Clambered on to the train (after passport check) at 3.30am in snowy Ekaterinburg. Fitful sleep…
I'm on the "Rossiya", train #2 to Vladivostok, but only for the 49 hours to Irkutsk. This is Russia's premier train, but not with quite the style of the express to Yekaterinburg. The restaurant car is freezing. Most meals are 'layered' and oily under a tasteless 'milk sauce'. The only 'vino' is champagne, so the lumbering waitress plies me with beer. Back in the compartment are the '24 Yaca' supermarket black bread, Italian merlot and fresh citrus fruit which are looking gooood! The time zones pass into a regular train routine of 22-23 hour days but the framed corridor timetable and train clocks stick rigidly to Moscow Time.
12.09: Ishim. The motherly provodniskaya urges me to walk: "10 minutes we haf."
4.20pm: Omsk. "Haf 10", so another brief stride up the platform and back, amongst smokers, boarding passengers, fluoro-clad railway officialdom; ice.
My travelling companion from Omsk is a man of few words and many medications. After clambering on to the train he dosed himself on a variety of pills, then proceeded to sleep soundly for most of the 3000 kilometers to Krasnoyarsk. At which point he put on many layers and boots, wished me good luck, and wandered off the train. His only bit of mirth is when he laughs at me adding three layers, boots and rabbit skin hat (and thank you so much to kind friends for saying it makes me look like "Wilfred") to go for a 10 minute traipse along some ice covered platform for remarkably fresh air...
"Krasnoyarsk: We haf ten."
As with all extended train journeys, you quickly become institutionalised to the routines: 2 or 3 extended stops each day with 15 minutes to layer up, walk/smoke/buy restaurant-car-avoidance food (the station kiosks do a roaring trade on pot noodles and pot potatoes), then climb back on board before the providnitstas cease scraping/banging the undercarriage and become too anxious about leaving stray passengers behind.
Adding to the institutional feel is "hospital" food: one meal is free on a soft class ticket. It is negotiated when you board and the (usually) taciturn PECTOPAH attendant pushes open the compartment/cell door to thrust a welcome pack of fruit, water, excellent dark chocolate and chemical '7 Day' filled croissant at you with a request: "Pork or Fish for free dinner?". Our attendant this time is a kind of Nurse Ratched as portrayed by Hattie Jacques (if you are under 40, Google 'Carry On Movies' and she'll be there). At 7pm (Moscow Time) she hammers and throws the door open to deliver, under a nursing home plastic warmer, something grey and solid, swimming (so it must be fish) in a watery white gruel, decorated with 7 greasy chips.
"Ilanskaya: We haf ten."
It's comfortable in this rolling, institutional existence, sauna-heated to 30 degrees, while outside it's snow flurries and -10. And the journey passes immersed in the wonderful 700 pages of Svetlana of Alexievich's interviews of the last Soviet generation in: "Second Hand Time" and its graphic personal accounts of Stalinist purges, life in the gulags and forced-orphanage lives for children of the enemies of the state, mass deportation in cattle trucks to Siberia as a result of removing Kulaks or ethnic cleansing.... Her interviews juxtapose the past Soviet mind set with the oligarch capitalists who replaced the ageing Nomenclature: the sudden gulf between the "known" world and robber baron capitalism... and the barbaric cruelty of the ethnic and civil wars which broke out in and between former "Socialist Republics". They grabbed the chance for independence to expel or murder remaining Russians, and each other... I'll share some of what I’m reading as "stuff happened" between Ekaterinburg and Vladivostok.
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" - We're always talking about suffering... That's our path to wisdom. People in the West seem naive to us because they do not suffer like we do, they have a remedy for every little pimple. We're the ones who went to the camps, who piled up the corpses during the war, who dug through the nuclear waste in Chernobyl with our bare hands. We sit atop the ruins of socialism like the aftermath of war. We're run down and defeated. Our language is the language of suffering."
- Remarks from an Accomplice: "Second Hand Time"
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Every 20 minutes or so, the train rolls past wooden villages or towns. Not much moves in the deep snow apart from drifting household and factory smoke, and passing freight trains every 5 or so minutes all the way... The graphic horror and deprivation of the forced marches into Siberia lasting months for prisoners under the Tsar, and for the victims of forced immigration and gulag labour and 'volunteer labour' for the Motherland under the communists, is also described in the helpful pages of the Trailblazer and Lonely Planet guides.
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"Stalin is our warrior glory,
Stalin is the joy of youth,
Singing, battling, victorious
Our nation follows Stalin's path...
And yes! Yes! Yes! My greatest dream was to die! To sacrifice myself. Give myself away. The Komsomol oath: 'I am prepared to give my life if my nation should need it'. These weren't just words, that's what we were really taught... When I was entering the Party, in my application, I wrote, 'I know and accept the Party Program and Regulations. I am prepared to devote all of my energy, and, if necessary, to give my life to my Motherland.'... And what do you think of me? That I am an idiot? That I'm infantile? Some of the people I know… They have outright laughed at me: emotional socialism, the ideals on paper... That's what I look like to them. Stupid!"
- Margarita Pogrebitskaya, doctor, 57 years old: "Second Hand Time"
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Soon after leaving Krasnoyarsk, clanking slowly over the Yenisey River bridge overlooked by ritzy new stainless steel hilltop apartments, we amble past clusters of dachas: each small wooden house on its own fenced allotment and small food garden. Each yard seems to have its own wooden outhouse; a few have animals. Most are quiet now in Winter, livening up when warmer weather allows planting and local walks to collect wild foods. As we travel west, a custardy yellow sun breaks through clouds over snow covered mountains and broad iced rivers.
Krasnoyarsk was also a "Closed City" 35 years ago, being the base for a huge and secretive space centre, as well as armaments factories uranium enrichment and research. There are stories that, in the sudden shift of industries west of the Ural Mountains following the Nazi invasion of Russia, factories were literally built around workers as they urgently manufactured weaponry.
Sunset is an extended salmon-pink twilight, turning the whites and greys of the birch trees and snow drifts into luminous golden, shadowy, Impressionist landscape. I'm now the only passenger left in the carriage (for the next 24 hours into Irkutsk) and my provodnitsa is quietly amused at my failed efforts to photograph the changing colours from the galloping train.
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"My father took part in the Revolution... In 1937 he was repressed (publicly denounced)... But they soon let him out because a prominent Bolshevik who knew him personally intervened on his behalf. Vouched for him. But they wouldn't let him back into the Party. It was a blow he could never recover from. In jail, they'd knocked his teeth out and crushed his skull. Still, my father didn't change his stripes, he remained a communist to the end of his life. Explain that to me..."
- On Cries and Whispers and Exhilaration: Margarita Pogrebitskaya, doctor, 57 years old: "Second Hand Time"
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"Ilanshaya: Ten minutes!" 5.30pm Wednesday night (13.19 in the timetable: Moscow Time, eight time zones away). Another brisk stroll on the platform as passengers join and leave. Provodnitsas check passports and tickets then continue clunking and sweeping the ice and snow from beneath carriages. The strong smell of coal pierces the air as a small truck delivers a couple of buckets for the heating system in each carriage. A rather more piquant smell hangs in the air as a tank truck travels along the platform, decanting the onboard toilets...
Irkutsk: The city is on a broad river bend; the glint of golden onion domes greets arrivals crossing the river into the old city centre. The communist governments' longer term plan to completely demolish the intricately patterned and filigreed traditional dark-wooden houses (where closed wooden shutters open to become multi-coured windows into quiet interior lives) was never fully implemented. Leaning traditional cottages abruptly adjoin high rises or 19th century Tsarist cement-filigreed buildings. Indeed, the city has created '130 Kvartal', an area of restored, removed, "gussied up" and newly constructed 'heritage' wooden buildings in a lovely tourist enclave, leading to the clutch of a vast new concrete shopping mall.
Above '130 Kvartal', I wandered up towards the central park through a cluster of old wooden houses. Until you are off the main roads, you don't see the resident old people and children pushing/shoving barrows or trolleys or sleds to the local communal pump: picturesque old houses have no facilities... As a young boy struggled to jump and put his whole weight on a reluctant pump handle to fill an old milk churn, a bent-over man pushed an old baby's pram through the rutted ice (with icicles hanging from the pram's undercarriage) towards him. Their combined efforts forced pumped water into containers, before the long push/shove home through ice and deep snow.
The hilltop city park used to be a 200 year-old cemetery before a 1932 edict that the graves be unceremoniously bulldozed to create frolicsome greenery. This may explain the ironic title: "Central Park of Culture and Rest". Happy kids were sledding down the hill, ignoring the Hero Workers' monument being renovated behind them.
There's a unique aspect to commuting in a Russian winter. On the extended trolley bus ride through kilometres of 5 storeyed Khrushchyovka apartment workers' estates to the massive Agora dam, I was stroked by a sable? Or a mink? Possibly an arctic fox...? Russian women love their furs, so in a crush-loaded bus, you too can share the unexpected creepiness of a woman's pelt on your backhand as you use the grab bars to balance during the jerky ride...
Irkutsk trams ("You must take route 4," says my transfer guy. "It goes past the sites of several gulags, including one that was just for police.") are decrepit and ungainly-looking, rusty and cumbersome vehicles travelling over noisy, corrugated track. There was little to see of old gulags amongst the growing private land development, but the journey was a series of loud rumblings, grinding curves and ill-fitting sliding doors that made a reluctant, loud mooing noise whenever they were forced to open. More crowded back-hand mink, fox, sable, rabbit; beaver?
On return, a visit to the houses of "Decembrists": those nobles who attempted a coup in 1825 and were exiled rather than shot, shows the culture and style that they brought with them (along with their wives who renounced their royal status to follow their exiled husbands). Along with riches from gold rushes, this made Irkutsk the "Paris of Siberia" for a time. The Decembrists also had the money to survive through the corrupt exile system, rarely overseen by any official from faraway St Petersburg.
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"My God! It's not Stalin I remember, it's our life... I joined a club and learned how to play the accordion. Mama got a medal for being a shock worker (greatly exceeding her work quota). It wasn't all misery... barracks life... In the camp, my father met a lot of educated people. He never met people that interesting anywhere else... My father wanted all of his kids to go to university. That was his dream. And all of us - there were four of us - ended up with degrees."
- Elena Yurievna S., third secretary of the district Party committee, 49 years old: "Second Hand Time"
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The Irkutsk city guides and guidebooks advise you of great places to eat but they are away across town, and it's minus 15 degrees... I looked for places around my boutique pub.
First night in Irkutsk: 'China Town' restaurant... Verrrry upmarket (many dead animals hanging in the cloak room) and a great vegetarian meal using picture menu, phrase book, and Russian waitresses' best guess.
Second night: a rather ordinary steakhouse (from the outside) was Russian Hipsters At Play on a Friday Night in a steampunk bar. Hidden in a corner table (as I was not the preferred demographic) I had a wonderful English speaking waiter (between mobile phone checks), ok food, and endless entertainment of drinking-shot games: a great experience of younger Russian entitlement (although not so many pelts in the cloak room on this occasion).
Lunch in '130 Kvartal': "You must try omul from Lake Baikal." It looked like significantly more pie than omul, but the gritty, smoky, sardine taste was strong and bitey.
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"For us a kitchen is not just where we cook. It's a dining room, a guest room, an office, a soapbox. A space for group therapy sessions... Thanks, Khrushchev! He's the one who led us out of communal apartments; under his rule, we got our own private kitchens where we could criticise the government and, most importantly, not be afraid, because in the kitchen you were always among friends. It's where ideas were whipped up from scratch, fantastical projects concocted. We made jokes - it was a golden age for jokes! 'A communist is someone who has read Marx, an anti-communist is someone who's understood him'."
- Snatches of Street Noise and Kitchen Conversations (1991 - 2001): "Second Hand Time"
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In both of my homestays, the kitchen was the family room with a couch, television, radio and bookshelves. This was where life seems to be lived: in standard Russian apartments where there was no "living room", just bathroom and two more rooms for sleeping. In Tatiana's apartment, I was "invited in" for breakfast. In Moscow, I was not invited or encouraged to impinge on the family kitchen space at all.
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Irkutsk station: Russian Orthodox Christmas Day (7th January), 7.30am:
The "Rossiya" to Vladivostok pulls in. Across the dark platform is the short, drab, green, weekly train from Moscow to Beijing. A lone English traveller yells and waves to me from the doorway (while his carriage attendant stokes the boiler behind him). My new provodnitsa is a jolly granny who moves me into a compartment on my own (as her bags and boxes are stored under the opposite bunk). For the next 3 hours we travel round the southern edge of the huge Lake Baikal during an extended grey sunrise over frozen waters. The landscape is rugged - so much so that the first Trans Siberian train tracks had to be laid across the ice, with foreseeable and unfortunate results.
And on Christmas Day, from Onokhoy we travel many kilometres along the valley of the River Brian.
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"Gorbachev had more power than a Tsar. Unlimited power. Then he went and said, 'We can't go on like this'. Those were his famous words. So the country turned into a debating society. People argued at home, at work, on public transport. Families fell apart over political disagreements, children would fight with their parents. One of my girlfriends got into such a big fight about Lenin with her son and daughter-in-law, she kicked them out. They had to spend a whole winter in a dacha outside of Moscow."
- Elena Yurievna S., third secretary of the district Party committee, 49 years old: "Second Hand Time"
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Chermshevsk: "Haf 10 minutes": It's an overrrrrrrrly bracing -28 degrees outside. The rather more glamorous restaurant crew on this train finds me, provides a generous bag of chocolates and fruit and the inevitable chemical croissant, and take a detailed order for the "free dinner" at 12 noon (Moscow time), so 6-ish...? Lunch is a surprisingly good "Sheeesh...": a rich lemony chicken soup. I become optimistic about dinner (and rightly so), and grateful that I'm not being fed by "Hattie Jacques" and the 'greasers' from the previous train for the next 40 hours. The only disturbance is the carriage toilet which is loudly malfunctioning. Each vacuum flush is a loud squeal for help followed by a louder "THOOP!". I'm so grateful not to be in the adjoining compartment.
The journey falls into the same routine of meal times and "We haf 10 minutes" stops. As I'm the sole passenger my lovely provodnitsa checks on me every stop, scrubs and vacuums (and hammers the under carriage during long stops) and plies me with tea, chocolate and tasteful Russian Railways souvenirs (you have been warned...). With the lack of passengers, she job-shares with two colleagues, so disappears somewhere for 12 hour sleeps.... We're in permafrost country now where only the hardiest vegetation (and humans) survive, with some treeless hill country looking like the vast hills of the Scottish Borders.
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"Just like Kruschev, who only ever referred to the generals as 'spongers', Gorbachev didn't like the army. We are a military nation: 70 or so percent of the economy was, in one way or another, tied to the military. Our best minds worked for it... physicists, mathematicians... All of them helped develop tanks and bombs. And our ideology was also militarised. But Gorbachev was profoundly civilian..." 'Are you preparing to fight?' He would ask the top brass. 'I'm not.' And there are more generals and admirals in Moscow alone than there are in the whole world combined.' Before him, no one had dared to speak to the top command like that, they used to be the most important people in government."
- N.'S Account: "Second Hand Time"
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Early morning in mid Siberia: in passing villages there is deep snow and nothing moves, save for the slow smoke wafting from cottage chimneys and the local industries, tracing lazy, diagonal parallel lines into the grey-pink and cloudless dawn skies...
Mogochar, 2.15: "We haf FIFTEEN minutes!" The guidebook is being rather too kind, describing this town as "unpretty". It's a railway-and-coal-train town: Lithgow in permafrost Siberia, without the style.
Dinner in the PECTOPAH car: thirty five years ago our tour group would be presented with a vast menu. Prices were pencilled in against the half dozen or so available items. What the group didn't eat was then 're-sold' to a bunch of local passengers, second-hand, down the back of the dining car. Everybody happy: especially the dining crew who were topping up their meagre official wage - which they would attempt to spend by buying our jeans, hassling us in icy carriage vestibules where our severe Intourist guide could not see.
(Intourist, by the way, was part of the security service, so locals ran a mile when approached by our lovely guide. Her job was to corral us into seeing what was approved, and to separate us from as much hard currency as possible through Beriozka shops - only for foreigners and the elite and full of consumer items most Russians could not access - and through usurious exchange rates in dingy offical banks).
Radio Moscow was imposed listening on the train back then. The Russians were in an unpopular war, but whenever "Afghanistan" or “Kabul” were mentioned on the radio news, our “trusted” Intourist guide insisted it was only the weather report.
In freewheeling capitalist Russia, this has all changed. In the dining car an extensive English menu is available, with the usual markups you expect on trains (but quadrupled for alcohol). Your attentive waitress allows time to fully read the menu and make a considered selection. She smiles, thanks; disappears into the kitchen. A quick reappearance: "It is finish! This is all ve haf!" So that is what you get. She did recommend a verrrry good Russian beer with a dark taste of fruit rather than hops. It was double the cost of the food, and quite wonderful. The final "Rossiya" lunch order was to a similar pattern, followed by... "Our cook making fresh pancakes. Would you like with salmon and caviar?" I do think so.....
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"We wanted to live like they do in the West. Listen to their music, dress like them, travel the world...Meanwhile the only things or sale in the shops were three-litre jars of birch juice and sauerkraut. Bags of baby leaves. We had ration cards for noodles, butter, grain... tobacco... You could get killed in the vodka line! But they published the forbidden Platonov, Grossman... They took the troops out of Afghanistan. I got out alive, I thought that all of us who fought there were heroes. We returned to the Motherland only to discover that it was gone! Instead of the Motherland, we found ourselves in a new country that didn't give a damn about us. The army fell apart and people started flinging mud at army men. "Murderers!""
- Her son's story: "Second Hand Time"
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Erroly Pavlovich, 6.15 pm: "Haf 10 minutes". There is no platform so you tumble off the bottom step onto icy ballast. Passengers make for the kiosk over the next set of tracks. There's a sudden high pitched train-whistle squeal and a lumbering freight rumbles through, separating perturbed purchasing passengers from their train: a quick, slippery sprint back as the freight disappears into the dark. Within minutes a second vast freight train roars through, and is ongoing as the "Rossiya" edges out of the semi-reconstructed station for Vladivostok.
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"Gorbachev didn't want to be a Tsar. He refused. Compare him to Yeltsin... When, in 1993 he (Yeltsin) felt the presidential seat begin to rock underneath him, he kept his wits about him and ordered to fire on the Parliament. The communists had been too sheepish to shoot in '91... Gorbachev ceded power without any bloodshed. But Yeltsin fired from the tanks. He went into battle. So that's that... And the people supported him. Our country has a Tsarist mentality it's subconsciously Tsarist. Genetically. Everyone needs a Tsar."
- N's Account: "Second Hand Time"
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Mid morning east of Arkhara: vast hills, deep snow in snow flurries; a prison. Bare concrete cell blocks, barbed wire; guard towers, with snow half way up the concrete. A sudden tunnel and we're back in permafrost taiga. At least current prisoners condemned to Siberia don't need to build their own barracks as the Gulag prisoners and exiles were once forced to do....
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"Who am I? I'm one of those idiots who defended Yeltsin. I stood in front of the White House, ready to lie down in front of a tank. People went out into the streets on the crest of a wave, on a surge. But they were out there to die for freedom, not capitalism. I consider myself a person who's been deceived. I don't need this capitalism we've been led to...
Overall I was satisfied with socialism: no one was excessively rich or poor, there were no bums or abandoned children... Old people could live on their pensions, they didn't have to collect bottles and food scraps off the street. They wouldn't look at you with searching eyes, standing there with outstretched palms... We've yet to count how many people were killed by perestroika. (A pause) Our former life was smashed to smithereens, not a single stone was left standing."
- From Interviews in Red Square in December 1991: "Second Hand Time"
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When you think of the fun and excitement of foreign travel, what colours come to mind? In the Hotel Intourist in Khabarovsk it's vibrant mission brown and fawn vinyl trim.... The old Intourist of Soviet mass-controlled group-tour days lives!! (Up to a point).
It was all there from the 70's: vast barn-like marble spaces for “reception” (such as it is) and eating areas. The transfer guy who collected me from the train, literally ran through the falling snow dragging my bag, forcing me to sprint (as much as one can on ice...) to the warmth of the waiting van. Reception was perfunctory and they would "hold" my passport (said the stout lady in the fright-red hair). "Wifi for you? NYET!" And a smile.
There are still Floor Lady desks (In Soviet times they used to hold the keys and monitor your movements, including 3am phone calls, yelling at you to make sure you were in your correct room/bed). Now they are occupied by the cleaning staff. If not at the desk, they monitor you by peeping through the door of a spare room. The same rooms; the same dodgy plumbing (shower would flow ceilingwards, or at a 30 degree angle to the wall so you have to flatten yourself to the tiles for full or strategic "coverage"). One Floor Lady did appear to knock imperiously, present me with an incomprehensible Russian street map (I think...), looking at the ceiling at the same time and screaming: "PerrrSHALST!!!!" When it was accepted.
The restaurant waitress (feet up) declined to serve in her tiled barn, so sent me downstairs to the Korean Restaurant tiled barn. I was silently thrusted the menu in 4 languages (Korean and Japanese tour groups seem to be a big deal here). The waitress then scuttled back and hid at the bar with two bored colleagues (I was the only customer at 7pm and, I suspect, beyond). She re-emerged. grunted a sour "Ah hum..." at the order and returned to the hide. At least the sound system was playing Dire Straits (possibly appropriate) and Chris Rea, so it wasn't all bad. Food and vino were ok. The "service" was several bodies sitting/lying around and occasionally one making a move to lethargically leave the conversation and do the job. It brought back soooooo many memories of my previous Russian experience. In general, if being generous, you could describe the hotel service as "meagre"...
Breakfast: No English menu so the waitress did the: "Ah hum..." thing and stolidly recited the menu options: salad, omelette and pancakes, or I could have pancakes, salad and omelette, or I could have omelette, pancakes and salad. I ordered omelette, salad and pancakes, and I received salad, pancakes and omelette. So that was all good.
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1991:
"I remember...it was so funny... in the university library and the Dean's office, they kept barrels of pickles and pickled tomatoes, mushrooms and cabbage. They sold the pickles and used the proceeds to pay the professors. Or suddenly, the whole department would be flooded with oranges. Or stacks of men's dress shirts... The great Russian intelligentsia did what it could to survive. People remembered the old recipes... what they ate during the war... In the hidden corners of the parks and sloping plots off railroad tracks, people planted potatoes Does eating nothing but potatoes for weeks on end count as going hungry?"
"I got a job as a freight handler. Real happiness! My friend and I would unload a truck of sugar and get paid in cash plus a bag of sugar each. What was a sack of sugar in the nineties? An entire subsistence! The beginning of capitalism... You could become a millionaire overnight or get a bullet to the head..."
- On The Mercy of Memories and the Lust for Meaning: As Told By His Friends: "Second Hand Time".
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So, the place you might expect the full Soviet, queueing-and-shuffling-in-drab-surroundings-experience would be buying postcard stamps in the post office???
Not so: the print-your-ticket-number-lady called behind a colourful sales banner to "Alex" who emerged, suppressed, slim, middle-aged energy, beaming, ushering me into the Philatelic Centre with a fulsome Russian welcome. When he paused, I spoke: "Angleeskee" and he said: "But you LOOK Russian!" (Which might explain why complete strangers keep asking me directions when I hope I'm standing at the right bus stop...). I thanked him for the compliment and we got down to selecting suitably evocative stamps for Australians, Americans and Scots (so I DO hope they arrive...). While I was generously loaned the official glue stick for the stamps (something else that has not changed is that Russian stamps don't lick-and-stick...) the conversation carried on: "You are Australian! Why is it that people from other countries travel in organised groups but Australians travel alone? You are Andrew. I am Alexandrevich: my first son is Alexander and my second is Andrey so they both have my name. He then proceeded to give me a detailed description of all of the small cats and tigers I could see at the local zoo and offered himself as tour guide. Only have one day?? Then here is my card for next time..." So, if you are contemplating travelling to Khabarovsk soon, I know just who to call.
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"We're living in the most shameful era of our entire history. Ours is the generation of cowards and traitors. That's how our children will remember us. 'Our parents sold out a great country for jeans, Marlboros, and chewing gum,' they'll say. We failed to defend the USSR, our Motherland. An unspeakable crime. We betrayed everything... It was not the stupid Bolsheviks that fucked up the country, and not even the bastard intelligentsia that destroyed it so they could go on trips abroad and read 'The Gulag Archipelago"... Don't go looking for a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy. We did it all ourselves. With our own hands. We dreamed of having a Macdonald's with hot hamburgers. We wanted everyone to be able to buy themselves a Mercedes, a plastic VCR. We wanted porn films in the kiosks... Russia needs a strong hand. An overseer with a stick. Long Live the Mighty Stalin! Hurrah! Hurrah! Akhromeyev could have been our Pinochet... Our General Jaruzelski... It was a great loss.."
- From interviews in Red Square in December 1991: "Second Hand Time"
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The mixed delights of walking Khabarovsk start to pale in the extended cold of -16 degrees. Nose has iced up so that breathing is like puffing through balls of wet straw. Moustache has iced solid. I won't make the mistake of removing gloves to take a photo again: I can feel my 'blains' 'chilling' as I type. But it's the feet: inside three pairs of socks and solid boots: solidified, excruciating; freezing pain. Hopping a warm if shambolic local tram does not help: the radiators are under the seats, so butt is (too) warm: extremities not at all: good excuse for an Americano and piroshki in a warmish cafeteria. Memo to self: outside walks to be in short bursts, and no standing still on the frozen pavement. This is a 'mild' Winter day, I'm told. I can only begin to imagine the pain and deprivation imposed on those generations of poor bastards who were force-marched for months to Siberia, or those lucky(?) enough to do the journey in draughty cattle trucks for extended weeks to become forced labour in the gulags.
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"... our train would pull into Belorussian station and a march would play over the loudspeaker; my heart would jump at the words: 'Comrade passengers, our train has arrived in the capital of our Motherland, the Hero City Moscow!' 'Roiling, mighty, undefeatable / My Moscow, my country, I love you most of all...' That's the music we would disembark to.
But then... where are we? We were greeted by a strange and unfamiliar city... At the train station... and by the metro... everywhere you went, you saw grey rows of people peddling lingerie and sheets, old shoes and toys, loose cigarettes like in war films. I'd never seen anything like it except in films. On beds of torn paper, in cardboard laid directly on the ground you'd find salami, meat and fish. In some cases it 'd be covered in tattered cellophane; in others, it laid bare. And Muscovites were buying it all. Bargaining knitted socks, napkins, food and clothes, all side by side... So many poor people... Where had they all come from? Invalids... Like in the movies... That's all I can compare it to, old Soviet films. I felt like I was watching a film."
- Margarita Pogrebitskaya, doctor, 57 years old: "Second Hand Time".
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I've been trying to find a way to describe the feeble slightly upwards high-pitched whimper that is the horn of a massive Russian train. I'm thinking that it is an "SBD" fart, where the 'S' didn't quite go according to plan.
The "Ocean" is the privately run overnight express from Khabarovsk to Vladivostok: very 'poshe'. Dinner served in your Soft Class berth before 10pm, and gentle piped music to wake you at 8.15 in the morning for an 8.30 arrival. My travelling companion only just made the train: Roman is a 'techie' and entrepreneur, manufacturing and distributing plastic tanks of all sizes ("This is my web page," on his phone) from Vladivostok to Irkutsk. He's just 40 years old so Communism is barely a memory for him. He was keen to talk, using a Russian version of Google Translate (and my limited Russian dictionary) we covered home, family, hobbies, human hierarchy of needs (glad I remembered my Maslow), fish species in Lake Baikal, growing inequality and his brother's mathematical formula for making the world a more equal place, environmental destruction, God in his heart, food adulterated with chemicals, second-hand Japanese cars, ice fishing (I now know how to drill the hole...), catching wild salmon (with phone videos of his latest catch), Christmas/New Year and how hyper-inflation in the early '90's changed Russia forever: ingraining and increasing inequality and poverty. It was quite a long dinner, over Merlot from Italy via Irkutsk.... and excellent company for my last night of Russian trains across Siberia and the Russian Far East.
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" - A bear accidentally wound up in Moscow and survived the whole Winter here. All he ate was migrant workers. Because who counts them... Ha, ha, ha..."
"Before the fall of the Soviet Union, we lived together like one big family... That's what they taught us in political literacy classes... Back then they were 'guests in the capital', now they're 'churkas' and 'khaches'. My grandfather would tell me about how he defended Stalingrad alongside Uzbeks. They all believed they were brothers forever!"
"What you're saying surprises me... They're the ones who decided to split off from us. They wanted freedom. Did you forget that? Remember how they'd murder Russians in the nineties? Rob them? Rape them? A knock on the door in the middle of the night..."
"We remember the humiliations suffered by our brothers and sisters! Death to the 'churkas'! It's hard to rouse the Russian Bear, but once he's up, there'll be rivers of blood."
- In Moscow Apartments: "Second Hand Time"
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Vladivostok: Home of the Russian Far East naval fleet (and a "closed city" to foreigners until 1990), where second hand Japanese cars (left hand drive) and used Korean buses (right hand drive) come to die... Traffic is... err... interesting. The local mayor has got rid of nearly all fixed electric public transit and can't work out why traffic has got worse... Derrrr.....
It's a pleasant city centre with medium-rise Tsarist and Stalinist buildings and huge memorials to both regimes, newly reconstructed churches and a frozen sea front (where the sea freezes into iced waves...). On the way in by train, 4WD vehicles drove under the rail line on frozen rivers and far out into the Amursky Gulf. "Not entirely safe," says Roman.
The naval base is in the central city, so I now have photos of (what a Facebook friend who knows this stuff assures me are) Russian destroyers in port. After riding the one remnant tram line on vehicles which give a whole new meaning to "austerity", I spent the afternoon at the Tsarist fortress. Designed to repel the Japanese, it had limited success in 1905, and none in 1920 when the Japanese occupied Khabarovsk for a year during the Civil War. Forty five years later, apart from taking Sakhalin from Japan, the Russians used WWII Japanese POWs to build Siberian railways until 1949 when they (or what was left of them) were repatriated. We're close to China and the Koreas, but there are few Asian residents as most were deported or shot by Stalin in the 1930's as suspected spies and criminals. A notorious Asian ghetto was bulldozed to ensure suspect residents could not return.
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"Old fashioned ideas are back in style: the great empire, the 'iron hand', the 'special Russian path'. They brought back the Soviet national anthem; there's a new Komsomol, only it's now called Nashi (the youth organisation associated with Putin's political party); thereof a ruling party and it runs the country by the Communist Party playbook; the Russian president is just as powerful as the general secretary used to be, which is to say he has absolute power. Instead of Marxist Leninism, there's Russian Orthodoxy..."
- Remarks from An Accomplice: "Second Hand Time"
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My last night in the Russian Far East was at a passable Vladivostok Vietnamese restaurant, eating lactose free, under an Asian Communist national red ensign, avoiding the menu options of ostrich(?), crocodile, and something called "Pork Kebabs In Vietnamese"(!). The Saigon beer is good, and I'm in the hands of Korean Airlines tomorrow. A local joke is that the large statue of Lenin (near this restaurant) which gestures to you as you leave Vladivostok station, is actually directing you to Japan. Like many Soviet citizens before me (but of my own free will), I will follow Lenin's directive for the next 10 days.
And so: spaseeba (if you've made it this far) and da sveedanya!
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" - Over the course of the past twenty years we've found out a lot about ourselves. Made a lot of discoveries. We learned that Stalin is secretly our hero. Dozens of films and books have been made about him, which people avidly read and watch. And debate. Half of the country dreams of Stalin - and if half the country is dreaming of Stalin, he's bound to materialise you can be sure of it. They've dragged all of the evil dead back out of hell: Beria, Yezhov... They've started writing that Beria was a talented administrator, they want to rehabilitate him, because under his leadership, the Russian atom bomb was built..."
- Snatches of Street Noise and Kitchen conversations (2002 - 2012): About the Past: "Second Hand Time"
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A Post Script: The "Floor Ladies" of the communist era no longer call at 3am to check on you. Tonight I did have a series of calls to my room:
"Maybe you want a beautiful girl?"
"No?"
"Excuse me and good night."
MY, how free enterprise has changed Russia!
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Alexievich, Svetlana, & Shayevich, B. (Translator) 2016. Second Hand Time. Fitzcarraldo Editions: London