TATIANA - Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia - page 118

15 • TATIANA
H AVING NO VISA for Kazakhstan means an extra twelve hours of train travel.
Through the night we straddle the Ural Mountains, from Chelyabinsk back up to Ekater-
inburg. Then we bend southeast, emerge from the Urals, stop for a long layover in Tyumen,
then move deeper into Siberia. The train stops less frequently. The landscape is more rugged
and picturesque. As hours pass the scenes become more captivating—maybe just because
you need something to do. There is endless snow stretching to the horizon. Then forest. At
sunrise and sunset, streaks of light cut through the trees and the snow glows in orange. We
pass villages with little wooden homes. Some look abandoned—not rare in a country where
many villages are losing population and dying. Some have smoke rising from the chimneys,
and I imagine Viktor Gorodilov inside, in his plaid shirt and hunting pants, warming his
hands by the wood fire. Or Ivan, orphaned as a teenager, alone in the small house he rents.
Deep in these thoughts, I suddenly feel a burst of pressure from the chilly window that
my head is resting on and a loud hacking sound as another train flies by in the other direc-
tion. Within seconds the train is gone and peace is restored.
“I am driving across the plain of Siberia,” Anton Chekhov wrote during a trip—by car-
riage—in May 1890:
I have been transformed from head to foot into a great martyr. This morning, a keen
cold wind began blowing, and it began drizzling with the most detestable rain. I must
observe that there is no spring yet in Siberia. The earth is brown, the trees are bare,
and there are white patches of snow wherever one looks; I wear my fur coat and felt
overboots day and night. . . . Well, the wind has been blowing since early morning . .
. heavy, leaden clouds, dull brown earth, mud, rain, wind . . . brrrrr.
Siberia, this vast and forbidding geographic expanse, has been the fascination of Russian
writers, the torture chamber for Russian exiles, the gold mine for Russian energy companies,
and the savior for Russia at large. Paradoxically, cold and forbidding lands have helped
this country survive. As Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy write in their book The Siberian
Curse , Germany lost its first major battle in World War II because thousands of its men were