This is the first post about the longest trip of my life so far, which started on July 27th 2020 and ended on August 31st 2020, for a total of thirty-five days. I went by train across the largest country in the world, to Russia's Far East on the Pacific Ocean, and back. I logged many hours of train travel, and got the true experience of traveling the Trans-Siberian Railway- not the glamourous version many imagine. I traveled in 'platzkart,' third class, with the common people of Russia. I saw so much of this magnificent country, and this blog will help me to process much of it. Each blog post will be about a different section of my trip, based on a certain timeframe of my trip or about a region visited.
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| The Amur River |
This post is about the beginning of my journey, the train ride to Russia's Far East, to Vladivostok, capital of Primorsky Krai.
The decision to go to Vladivostok was made on a whim; for me, there is nothing unusual about that. I had all of August off, and had convinced myself to go somewhere far away as I am wont to do, despite the Coronavirus. But to where, I thought? I considered going to the Komi Republic, to the cities of Syktyvkar and Vorkuta, in the far north. It is a place known for its great natural beauty, but tickets were not the cheapest. The idea of riding the Trans-Siberian Railway all the way to Vladivostok had been floating in my mind for some time; while I have ridden the railway before (to the city of Irkutsk to see lake Baikal-a different post, some day), the idea of going non-stop all the way to the other side of the country seemed like the kind of thing I wanted to do. But the whole process of choosing where to go was made difficult by the fact that there was little information about whether or not one could even go to certain parts of Russia, due to the Coronavirus, or go to certain places without undergoing a mandatory two week quarantine upon arrival; this I most certainly did not want to do. A website I found showed different Oblasts, Okrugs and Republics (kind of like states) which were either open to travelers, closed, or required arrivals to self-quarantine. Chechnya, for example, had closed its borders to all, while neighboring Dagestan was open with no quarantine requirement, allowing all to come and go as they please. The railroad to the Far East passes through many different regions of Russia, and while the map looked like I would be passing through territory which didn't require self-quarantine upon arrival, it was impossible to truly tell, as I didn't know exactly where my train would go, through which Oblasts it would pass, and there are different railroads and different trains going in the same direction. The thought of being stopped at a railroad platform in some city and forced to self-quarantine was not appealing, but I likened this to paranoia, and doubled down and bought a one way ticket to Vladivostok.
Much preparation was done before going to the train station. Like my long-distance railroad trip before, I had to buy the provisions I would need for almost a whole week. Everything would of course need to be non-perishable. On the menu would be: 'doshirak' (Russian ramen), canned fish, bread, pate, apples, instant mashed potatoes, canned 'grechka' (buckwheat), dried fish, sunflower seeds, canned meat, some sweet cakes, and pinecones in syrup, a Siberian specialty. I amassed seven days worth all of this in two large plastic bags. As for what I was bringing with me, I traveled a little heavier than normal, but not too much heavier. I brought two shirts, one pair of pants, one pair of shorts, all other necessary garments, my signature Adidas tracksuit, Adidas flip flops, shoes, my computer, camera, a deck of cards, a US army aluminum canteen cup, all other necessary electronic equipment, and some other random stuff. All of this fit nicely into my backpack. There was also some mental preparation; the idea of an almost week-long journey wasn't exactly daunting for me, but it is an easier said than done situation. I had been told by Russians that platzkart is Hell, that it should be avoided if possible. The amount of time spent on a train would be very long, but I told myself that at some point it would be in the past, finished, completed. I wondered what my neighbors on the train would be like; if they would be friendly and talkative, or cold and reserved; I wondered if it would be smooth sailing, or if I would face some adversity along the way. I was ready to take whatever the journey would throw at me for the sake of going on it.
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| Provisions |
At around 10pm on July 27th, I took a taxi to Leningradsky Vokzal, one of the three main train stations all located slightly northeast of the city center. I got on the train, and found my bunk. Each compartment within one wagon has six beds; an upper and lower running parallel to the aisle, and two sets of upper and lower beds facing each other, perpendicular to the aisle, with a table in between. I was on the lower bunk within the compartment. There are pluses and minuses of each place. On the lower bunks, you may have to share your seat with passengers during the day, to make space for them to eat at the table, whereas on the upper bunks, the seat is always yours but you have to climb up to it each time. The inner compartments are more private, but your legs can stick out and people can bump them as they pass, possibly waking you up at night. This can't happen in the aisle bunks, though they are shorter and can be less comfortable. I got my linens, made my bed, and mentally prepared myself for the next six days, but for what, I did not know.
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| A view from the train |
My neighbor, a woman whose husband had seen her off, was gone the next day, and was soon replaced by young lady who said little for the entirety of her trip. The desire to communicate fomented within me as I looked outside the window for hours on end, looking at the flat, forested territory of western Russia; perhaps, I can say, that boredom was beginning to set in. I said not a single word for how long I do not know. I asked her if she was bored, to which she said yes; I asked her to join me for a game of cards, to which she said she didn't play cards, and looked at me as if I was going to ax murder her, and that was that. But, for all her mousy behavior, I suppose it was not so bad; there are much worse neighbors on a Russian train than a non-communicative soul.
Small towns, villages, fields, forests, and bogs all began to blend together in one green-brown-tan blur as the train surged forwards, interrupted only by a stop at a city or by passing over one of Russia's many imposing rivers. The train never stops for long; at towns, it may stop for two minutes; at medium-sized cities, for twenty, and at large cities for forty or even an hour. But the train is always moving, day and night. East of Moscow, the train stopped at Galich, Kotelnich, Kirov, and Glazov; these cities of lesser significance are, to me, but a stop along the railroad; yet I know that these cities in the woods are indeed the true Russia, not Moscow. Located in Kostroma Oblast, Kirov Oblast, and the Udmurt Republic, they feel a world away from Moscow even though they are but a day's train ride. Beyond them is the city of Perm (which means 'far away' in Finno-Ugric languages) in Perm Krai, and after that, Yekaterinburg in Sverdlovsk Oblast, which is generally accepted as where Siberia begins.
Not long after passing Yekaterinburg, the quiet lady got off at the Siberian city of Tyumen in Tyumen Oblast, and my new neighbors, two men in their mid-thirties, took the bunks across the table. They were Vladimir and Kolya, working men with whom I would communicate and learn much from. They were diehard Soviet apologists, which was unusual for someone born in the eighties; only their childhood was spent during the last years of the Soviet Union, but perhaps their opinion was formed out of nostalgia, as many of us are likely to remember the good old days when we were children and life was simple. It was interesting to chat with them and hear their side of the story. Vladimir in particular, while nice and respectful towards me, was rather critical of capitalism and the 'American way'. For instance, he asked me about how the history of World War 2 is taught in America; I explained how we of course see ourselves as having played an important role in World War 2. Yet the Russians see themselves as being the reason Nazi Germany lost, perhaps the only reason, and they paid dearly, with upwards of 27 millions deaths, both civilian and military, from all causes related to the war. It is therefore easy to understand how Russians may look with contempt at the way this history is taught in the United States, as it is indeed true that the role played by the Soviet Union was much greater than the role played by any other country.
But what people like Vladimir fail to understand, or perhaps choose not to remember, is how the glorified leader Joseph Stalin, an ethnic Georgian, set the Soviet Union up for this catastrophe during two key massive operations: the Holodomor, or Famine-Genocide of 1932-1933, and the Great Purge, often called the Great Terror. During the Holodomor, the Red Army was sent to the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, Ukraine, to repossess grain from successful peasant farmers or 'Kulaks' who could be anybody with a cow; this was because Soviet agricultural policies of collectivization in Russia's heartland had failed, and a poor harvest was threating mass hunger for the Soviet Union's factory workers in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The mass redistribution of grain led to a massive starvation, often considered genocide against the Ukrainians, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 3.5 million people; posters were made in the region explaining why it was immoral to eat your children, as cannibalism became for many the only way to eat. Foreign countries offering food aid to Ukraine were refused. Many ethnic Ukrainians later welcomed the advancing German army during Operation Barbarossa, seeing them as liberators; but they, like the Poles, would be stuck between two terrible giants. The Great Purge of 1936-1938 led to the execution of more Kulaks, as well as high-ranking military officers, party members, and ethnic minorities. The deaths of ethnic minorities fomented unrest within the Soviet Union, the death of more Kulaks even more agricultural disasters. But the execution of military officers and party members perhaps did the most damage in the long run. Six Soviets, including Stalin, were the original politburo members during the 1917 revolution; by the Great Purge, Stalin was the only one left, the sole inheritor of the Soviet Union, as he had had all other prominent Bolsheviks executed. His paranoia determined the fate of the largest country in the world, when he had Russia's best strategists, high-ranking generals and officers, arrested and executed. This left a massive vacuum of leadership on the battlefield at the start of World War Two, and due to the Soviet Union's disorganization and virtually no experienced strategists, the Germans were able to mow down entire Soviet armies like grass. This is such a tragedy for the Russian people, that not so many needed to die. And so, it is not because of Stalin's leadership that the Soviet Union and the Russian people were victorious in World War Two, but despite it.
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| Neighbours |
What Vladimir also got wrong was his assessment of aggression towards the Soviet Union. "Everybody attacked the Soviet Union, we were on our own; the Soviet Union never attacked anybody, never did anything wrong". It is true that during the very beginning of the Soviet Union, formed after the 1917 Revolution, many countries were trying to repress it, with countries like Britain, France, Japan, and the USA sending assistance and even troops to the White Army as it tried to wrest control of the country after the Bolsheviks illegally seized the means of production; can we blame them for doing so, after Lenin was financed by the German Empire to start a revolution in Saint Petersburg and bring Russia out of World War One? This is part of the us-versus-them mentality, that everyone was jealous of the Soviet Union, which never attacked anybody, never did anything to anybody. Except for the Finns, whom the Soviets invaded during the Winter War, out of paranoia that they would help the Germans. And the Estonians, whose capital, Tallinn, was bombed indiscriminately and for no apparent reason. And the Kavkasians, almost all of whom were deported to the most inhospitable regions of Kazakhstan, where many of them perished. And the Buryats, many of whom were executed or sent to the gulags after they rebelled against the collectivization of their herds, which were stolen from them. And the Cossacks, the traditional guardians of Russia's borders, accused of disloyalty. And the Ukrainians, who were starved, likely done so as to suppress efforts of independence. And the Poles, whose land and people were completely devastated by the Red Army when it invaded Poland in a pact with Nazi Germany (that's right, Joseph Stalin made a deal with Adolf Hitler). And the Russians themselves; ordinary people, farmers, workers, intellectuals, clergymen, who were rounded up in the dead of night, taken away from their houses and their families in black NKVD trucks, because the secret police had a quota to meet for 'dissidents' which were needed to work in the gulags; all those ordinary Russians, who never saw their families again, and whose families know not the fate of their loved ones, for the sake of the the great socialist experiment. But other than that, the Soviet Union never did anything wrong, it was all necessary for the sake of progress! It is strange how someone can be born in Russia and develop a strong sense of patriotism due to the Russian people's victory in World War 2, but fail to remember these details. Or perhaps they know all of this, but choose to forget, feeling it would discount their great victory. These events from not so long ago have taken a back seat to the pompous victory parades celebrating not the Russian people but the Soviet Union. But for those who would question the legitimacy of all this, a simple review of the history of the Soviet Union should refresh their memory, or perhaps a trip to Moscow's Gulag museum, an unapologetic display of its inhumanity. But to point out these facts to Vladimir seemed pointless; his mind was made up that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the destruction of utopia.
For a couple days, we chatted about world events, history, travel and other topics. They had plenty of questions for me about my homeland, and I of course wanted to know about theirs, specifically about their city, Tyumen. I showed them pictures of places where I have been in Russia, like Dagestan and Kamchatka, and gave them an online excursion, which they greatly appreciated. We ate our meals together and shared our food with one other, the embodiment of brotherhood on platzkart, aside from sharing vodka (which is prohibited by federal law but happens anyway). We passed by the cities of Omsk and Novosibirsk, located in- you guessed it- Omsk Oblast and Novosibirsk Oblast.
There was a man in my compartment in the bunk parallel to the aisle also named Kolya who got on after the first day of my trip and got off in the Far East at a city called Birobidzhan, which is the capital of Jewish Autonomous Oblast (which, oddly, has almost no Jews). For the entirety of the trip, this former paratrooper with bad teeth never ceased to entertain. A lanky, tattooed man a bit older than me, he cracked jokes the whole time, specifically about our toilet which made a deafening noise when flushed, referring to it as 'our elephant' and asking if people were deaf when they would leave it. New neighbors, sometimes slightly taken aback at Kolya's readiness to immediately start chatting with them, were told that "we have a very musical toilet." Kolya certain didn't seem like the most educated sort but he was a friendly, salt-of-the-earth kind of person whose simplicity was admirable. To me he represented the common man of Russia, if not the world. He sat down next to anyone, including myself, and chatted with them; old women, soldiers, Russians and non-Russians alike.
Vladimir and Kolya got off at Achinsk, a city not far from Krasnoyarsk, the capital of Krasnoyarsk Krai. We said our goodbyes and wished each other well. This is the beauty of riding platzkart, that you can meet people, have interesting conversations about anything and everything, and then they are gone. People come and go, and with each passing day you figure out who is new on the train and who has been there since day one, and by the end of the trip, almost nobody has been on the train since Moscow. The magic of platzkart is that you communicate with people who you normally wouldn't, and at a level which you normally wouldn't. This is perhaps because people can be themselves a bit more, as there are no repercussions of doing so like there might be at work- you will never see these people again. Neighbors start talking to one another, asking each other where they are from and telling stories. I remember at one point playing card games with a Buryat and an Azeri, teaching them various card games like blackjack, which we played using sunflower seeds as money. Our unlikely trio could never have happened anywhere else under any other circumstances. Other people I met included an old grandma with a very friendly demeanor, a young man from Perm going to the Far East to begin his military service as a truck driver, and a group of Dagestani soldiers, who were very noisy but with whom I got along just fine. Using the knowledge I had learned from Malik during my previous trip to Dagestan, I learned which groups they were from- one was Tabarasan, another Dargwa, one Kumyk and one Laks; I joked with them, demanding the Tabarasan make me a handmade rug and asking the Dargwa how his business was going. While the rest of our wagon seemed to be slightly uneasy about these rowdy young soldiers, I didn't mind them and we all had some good laughs.
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| Industrialism overgrown |
The scenery up until Krasnoyarsk Krai and even until Irkutsk Oblast is decent but after a while it all seems to blend together, with each flat plain or forest looking like the one seen the day before. One can see many farms and villages, scenes of real Russia. There are also many abandoned factories which can be seen, especially in Krasnoyarsk Krai, and look like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie; massive factories with trees growing on the roofs and collapsed buildings. Sometimes it seems that an entire town or village was built for the purpose of some factory's construction and operation, and as the economic policies of the Soviet Union gradually failed, as the collectivization of labor revealed its shortcomings, the people left and the town died.
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| Lake Baikal |
The scenery does not differ very much between Moscow and Irkutsk, but after Irkutsk the train goes up into the hilly Taiga around Lake Baikal and the scenery changes dramatically, the flat plains giving way to pine-covered hills and mountains. The railroad curves around hillsides and goes through tunnels, and the pace slows as the train cannot go as fast as it can on the straight flat trajectory of central Siberia. Passing the lake on its south-western side, the mountains continue into the Buryat Republic, the train going over streams and rivers emptying into Baikal and beautiful forest scenes coming into view.
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| The Selenge River |
Our train stopped at the city of Ulan-Ude, one of my favorite cities, and there I bought some buuzi, which are the Buryat's variation of steamed meat dumplings. After Ulan-Ude the scenery becomes rugged and even sandy but still with plenty of trees; it is in essence a vast forested steppe. This territory is essentially an extension of Mongolia, both geographically and culturally. The rolling hills with forested patches conjure up thoughts of Mongolian nomad-warriors of bygone times crossing great distances on horseback, making their way north, perhaps, to their spiritual center- Baikal; or perhaps west, to conquer.
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| Buryatia |
The land changes once again upon entering Zabaikalsky Krai, a very large and hardly populated swathe of territory whose epic forests and mountains can be considered archetypical of Russia's wilderness. This was perhaps my favorite part of the whole trip; I spent hours on end looking out the window at the spectacular landscape, as the train ran parallel to a calm river. This wild place was vastly different from the scenes in central Siberia, as there are far fewer villages and buildings, but when there are, you can't help but imagine what it must be like to live in this beautiful but far-flung part of the world. Some villages look like nobody has lived in them for ages.
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| Zabaikalsky Krai |
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| A village in Zabaikalsky Krai |
I later learned that Zabaikalsky Krai is one of the poorer regions of Russia, and frequently overlooked in the grand scheme of things. This far flung region north of Mongolia and China is very secluded, the people living there rather insular, and the climate very extreme. The train stopped in Chita, the capital of Zabaikalsky Krai- a capital surrounded by low mountains in the middle of nowhere. Much further down the railroad tracks, the train stopped for a short time in Mogocha, a former GULAG, which has little more than four thousand people and seemingly little to do. There is in fact an old Soviet phrase which goes "God created Sochi, and the devil created Mogocha." Formerly inhabited by prisoners forced to mine iron ore and cut timber, Mogocha appeared to be one or Russia's more extreme settlements, the kind that makes one wonder why anyone would live there.
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| Mogocha |
The further into Zabaikalsky Krai the train went, the more otherworldly and even foreboding it seemed; the effect of the unending forests and mountains made me feel as if the train would soon be swallowed up, as if it had taken the wrong track, a track leading to nowhere. The scenery here was stunning; at one point I awoke early, around 4:30 in the morning, and beheld an exquisite sky, and a slow moving river next to a forest covered with a patch of fog. I wondered how the Cossacks had made it this far, how they had penetrated this deep into unknown territory, not knowing if they would survive, and what motives had driven them on such daring expeditions. I mulled these thoughts over as the trees passed by, and I was glad to have awoken earlier than anticipated.
Leaving Zabaikalsky Krai, I entered Amur Oblast, whose river, the Amur, serves as the border between Russia and China, as it has done for centuries. Amur Oblast appears to be much more hospitable, and is much flatter than Zabaikalsky Krai, featuring wide, flat expanses of plains with green and red hues.
By this time I was well used to the routine of train life. I would wake up at eight or nine, drink coffee and have breakfast. Then I sat and looked out the window for several hours, or chatted with the neighbors. The train would stop at some town for twenty minutes, and almost everyone would go outside and stand on the platform to make phone calls and smoke cigarettes, or to buy some food at small shops or from elderly women selling whatever they could. Lunch was around noon, maybe a little later. There were card games occurring at random intervals throughout the day but more in the evening. There was a decent amount of waiting as well; waiting for someone to hurry up in the toilet, waiting for a meal to cool down, waiting for one of the two phone charging stations to be free (which were seemingly forever occupied). I read an eBook on my phone, and finished Sun Tzu's the Art of War in a few days. Dinner was usually around six. For me, dining on the train has become a sort of ritual, something that I looked forward to even though the average meal was instant noodles and canned fish. But breakfast was always my favorite, and I savored the cup of coffee I drank almost every day, enjoying it as I gazed out the window at the passing landscape. Of all these activities, the only ones that happened in the same order were breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Everything else just blended together, and that was how life was for me on the train.
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| Amur Oblast |
Passing Jewish Autonomous Oblast at night, I awoke in Khabarovsk Krai, and passed the capital of the region, the famous city of Khabarovsk. I think most Russians only know it since it is on their largest bill, the five thousand ruble bill. The Dagestani soldiers I had met got off there, and I was suspicious about whether they were sent there to quell the recent anti-Kremlin protests occurring in the city.
At night the train entered the final territory of the Trans-Siberian Railway, Primorsky Krai. Therefore I didn't get to see much of the landscape, and at six in the morning as the train rolled into the outskirts first of a city called Angarsk and then into Vladivostok, everything was enveloped in fog. The Pacific Ocean came into view, and tower flats appeared out of the mist as the final moments of the longest one-way train ride of my life so far came to an end. I had made it to Vladivostok.
Nice.
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