Crossing Siberia

It is midnight in Moscow, 6am in Vladivostok and I lie somewhere in the expanse between, God knows where or when exactly, barrelling through the night, lurching further and further into Siberia, the bone-chill outside licking at me as I weave a bit drunk between cars, from the pectobah to my sleeping compartment. Outside you can see only the shadow-tree line flying past and a milkspill of stars like a million eyes passively looking back at you, a disinterested pantheon.

The trans-siberian is old school like an old Hitchcock movie. A period piece during wartime as you slide through the forest in the middle of the night toward an abandoned nineteenth-century train station lit up with hammer-and-sickle, the clack of the tracks scraping the bottom of the car as it turns, mile-long coal caravans slithering past, lumber stacked on flat-beds, in the rail yard random passenger cabs lit up and moving by slowly but with no people on them, linking and unlinking, ghost cars in a ghost station.

On the platform uniformed female attendants stand at attention outside each open doorway of our train, chit-chatting a bit as a robotic female voice makes pronouncements in Russian over the loudspeaker to an empty station. The sharp smell of creosote and woodstove. A mechanic pings the engines under each car with a rod, looking for leaks; they sound out like random marimba notes. A young German couple with backpacks wanders from door to door looking a little nervous. Inside the station there is only a sour-faced woman selling vodka and salami from a kiosk.

The stations are lively during the day. The platform is dotted with extremely nice old peasant women with headscarves selling whole smoked fish from wicker baskets, fresh yogurt with berries, sunflower seeds, tangerines, apples and bread. You can wander around for a bit, always a little nervous that the train may take off but elbowed forward by the desire to see a bit more, moving past Uyghurs and Tatars and Kazakhs, some oddball new thing sitting there waiting to be discovered, if you’re willing to take a risk.

The train compartment is old school, too. I had it to myself for the first two nights but a polite man named Sergei stepped aboard at Omsk (the city to which Dostoyevsky was exiled) and now lies snoring across the cabin from me. Two couch-beds facing one another in the narrow space with pillow and blanket and a small table in the middle, room up top for stuffing your luggage, a light socket for powering the laptop and a view out the window. Sergei has a coffee mug with a picture of his daughter on it that he keeps filled with some sort of carbonated home-brew. When you lie back and close your eyes the roly-poly back-and-forth rock of the train eases you into sleep rather quickly. On one side of each cab is a samovar, on the opposite an admittedly basic lavatory. No showers, but you can clean up a bit at the sink.

My fellow passengers are less aggressively interesting than one would hope, but pleasant. A number of middle-aged Russian men, some couples, a soldier here and there, and a smattering of tourists like myself. Easy enough to drink vodka with in the restaurant car, and I spent several hours yesterday getting my ass kicked repeatedly at chess by a banker named Vladimir who, aside from chessboard skills was notable for his persistent desire to discuss NHL hockey with me in excruciating detail – though his broken English combined with my grand total of ten Russian words and the black hole of my NHL knowledge-lack left him a bit heartbroken:

“Chicago Blackhawk. Very. Gut. Team!”

“Yes, the Chicago Blackhawks.”

“The goalie, what is name? He is strong.”

Blank stare.

“Their coach, he is gut man. They have same coach? What is name? Oh wait, checkmate! Haha. My friend, what you know about less, hockey or chess? Bahaha.”

Those who know me well know few statements could have burned my ass more than that one. I love chess.

Unfolding for us out the windows on either side of the car were an array of idyllic pastoral scenes as we passed over the Urals, none of the vast tulip fields I was promised by Dr Zhivago (what a rip-off), but still beautiful with the autumn leaves ripening into reds and golds over the ghost-white of so much birch-bark, bucolic farming villages with pretty wooden cottages and those omnipresent old ladies in babushkas carrying milk pails on either side of them, attached via long metal poles that are bent over the shoulders like in those great Flemish paintings. It’s no wonder Tarkovsky chose paintings by these Old Masters in the original Solaris to convey life on Earth to that strange alien being – so much of rural Russian life is captured in them. Further out, though, in Siberia proper the land flattens out into Kansas without corn for a day or so before resolving into more rolling hills beyond Krasnoyarsk.

The cities that punctuate this landscape are, for the most part, the most impressively depressing I’ve ever seen in the industrialized word, especially as you head further east. They seem like science fiction mining colonies on Mars. Some of the older ones have charming little city centers with parks, but even then these are dwarfed by massive dull-grey concrete block housing resembling penitentiary life. Tough places to live; the people here are hard-scrabble but warm enough in their way, certainly hospitable. They have the same jury-rigging skills as denizens of African cities; just now we’ve stopped in Tatarsk and a van rolls past held together with what looks like packing tape, a strategic bit of rope and a prayer, exhaust fumes belching loudly out of what passes for a tailpipe.

Weirdly, despite Stalin and his wholesale destruction, each town retains its shiny, ornate orthodox onion dome bell tower after all these years. It reminds me of three days spent travelling by boat down the Niger River seeing every wattle-and-clay hut village along the water with its own dry-mud mosque minaret. Even in the vodou regions of the Dogon there were giant stones in the center of villages meant to provide some manner of supernatural protection. In New York I suppose the World Trade Center used to stand in for the church tower. Perhaps the first thing an alien might remark on after visiting us is the omnipresence of these edifices, part flagpole, part antenna to the sky god.

Attached to these urban outposts are one or more of the Mordor nightmare complexes that pock the region and provide all the jobs, coal mines and chemical plants, grain depots and Godzilla-sized lumberyards, smelting foundries the size of cities, sometimes giving off an eerie effervescent red smoke overhead for a mile or more and crammed with elaborate industrial machinery which few people know the name for. It reminds me of nothing so much as driving through Nitro, West Virginia or Gary, Indiana on our way back from visiting relatives down south when I was a kid. These are the hidden sewers of western civilization, producing most of the power and much of the chemicals and raw materials that make Europe run from day to day. Whenever Russia threatens to cut off the Siberian spigot, panic ensues from Reykjavik to Kiev.

It’s hard not to think of the multitude of political prisoners transferred to Siberian gulags via this very rail line, some like Lenin and Dostoevsky by the czars but a vast majority of millions during Stalin’s extended reign of terror, in train cars like this one. Sometimes you can’t help but look out at this tremendous expanse of nothing through their eyes. A terrifying journey with an unspeakable end. When I mentioned this leg of the trip to my Latvian improv teacher and friend Silvija Ozols, her face jumped back for a millisecond as if I had said I was going off to a beach holiday in Birkenau. There are one or two small museums along the way at the site of former gulags, and a statue stands at the head of the Road of Bones further east, north of Vladivostok – where dead prisoners’ corpses were crushed and incorporated into the road itself. But for the most part all those millions of people were simply swallowed up whole and never heard of again, engulfed by this immeasurable, desolate landscape, so vast the human mind cannot quite compass it, even standing within it.