Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia Read online

  Democracy has come to countries that were prisoners of the Soviets—Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic—and to countries that were actually annexed by the Soviet Union, like Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. But elsewhere in the former Soviet space—and especially in Russia itself—not so. And if you are like me and Rose, raised to believe in the so-called “end of history,” taught to expect democratic change to sweep the former Soviet Union and then move beyond, the course of history has been a surprise.

  Rose and I moved to Russia in 2009. I was taking over as the Moscow bureau chief for NPR News, and Rose was giving up a successful career in public policy to relocate temporarily for her husband (making no secret of her expectation that he’d spend the better part of his life repaying her). We were eager to understand where Russia was going. The home of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, ballet dancers and supermodels, Russia is more than a cultural epicenter. It has a massive economy, holding much of the world’s oil and natural gas. It remains a country with influence, and when given a motive can easily threaten the strategic interests of the United States.

  Most worrisome is the nation’s leader, Vladimir Putin, recently reelected after serving two terms between 2000 and 2008. Forced out by term limits, he handed the reins to a protégé—Dmitri Medvedev—but after a few years was ready to take his job back. Putin is accustomed to Russians showering him with love and affection. But there have been hints that that may be changing. Russians, mostly in Moscow, took to the streets by the thousands in 2011, chanting anti-Putin slogans and calling for a new leader. Some have grown tired of a man who once said that protesters taking to the streets without a permit deserved to be “clubbed in the head.” But Putin withstood that outburst of opposition and seems, as of this writing, as securely in power as ever.

  Russian scholars and writers have long spoken of their country’s confounding nature, how it takes wild turns and goes through periods of upheaval but always seems to return to a cruel, dysfunctional resting place. The novelist Nikolai Gogol once compared the country to an out-of-control troika—a traditional Russian carriage pulled by three harnessed horses—intimating that it could crash and burn at any moment. “Russia, where are you flying?” he asked in his novel, Dead Souls. “Answer me . . . there is no answer.” The contemporary Russian novelist Mikhail Shishkin said recently that Gogol’s metaphor is as applicable as ever. Shishkin just updated the mode of transport. “Now Gogol would compare Russia with a metro train, which travels from one end of a tunnel to the other—from order dictatorship to anarchy-democracy, and back again. This is its route. And you don’t go anywhere else on this train.”

  But come with me on a train ride, and let’s see where it goes. Maybe we won’t answer the largest questions about Russia definitively. But we’ll try as best we can, and along the way, meet people who will make us laugh, reveal their pain, and teach us about a country that plays a big role in the world and is important to understand. In this book—along this ride—I will interject snippets of analysis, insights from historians and fellow journalists, and observations I made during my time in the country. But mostly this book will be a journey and an adventure, a wild ride on one of the world’s epic train routes, 6,000 miles from Moscow to far East Asia, taking us into the heart of a country and into the lives of its people. From all the Russians we meet, we’ll make connections and learn whatever we can.

  SCHOLARS IMMERSED in Russian studies have written innumerable, groundbreaking books about life, history, and politics. Spending a few years living and working in the country keeps me squarely in their shadows. But during that time I watched Russia closely with fresh eyes and innocent curiosity. With its cruel leaders, history of tragedy, harsh weather and boisterous personalities, Russian life can play out almost like a stage drama. And I always like to think of myself as a quiet character, sharing the stage and taking in the surroundings. It’s an approach I have used as much as possible in my on-air storytelling at NPR. In 2009 the United States seemed to be at an inflection point: The economy was in shambles, just as a historic political moment arrived. Americans had just voted for their first black president. During the first three months of 2009, I hit the road in an SUV, equipped with a recorder and notebook, fueled by caffeine and gas-station food. I traveled from northern Michigan to Florida, then from New York to San Francisco, mostly just listening as people shared their personal struggles and hopes for their families and communities. None of my reporting would have deserved a “breaking news” headline on cable news, but I learned a great deal about America in a difficult and defining moment.

  This was on my mind in December 2011, as Rose and I began what would be our first trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway. (This book brings you along on our second.) I was wrapping up my tenure in Moscow for NPR, and my editors and I believed the train trip might offer me one wild, romantic way to take our listeners to an unfamiliar place and provide clues about Russia’s journey as a country. By turns, the train trip was in-your-face, unpredictable, grueling, loud, poetic, humorous, and deflating—all of which could describe Russia itself. The conversations I had along the way opened a window on a culture long shrouded in mystery and misunderstood by the West. My fellow passengers talked to me about the wounded soul of their once-great nation, baring their anger about Russia’s present and their fear about what the future would bring. They taught me how years of hardship—under czarist, Communist, and capitalist rule—had taken their toll on Russia’s people and made their mark on everything from Russian folklore and traditions to politics and family life.

  TWO DECADES AGO, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the Western media focused heavily on the promise of capitalism and democracy. Today the glue holding the country together seems to be eroding. As I traversed Russia in a train, I couldn’t help but feel I was traveling on the only concrete thing holding this nation together. For years Russians had an identity, shaped in all ways by Soviet culture. But modern Russia seems to be living in a void: a place where the powerful and connected can rake in eye-popping amounts of money, where a $275,000 bottle of champagne is on the menu at a Moscow hotel thirty miles from impoverished villages, where ordinary families go about their daily lives hoping to survive, unable to dream of any higher purpose.

  That feeling of emptiness has many Russians turning to the past for answers and guidance. To live in Soviet times often meant not being able to define your own future. You could not travel, determine how much money you made, or decide where you lived. But many people had stable jobs, quality education, and a sense of pride that their country was respected in the world. Today the social safety net from Soviet times is gone, and Russians are not confident that anything has replaced it. The reality is harsh: Russia seems to stand for little besides wealth at the top, corruption, an uneven playing field, and the repression of civil rights. Russians today are free to travel and free to express their views in public, but the Soviet Union has been replaced by a system eerily similar in some ways—featuring the same repression and inequality that existed before, only without the Communist ideology that at least put food on the table.

  The Russia I saw was very much as Gogol described it more than 150 years ago: careening down an uncertain path. On the Trans-Siberian Railway I began to see a thin line of constancy, connecting Russia’s cities and its steppes, its problems and its potential, its past and its future. Cultural heritage seems to pervade a nation that stretches from Europe to Pyongyang and Alaska, making some customs and ways of thinking feel the same through all of Russia’s extremities. And across this vast country the emotion that remained constant was an uneasy frustration: Here are millions of people across different landscapes, climates, and communities, all with families they love and ideas to offer, but almost universally unable to answer some simple questions: Where is your country going? And what do you want for its future?

  I learned a lot from that trip in 2011, but not nearly enough. I wanted to see more, wanted to meet more people. I knew that even though my career had taken me b
ack home, my time in Russia was far from finished. I would be getting back on that train.

  . . .

  I LANDED BACK in Washington in 2012, around the same time as a friend and colleague, Julia Ioffe. She was born in Russia, moved to the United States in grade school, went to Princeton for college but never got rid of the Russia bug. She returned as a journalist, writing for Foreign Policy and The New Yorker magazines while living with her grandmother in the family’s Soviet-era flat in Moscow. Our time as foreign correspondents overlapped, but Julia—having been born in the country and learned Russian before English—knew the place intimately. I took whatever work Julia produced seriously—and one of the first things she did after returning to the United States was to translate an essay by Mikhail Shishkin. His essay, published by Julia’s current employer, the New Republic, is called “Poets and Czars: From Pushkin to Putin, the Sad Tale of Democracy in Russia.”

  In czarist times, Shishkin wrote, Russia was a “Holy Fatherland” surrounded “on all sides by an ocean of enemies.” And to live in Russia meant being a “child and soldier” of the czar. But the protection you received in return made all that worthwhile. As Shishkin put it, “the unconscious slavery was bitter for the body, but life-sustaining for the spirit.” This was a convenient arrangement for Russia’s all-powerful czars. People believed that in a dangerous and uncertain world, to be in Russia was the best one could hope for. But, “everything changed with Peter the Great,” Shishkin wrote. Czar Peter had worthy intentions. He wanted to throw open the doors to eighteenth-century Europe, with its new ideas and theories about science and technology. But Peter could not pick and choose who came through the door, and poets and thinkers entered as well, with European ideas about individual rights and human dignity. As Shishkin put it, Peter “wanted to ‘cut a window to Europe,’ but instead, he cut a hole in the Russian ark.” Suddenly Russian thinkers and writers were armed with progressive ideas.

  The great poet Pushkin may have owed his literary genius to his Russian blood, but his ideas were shaped by the West. This led him to challenge the power vertical in Russia, writing in the poem Exegi Monumentum, “I’ve set up to myself a monument not wrought by hands. The public path to it will not grow weedy. Its unyielding head soars higher than the Alexandrine Column.” This was a direct challenge to the czar. Shishkin points to those words as Pushkin’s “declaration of independence.”

  Then something funny happened.

  The czar who ruled during Pushkin’s time courted the poet, realizing and fearing his influence. Nicholas I named Pushkin the country’s “First Poet,” and the poet obliged. Shishkin writes of a tragic calculation that Pushkin faced. He was convinced that democracy would never really flourish in Russia. Undermining the czar would only create a power vacuum, and the new reality would be uglier than what it replaced. “Pushkin saw that in Russia, the choice between dictatorship and democracy was beside the point: the only choice was between bloody chaos and ruthless order.” More specifically Pushkin “understood that in a Russian revolution, the first things to burn [would] be the libraries.”

  Shishkin uses this history as an appetizer for his bitter main course: recognition that history in his country can’t stop repeating itself. Shishkin’s novels drill into universal human themes and questions—love, pain, decency—and he’s been compared to some of the great Russian writers of the past—Pushkin, Chekhov, Tolstoy. And in 2013 Shishkin himself faced an impossible calculation. His government helped arrange an annual trip to the United States for Russian literary moguls. Having gone the year before, Shishkin declined this time. A critic of Putin and the Kremlin, he refused to be showcased by a government he found unpalatable. I can’t help but see his predicament as comparable to Pushkin’s, facing the czar three centuries ago. Historical parallels are tenuous, but make no mistake: Russia today exists in a bizarre purgatory, not unlike the country Pushkin knew. Pushkin then, Shishkin now, faced a terrible choice: Stand for change that could be messy and unpredictable, or settle for and endorse a status quo that is unsavory but somehow safe?

  In Shishkin’s time, after Soviet rule, Russia opened to the West and seemed on a path to democracy. But the dust has now settled, and Russia has an autocratic, power-hungry leader. What happened? In Shishkin’s mind the brief flirtation with democracy after Soviet times “ended with everyone returning to their barracks. We had to live, after all. And order returned on its own, the very same order, because no one in Russia knows a different one.”

  If anything came through on my first train trip, and in my time in Russia, it’s that people in this country dream of change—in the abstract—but have little or no faith that they can contribute to it or control it. And that has been ingrained in the psychology for generations. I always turn back to an essay called “The Image of Dual Russia,” written more than five decades ago by the late Robert Tucker, a Princeton scholar who studied Russia and the Soviet Union. He writes that over centuries—from the 1400s straight up until the 1917 Bolshevik revolution that ushered in Soviet times—Russia became divided. On the one hand there was “official Russia”: the state, in Russian, the gosudarstvo. Quite separately there was “popular Russia”: the people, many of them peasants in far-flung communities, taught to make sacrifices Shishkin described in order to feel protection and a sense of purpose. Most strikingly, Tucker explained how there was no relationship between the two. They existed and lived in entirely separate worlds. Russian leaders and bureaucrats viewed the people as soldiers in some us-against-them war against the world, but didn’t value them as human beings. And the people saw the government as “alien”—a distant, conquering force whose vision, cruel as it seemed, was intractable, inevitable, and inescapable. And so popular apathy prevailed. In 1917 the Bolsheviks arrived and, in the eyes of the outside world, brought their Marxist vision into a fight on behalf of the people. But Tucker believed that the Russian people—most of them, at least—were apathetic and not really ever involved. The Bolsheviks were able to topple the czar fairly easily, he said, because in reality, the czar had little support from the uninvolved and apathetic masses. But neither did Lenin and the Bolsheviks. They took power and began a new chapter in Russian history, in large part by making themselves a “self-appointed organ of consciousness,” Tucker wrote. The Russian people themselves saw little if any personal stake in the way things played out—they were innocent and detached bystanders to history.

  That’s alarming. But Tucker’s conclusions from decades ago, like Shishkin’s insights today, nevertheless paint a broad picture of the Russia I saw. At a moment when there could be a fight for change, history’s handcuffs remain on this proud country that’s full of warm, creative, strong people. At the very moment when countries in the Middle East—Tunisia, Egypt, Libya—were rising up and overthrowing leaders in the Arab Spring, Russians made a bit of noise and then settled down again. Why did they not see things through? How can Russians accept the harsh reality they live in—a country with low life expectancy, rampant health problems, gaping inequality, and a dwindling population? What is holding people back? Is it fear? Fatigue? Fatalism? Public apathy? An innocent but false belief in country? A paternalistic faith that leaders are there to protect you? Or, most likely, a recipe of all these ingredients—a recipe written by the czars, cooked for generations, and infused so deeply in Russians that they would struggle to exist without it.

  ALL THESE QUESTIONS lingered when I finished my assignment in Russia and returned home in 2012, as did one more: How can I love such a maddening place? For all its troubles there’s an inner energy and warmth and unpredictability that make Russia as addictive as Aunt Nina’s stewed chicken. Spend enough time there, and for all the pain you witness, you don’t want to leave. I yearned to go back to Russia because of my love for the place and the unfinished business of understanding it. So, I returned in 2013 for another Trans-Siberian journey. This book is that journey.

  1 • ROSE

  ROSE WAS CONVINCED it would be snowing when we l
anded.

  It was September 2009, and the two of us were about to begin a new life in Russia.

  Snowing? Sure, I thought. It’s always cold in Moscow. It even snows in September. What are the other clichés, honey? All Russians do is drink vodka, wear fur hats, and train for the Olympics?

  It was snowing.

  We could see it as our Delta 767 from JFK made its final descent into Moscow.

  “You know I’m a warm-blooded Mediterranean, right, Greene?” I did. But this question wasn’t meant to offer new information, rather to underscore the meteorological sacrifice my Sicilian-Lebanese-American wife was making in beginning this new chapter.

  In our warm apartment in New York City’s East Village, Rose and I had spent endless hours talking about the job that opened at NPR: Moscow bureau chief.

  I had covered the White House for eight years, done some economic reporting in New York, and was hankering for a foreign assignment. Rose had gotten a master’s degree in public policy, launched into a great job as a policy adviser for the New York City Council, and was always hungry for a new adventure—she loves to explore and travel—but Russia?

  Rose grew up in rural Ohio. Her Lebanese-American mom raised four kids, taught school, and opened a family restaurant in a small town along Interstate 75. Her Sicilian-American dad taught college law and pharmacy for four decades. I grew up in Pennsylvania. My late mom, another academic, was a beloved psychology professor. My dad is a physician in the pharmaceutical industry who shares my passion for late-night chats about politics or yesterday’s Pittsburgh Steelers game. Our parents all worked to make us worldly. Rose and I talked about current events growing up, we traveled, and we read the Dostoevsky and Tolstoy required in class.