Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia (6 page)

One final tradition that Nikolai passed on to me was one we Americans share: Na pososhok—“one for the road.” This was one final good-luck shot before Nikolai hugged me good-bye and sent Sergei and me on our way.

In the following hours I wandered the streets of Donetsk with Sergei, chatting with voters in conversations I frankly don’t remember. It was late afternoon when the ten or so shots of vodka began to wear off and Sergei and I began meaningful interviews. We spent hours in the break room at one of Donetsk’s mines, an aging brick building where the walls were sprinkled with Russian Orthodox icons—small pieces of religious art that Russians often display, especially when they are doing something dangerous. The room was dark, the smell of coal oppressive. We were surrounded by various hunks of equipment, too old and dirty even to guess what purpose they served or when they were last used. The workers sat on wooden stools, still wearing grimy helmets outfitted with flashlights. One man at a time would speak to us. The others occasionally glanced up but mostly chain-smoked and paged through photos of naked women in Russian-language
Maxim
magazines.

Ukraine had gone through political upheaval in recent years. A Western-backed leader, Viktor Yuschenko, had become president in the 2005 Orange Revolution, an event hailed by U.S. president George W. Bush as a watershed moment in democracy’s march to new corners of the world. (At the time, I was covering the White House for NPR and saw on television somewhere close to a million people filling the streets of Kiev, declaring victory for democracy.) Five years later many Ukrainians—especially here in the east—looked at the Orange Revolution as a failed experiment with democracy that delivered nothing. The miners of Donetsk saw their wages shrink and struggled harder to feed their families.

Now a Russian-speaking candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, was promising to end the experiment for good and make sure miners got good wages. Forget that Yanukovych was viewed by the West as corrupt and little more than a thug, or that he had been convicted on robbery and assault charges as a teenager and spent a year and a half in prison. He talked tough, spoke Russian, and the miners saw him as something familiar, an authority figure whom they believed they could trust.

“Politicians are all bandits,” the coal miner Roman Fyodorov told me, holding his left palm on his
Maxim
so he didn’t lose his place. “Yanukovych is just our bandit.”

Several days after I interviewed the coal miners in Donetsk, I followed Viktor Yanukovych on the campaign trail. During my days as NPR White House correspondent I had the fortune of traveling in the luxury press cabin on
Air Force One
. Now I was aboard a sputtering Soviet propeller plane, built in 1969 and apparently not updated since. The seat cushions on the Yanukovych press charter were threadbare. A piece of metal pushed into my thigh with every bump and the engines whined from age and overuse. Food and beverage service amounted to bottles of cheap vodka, which Sergei and I made good use of as our plane violently lurched back and forth at twenty thousand feet.

At one stop I interviewed Yanukovych and got my first close-up look at the man who was about to win an election and lead Ukraine. He was tall and imposing with broad shoulders that made him appear brutish. More confident than smart, he was someone you’d expect to see on a soccer pitch or rugby field rather than on a campaign trail. He was just the right bandit for his people and said what ethnic Russians—who would turn out in large numbers for him—wanted to hear. “In the last five years, Ukraine has lost so much,” he told me, speaking Russian. “These have been lost years in the development of Ukraine.”

He was ready to begin a new era. The Orange Revolution was over. And he was about to take office and fulfill his promise, moving Ukraine further away from democracy.

After boarding our plane to head to the next stop, Sergei and I spoke about the morning we spent with his father.

“Your dad was a coal miner, too,” I said. “He’s clearly struggling. Who is he voting for?”

Sergei took a long pause, then sighed. “Yanukovych.”

I’ve covered my share of politics back home. I’ve done scores of interviews with Republicans, Democrats, independents. Sometimes I connect with the point of view I’m hearing, sometimes not. But I try to put that consideration aside. There can be no personal bias in the business of journalism. Hearing Sergei say that name—Yanokovych—was my first powerful reminder that I had to remain true to that philosophy in this new chapter of my career. Covering American politics, I meet people who disagree—sometimes fiercely. But in so many cases Americans agree fundamentally on the idea of democracy, the belief that people have the power to speak out and make change. Here, sitting in a creaky old airplane on a frigid tarmac in Ukraine, I realized I would have to take openmindedness to a whole different level. Yanukovych was open about wanting to roll back one of the most optimistic democratic movements in modern history. And the people supporting him were not just coal miners I interviewed on the job but also the father of my colleague and friend, the elderly man who fed me at his dining room table and took me to his wife’s graveside. Even as I got close to people in this new job and entered their lives, I would have to be careful to try to see things through their eyes and to never make assumptions. Feeling a connection with a person would not mean they would necessarily have a world view anywhere close to my own.

The coal that heated Nikolai’s home, over which he also cooked, came from a pension that was his lifeline. Nikolai needed every bit of that pension to stay alive, and feared it would dry up under capitalist rule. While talk of democracy and Western values sounded promising at one point to an old man like Nikolai, it was a Russian-backed, Russian-speaking leader who made him feel safe. He spent most of his lifetime valuing strong leadership and predictability, neither of which democracy can guarantee. To Nikolai, promises and talk of change were no match for the culture that built him and no match for the broad figure climbing the stairs of the plane next to ours, Ukraine’s soon-to-be-president, Viktor Yanukovych.

“Na pososhok?” Sergei asked as he passed me a plastic cup filled with two fingers of vodka.

I smiled: “One for the road.”

The two of us did love traveling together. I knew Sergei’s idiosyncrasies, he knew mine. I knew he got stressed about money, wanting to make sure we had cash out to pay a cab driver when he asked, to avoid any delay or perceived impoliteness. He knew I got frustrated when we were trying to set up an interview and a person posed an endless stream of bureaucratic questions about our intentions, stealing valuable time from actual journalism. We knew how to calm each other down—but rarely was it necessary. We were always just itching for our next trip.

For Sergei, train travel is especially meaningful because it’s where he met his wife. During his third year of college in Moscow, Sergei was invited by his sister on a short vacation to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) with a group of employees from her factory, including several young single women. How could Sergei say no? Just before the trip, Sergei’s sister bowed out—likely strategically, to lessen the distraction, because she wanted Sergei to get to know her friend Maria.

Sergei didn’t like Maria much. The two other women in the cabin were Olga and Tania, his future wife. “And Olga liked me more than Tania,” Sergei once told me.

“Wait! Your sister stuck you on vacation in a train cabin with three girls who all had a thing for you?”

“You could say that,” Sergei said. “Nice ride!”

Sergei and Tania soon married and now have a twenty-four-year-old son named Anton, who’s doing a medical residency in Moscow. As with so many families in Russia, the winds of change dictated their planning. Anton was born in the waning days of the Soviet Union, and with so much uncertainty ahead, Sergei and Tania decided to stop with one child at that point. Many of their friends decided a decade later—when Putin first became president and there were hints of prosperity—to have a second child. But Sergei and Tania decided it felt too late.

Now Sergei and I are beginning our latest journey together, aboard the Trans-Siberian. And for the next month or so he and I will be one another’s family.

I
T IS NEARING
midnight in Moscow, and Sergei and I have escaped the ticket office and are sitting in the waiting hall on the second floor at Yaroslavsky station. At a plastic bench nearby, a police officer has paused, menacingly. He reaches down and jostles a young man from his slumber, angrily demanding to see some documents.

“Passport, passport,” he says, using a word that’s equivalent in Russian and English.

The sleeping man, dressed in black pants, holding the leather jacket that was his pillow, wearily reaches into the jacket pocket to find his passport and dutifully presents it. With black hair and a darker complexion, the man appears to be from the Caucasus—which means he is sadly accustomed to visits like this. After a string of terrorist attacks in recent years, Russia’s uniformly unpleasant police spend much of their time interrogating people, mostly men, who have darker skin, suspecting they come from the North Caucasus region, a hotbed of Islamist radicalism. In the United States this kind of profiling is illegal, or in the rarest cases allowed but hugely controversial. In Russia, it carries on unencumbered by laws or debate.

A crackly march begins to blare from the station’s old speakers. This moment of ceremony seems lost on the majority of people in the vast station—many of whom are asleep on benches. But this is an important ritual: the most famous Trans-Siberian train, the No. 2 Rossiya, is boarding to begin its six-day journey to Vladivostok. Russian train stations play music to mark the departure and arrival of the most famous trains. The Red Arrow, the best-known overnight train between Moscow and St. Petersburg, pulls out of St. Petersburg to the tune of “The Hymn to the Great City.” That train is also known for its departure
time
. It leaves both cities moments before midnight. That allowed businessmen during Soviet times to claim an extra full day of work during a business trip—which they would not have been able to do if their tickets showed a departure at 12:01 a.m.

Our own train is leaving in about an hour. That means one thing: chai (Russian for tea). Having lived in this country for a few years, I can honestly say that the United States missed a golden opportunity to win the Cold War. Forget nuclear negotiations. Depriving this place of its tea would have brought an immediate cry for mercy from the Kremlin. Russians love tea and can’t live without it. Hell, within months of moving to the country,
I
loved tea and couldn’t live without it. I don’t know if it’s the cold chaos of the place that makes you crave a warm soothing drink, or if it’s an old-fashioned follow-the-crowd syndrome that stuck, but the manic scene at the ticket office has left me in need of . . . tea.

“Chai?” I say.

“Chai,” Sergei says, clearly already thinking the same thing.

We find the best Yaroslavsky Voksal has to offer at this hour—a woman at a kiosk with Lipton tea bags, small brown plastic cups, a rusty electric tea kettle and a bowl full of sugar cubes.

Sergei and I inspect the spread and have the same reaction: “Perfect.”

3
•
BORIS

T
HE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY
is intertwined in Russian history. After years of struggle, mismanagement, and vicious battles with the land and elements, the railroad—at first, from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok—was completed in 1916 and quickly became a symbol of Russian ingenuity. Russians marveled at how they were able to build a six-thousand-mile-long railroad that held the vast country together and opened up the Asian frontier. The railroad crossed forbidden landscapes and required complicated bridges—one of which shared a prize with the Eiffel Tower for world-class design. Today, “Trans-Siberian” is a catchword for a number of routes. If you travel from St. Petersburg or Moscow to Vladivostok, or from Moscow to Beijing, you are definitely on a “Trans-Siberian” journey. But long trips between cities that are far apart, and that take you a good distance from west to east or east to west, can also safely be called “Trans-Siberian.”

There is a haunting past. The rails were constructed largely by migrant workers and prison laborers, many of whom, in the words of American Paul E. Richardson, who writes about Russian culture, died “from exposure and from infectious disease, from typhoid to the bubonic plague.” The railroad, once built, was also convenient for Joseph Stalin, who used it to transport exiles to Siberia. By the hundreds of thousands, the Kremlin could send government critics, lawyers, doctors, religious leaders—really anyone it chose—to the dreaded gulags in some of the harshest conditions on earth. Stanley Kowalski was a gulag survivor. His daughter described the tortures of the train her father experienced in her 2009 book,
No Place to Call Home
. The Polish army officer was captured by the Soviets in 1939, and transported by train between prisons several times—one journey took him across nearly all of Russia on the Trans-Siberian, in a red boxcar with little light:

The train . . . made unscheduled stops in deserted stations or empty fields where, if lucky, [prisoners] might be allotted their daily ration of food: a piece of bread and fish. Water, on the other hand, was becoming a rare commodity. At some stations, the inmates would pound upon the barred doors, demanding something to quench their thirst, but often their pleading was to no avail. Amidst these surroundings, the weak had little chance of survival.

Especially striking was how in the midst of all this cruelty, Kowalski remembered peeking out cracks in the wooden walls of the boxcar to marvel at Russia’s landscape. Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia, he recalled, “could take one’s breath away. At first glance, all one noticed was the unadulterated beauty of the blue-green water reflecting the majesty of the mountain peaks beyond. The scent of pines completed the exhilarating experience.”