided some bedrock services and guarantees for its citizens. As for the future, they can’t see it clearly yet. Not a single person we met on this trip could. But no one said, I’m satisfied with the system in Russia—let’s leave it as is. As an American, sure, I’d love to make some tweaks. But all in all, if a Russian writer came and asked me, I would say I’m pretty proud of what I have. No one in Russia said that. Still, so many people want and expect change.

But when? And what will it look like? Olga and Dmitry and so many other people showed an unimaginable willingness to wait—patience as long and hard as a crazy five-week train journey across all of Russia. Maybe that patience comes from learned endurance, a fatalism that anticipates difficult times, and a tendency to grab onto whatever feels safe, not wanting to shake things up and induce chaos too quickly. And so perhaps this will be a long but fruitful process. Perhaps the small battles we saw will go on. The young generation of Russians will learn about individual rights and freedoms, and ultimately that will lead them to deciding on a system that will make them proud.

T
HE TROUBLING REALITY
about Russia is that for any sense of optimism to arrive, for people to feel hope, inspiration and a drive to bring positive change would mean escaping years—generations—of history. History and culture matter. Everything I heard on this trip—the feeling that strength comes from endurance, the fear of chaos and thirst for any sense of stability, the lack of faith in the ability to shape the future—are emotions and feelings that may well be embedded in the Russian soul.

The Decembrists are remembered as some of the rare few in Russia’s history to rise up and try to break apart the system that ruled the day. They failed, and faced punishment and exile. Yet, amazingly, not all of them felt unjustly treated, or felt that the chance to change the course of history had slipped through their hands. Mikhail Zetlin quotes one of the Decembrists, Yakubovich, who was writing in a journal in 1843, two decades after the failed revolution.

The 20th year of exile, of persecution, poverty and hard work is about to begin. Oh God! Give me the strength to do my duty as a citizen and a man and to add my contribution to the annals of sorrow of the Fatherland. Do not let this contribution be sullied by pride and egoism, but let it find its expression in love and truth. I am a very sick man. I am 59 years old . . . the end is approaching, the end that heralds the dawn.

But what
is
the dawn in a place where someone believes it is his “duty” to contribute to the “annals of sorrow” in his country?

Mikhail Shishkin, the great modern-day Russian novelist, struggles to see the dawn.

“To call people to the barricades in Russia is beautiful, but senseless,” he said in a 2012 interview with the Web site Russia Beyond the Headlines. “We lived through all this already in the early ’90s. All revolutions take place in the same way—the best people rise up to fight for honor and dignity, and they die. On their corpses, thieves and bandits come to power, and everything comes full circle. The same thing happened during the Orange Revolution in Kiev. The same thing is happening right before our eyes in the Arab world. Apparently, in Russia a new generation has grown up who want to experience the barricades. All right. They will experience them. And they will be disappointed.”

But Andrei Grachev, a longtime adviser to former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, isn’t so sure. When I asked him about Russia’s future, he pointed to August 1991. Hard-liners in the Communist Party had carried out a coup, forcing Gorbachev from power. Thousands of people took to the streets outside parliament, waving anti-Communist flags in support of reformer Boris Yeltsin. Tanks were on the streets, but the military refused to fire at the protesters—some soldiers placed flowers in the barrels of their guns.

Yeltsin came to power. But his efforts at reform are seen in Russia not only as a failure, but as a big reason why people have such little faith in democracy. And yet, when I spoke to Grachev recently, he refused to believe that what those protesters fought for is dead. As he put it, “There is fire under the ashes.”

Whatever the future holds, I am grateful to have had the chance to experience this country, to be touched by so many lives and stories, to have learned so much. I can’t believe, looking back twenty years, that I saw Russia as a cold, oppressed, backward country, emerging from decades of terror and on the cusp of enjoying the wisdom of America’s way of life and system of government. If nothing else, I for one, now understand that Russians may well want—and get—something else. They’re taking time to figure that out. I can’t predict what will happen, but I’ll certainly be thinking about and rooting for the people I’ve met.

Suffice it to say, the story of Russia is far from finished. So perhaps it’s fitting that while Vladivostok is the obvious last stop on this journey—the end of the train line, the window on the Pacific—my thoughts tend to wander back to the middle, where the trip was far from complete.

After our detour to Chelyabinsk to follow the meteorite, and our realization that we could not travel east, since that would require a visa for Kazakhstar, we took the train north to Ekaterinburg, east to the city of Tyumen, where we stopped for the day, then on to Ishim. During that stop in Tyumen, Sergei and I took a ninety-minute drive through a raging snowstorm to find a rehabilitation center for drug addicts. Russia loses tens of thousands citizens each year to heroin addiction, and there are believed to be more than two million people actively using. It’s a devastating epidemic and a big reason Russia was eager to work with the United States in Afghanistan—that’s where much of the poppy that flows into Russia is produced, and Russia’s government has been desperate to curtail it.

Sergei and I walk through knee-deep snow into a ramshackle building and a living room with old rugs and couches. On the wall, there’s a painting of the sun, shining over a pasture covered with flowers. A sign on the wall, translated into English, reads, “If pain today, look ahead to tomorrow.”

Nine of the people in the rehab program have agreed to meet with us—six men, three women. They’re in comfortable sweats and T-shirts, sitting before us on couches. They talk about how they got here.

“I started smoking dope when I was fourteen,” says a young man named Vitaly. “When I was fifteen, I started using heroin. And I was diagnosed HIV-positive.”

“I was selling drugs at seventeen,” says a nineteen-year-old named Paulina. “I could see I was dying.”

“I started smoking when I was fourteen,” says Kate. “It was the only thing that made me happy.”

Drug addictions aren’t unique to Russia, of course. But the director of the program, a thirty-three-year-old named Natalya—a recovering heroin addict herself who is HIV-positive—says that when people reach for help in Russia, it’s nearly impossible to find:

“When it comes to disabilities, when it comes to drug addictions, in our society, it’s simpler to put a fence around these people than to help them. I travel to other countries. I ask people about the drug problem, and people will say how sad and awful it is. Here? People think it’s better to just take addicts to an island to execute them. And the government is really not guilty. It’s the Russian mentality. A Russian starts thinking about how to help a disabled person, or an addict, only if the person appears in
his
family.”