SUNDAY IN IRKUTSK IS NOT AS BAD AS IT SOUNDS...

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000403450003-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 10
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 11, 2012
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: February 24, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
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ARTICLE APPEARED
I V,
'
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
ho~~l1
e
T WAS NEARLY 6 A.M., 54 HOURS
since we set out together from Moscow
and only an hour before we were to go our
separate ways, when Alek rendered his
judgment
The train was passing through western
Siberia's Barabinskaya Steppe, a snow-
covered flatland that seemed even colder and emptier than
the star-studded night sky that stretched above it. Our two
traveling companions - Shurik and Vitya - had suc-
cumbed to drink and the late hour and lay sound asleep on
the two upper berths of the four-person compartment. It
had fallen to us to finish off the tepid white wine and close
out the journey, for me the first long leg in a 5,300-mile
train trip eastward across the breadth of the Soviet Union.
A big, sloppy-looking man of 31, his easy grin made
ragged by the absence of two left front teeth, Alek had
been the dominant voice in this trio of Soviets who had
spent two days and three nights in the constant company
of the first American any of them had ever met. During
political arguments, he generally spoke for the others.
Whenever the conversation dragged, he brought us back to
life with a few selections from a seemingly endless reper-
toire of off-color jokes.
A Muscovite, he felt he knew more of the world than the
two Siberians and constantly drew from his former wife's
experience with Westerners, as a guide and translator for
Intourist, the huge Soviet tourist agency. At one point,
when the others were out of the compartment, he had
confided that he had more in common with me than with
them.
Now, he had something important and confidential to
say to me. We sat face-to-face on the two lower berths of
the dimly lighted compartment, the small plastic-covered
table jutting out from the wall overflowing with the
detritus of the journey - empty bottles and stale slices of
bread, crumpled paper, soiled flatware and a fish tin filled
with cigarette butts.
Our time together had been interesting and enjoyable,
Alek began, leaning forward and fixing me with his pale
green eyes. I had proved to be an khoroshy pares, a good
guy. But he had concluded, beyond a doubt, that 'l was an
undercover operative for the CIA, that, as he put it, "that
big salary of yours is coming from Langley."
I looked to see whether he was smiling, but he was dead
serious. This man who had been my card partner and
bunkmate, who had given me his jackknife as a gift when
mine had disappeared, who just seconds before had clicked
cups with me for about the 100th time iii this besotted
voyage was accusing me of being a spy.
He outlined his case. In political discussions, I had !
consistently taken a "provocative," anti-Soviet stand, par-
ticularly in my criticisms of the Soviet presence in Afghan-
istan and the destruction of the South Korean jetliner.
When we were passing through Omsk, one of many cities
closed to foreigners, I had asked Shurik, a marine mechan-
ic from Novosibirsk, what kind of industry they have there.
Even my style as a chess player, he said, betrayed a
carefully masked .cleverness.
"I, don't think you work for the CIA," he said in
conclusion. "I'm sure of it."
I spluttered out my defense - how journalists in the
United States had nothing to do with the CIA, how the
CIA has satellite photographs of every square foot of Omsk
and does not need me to ask train travelers from other
cities about the local industry, how it saddened me that he
was too poisoned by his government's propaganda to
accept me for what I am. "This is typical Soviet paranoia,"
I huffed.
"It's not paranoia," he snapped back. "It's realism. All of
us, from the time we are children" - here he held out his
hand, palm down, to show just how small these children are
- "are raised to believe in and support the motherland
and to be vigilant against those who would destroy it. This
is exactly what makes our country great, the greatest in the
world."
At his insistence, I agreed that the Soviet Union was a
great country, then asked whether he would agree that the
United States was a great country as well. Yes, he said,
America was great, but the U.S.S.R. was greater. Taking
the schoolyard argument to its conclusion, I proclaimed
that the United States was, in fact, greater. Here, he smiled
and offered his hand in a kind of truce. He topped off the
cups and clicked them once again.
Continued
az- ne 24 February 1985
SUNDAY IN IRKUTSK
Is NOT As BAD As IT
SO UNDS ... By DONALD KIMELMAN
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"I'm telling you this because I like you," he said. "Don't
1 ask those kinds of questions later in your trip. These
Siberians don't fool around. They will report you at the
first stop, and you'll end up spending eight years in prison.
By not reporting you myself, I'm risking five years."
THE IDEA FOR THIS TRIP HAD COME TO ME ON
a sleepless night six months before. After more than a year
as a correspondent in the Soviet Union, I was feeling
frustrated that I had seen so little of the country and had
had no more than a half dozen serious conversations- with
ordinary Soviets. For the Moscow correspondent, who lives
and works in special foreigners' complexes under the
constant vigilance of uniformed sentries, the Soviets who
enter your life tend to - be either propagandists or
dissidents.
Seen from a distance - uncommunicative faces on the
street or in the subway - the Soviet people become an
abstraction. They are the compliant masses, the warm-
hearted but unquestioning pawns of the elite that runs the
country. And a myth is created: good people, bad system -
as if one had almost nothing to do with the other. Yet, even
the darkest view of KGB intimidation and constant politi-
cal indoctrination did not sufficiently explain how so many
people over so great a territory remained so utterly in line
with their unelected rulers.
It also struck me that Americans, in particular, have
a hard time being dispassionate about the Soviets. In
times of tension, the Soviet Union becomes a caricature
of evil. As soon as the threat subsides, we rush to the
conclusion that these are people just like us and that
there is no sane reason for hostility..
With these muddled thoughts in mind, I decided to
ride the world's longest railway - the Trans-Siberian
from Moscow across seven time zones to the far eastern
city of Khabarovsk. (The train continues on to the
Pacific port of Vladivostok, but that is closed to
foreigners.) The trip, not counting two overnight stops,
would take more than seven days - ample time to talk
at length, and in the most relaxed possible atmosphere,
with other travelers.
The idea worked. People were forthcoming and
curious and grew increasingly relaxed as our time
together wore on. They made a good cross section -
workers, scientists, teachers, a low-level bureaucrat,
two high-level bureaucrats, a factory supervisor. We
shared food and drink, played chess and cards, delved
into personal problems and family histories.
In the beginning; I periodically encouraged the
conversations to take a political turn. In the end, I
tried without success to avoid it. With one exception -
a man I met during a stopover in Novosibirsk - the
pattern was invariably the same: me against them, each
side armed with not only its own set of unshakable
opinions but also its own set of facts. When I was ready
to call it quits, they often were not. I had to be
convinced. I had to see it their way.
In the end, I was convinced - convinced that the
gulf between us was unbridgeable, that our best hope,
at this stage of history, is a polite standoff. The
idealistic notion that if we just got to know each other
better it would bring down the barriers of suspicion
seemed sadly naive. I was also convinced that the party
elite who run this country enjoy stronger support than
most Westerners would like to think. It may be that
people here are not as passionate about building
Communism as they were in the years following the
Revolution, but the ones I met had an abiding faith in
the rightness of the system and its prospects for the
future. It was not surprising, perhaps, that everyone
felt obliged to take a strictly orthodox line in conversa-
tion with a Western journalist,- but the intensity of
their arguments went beyond the call of duty.
It struck me that the Party's need to monopolize
information and to present a strictly partisan view of
the world satisfied the public's most basic need as well -
People here do not want to question. They want to
believe. 'And in that shared determination, there is
strength.
onday, Nov. 12 .
Trains for Siberia leave from Moscow's Yaroslavl
station, about two miles northeast of the Kremlin.
I arrived there an hour before train time on an icy,
late fall evening and installed myself in a waiting room
with oak benches, marble walls and high, wood-framed,
arched windows. The room was crowded with warmly
but crudely dressed people. There were more bundles
than suitcases. Mixed with the Russian faces were the
faces of the Asian provinces. A soldier, one of several
dozen in the room, sat playing a guitar while his
companions, in their olive-brown greatcoats, stood
round. An old woman kneeled before a pretty child in a
fur hat and massaged her tired-feet.
The train that would take me the first 2,000 miles to
Novosibirsk, where I would make the first overnight
break in my journey, was called the Siberyak, the
Siberian. Its entire crew was made up of Siberians, just
as the express train to Estonia is manned by Estonians
and the train to Armenia by Armenians, a source here
of ethnic pride in a country that considers itself an
amalgam of homelands for different national groups.
My second-class ticket entitled me to a vinyl-uphol-
stered bunk in a "hard-class" wagon, made up of nine
separate compartments with four berths each. (First-
class or "soft-class" wagons are identically laid out but
have only two berths per compartment. The third-
class, platskartrry wagons have partitions instead of
closed compartments and two additional tiers of bunks
running down the aisle, 58 people stacked in one
pungent box.)
Living arrangements depend on the harmony within
the compartment, as each person has exclusive right to
his own bunk. During waking hours, the occupants of
the top bunks can sit at ground level only through
dispensation from their neighbors below. In our case,
these protocol matters never came up. Shurik, Vitya
and Alek were all men in their early 30s who estab-
lished an immediate rapport and then quickly included
me in the gang. They were pleased that no old peasant
women or babies would ruin the atmosphere in the
compartment. Shurik, blond and wiry with a reddish
mustache and a shortage of teeth, shut the door and
immediately lit up one of his strong papiras, cheerfully
violating the ironclad rule against smoking in the
compartments. The rest of us followed suit, and the
conspiracy was sealed.
Continued
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Introductions were made, and all expressed amaze-
ment that the Russian-speaking foreigner was, in fact,
an American. "We now have an international compart-
ment," Shurik said with delight. He reached into a bag
stored below the seat and brought out two bottles of
Russian beer, which has more than twice the alcohol
content of American beer. I produced a loaf of bread
and a salami, and Alek dramatically snapped open his
Samsonite attache case and pulled out a bottle of
Stolichnaya vodka and four plastic cups decorated with
cartoon animals. Vitya, who had come with the least
provisions, chortled at his good fortune.
Thus began the kind of drunken evening that Soviets
treasure as part of their national heritage. The two
bottles of beer went first, then 21/2 bottles of vodka,
gulped down by the cupful amid toasts to our acquaint-
ance and the journey ahead. Small talk prevailed. The
two Siberians, showing a Texan-like pride in a region
that the state has to pay people extra to populate,
bragged about the superb climate of their region, with
its dry, cold winters and hot summers, which they
professed to find invigorating.
At some point, when both Siberians were out of the
compartment, Alek asked me which of them seemed
more interesting. Too early to say, I replied. He then
gave his analysis, which turned out to be on the money.
Vitya, a bearded young man in jeans and a flannel
shirt, was typical of his breed throughout the Soviet
Union. He worked in a scientific institute in Novosi-
birsk, Siberia's largest city, studying the noise levels of
mining equipment. Shurik, on the other hand, was
something special - the true Siberian, rugged and
untamed like the land itselL For Alek, a supply officer
in the Moscow-based construction ministry, sharing a
compartment with him was akin to a Washington
bureaucrat's bunking with a real cowboy.
Shurik's life, in fact, was not on the range but on the
river, the mighty Ob, which runs about 2,000 miles
from Novosibirsk through Siberia's northern wilds to
the Arctic Ocean. In the six months when th -river was
navigable, he worked as a mechanic on a ship designed
to measure -the river's depths and currents. When the
river froze in October, he was free until the following
January, when it was time to begin readying the ship
for the spring. During much of his long holiday - he
had just spent 10 days with an uncle in Riga - he
drank This was his pleasure, he said, making sure the
cups were never empty for long, and he wanted us to
share it with him.
Toward the end of the night, Shurik, who had been
half-drunk when he got on the train, somehow put his
hand through the window of the door at the end of
wagon. He came back waving his bloody hand with the
conductor hard behind him. A pleasant-faced, middle-
aged woman who looked like she had seen far worse
things in her time, the conductor efficiently cleaned
and bandaged the wounds without a word of reproach
for Shurik or his now obviously drunken pals. Shurik
curled up behind Alek and passed out, and the party
continued until I lurched down the hall and threw up.
The last thing I remembered was Vitya solicitously
covering me with a blanket and coaxing me to lie with
my head near the window rather than by the door, as
the latter position brought bad luck.
uNov. 13 -
_Everyone was hung over except Shurik, who. woke
bright and chipper and proceeded to organize our
recovery. This involved brown bread and chicken soup
for breakfast in the dining car and a curative shot of
vodka that Vitya and I firmly refused. An alliance of
the lily-livered had been formed.
We spent the day napping and reading and playing
cards. Alek produced a deck that was minus all deuces,
threes, fours and fives, and I was instructed in the
basics of durak - the word means "fool" in Russian -
a game as widely known here as poker or gin rummy
back home. -
It was nearly dark by 4 p.m., as we had lost an hour
in our passage east. The time change went unmarked, a
peculiarity of the Soviet transportation system. All
planes and trains operate on Moscow time, and the
clocks in the local airports and train stations are set
accordingly. Under the czars, all railroads ran on St.
Petersburg time.
As we revived, Alek and the others fired a salvo of
questions at me about America, measuring my re-
sponse against the dire reports in the Soviet press. We
talked about crime, racism, unemployment, the cost of
housing, the cost of education, wages and taxes. I asked
them whether they thought that President Reagan was
another Hitler, as Soviet propagandists had bitterly
suggested last spring. No, said Alek, he was just
following the dictates of his political party.
The concept that seemed hardest for them to accept
3
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was the absolute tolerance of American society for any
citizen who decides, for whatever reasons, to pack up
the family and move overseas. In the Soviet Union,
Shurik said, there is a word to describe those who opt
for life in the West: traitors.
Shurik then started in on the thorniest topic. Why
were Americans so hostile to the Soviet Union? The
awns race, he said, was an American invention, with
the Soviets always playing catch-up. Now, the Ameri-
cans had taken the competition into cruise missiles,
which were difficult to count and thus hard to limit.
The next contest would be in outer space, with each
new generation of weapons decreasing response time
and increasing the likelihood of an accidental war.
And Shurik proclaimed: "You won't find a.single
person in this country who will say 'I want war.' Not
one. Can that be said of America?"
This refrain, which usually includes an account of
the suffering of the last war, comes up so often in
conversations between Soviets and Americans that
Americans here quickly become hardened to it. Why is
it assumed that we are itching for a nuclear showdown?
Shurik was utterly sincere, and yet I could not help but
wonder. With this political system's ability to justify
aggression in the name of. higher. principles, would
Shurik and his like-minded compatriots ever balk at
supporting an invasion of Europe done in the name or
protecting the motherland and guaranteeing a lasting
peace?
Alek closed the discussion with a message for me to
pass on to the President:. "Tell Ronnie we're not
hooligans."
The train had arrived at Perm, an industrial city in
the Ural Mountains. It was time to take a walk along
the platform, to breathe the frosty air and watch the
yard workers, nearly all of them women, move from
wagon to wagon, knocking the ice off the
undercarriage.
WHEN WE GOT BACK TO THE COMPARTMENT
after dinner, I led off with a provocative question:
Whose leadership did they, prefer, Kostantin - Cher-
nenko, or his late predecessor Yuri Andropov?
They avoided the invitation to compare the two men
but leaped to praise Andropov as an intelligent and
forceful leader with a clear vision of how to make the
country run better. Conversations throughout the trip
would echo those sentiments, showing the extent to
which Andropov has become a revered figure since his
death a year ago. Things had unraveled toward the end
of Brezhnev's 18-year rule, everyone agreed. Andropov
set -things moving in the right direction, and Cher-
nenko is following through on his programs. No great
reforms are needed, Alek said, just better organization
and discipline.
The conversation moved into the state of the Soviet
economy and immediately took a querulous turn. Alek
disputed my contention that the high degree of central-
ization made it impossible to ever efficiently produce
the vast and changing array of goods that consumers
require. The Soviet. system is the most efficient in the
world, he argued, with all resources correctly distribut-
ed. The lack of coordination in capitalist economies, he
said, leads to tremendous waste.
As for the chronic shortages of everything from car
parts to toilet paper, that was a function of prosperity-,
Soviet citizens are better off than they ever were and
want things faster than the economy can produce
them. All three of them took the,line-that the Soviet
Union is still playing catch-up from World War II Chit
the United States did not have . to,, undergo'such
massive reconstruction. .
As we argued over the state of the Soviet economy,
the train had reached the puny 1,345-foot summit of
the gently sloping Urals and had begun the gradual
downhill slide toward the Siberian steppe. The transi-
tion is marked by a white obelisk alongside the track,
with Europe inscribed on one side and Asia on the
other. .
Somehow, we got back on the subject of crime, and I
was relieved to have something positive to say about
the Soviet Union. In Moscow, I told them, I allow my 7-
year-old son to roam free for hours among the alle
s
y
and apartment blocks of my Moscow neighborhood
, 11. ~
something I would never do in any big American city.
Alek asked whether it were true that in American
can see it. I said that it depended on the commiu
lty
r
but that the proliferation of pornography had pro-`
k
d bi
t
yo
e
t
er controversy in America
U... T . .n...
my country, and you won't say a word against yours?"
Alek looked wounded. "I criticize my country, too".,:
he said
"Ther
i
t
u
h
.
e
s
oo m
c
speculation [black-market.
trading] and corruption." Then he added: "But corrup-
tion is worse in the West."
Shurik decided that ' the argument had gon
f
'
e .
.
ar,
enough. He poured four glasses of vodka token
amounts for the still-wobbly Vitya and me end
p
d
"
pro
ose
a toast to
mutual understanding.", This we
ednesday, Nov: ,1
My first view of Siberia, on awakening ' the next
i
morn
ng, was disappointing in its ordinariness -
amemd
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patchwork of woods and fields with an occasional
wooden house.
The prosaic landscape reminded me that the great-
ness of Siberia is not its terrain but its nearly unfath-
omable size. George Kennan, cousin of the famous
diplomat and author of a classic 19th-century work on
the Siberian exile system, summed it up for all time.
"You could take the United States of America,"
Kennan wrote in 1891, "... and set it down in the
middle of Siberia, without touching anywhere the
boundaries of the latter territory. You could then take
Alaska and all the states of Europe ... and fit them
into the remaining margin like the pieces of a dissected
map ... [and even then) you would still have more than
300,000 square miles of Siberian territory to spare."
The cruel genius of exiling people to Siberia
stemmed from the territory's size and climate. Prison-
ers who escaped in the spring could not hope to make it
out of Siberia before the following winter. By fall, they-
had to turn themselves in or freeze to death. The April
thaw revealed the preserved corpses of those who failed
to heed this natural law. They were known colloquially
as "snow flowers." On this late November day, the
temperature outside was minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit.
In one field, a tractor seemed to be busily plowing
snow. Shurik explained that the driver was redistribut-
ing the drifts so that they would evenly irrigate the soil
during the spring thaw.
In the dining car, where the tables had red-checked
cloths and live potted geraniums, the juice and mineral
water was already gone. But the chef had made a tasty
borsch, as well as meatballs and gravy with kasha. Back
in the wagon, I was impressed by how conditions were
not allowed to deteriorate as the hours wore on. The
two female conductors, working opposite shifts round
the clock, were continually cleaning and vacuuming.
The toilets - the great dread of the squeamish
traveler - were nearly immaculate. This proved true
all the way through the trip.
DUSK BROUGHT DRINK AND MORE SERIOUS
talk. Vietnam vs. Afghanistan this time. We all agreed
that the United States erred in becoming so deeply
involved in Vietnam's internal strife. My -three com-
panions could not say the same of the Soviet role in
Afghanistan.
First of all, Alek said, it was not a war at all. If it was
a real war, the Soviets would have won long ago. He
repeated the party line, that Soviet troops had been
invipinto try by its government, that they
were combating CIA-backed banditry and terrorism.
Only the dushmani - the guerrilla bandits - were
killing civilians.
Instead of the standard Western estimate of Soviet
troop strength in anistan, 100,000 men, my travel-
ing companions believed the number to be between
6,000 and The Soviet destruction o ght
007 was another predictable sore point. They rejected
all notions o o error or unwarranted brutality,
ar that the airliner was unquestionably on a spy
mission and that the blood of its victims was on the
hands of the CIA.
This well-worn argument was mercifully interrupted
by a 20-minute stop in the big industrial city of Omsk,
where Shurik, Vitya and I found an open supermarket
and bought wine for our final evening together. When
we got back into the wagon, the radio was broadcasting
news from Moscow. It told of another successful test of
the United States' new air-launched anti-satellite mis-
sile. "That's it," Shurik exclaimed, punching a fist into
his hand. "The arms race has now. moved into space.
Previously, it was just talk. Now it's for real."
Vitya, feeling bad for me, noted that the system was
still in its testing phase and that real deployment had
not yet begun.
We quickly dropped politics and settled down to an
all-night drinking bout. Alek, who had the fleshy,
expressive face of a young Charles Laughton, was his
most uproarious, telling joke after joke. They agreed
that it had been a stroke of good fortune to spend these
days with a real American. "We can say we not only
met an American," Shurik said, "but touched him."
Here, he pressed a finger against my knee.
"And he didn't have horns," I replied to laughing
affirmation.
"And I hope you will say the same about us," Shurik
said, "that we are a peaceful people."
This spirit of brotherhood and good cheer lasted
through most of the night, until Shurik and Vitya had
nodded off. That's when Alek accused me of being a
spy
The two female conductors
were continually cleaning
and vacuuming. The toilets
- the great dread of the
squeamish traveler - were
nearly immaculate.
hursday, Nov. -15
For the tourist in search of Siberian color and lore,
Novosibirsk is well worth missing. The region's de facto
capital is a sprawling, modern city with 1.5 million
inhabitants. The general impression is of wide, wind-
swept avenues and soulless blocks of drab apartment
buildings.
I went directly from the train to the Central Hotel
and slept until midafternoon. Shurik and Vitya had
given me their phone numbers and offered to show me
the town. As my liver was not ready for another bout
with Shurik, I phoned and woke up Vitya, who agreed
to meet me in front of the hotel at 4 p.m.
He was clearly nervous as we walked down one of the
main avenues, trying to figure out a program for the
evening. Perhaps he was wondering whether he had
taken this relationship with an American correspond-
ent - a dread breed that the Soviet newspapers are
forever warning the citizenry to avoid - a step too far.
He stopped at a phone booth to call an old friend,
Misha, a teacher at a local institute whom Vitya
described as intelligent and well-connected. Vitya said
the man had phoned him by chance earlier that
afternoon and had now agreed to meet us on the street
in 10 minutes.
It was my turn to be suspicious. My original phone
timed
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call to Vitya had probably been monitored, and now
the KGB, which routinely tails correspondents when
they venture out of Moscow, had assigned a watchdog
to monopolize my time in Novosibirsk. Meeting Misha
only added to my suspicion. A youngish 40, he was tall,
well-built, self-assured and strikingly handsome -
fitting the up-to-date image of the handpicked elite of
the modem KGB. He was wearing a synthetic brown
suit, orange shirt and wide, striped tie. When he asked
me what kind of people I wanted to meet and, in
particular, whether I wanted to meet any women,
sirens went off inside my head. A honey trap no less. I
told him that women were not the priority and to
introduce me to anyone he considered interesting.
I was to spend much of the next 24 hours with
Misha. He turned out to be the only person I met on
the trip who was willing to forthrightly discuss some of
the country's deficiencies.- In the end, I decided to
accept him at face value but was intrigued by the
possibility that the KGB had sent him my way to show
that there were a few people out there'in the hinter-
lands who could think for themselves.
We a ent to a nearby cafe for dinner and then, at
Misha's suggestion, to the apartment of a young
woman who had a good job with a government agency.
That the woman, Vera, had her own well-furnished
apartment near the center of the city was proof of
special status. Not only did she have a prestigious job,
but also her father was a leading scientific figure with
influence to spare. Over coffee and cognac, she talked
of her two trips to Western Europe, most recently an
18-day summer cruise that had taken her to England,
France and Denmark.
Misha, too, had twice been abroad and had hoped in
1984 to finagle his way-into the local group that was to
have gone to Los Angeles to see the Olympic Games.
-His dream, he said, was to watch Carl Lewis - "the
greatest athlete in the world" - perform.
After Vitya, pleading fatigue, had headed home,
Misha turned the subject to politics but unlike the trio
on the train was willing to speculate about the
strengths and weaknesses of various members of the
leadership. Unlike Alek, Misha felt that major econom-
ic reforms were needed if the Soviet economy was ever
to operate efficiently.
In general, Misha had more questions than answers.
He wanted to know details of the case of Andrei
Sakharov, the exiled human-rights leader, and of the
situation with Jewish refuseniks in Moscow. Did I
think the Soviets could ever win in Afghanistan? He
said he was disappointed by Reagan's re-election but
thought that a Reagan-Chemenko summit was inevita-
ble and that relations would improve. "All this arguing
over missiles, on both sides, is mostly a question of
prestige," he said.
Vera listened intently through all of this but kept
silent. She seemed more comfortable when we went on
to the safer subject of life in Siberia. Misha, she said,
was a crack hunter, known for his shooting skill. At our
urging, he told how he and a few friends went out into
the steppe most winter weekends to hunt deer, sleeping
Misha and Vera agreed that Novosibirsk was not the
real Siberia and that they admired friends who had
taken temporary jobs in more rugged communities
farther north and then settled there for good. Vera told
of a girlfriend in the isolated oil town of Surgut, who
brags that she can hail a passing helicopter the way
someone in Novosibirsk might hail a cab.
The evening broke up at 1 a.m., and Misha walked
me back toward the hotel along Krasny Prospekt (Red
Avenue), the city's main boulevard. Snow squeaked
underfoot, and a half moon was rising in a dear, starry
sky. We agreed to meet the following day fora trip to
Akademgorodok, the campus-like headquarters of the
Soviet academy of sciences' prestigious Siberian
branch.
Frid
ay, Nov. 16
Just before lunchtime, Misha showed up with an
affable fellow teacher in a green Soviet jeep they had
borrowed from a geology institute. We drove out of the
city for about 20 miles, following the route of the frozen
Ob much of the way, and turned into the piny confines
of Akademgorodok.
The buildings were widely spaced along with boule-
vards and their architecture prosaic. But the two men
were reverential as they pointed out each center of
study in turn - nuclear physics, geology, computers,
economics and so on. In those drab-looking buildings,
leading scholars and scientists whose names are ban-
died about in the Soviet Union like home-run kings,
lead the effort to unlock and exploit Siberia's elusive
natural riches.
Over lunch in a seedy hotel built for visiting scholars,
Misha seemed to be having his own second thoughts
about befriending me. When his friend told a mildly
irreverent political joke, he remarked, "Careful or
Donald will write that the intelligentsia in Novosibirsk
is anti-Soviet."
But toward the end of the meal, he leaned forward
and asked in a low voice how I felt about the very
conccpt of the Soviet Union, the incorporation of a
wide array of nationalities under what amounted to
Russian sovereignty. Did I think the various ethnic
republics should have their independence?
It was not a simple question, I answered. I had been
to Armenia and found general satisfaction with Soviet
rule. In Estonia and Lithuania, I had found resentment
but resigned acceptance. Eastern Europe presented
more difficult problems. In Poland, I said, people are.
outwardly contemptuous of Soviet rule and will proba-
bly never reconcile themselves to it. What was his
opinion of Soviet domination there?
His voice dropped another notch. Poland, he said,
should be neutral and independent: "Not yours and
not ours."
I NEEDED SOME SORT OF RESPITE BEFORE
boarding the train again late that night and found it at
the ballet. Novosibirsk's ballet company is considered
to be one of the best in the country, good enough to
tour abroad. But on this night, it was performing
Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty for the locals - the
ornate opera hall. filled with the faces of common
people who had paid a pittance to view so mach highly
trained talent and beauty.
It took a revolution to make that scene possible, and
sitting there, I understood why people here still believe
in their workers' state. I have the same feeling when
seeing befuddled-looking laborers boarding an Aeroflot
jet for a $30, thousand-mile ride through the
stratosphere.
An hour after the ballet ended, I was aboard the
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Rossiya. Named after the motherland itself, this was
the premier train on the Trans-Siberian Railway,
instantly distinguishable from all the others by its
shiny, blood-red wagons. My next destination was
Irkutsk, a mere 33 hours and 1,148 miles away.
Saturday, Nov. 17
In the morning, an elderly couple who had been
there when I got on board left our compartment, and I
waited, half-asleep in my bunk, to see who would
replace them. To my surprise, a handsome young man
in a-naval officer's uniform came in with another man
in street clothes. He gave me a friendly greeting that
promised good conversation in the hours ahead.
The feeling was short-lived. The two men had just
finished hanging up their coats and stowing their bags
when the conductor called them outside. I overheard
him telling them that the compartment was reserved
for Intourist passengers. They quickly gathered their
belongings and moved on. Since the same conductor
then assigned the empty berths to two Soviet civilians,
I could only presume that somewhere in his instruc-
tions was a proviso not to mix military personnel with
foreigners.
The landscape was getting hillier and more wooded
as we were entering the lower reaches of the taiga. It
could have been Vermont or New Hampshire. A man
was climbing a snow-covered hill in a horse-drawn
sledge, the lowered ears of his fur hat flapping like a
puppy's ears. At various points along the way, the train
ran parallel to an ice-covered two-lane road that I took
to be the still-primitive heir to the notorious Siberian
Trakt. Until the railroad was built, the only way to
cross Siberia was a brutal journey by horse-drawn sled
or wagon over this frontier trail. The mud was two-feet
deep in spring, the dust nearly that thick in summer.
Crossing Siberia in the summer of 1885, George
Kennan gave this description of the Trakt: "Even
where the road was comparatively hard, it had been cut
into deep ruts by thousands of freight wagons; the
attempts that had been made here and there to
improve it by throwing tree trunks helter-skelter into
the sloughs and quagmires had only rendered it worse,
and the swaying, banging, and plunging of the tanantass
]a primitive carriage] were something frightful. An
American stagecoach would have gone to pieces on
such a road before it made a single station." -
Over lunch in the Rossiya's dining car, I was reading
of the woolly adventures of earlier travelers, when an
acrimonious scene brought me back to Soviet-era
reality. At some point in the middle of the lunch hour,
the waitress in charge started turning people away and
began setting up the emptying tables for a still-absent
tourist group. Most people wordlessly accepted this
verdict, but four strapping young men sat themselves
down at one of the tables and demanded to be served.
The waitress shrieked at them that this was a
prestige dining car where tourists had precedence.
"We're Siberians," one of the men shouted back.
"Isn't that good enough?"
"There's another restaurant for workers," she re-
plied, "and you are workers."
I toyed with my coffee in the hope of getting a look
at this pack of tourists who were so blithely unaware of
the battle being waged to give them an empty dining
car. I imagined a wagonload of big-spending Japanese
secreted away at the far end of the train.
To the contrary, the tourists
turned out to be a group of
young workers who were build-
ing the new Baikal-Amur rail-
road through the frozen
wilderness of eastern Siberia,
the kind of passengers you
might expect to find packed like
sardines in the lowly platskartny
wagon. But they were returning
from a package tour of East
Germany and, until they were
delivered safely to their bleak
settlements, they retained their
status as tourists, privileged
customers of the special dining
car.
THE TWO MEN WHO
joined me in my compartment -
boarded at a town called Tay-
shet. They were confident, pros-
perous-looking' men in their
early 40s, administrators with
the Ministry of Railroad Con-
struction. They had arrived in
Tayshet that morning for-s few
hours of consultation followed
by a four-hour dinner that had
both of them reeling from the
farewell toasts. -
Sasha,. a sandy-haired man
with an outsize belly, explained
that a number of years ago, he
had lived for a year in Nizhneu-
dinsk - a town a few hours up
the line from Tayshet - super-
vising. construction of a factory
that built modular housing for
the new towns going up along
the Baikal-Amur railway line.
This trip-amounted to a follow-
up, and he moaned that life on
the road was not as much fun as
it had been in his youth. While
he was still welcomed as a re-
turning son in Nizhneudinsk, all
the women he had wooed had
gotten married.
Volodya, his traveling com-
panion,-had a full head of gray
hair and a face that could have
ridden with the golden horde of
Genghis Khan. He was born in
Astrakhan, at the mouth of the
Volga, and said he had no idea
just where his- "eastern" fea-
tures had come from He con-
sidered himself Russian and
believed that Russia (he never
referred to-the Soviet Union)
was the "greatest country in the
world."
1-7
Both men considered them-
selves successful. They had city
apartments and country dachas
and had enrolled their grown
children in institutes that virtu-
ally guaranteed them comfort-
able professional jobs in the
same ministry where their fa-
thers worked. .Volodya, who had
a pretty second wife and a new
baby (he showed photographs of
both), was brimming with self-
satisfaction, while Sasha was
mourning his passing into sed-
entary middle age. He told wist-
ful tales from his days as a
merchant sailor in his early 20s.
We moved into the corridor
as the train passed through
Nizhneudinsk, so Sasha could
point out the factory he had
helped to build. Then we trun-
dled into bed.
unday, Nov.- 18
Sunday in Irkutsk was not as
bad as it sounds. The town has
a colorful, albeit violent, history
- reminiscent of America's
frontier outposts.
Founded in -1661 as a transit
hub for the east-west overland
trade, Irkutsk came into its full
glory after the east Siberia gold
discovery in the first half of the
19th century. Its .bars and
brothels were patronized by
Russian gold miners and Chi-
nese gold smugglers, along with
fur traders, tea merchants, ex-
iles, former convicts and other 1
less classifiable fortune seekers.
Rich merchants and 'successful
prospectors built mansions
along pitted, unpaved streets.
Wooden sidewalks were laid
over open sewers.
Travelers at the end of the
century said the town was aver-
aging a murder a day, mostly by
robbers who would garrote their
victims under cover of night
Bolder thieves in horse-drawn
sledges took advantage of day-
time blizzards to lasso lone pe-
destrians and drag them into
deserted alleys
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sume the places of the retiring
detachment. -
The narrow streets in the cen-_
ter of town are paved now and
safe to walk on, but the sense of
old Irkutsk is still there in the
elaborately trimmed wooden
houses along the side streets
and in the turn-of-the-century
mansions that have been reborn
as government buildings. On
this sunny Sunday, hundreds of
people of all ages, snugly
dressed in bulky woolen coats
and fur hats, were promenading
along the banks of the swift-
flowing Angara River, talking
and laughing_ among them-
selves. The only frenetic activi-
ty was a fierce, schoolboy
hockey game on an iced-over
street in the middle of town.
At one end of town stood a
memorial to the war dead, a
marble platform with an eternal
flame in its center. Four sen-
tries stood at stiff attention at
each side of the flame, all of
them schoolchildren just enter-
ing their teens. Boys and girls
alike were dressed as soldiers in
heavy suede overcoats with
white belts and black boots, al-
though the girls had big white
bows under their blue. fur hats.
Each carried a scaled-down
model of an automatic weapon.
Every 15 minutes, a new .team -
would appear from around the"
corner, marching in a slow, cere-
monial goose-step and, with
pomp and precision, would as-
The last leg of the journey
was the longest, nearly three
full days of travel along the
Mongolian and Chinese borders
to Khabarovsk. At. 9:30 am., .I
boarded wagon number one of
the next day's Rossiya, feeling
refreshed and ready for new
encounters. But my most imme-
diate interest was touristic. -
Two hours out of Irkutsk, the
train descended to the south-
west shore of Lake Baikal. The
lake, which occupies a mountain
crevasse, is 395 miles long and,
at its broadest point, 50 miles
wide. But most impressive is its,
depth, more than a mile at the
maximum point. It is the deep- I
est lake in the world, a reservoir . I
for roughly one-sixth of the
world's fresh water. -
'l'he terrain surrounding it
was so rough that the railroad
engineers originally decided to
cross it by ferry rather than to
circumvent it. A 290-foot ice-
breaking marvel, called the Bai-
kal, was constructed in Britain,
disassembled and shipped east
to be reassembled on the lake
shore. It proved a spectacular
failure. Storms with waves as
high as 16 feet, impenetrable
fog and winter ice up to six feet
thick made the ferry and a
smaller sister ship virtually use-
less most of the year.
Lake Baikal was in a benign
mood when we edged alongside
it just outside the mica-mining
village of Sludyanka. The lake's
water is known throughout the
country for its clarity and pure
taste - they say you can drop
in a coin and watch it fall to a
depth of 130 feet - and when
we made an unscheduled stop
100 feet from its shore, a half
dozen young men slid down a
snowy embankment to fill up
empty bottles. Valentin, the
day-shift conductor in our wag-
on, ran down to the lake for my
benefit and came back with a
glassful of Baikal's finest. It
tasted, alas, like water.
AT THIS POINT IN THE
trip, I had only one bunkmate, a
31-year-old geologist, named
Volodya. He had brought his
own tasty, home-cooked lunch
of boiled potatoes, beets, and
cabbage and carrot salad that
he gladly shared with me, push-
ing potatoes the way Shurik the
boatman had pushed cups full of vodka Volodya was slim and
handsome to the point of pretti-
ness.
In the course of the after-
noon, we were joined by Valery,
also 31, a teacher at an institute
in Irkutsk that trains profes-
sionals to work with automated
electric urban mass transporta-
tion. A slim, fair-haired man
with a mustache and high brow,
Valery had packed along a huge
chess set and was in search of a
game. He was wearing the
standard-issue blue jogging suit.
A number of people, upon
boarding the train, had donned
pajamas and bathrobes and
would stay that way until get-
ting off. A more stylish alterna-
tive was the jogging suit.
Roughly one-fifth of the men
aboard were wearing nearly
identical royal-blue jogging out-
fits with white stripes down the
pantlegs and sleeves.
Valentin the conductor
popped his head in at one point
- we had given up chess for
chatter - and decreed that Va-
lery should move from the
neighboring compartment to
ours. He said he did such rear-
ranging all the time to create
more compatible groups, and
the three of us seemed to have
formed a nice "club."
3y nightfall, the train had
passed Ulan-Ude, capital city
for Siberia's once-nomadic Bur-
yat tribes. I was now closer to
the ' Chinese capital than to my
final Soviet destination. Nearly
half the passengers on this last
border-hugging stretch were
fresh-faced soldiers, part of the
one-million-strong contingent
of Soviet troops stationed along
the Chinese border. Nearly all
were healthy-looking young
men in their late teens who had
abandoned their uniforms for
trousers and T-shirts or sweat-
suits. There was much drinking
but no rowdiness. -
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I uesday, Nov. 20
Volodya and Valery were al-
ready at the chessboard when I
woke up.
Details of Valery's life tum-
bled out in the course of the
morning. He was Jewish, his
parents and grandparents hav-
ing escaped extermination in
the Ukraine by fleeing east be-
fore the war broke out. Against
his parents' advice, he had mar-
ried a non-Jewish woman of
Tartar ancestry. She had even-
tually abandoned him and their
daughter and had moved to
Petropavlovsk, a port city on
the remote Kamchatka penin-
sula, where she literally ran
away to sea. She was now a cook
on a freighter.
He had recently remarried, to
a research assistant at a chemi-
cal institute, and his second
wife, carefully chosen for her
domesticity, had baked him a
bag of delicious cookies for the
journey. She also was not Jew-
ish, and Valery said he did not
rare whether his daughter, who
is 12, chose upon reaching
adulthood to declare her nation-
ality as Russian or Jewish. He
said that he personally had no
desire to emigrate and felt no
particular affinity for. Israel
And Volodya, an ethnic Rus-
sian, noted that his departed
wife was Jewish, so there was a
certain symmetry in his and
Valery's domestic histories.
The Jewish question having
thus been broached, both want-
ed to know the extent of anti-
Semitism in America and the
fate there of Soviet Jewish emi-
gres. Their impressions were
colored by stories in the Soviet
press of Ku Klux Klan cross-
burnings on Jewish lawns, but
they seemed more interested in
hearing my version than argu-
ing their own.
Dusk brought a new member
to our club. Lena, a refugee
from the boredom prevailing in
the neighboring compartment,
was a short, stout woman with
tiny dark eyes and bleached
blond hair. She had been raised
on the plains of northern Ka-
zakhstan, where her father had
moved in 1954 in the first wave
of volunteers for Nikita Khru-
shchev's "virgin lands" pro-
gram. (Lena said that when her
brother, then 3, had gotten off
the train and seen the absolute
emptiness of the surrounding
steppe, he had taken off on a
dead run toward his native
Ukraine, almost 3,000 miles to
the west). Her widowed mother
still lived there with most of her
family, but Lena had moved
with an older sister to a new
settlement in the far east, where
she worked in a giant new coal-
burning power plant.
Lena's arrival revealed Volod-
ya's rakish side, and the two of
them were soon exchanging
clever toasts with the remaining
cognac. At some point, Lena
turned serious and asked me
what Americans thought of An-
dropov. I said they probably
thought highly of him because
correspondents had generally
described him as an intelligent
man with strong notions of how
the nation could be better run.
This pleased her. She said that
many people now had portraits
of Andropov in their homes
(both Andropov and Stalin
hung in hers) or had preserved
the newspapers announcing his
death. All three agreed that he
would have been a great leader
if he had lived longer.
I asked them how they felt
when Chernenko was chosen,
another ailing old_ man who
could not even raise his arm in a
full salute at Andropov's funer-
al. Lena smiled .knowingly at
this description and offered no
defense. Volodya argued that
older men are wiser and make
fewer mistakes. I pointed out
that Lenin was 47 at the time of
the revolution and died when he
was younger than all but one
member of the existing Politbu-
ro. Lenin was a genius, Valery
retorted. In any case, Cher-
nenko was just one voice in a
largely collective leadership.
The conversation, . carried
through dinner in the dining
car, grew increasingly partisan
and heated. Somehow, we got
onto the subject of the three
Baltic republics - Estonia,
Latvia and Lithuania - that
the Red army occupied in 1939.
My companions insisted that
Baltic nations voluntarily
agreed to become part of the
Soviet Union. Likewise, they
said that the eastern European I
allies all freely chose to pattern-
their governments after the So-.
viet Union and to join the bloom
So why were Soviet tanks need-,
ed to restore order in Berlin
1953, Budapest in 1956, Pragoe
in 1968? To assist in combatting-
Western-inspired outlaws, they
said, much as troops are now
doing in Afghanistan.
I said I could understand the
argument that the Soviet Union
paid for its eastern European
possessions with blood and val-
or in the last war or that it
needed to control them for ,its
security. But I just could not
accept the outrageous conten-
tion that it all happened by
popular choice. They heatedly
disagreed and, as proof, pointed
out that the Soviets had also
occupied parts of Finland and
Austria after the war and volun-
tarily withdrew. _
Late in the evening, after I
had explained my own personal
differences with the Reagan ad-
ministration on Central Ameri-
can policy and some other
issues, I asked whether there
was a single Soviet policy or
action that they disagreed with.
There was a longish silence, :s
nally broken by Valery. He said
that decisions were made collec-
tively, not by individuals, =so
there was less chance of error.
I told them that the hardest
thing for me to understand,
when talking with people of ob-
vious intelligence, was this com-
plete lack of dissent. Valery said -`
that I needed to have a better
understanding of Marxist-Le-
ninist theory.
Volodya had a more personal
explanation. He said his grand-
father had been an impover-
ished cobbler, who earned 30
rubles a month after the revolu-
tion, but believed fervently in
Soviet rule. His children had all
completed university and had
easier lives. Volodya himself .
was a professional with an inter-
esting job, his own apartment
and frequent opportunities to
travel He did not have a car
yet, but he had a motorcycle. In
short, the revolution had suc-
ceeded, and there was no reason
for him to be any less devoted
than his grandfather.
Continued
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Now Lena, `who'hsd'told us
earlier of her sickly childhood,
weighed in, her words charged
with emotional intensity."
"What I have is a guarantee "
she said. "That's most inipor-
tant. If I get sick, the hospital
will be paid for, and my job will
be held until I return. Can ev-
eryone in America say that?"
We agreed that no one was
being won over, and Valery said
that three against one was un-
fair. Our good cheer revived, we
called it a night.
ednesday, Nov. 21
- During the night, we had rounded the top
of Manchuria. This final day would be spent
in the broad, flat valley of the Amur River.
Over lunch, Lena asked me a series of direct,
probing questions about my life. Where was I
raised? What did my father do? Did my
mother work? If my father had sold his
business, how did he live now? How did I
choose my profession? How did I get my job?
When the interview was over, she simply
shook her head. So many options, so much
movement "It's an entirely different kind of
life," she said. "Impossible to imagine."
We whiled away the day with chess, cards
and aimless conversation. Volodya and Lena
sang a few duets, which inspired Volodya to
recite some poems by Aleksandr Blok.
After dinner, the arguing began anew.
Someone - not me -brought up Sakharov,
the exiled human-rights 1,.ader. Volodya re
peated the official lie that Sal-ha ov -,bad
publicly called for a nuclear attack against the'-:_
Soviet Union; and all agreed that he should
count himself lucky-that he is not in jail.
"What right should anyone have to tear down
and weaken his country?" said Lena.
We took up where we had left off with the
Baltic, then moved on to Vietnam, Afghani-
stan, Poland, Grenada, Nicaragua, missiles
and space weapons. At one point, I asked
whether anyone would acknowledge that, in
this global arena, the Soviet Union occasion-
ally acts as a great power trying to strengthen
its political influence and not merely in the
selfless pursuit of world peace and human
betterment No one would.
While still outwardly friendly, there was an
edge to the conversation.. Volodya and Lena
bore down hard, determined to convince me
and disturbed by my stubbornness. Volodya's
voice grew louder and louder, and a nervous
cough became increasingly pronounced.
Around midnight, -just after I had :pro-
claimed that Soviet newspapers gave a dis-
torted and one-sided view of the world, Lena
calmly announced that my remarks were in-
sulting to her country and that she could
endure no more. She excused herself and
returned to her compartment
A truce followed soon after. Volodya pro-
posed a toast to mutual understanding, then
amended it to say, "It is more important that
our leaders understand each other, that Cher-
nenko and Reagan have a better understand-
ing." I proposed a few-hands of durak.
AT 5 AM, RIGHT ON SCHEDULE, THE
Rossiya crossed the frozen Amur on the
outskirts of Khabarovsk, the river nearly a
mile wide at that point. The ice, glowing in
the starlight, looked as if it had been attacked
by an ax-wielding giant. Ten minutes later,
Volodya, Valery and I were standing on the
platform saying warm farewells.
The Intourist representative spotted me
immediately, as they always do. "Good morn-
ing," she said in English. "Are there any other
passengers in the wagon?" It took me a
moment to understand that she meant foreign
passengers. "No," I replied, also in English.
"I'm the only one."
She led me off to the waiting car that would
take me back to my separate life. 0
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