We say, “Congratulations,” again to Bill Fink, whose story ““Across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railroad” won the Gold Award in the “Best Newspaper Article” category of the 2010 BATW BEST Awards. The article originally ran in the San Francisco Chronicle on Nov. 30, 2008.
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Aboard the Trans-Siberian Railroad — The Chechnya war veteran barged into my rail car cabin, flashing an evil grin.
The old tractor driver followed him, cradling a brown paper bag and a stained metal cup. They pulled a bottle of vodka from the bag. The cap came off, and it wouldn’t go back on again. I knew the drill.
It was just before noon, somewhere in the Ural Mountains, my sixth day aboard Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railroad.
Ninety years ago to the week, the last czar, Nicholas II, traveled on my same path from St. Petersburg to Siberia. He and his family ended up shot, burned, doused in acid and dumped in a mine shaft. I was hoping for a better outcome on my trip to explore the new Russia on this old route.
At my group’s meeting point in St. Petersburg station, Lenin’s bust was long gone, replaced by one of Peter the Great. Only blocks away, Nicholas II had been snatched from his palace during the 1917 revolution and sent away under guard by train. The “guard” for my trip was waiting by the statue.
Maria was literally an Intrepid guide (from the Australian company of the same name), a far cry from the propaganda-spouting old Soviet Intourist handlers. She was a young local who shared our rail cabins, vodka and surprises as we traced the path of the last czar to the literal end of his line in Siberia.
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We departed on the night train to Moscow, where we would connect with the Tran-Siberian. I entered the rail car a bit before midnight and felt like I was on a prison train to summer camp. There were 100 people crammed into a 2-foot-wide hallway, tossing bedclothes, linens and provisions all over beds, tables and each other.
Each rail car had 15 doorless alcoves, each with two sets of bunk beds that left everyone’s feet hanging in the hallway. Two more beds folded out from the hallway wall, which meant every six people shared a space 10 feet long and 5 feet wide.
I entered my alcove to stumble upon the Three Stooges of Siberia. Three thick men in their 50s sat jammed together on one bunk, their reddened eyes and raised voices indicating a pretrain tailgate. They smelled like a combination of cheap vodka, sausage and sweat. Maria took one look at them, turned to me and said “Welcome to genuine Russia experience. Good luck.” And she left.
The first Russian shouted at me jovially, then waved his hand in disgust like Curly when I didn’t understand him. I unfurled a map of the United States to show them where I was from. Curly jammed his finger in the middle of the map and shouted “Baikul! Baikul!” The man next to him with the gold teeth and bad haircut (Moe) whacked him upside the head, saying (presumably): “That’s Lake Michigan, you idiot!” The third, more scholarly, man with bifocals (Larry) peeked at the map until Curly roughly grabbed the glasses off his head to look for himself.
When we ran out of phrase-book discussion topics (“Beer is good. I like soccer”) I stepped briefly into the hallway and was blinded by sight of a 250-pound, middle-aged woman stripping nearly naked to change into her PJs. I returned to the alcove, made my bed and hid under the covers. The steady “ca-chunk ca-chunk ca-chunk” of the tracks drowned out the ongoing stooge-fest and lulled me to sleep.
Endless birch and pine trees
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After a 6 a.m. change of trains in Moscow, I watched blurred birch and pine trees whiz by outside for hours. For two days it was the same view, as if I were on a treadmill instead of a train. It reminded me of an ill-advised college bus trip I once took from Michigan to Wyoming. We kept drinking, passing out and waking up shocked to find we were still in Nebraska, convinced the bus driver was punishing us by driving in circles.
I walked the halls until I bumped into a wiry looking tough staring out at the trees with that “thousand-yard stare” they talk about in war movies. He was an ex-paratrooper who had spent the ’70s in Vietnam, the ’80s in Afghanistan and the ’90s in prison. “But he went to prison for a story some other people made up, so don’t worry,” said my guide, who was translating. The man lifted up his shirt to display a topographical map of scars covering most of his torso, then asked me why I wasn’t afraid to travel in Russia.
The violent past of Russia was evident in our stop in Yekaterinburg, the site of the execution of the czar and his family during the Russian Revolution. Two thousand miles from St. Petersburg, it was truly the end of the line for the Romanov dynasty, but only the beginning of insights for us visitors.
On the execution site of the czar there now stands a hulking Russian Orthodox cathedral that our guide said cost more than $200 million to build. Inside the ornate church, golden icons celebrate each Romanov family member, and even decorate a holy relic of one of the children’s teeth. In a bizarre turn of events, Czar Nicholas II, the last of the oppressive monarchs who drove his people to revolution, has been declared a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church, along with his entire family. I imagined Lenin’s embalmed body was spinning so rapidly in his grave that he has launched into a Sputnik-like orbit.
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Pilgrims filled the cathedral grounds in commemoration of the 90th anniversary of the execution. We arrived just as a convoy of Mercedes limos unloaded the bearded and robed hierarchy of the Orthodox Church into a mob of ring-kissing babushkas. Some ultranationalists gathered on the church steps wearing T-shirts that said “I am a True Russian! Glory to Russia!” They waved the old imperial flag and chanted slogans in support of the Romanovs.
Our guide said dismissively, “People should not wear such shirts. All of this,” she waved at the church, the priests and the pilgrims, “is just about money and power, like everything.”
The czar’s final stop
We traveled farther into Siberia to reach Tobolsk, the town where the czar and his family spent their last months under house arrest. We visited the home where caretakers had re-created the scene as it was in 1918. I asked the host what she thought of the czar and his execution. She said, carefully, “As a human, I feel sad for his family being killed. But if the czar did crimes, then I believe he should have been punished.”
From there we took a bus for hours into rural Russia. We were 2,500 miles from St. Petersburg, but still only halfway across the nation. The land opened into Montana-like big sky country. Cumulus clouds gathered like endless schools of fish, and purple bursts of wildflowers colored wide-open fields. We spotted herds of cattle, wandering goats and sheep tended by gnarled old shepherds.
The bus stopped to spit us out into an expanse of blank farmland. Like exiles, we unloaded our bags in the middle of nowhere, with only the smell of manure to keep us company. I half-expected KGB guards to appear, hand me a shovel and tell me to get to work.
But it was the place for a pre-arranged rendezvous. A friendly couple eventually drove up in a Lada to take us to our final destination, the village of Pokrovskoye. It is infamous as the birthplace of Rasputin, the “mad monk” who with alleged mystical powers helped to corrupt and destroy the government of Czar Nicholas II.
There wasn’t anything particularly magical about the village, a no-stoplight outpost of a couple thousand hardy souls who endure 100-degree heat all summer and months of darkness and 40-below temperatures in winter. Gardens surrounded wooded houses alternately painted up pretty, or sagging from neglect, depending on the farming families’ fortunes.
We stayed with a family who had no running water, a house buzzing with flies and a 15-year-old daughter who spent the day texting her friends on her cell phone.
Unlike exiles, we were able to “quickly” return from Siberia to Moscow via a three-hour bus ride and 38 straight hours on the train.
On my sixth overall day on the train, I met the Chechnyan war vet and his friend. We finished two bottles of vodka with military precision: Pour shot. Bite pickle. Chug vodka. Chew black bread. Slam down cup for refill. Repeat.
Shooting gun out window
After we polished off the first bottle, the vet pantomimed shooting his gun out the window, then snatched a gulp out of his stained metal cup. He pointed at the cup and held up eight fingers to show how many years he had kept it at his side since he carried it into battle in Chechnya.
The vodka and the train’s bouncing made me morose. It seemed that there was no “end of the line.” The train was just tracing a back-and-forth path over hundreds of years of conflict. The Romanovs had been reborn as right-wing nationalist saints, and the wars of the past were returning in new places with new names.
But as we approached Moscow, the vet drank the last vodka in his cup and held it in front of himself, reflecting. Then he put his hand on his heart and gave the cup to me. He pointed to the scenery outside, his friend and our cabin, then to the cup to imply it should hold better memories for me than it did for him.
The now shiny cup sits on my desk at home, one small piece of the past that has finally reached the end of the line.
Five cool things about the Trans-Siberian Railroad
1. A Movable Feast: Buy local specialties at every train stop (at least during summer). Vendors will offer a smorgasbord of fresh produce including: berries, gingerbread cookies, veggies, fish, meat pies, chilled beer and sodas. Between some stops, merchandise vendors will hop on board, hawking shawls, lace, and other handmade products.
2. The route spans 5,771 miles from Moscow to Vladivostok.It would take you 170 hours – a little over a week – to ride it directly from end to end, so bring a book. In comparison, the longest U.S. train ride, from New York to Los Angeles, via New Orleans, is 3,420 miles.
3. The train covers eight time zones, but the train itself and the official schedule stays on Moscow time, which can be quite confusing when you leave the train and look at station clocks.
4. The railway took 26 years to build and was finished in 1916. It cost 1.4 billion rubles (equivalent to Russia’s cost of World War I) and the lives of uncounted thousands of slave laborers.
5. Temperatures along the route can range from 60 below zero in winter to well above 100 degrees in the summer.
If you go:
TOURS
I’m not usually one for group tours, but in Russia it can be helpful to have a translator and a company to deal with visa hassles and travel arrangements. Intrepid Travel offers a number of train-based Russia trips, including the one I went on (“Footsteps of the Czars,” 18 days, $3,600; two departures a month between April and October) which combined the rail trip with city visits, with all internal transport and lodging and some food covered. Intrepid’s more basic Trans-Siberian Railroad trip covers the entire country over 21 days for $2,435.
INDEPENDENT TRAVEL
It’s certainly a possibility, although you need an official letter of invitation to get a visa to Russia. Many hotels can provide this letter, but travelers are officially required to register their visa in every town they visit. Finding people who speak English is pretty easy in big cities, tougher in the country. The Russian Cyrillic script on signs, schedules and tickets can also make independent travel tough, but you’ll decipher it over time.
FOOD
Trains have a dining car, with generally nasty food. Most Russians bring aboard vittles bought at markets or at train stops from vendors at the stations. Bread is always cheap, and beer can be had for the equivalent of a dollar at kiosks. But at a decent restaurant beers can run $10, entrees $30. I dropped $45 for lunch in a mall food court one day.
LODGING
Four to a compartment on trains, with bedrolls, fresh linen and rough wool blanket included. Hotels aren’t cheap in most cities (maybe $150 a night for a two-star Soviet-era dump) with Moscow recently ranking as the world’s most expensive city: Check out the Moscow Sheraton for $650 a night.
–– Bill Fink
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