Tallinn to Fushiki - Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World - page 36

of Siberia is a mix of forested hills, prairies dotted with hay bales, and the occasional wide, gray river. It's
pretty—in large part thanks to its emptiness. At times it looks a bit like the Catskills, minus the billboards,
the gas stations, and the Jewish summer camps.
There's a fundamental difference in the quality of the light here, though. For some reason, everything in
Russia looks much drabber than in other countries. The sunshine is thin. The colors are drained. Even the
faces are sallow. It's the opposite of a vibrant place like India, where everywhere you look is the orange
shock of a marigold or the wild purple of a woman's sari.
Granted, there's a pleasing rusticity to the wooden houses here, with their herringboned slats, their cor-
rugated roofs, and their tiny square gardens. But these villages somehow look wintry even now, in August,
on a sunny afternoon. I imagine they'd be positively funereal under a thick blanket of snow.
Rebecca's taking a breather from War and Peace and has moved on to Gulag: A History —journalist
Anne Applebaum's definitive take on the Soviet prison camp system. The facts, figures, and anecdotes Ap-
plebaum collects are just as depressing as you'd imagine. One of the strange, heartbreaking revelations in
the topic is how truly arbitrary the whole gulag system was.
People were sent to the Siberian camps for no clear reason, often at the whim of a powerful official.
Once there, a surreal randomness reigned. Prisoners could become guards, and guards could become pris-
oners. Convicts could be set free with no notice and without knowing why. Life felt haphazard. Many tragic
deaths were the result of pure laziness. For instance, some guards on the trains headed to the camps would
refuse to give their prisoners any water—because the guards didn't want to deal with bathroom breaks.
Soon enough, as the prisoners dehydrated, the guards were dealing with corpses.
From what I've witnessed, this indifferent half-assedness continues to be the overriding Russian mood.
We see it in the way people treat us in stores and restaurants and in the crumbling infrastructure all over the
country. The sidewalks are pocked with rubble, the wall-to-wall carpets never reach the walls, everything's
broken and nothing ever gets fixed. It's as though the whole country just grew bored with its collective
existence. No one ever seems happy, and yet no one is moved to do a thing about it.
Having traveled pretty widely, I've become a student of comparative body language. I enjoy identifying
the nonverbal cues that prevail in different regions. In parts of India, for instance, people will frequently
perform a head waggle—a bobble-headed bouncing of one's cranium from side to side, indicating general
assent. In Japan, the bow is a highly ritualized indicator. Here in Russia, I've discovered that the signature
gesture is a shrug. Note that it is not like American shrugs, which can convey indifference or even, some-
times, mild agreement. The Russian shrug says: “Go fuck yourself, retard.” It's a hateful, aggressive pop-
ping of the shoulders—often accompanied by a frown, an eye roll, a loud exhale, and/or upturned palms.
Every time we encounter it (and we've encountered it quite a bit), the shrug cements my notion that this is
the land of the can't-be-bothered.
Yet there's a contradiction here. Any look at Russian history reveals a country with almost too much
passion. Its great writers—Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky—grapple with grand themes and bold choices. Its brilliant
dancers and composers radiate romanticism. And of course, if Russia were truly a nation of shruggers, it
would never have shed so much blood in the wild-eyed pursuit of abstract ideals. I realize the country may
be suffering an extended hangover after the fall of Communism, but still—it's hard to reconcile Russia's
fiery past with its seemingly listless present.
To better understand this dichotomy in the Russian character (and also to pass time on the train), I've
been reading Chekhov short stories from the late 1880s. They're off-the-charts bleak. Chekhov once de-
scribed his ambitions thusly: “All I wanted was to say honestly to people: 'Have a look at yourselves and
see how bad and dreary your lives are!' The important thing is that people should realize that, for when
they do, they will most certainly create another and better life for themselves.”