Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia (26 page)

Nadezhda pulls up to a restored building that is the city’s museum. Since we have checked out of the hotel and have a night train, we doubt we’ll see Nadezhda again. Sergei and I thank her and say good-bye, then head into the museum to meet Tatiana, the friend of the Tatiana we met on the train.

Tatiana Savchenkova is a local history and literature scholar, a larger-than-life woman with crooked yellow teeth and straight brown hair down to her chin, who speaks as loudly as Marina from the
sanatoriy
—and wants just as much to be our tour guide.

“Let’s start!” she says, beginning a dizzying tour that takes me and Sergei into every room of the museum. She must be six feet tall, waving her finger near my face as she tells me about the famous poet from Ishim, how Ishim once hosted a world’s fair for Asian and European merchants, and how this remote city in the snow, for reasons still not clear to me, came to be known as Siberia’s Italian city.

After our trip through the museum, Tatiana calls a taxi. The three of us climb in, and she directs the driver to a pleasant spot near an attractive Russian Orthodox church. Onion-domed Orthodox churches are a dime a dozen in Russia—every city you visit has one, or eight, and if you visit, typically an elderly woman inside will greet you and explain why this church and the religious icons inside are particularly important in Russian history. It is easy to grow weary of visiting yet another church in yet another Russian city. But then you recall how the Soviets wiped out religion—and you quickly get a warm feeling, seeing so many Orthodox believers appreciating what they have and are able to do today. Here in Ishim the bright blue onion domes, bathed in sun, look perfect in front of the snowy white backdrop.

“Come here.” Tatiana walks us over to the statue of a woman in the church courtyard. “Her name is Praskovia Lupolova.”

The figure has a scarf wrapped around her head. She’s bundled in a coat, wearing a long skirt. One foot is in front of the other, as if she’s walking. And she’s carrying a walking stick.

“Her family was sent here to Siberia,” Tatiana says. “She could see how much her father was suffering. So she decided she would walk to St. Petersburg. Alone, as a young girl. She could have died. In fact, she fell somewhere and nearly drowned.”

Hearing this woman’s story is making me feel very weak for feeling so cold at the moment. I am taking notes as Tatiana speaks, but the cold has frozen the ink in my pen, and my notes grow more and more faint.

“Praskovia walked for more than a year. When she finally reached St. Petersburg, she was received by the czar. He was impressed by her deed, and allowed her family to return to their homeland in Europe—what is now Ukraine. She vowed that if the czar saved her father, she would enter a convent, which she did. She died in that monastery in 1825. Her story amazed Russia.”

And me.

There’s an engraving beneath the statue: “To Praskovia Lupolova, who showed the world the deed of a daughter’s love. Ishim—St. Petersburg, 1803–1804.”

Tatiana stands next to that statue with a visible sense of pride.

“Unfortunately the Soviet authorities did away with religion—and with Praskovia’s story.”

“The story was banned?”

“Yes.”

“It wasn’t good to talk about people who did heroic things that were inspired by religion,” Sergei adds.

Tatiana has family roots going back generations in Siberia. And she
is
proud of that. She goes it alone these days—her husband died of cancer in 2000. She says she has a toughness that’s not unrelated to her Siberian roots. We have now—mercifully—headed back to the warmth of the museum to continue our chat.

“I would like to give you an interesting fact,” Tatiana says. “When the Decembrists arrived in Siberia, they realized they could use their talents and responsibilities in ways they never imagined.”

The story of the Decembrists is one of the most epic and colorful tales in Russian history. In December 1825 some Russian army officers—many of them princes and dignitaries in their own right—led a revolt against Czar Nicholas.

It failed.

The Decembrists, as the revolutionaries came to be known, were sentenced for their deeds—a few executed, others imprisoned. Many were exiled to Siberia. For some that was refreshing—for one thing, because they were still alive, but also because it offered a fresh start. After suffering through several years in labor camps, some of these men settled here, and their wives, who could have remained in the West, enjoying lives of royalty, joined them in exile. It wasn’t an easy road. When one of the wives, Princess Trubetskaya, “first caught sight of her husband’s emaciated, bearded face and filthy, tattered convict’s smock held up by a length of string,” she fainted. In his book
The Decembrists
, Mikhail Zetlin writes that another woman, Princess Volkonskaya, “was allowed to visit her husband in his cell. She found a tiny cubicle, six feet by four, filthy and with a ceiling so low that she couldn’t even stand up. The prisoners were so covered with vermin that the ladies had to shake out their clothes after every visit.” But things improved. Princess Volkonskaya rented a house in the city of Irkutsk, and her husband, once a prince, was released a changed man. He “preferred the company of his peasant friends,” but the princess “gave parties, balls and masquerades that were attended by all the local society.”

The Decembrists who settled in Siberia were by and large embraced by the locals, and their legacy has lived on here. Many people credit the Decembrists with bringing the region arts, literature, sophistication, and a can-do attitude.

“They began educating the Siberian people,” Tatiana tells me. “They opened schools and grew new types of plants. They constructed railways and developed natural resources. They no longer had to fight the czar. And they realized they loved Siberia, and loved the people of Siberia.”

“Was part of it a sense of freedom out here?” I ask.

“I think so, yes.”

“Is that spirit of freedom still here?”

“That feeling, that sense of freedom, lives on in people here, I know it. We feel like no one can make us do what we don’t want to do.”

Those words linger in my mind as Sergei and I wrap up our time at the museum. I reach into my pocket to give Tatiana a business card, and find something unexpected: my room key from the Hotel Tranquility.

After saying good-bye to Tatiana, Sergei calls Nadezhda, who says she was hoping she might see us one more time before we leave town.

“Oh, you’ll be seeing us again,” Sergei says, smiling. “David still has the key to his room.”

Nadezhda says she’ll swing by the museum to pick up us in fifteen minutes. Standing in the lobby, I ask Sergei a bit more about Nadezhda. Sergei is a fiercely loyal person. I occasionally wonder if he has conversations in Russian with people we meet and doesn’t translate everything, knowing the person is saying something private, hoping it won’t be passed on to me.

I tread delicately.

Sergei tells me that Nadezhda and her ex-husband have remained friends—they just had to be apart.

“I bet it had something to do with alcohol,” I say.

“I’d say yes. She just got tired of it. And she did what my mother could never do.”

He pauses. I remember how Sergei’s mom stayed with his father through the alcoholism and at least several beatings. Sergei is speaking quietly.

“You know, my sister and I are two years apart. If my mother had made the decision, I wouldn’t be here today.”

“You’re two years younger than your sister.”

“Right, and that was the time she thought about leaving my father.”

“Before you were born.”

“And if she had done it at that point, I would not be in this world. Part of it was a woman, with two kids, in the Soviet Union. If she left, where was she to go? Where would she live?”

These are different times. And I take nothing away from Sergei’s mom and the strength she must have shown in a difficult marriage. Yet Nadezhda’s decision to leave, to go off on her own, to raise two daughters and run a hotel, impresses me.

We see Nadezhda pull up outside in her SUV.

“Nadezhda, sorry about the key,” I tell her. “But you know I just kept it to make sure we would see you again.”

She smiles and drives us to a pub in town. As we get out of the car and walk toward the entrance, I snap a photo of one of Ishim’s main streets. It’s this straight, snowy road, getting smaller and smaller off toward the horizon, with a brilliant pink-and-orange glow in the sky above as the sun sets.

We head into the pub and grab a table.

“Nadezhda, tell me what it’s like to run a business in Russia.”

She smirks. “Oh, it’s complicated.”

“In what way?”

“You can never figure out what the authorities are requiring. Like a fire escape. I want to do what the law says. So I go to this government office and say, ‘What do I need to do?’ They’re not helpful at all. They say it’s all on the Internet, look there. But it’s not.”

This was always one of Rose’s chief gripes about life in Russia—especially for women—as she contemplated opening her own restaurant. Once she got home to the United States and began the process, she realized it was harder than she ever imagined. But having seen what aspiring entrepreneurs in Russia go through made her grateful.

“Now that I’m doing this,” Rose told me at one point, “I will say, there are days at the permitting office or other government buildings in D.C. when lines are long, people are confused, and I just want to scream, ‘I’m back in goddamn Russia again!’ What’s funny is, you could say I’m up against the downside of democracy—here, everyone has an equal voice. Three neighbors were against my place and were almost able to stop me from opening. But I have it so much easier. I have nonprofits that fight to help women opening businesses. There’s networking.

Entrepreneurship is encouraged. I was able to get a loan from the Small Business Administration. I really don’t think Russians have much of this. Or any of this. If I were a woman in Russia, trying to start a business, I would feel like there was no recourse if someone wanted to take advantage of me. If someone is bigger and more powerful and they want to extort money, they can do it. Nobody will stop them.”

In 2012, two students at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, Florentina Furtuna and Anna Ruvinskaya, looked at the small business climate in Russia and published a study called “Small Business in Russia: Drowning in a Sea of Giants.” They found business owners routinely “face corrupt officials who have the power to deny licenses, permits, office space and access to supplies unless substantial ‘gifts’ or bribes are offered.”

Paradoxically, efforts to stamp out crime and corruption seem to be making problems worse. One small business owner told the authors that “in the early 1990s, the gangs of bandits that controlled most of the markets during the period of organized crime seemed to be more humane than the current government officials; they had a certain threshold that they abided by; now these corrupt clerks can take even the last piece from our mouths.”

Nadezhda, in Ishim, is fighting to survive in a system where bureaucratic corruption feeds off the chaos. If officials are never clear about what’s actually required, they can say someone is wrong—at any time. And likely collect either a fine or a bribe.

“I ended up paying 75,000 rubles [$2,500] to upgrade my fire escape,” Nadezhda says. She did everything she could to follow the regulations, but different regulations called for different requirements. In the end, hoping to avoid fines, she built the best and safest fire escape money could buy. Just like she stayed on the phone overnight with an immigration officer, learning every detail she possibly could about the rules for registering a foreign traveler.

“Do you wonder if the money ends up in the wrong hands?”

She’s smiling. “There are so many ‘fines.’ Many are incredibly expensive. They can just show up and do an inspection. You don’t even know what they’re looking for. I wish they would just help—help me understand what the actual rules are.”

“My wife is going through the process of opening a business at home. And I’ll say the process has been hard. But I feel like one thing she has is certainty. She pretty much knows what is required, and then she has to figure out how to get there.”

“I wish we had that kind of stability.”

Sergei is worried about the translation here. “Maybe we’ve heard a lot of people talk about political stability in Russia—maybe Nadezhda is talking about a different kind of stability,” he says.

Or maybe not. Perhaps it’s all intertwined. In this crazy, unpredictable, unfair country, maybe what Russians really do starve for is stability—not just political stability, but stability in their own lives. In marriages, friendships, and businesses.

When I’ve pressed Russians—like Andrei Gorodilov—on why they don’t push for change in their country, and they answer “because they want stability,” I tend to scoff.

But then I look at Nadezhda. She craves stability—and is fighting for it. And in a way she’s calling the bluff of the local authorities. They have this elaborate web of rules and regulations set up to confuse and mystify, so they can come after her on a whim. Rather than cave to that, she spends a sleepless night researching every detail she can to learn how to register a foreign guest at her hotel. She works overtime to figure out how to design a fire escape that will pass muster in any inspection.

Her strategy is time consuming, expensive, and not fool-proof. But she’s trying. So was Andrei, when he fought off the local prosecutors who were ready to throw his father in prison and call it a day.

Publicity was our protection.

I wonder if these are the smaller battles that could someday begin to create cracks in the entrenched foundation of power in this country.

I
REMEMBER
true low points while covering the power structures in Russia. In the summer of 2010 wildfires ravaged parts of central Russia, destroying entire villages. Critics quietly raised questions about whether Putin had made recent policy changes that slowed the federal response to natural disasters. Those allegations never became much of an issue, and what’s more, Putin turned the events in his favor. He arrived at one burned village, Verkhnuya Vereya, a few hundred miles east of Moscow, and promised residents that their houses would be rebuilt before winter arrived. He had cameras installed in the village to chart progress on state-run television. “There’s one, two, they’re everywhere!” the excited deputy governor told me when I visited, pointing out the cameras on telephone poles, as construction crews buzzed around, erecting new houses as quickly, it seemed, as you can place pieces on a Monopoly board. It was hard to see this as anything but a ploy, a charade, to burnish the image of Putin and his ruling United Russia Party and protect them from any political fallout. This was underscored as I chatted with residents of the village, still recovering from the scare of the fires and not all that optimistic about the sturdiness of their new homes. One woman, who barely outran the fire and survived, said, “They should have spoken to us to find out how we wanted these houses built. They promised they’d talk to us individually. But that never happened. They’re building without us.” Her brother, whose own house up the street was destroyed, said the foundation of his new structure looked so weak he expected it to sink when the spring rains came—notably, after the cameras were shut off.