Introduction
"The Trans-Siberian Railway and connecting routes comprise one of the most famous, romantic and potentially enjoyable of the world's great train journeys... [it] makes all other train rides seem like once around the block with Thomas the Tank Engine." ~ Lonely PlanetThe Trans-Siberian Railroad is the mainline artery linking Moscow and European Russia with the vast stretches of Siberia and the Russian Far East. It was built in the years of the last Tsars to strengthen communication ties and reinforce shaky power over the eastern regions, but it was made famous by Communists who used it to transport political prisoners to labor and prison camps. The way was cut with hand tools along the old Great Siberia Post Road by exiles, convicts, soldiers, and foreign laborers. “Thanks to the terrain, climate, floods and landslides, disease, war and bandit attacks, not to mention shoddy materials and bad planning, the railway took 26 years to build. But it remains the most brilliant engineering feat of its time.” --Lonely Planet.The railroad begins in Moscow and runs south and east through Yaroslav and Perm, across the Ural Mountains and into Asia, and through Ekaterinburg, Omsk, Novosibirsk, and the Lake Baikal region. Here the Trans-Mongolian line branches off and heads south through Mongolia to Beijing, and the Trans-Manchurian cuts through northern China to the Russian port city of Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan. The Trans-Siberian line stays in Russia and continues on north of Mongolia and then hugs the border with Manchuria before heading south to Vladivostok.
Before the railroad was completed, the voyage from Moscow to the Pacific coast, a third of the way around the world, took at least several months of hard travel. Now it takes about a week of sitting around talking and drinking beers. Rolling across eight time zones and 9289 kilometers (5772 miles) of taiga, steppe, desert, and mountains, the Trans-Siberian is the longest continuous line of railway in the world.
Two friends and I planned the trip almost a year before while sitting at the Stanford Coffee House. Liz and Rob and I were sophomores at the time, and we would be studying together in Moscow during the following autumn. We thought taking the train would be a good way to meet people and see more of Russia than just Moscow. I also wanted to talk to people from different parts of Russia about how they were affected by the changes since the fall of Communism. I used an undergraduate research grant to sponsor the study. Liz and I didn’t speak Russian at the time, so we decided to take the train in December after our four months in Moscow were over.
The Rossiya is the train that goes non-stop from Moscow to Vladivostok. No. 1 goes west and No. 2 goes east. Several guidebooks said it was never a problem to get tickets on the Trans-Siberian, even the day before, but we played it safe and went to Moscow’s Yaroslavsky Station a week early. We were surprised to find that tickets from Moscow to Irkutsk, halfway to Vladivostok, cost less than a quarter of what the guidebooks said they would. The reason, we figured, was because we didn’t go through a travel agency, which would have charged about a 300% overhead, and we spoke Russian at the ticket office, so they didn’t add the “dumb foreigner sales tax” of approximately “whatever they felt like charging.”
We planned to get off the train at Irkutsk and explore for a couple of days before continuing on to Vladivostok, but the ticket lady told us that tickets from Irkutsk to Vladivostok were sold out every day that week. We were worried we might not be able to get to the end of the line at all, but she told us we could still get tickets direct from Moscow to Vladivostok. Still, we were disappointed by the thought of rolling through Siberia and missing places like Irkutsk and Lake Baikal, the biggest fresh water lake in the world, billed as the Pearl of Siberia, home of the nerpa and omul (I’ll explain these later). And seven sedentary days on a train with no shower was not the most pleasant prospect.
So I went back the next day and talked and explained and questioned for about an hour (in my still fairly basic Russian) with a very nice and patient young woman at the ticket office. I finally learned that although there were no tickets direct from Irkutsk to Vladivostok, there were plenty of tickets from Irkutsk to Ulan Ude and then from Ulan Ude to Vladivostok. I didn’t bother to ask why they hadn’t told us that before. Russians don’t tend to volunteer much.
So our schedule was set and we were happy. Four days on the Rossiya, two days in Irkutsk, a night on Train No. 26, a day in Ulan Ude, three days on Train No. 8, and four days in Vladivostok. The tickets cost a total of $87. It seemed an absurdly small amount to pay for six thousand miles of travel and seven nights of bedding. But we paid the Russian price, and for some Russians $87 is three months’ pension.
In Moscow I had bought bundles of Christmas gifts for friends and family back home, a lot of cheap Russian and Western music, some clothes, and my puffy grey coat, and my backpack had no room left for any of it. So I bought a giant imitation Adidas duffle bag for $8 and a rolling cart (like the ones the babushkas use to carry their wares around town) for another $8, bungee cords included, and packed all my treasures in tightly.
All of the following conversations were in Russian except where indicated. I met a lot of people on the trip, and they told me a lot of stories. Some were told in varying degrees of confidence, so a few things had to be left out, but most of it is here.
Day 1--The Rossiya