Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia (24 page)

“Well, how did this stability get lost?”

“Remember, Ivan?” Evgeni says. “We were talking about this the other day.”

“Yeah, people in the Soviet Union lived at one economic level. Now we have division in our society. And this division makes people tough, like beasts. Wealth has brought selfishness. Wealth means a person is not helping his friend. This is what’s being lost. I experienced a lot of hardship. I lost my parents. And now it’s hard to live here. I lost my parents before I was eighteen. But it makes it easier to endure hard times when you lose a person.”

His mother died of cancer when he was sixteen. His dad died of cancer when he was eighteen—perhaps related to his work at a dirty machine factory in Chelyabinsk.

“I am proud of my father and his work. And the plant did everything. We didn’t have to pay a kopek for his burial.”

Evgeni smiles and pats his buddy on the shoulder.

“All I have is my grandma and two friends.” Ivan looks at Evgeni. “Everyone else I pushed aside because I knew what to expect.”

Ivan was eighteen, an orphan but done with school, which made him eligible for his mandatory year in military service.

“I always wanted to serve in the army. But after losing my mom and dad, I didn’t want to go.”

“Did you ask to get out of it?”

“Yes. And their answer was no. I was in a fury. What could I do? I went to serve. And I never regretted it.”

“Why don’t you regret it?”

“As an American, I don’t think you understand what it’s like there. There is not a single person who supports you. They want to break you. There are people who morally break you, and emotionally break you.”

At this point I can’t help but think about the black-and-white images I’ve seen of Russian young men fighting in Chechnya in the two wars in the 1990s. Russia’s soldiers were known to be fighting machines, killing brutally and dying often. Then you would see these photos of them taking a break from the battlefield, cigarettes hanging from their mouths, teenagers, so hardened at such a young age.

“It takes time to show what you are worth,” Ivan explains. “But it makes you stronger.”

He describes his training in southern Russia. His commanders, he says, deliberately put ethnically Caucasian men together with Slavic Russians, hoping ethnic tensions would boil over and they would beat one another up. That was supposed to get them ready for battle.

“I considered it the right thing to serve in the army. Difficulty brings people together. I think what the Russian army achieves: It makes
Russians
.”

It makes Russians.

With Ivan I feel I am listening to a single voice amid the “millions and millions strong” in Russia’s outer provinces—Shishkin described this as the second of two “nations.” Tucker described it as “popular Russia.” And it’s about more than geography. Even amid the trendy cafes and fat paychecks in Moscow, there are many people toiling and seeking strength. I’ll never forget a former military doctor in Moscow named Sergei Pichonkin. I waved him down for a ride. He gets a pension of four hundred dollar a month and looks for potential passengers on the streets to supplement that income. When I asked how tough life is, he turned around and stared at me in the backseat. “Here I am, giving a ride to an American journalist. What do you think? Is this a good thing?” With that he turned to face the windshield again, I shut the door, and he drove off. From him, from the guys in Tver, from Ivan, I detect a determination to feel strong, and appear strong. But from Ivan I hear something more: a respect for the predicaments that molded his strength—and the
people
. Russians “want a tough hand,” Sofia Pinsker once told me. She’s a twenty-two-year-old college student in the Siberian city of Novokuznetsk who said even younger Russians display an old tendency—to look for role models, leaders, who exude strength. “Even if he was bad or cruel—for example, Ivan the Terrible—it didn’t matter and it doesn’t matter. He is our father, our king, and that’s all. We are supposed to do what he tells us.”

Ivan says his harsh military training made him “Russian”—which I take to mean strong and impenetrable. His words bring to mind Orlando Figes’s book,
The Whisperers
. In it he described interviews the historian Catherine Merridale did with Russian World War II veterans. “These men’s vocabulary was businesslike and optimistic, for anything else might have induced despair . . . It would have been easy . . . to play for sympathy or simply to command attention by telling bloodcurdling tales. But that, for these people, would have amounted to a betrayal of the values that have been their collective, pride, their way of life.”

“What do you think of your government, Ivan?”

Ivan, having lost both his parents and endured a punishing year of military service, doesn’t play for sympathy. And he’s businesslike.

“There are not enough honest people running this country.”

“In America people might say then it’s time for a protest.”

Evgeni laughs out loud. “Ochen interesno [Very interesting]!”

“People get used to living in difficult situations here,” Ivan says. “If the cup of anger gets filled? Then you have 1917.”

Evgeni is still holding on to my protest question.

“In our family” Ivan’s friend says, “it works like this. Husband comes home, wife gets angry, husband gets up and goes to work; then it repeats. That is the only kind of ‘protest’ we have. You just think about the hard life we have. You think there’s time to think about revolutions? You think anybody’s worried about a revolution?”

Ivan is starting to tear up, and I’m not sure why. It doesn’t seem that the conversation about politics took him here. Maybe he was holding it in when he spoke about his parents. But this tough young man is suddenly vulnerable in a way I never expected.

“Our government oppresses us,” he says. “But we love it. Our country—we love it.”

There is desperation in his voice. Maybe desperation to hold onto something: His friends, his grandmother, his village, his image of a Russia that protects him.

It’s easy to forget he’s only twenty-one.

“From childhood we decided that
we
would stay together in life,” Evgeni says.

I ask Ivan what he dreams about.

“I have a great wish to travel. But it’s not possible.”

There’s no money left. Ivan rents his own place. He and Evgeni do odd jobs around the village to get by.

“I would love to own my own business,” Ivan says. “It would take a certain sum of money—maybe five hundred thousand rubles [seventeen thousand dollar] to get started, rent a van. I have a driver’s license.” He pauses. “With all the difficulties in life? Will never happen.”

We have been sitting for more than two hours. Our tea is cold. I ask if anyone wants more, but everyone declines. The woman behind the counter has been watching an old Soviet movie on the television all this time.

“So what do Americans think of Russians?” Ivan asks.

First impression, I explain, is a country full of people who don’t smile much. But when you spend time, as I tell him, you see the warmth and friendship on the inside. Both young men smile. But Ivan presses on. (Who’s the journalist here anyway?)

“What was your worst moment living here?”

“My wife and I were used to living in a country where you can rely on the police if anything happens. I didn’t have that confidence here if, god forbid, anything happened to me or my wife.”

Now it’s Evgeni’s turn. “Okay, so was there a worst
moment
?”

“Fortunately nothing happened to either of us.”

“So,” Ivan says proudly, “your worst fear about Russia never came true.”

“I guess not.”

Ivan smiles. “In our country we don’t assume anything about our police. If something happens on the streets, better not to call anyone. Because it’s better to keep your record clean.”

I tell these young men how grateful I am to have met them. All thanks to a meteorite.

“There has been a joke on the local radio,” Ivan says: “We are never happier than when a meteorite lands in the morning.”

I don’t even know how to respond to that.

“I was so curious to meet a foreigner,” Evgeni says. “And you know we joked about how maybe you and this meteorite were not accident.”

“Oh, like somehow I rode on this meteor—”

“Konechno [of course]!” Evgeni says, laughing.

He stands up, and so does Ivan. I ask if I can snap a photo of them. Ivan drapes his right arm around his friend’s neck and with his left hand, makes a peace sign for the camera.

That photo is never being erased.

Sergei and I exchange hugs with the two young men, and say good-bye. Then Ivan Kichilin and Evgeni Barandin walk out of the café as they came in—with a tough-guy strut, marching back into their world.

Sergei and I lean back in our chairs, both moved by the last few hours. For Sergei, I know that hearing about Ivan’s military service was not easy. His son, Anton, has such big dreams of being a physician and traveling the world. He doesn’t know yet if he can go directly to a residency, or has to do his year in the military first. Clearly that year can change a young man.

The Russian army makes Russians.

Maybe it’s true, in a way. I have no idea how Ivan’s life might have been different if he had not lost his parents. But he’s a smart, personable, creative young man. Suffering the tragedy of being orphaned—then being beaten down and rebuilt in the army—hardened him. He self-imposes limits on his dreams, accepts his place, and wants to believe his country—his motherland—for all its flaws will protect him. It’s hard to bemoan such genuine faith.

There are millions of young men in Russia, each with a different story. But I would hazard a guess that many share something with Ivan—difficult upbringing, maybe the loss of a father at a young age, economic hardship, and a year in the military. Through all that, young men emerge stoic. I imagine many, like Ivan, see no other way.

Sergei and I pay for the tea and go outside, where Oleg has been waiting in his car, probably by now on his thirtieth cigarette. Despite our invitation to join us, he said he preferred to wait outside.

Sergei and I decide to take a night off from serious conversation. Oleg drops us off on the main promenade in downtown Chelyabinsk. It is a welcoming pedestrian mall, especially welcoming for a city known for being so dark and dirty. As is the case often on cold nights in Russia, there are no pedestrians to be seen. Usually it’s just that everyone is keeping warm inside. And that is what Sergei and I find as we wander into an Irish pub called the Fox and Goose.

I head directly to the bar, but notice that Sergei is still at the hostess stand. I had forgotten, since moving away from this country, how Russians generally dislike sitting at bars. Sure enough, the bar here is empty. It’s too casual, I guess. And the restaurant experience should be a serious affair, involving a table with seats.

I digress: Rose, the former bartender, did a guest stint at a Moscow restaurant. The goal was to encourage members of the American Women’s Organization to try the place. Rose was a big draw. The bar area was overrun with customers. People filled the barstools, and others stood behind. This left the Russian staff at the bar totally confused. They kept serving drinks to people standing, and asking Rose, “Where is that person sitting?” Rose would say they weren’t sitting. The staff member would say, “Then we cannot serve them—there is no way to put their order in the computer.” Just like Rose’s butter.

I cave to Sergei’s wishes and we take a table beside three Russian men who are so drunk on beer and cognac they’re barely conscious. Sergei and I don’t quite get to that point, but after a few beers, we take our own crack at Russian politics. Sergei has listened closely to my line of questioning. He knows that in Moscow there is an impression that Russians are antigovernment, ready to take to the streets. That’s not the case in the country at large.

“You know, David, I have a friend who likes Putin. He always says to me, if you want to meet nice people, go to a rally in Moscow. But nothing’s gonna change.”

We’re on our third beers.

“But what kind of government do we have? Capitalism? No. Socialism? No.”

I do wonder what it’s like to live in a country in such a state of uncertainty.

“Stalin, I would never support him. But he was the right man for the job in his time. No one stole anything.”

Sergei, like me, is looking deeply at a country—its people, its problems, its future. The difference is, this is his own country. We talk about the people we’ve met—Nikita’s parents mourning the loss of their hockey-star son, Alexei’s mom staring at us as we walked down the stairs away from her apartment, and tough Ivan, tearing up out of the blue.

It is almost lights out for me and Sergei. We wave down a cab in the bitter cold and return to our hotel. In the morning we need to buy train tickets for our onward journey, which becomes a freshly complicated affair. I check out a map and notice that the southern route of the Trans-Siberian Railway goes west to east through Chelyabinsk—good news—except that when it heads east from here, it passes through a small section of Kazakhstan. We have two choices: visit the Kazakh consulate here, apply for a transit visa and wait who knows how long. Or take a circuitous route back up to Ekaterinburg, then eastward again. We choose option two.

The train station in Chelyabinsk the next morning is far less welcoming than the city’s pedestrian mall. It is a concrete block of place with no signs to tell you anything—where you buy tickets, where you catch trains, what time it is.

“This is strange,” Sergei says, as we walk around outside.

It’s actually not. This kind of disorder no longer surprises me here. I’ve just come to live with it. Accept it. God, I sound Russian.

15
•
TATIANA

H
AVING NO VISA
for Kazakhstan means an extra twelve hours of train travel.

Through the night we straddle the Ural Mountains, from Chelyabinsk back up to Ekaterinburg. Then we bend southeast, emerge from the Urals, stop for a long layover in Tyumen, then move deeper into Siberia. The train stops less frequently. The landscape is more rugged and picturesque. As hours pass the scenes become more captivating—maybe just because you need something to do. There is endless snow stretching to the horizon. Then forest. At sunrise and sunset, streaks of light cut through the trees and the snow glows in orange. We pass villages with little wooden homes. Some look abandoned—not rare in a country where many villages are losing population and dying. Some have smoke rising from the chimneys, and I imagine Viktor Gorodilov inside, in his plaid shirt and hunting pants, warming his hands by the wood fire. Or Ivan, orphaned as a teenager, alone in the small house he rents.