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Sergei didn't like Maria much. The two other women in the cabin were Olga and Tania,
his future wife. “And Olga liked me more than Tania,” Sergei once told me.
“Wait! Your sister stuck you on vacation in a train cabin with three girls who all had a
thing for you?”
“You could say that,” Sergei said. “Nice ride!”
Sergei and Tania soon married and now have a twenty-four-year-old son named Anton,
who's doing a medical residency in Moscow. As with so many families in Russia, the winds
of change dictated their planning. Anton was born in the waning days of the Soviet Union,
and with so much uncertainty ahead, Sergei and Tania decided to stop with one child at that
point. Many of their friends decided a decade later—when Putin first became president and
there were hints of prosperity—to have a second child. But Sergei and Tania decided it felt
too late.
Now Sergei and I are beginning our latest journey together, aboard the Trans-Siberian.
And for the next month or so he and I will be one another's family.
I T IS NEARING midnight in Moscow, and Sergei and I have escaped the ticket office and are
sitting in the waiting hall on the second floor at Yaroslavsky station. At a plastic bench
nearby, a police officer has paused, menacingly. He reaches down and jostles a young man
from his slumber, angrily demanding to see some documents.
“Passport, passport,” he says, using a word that's equivalent in Russian and English.
The sleeping man, dressed in black pants, holding the leather jacket that was his pillow,
wearily reaches into the jacket pocket to find his passport and dutifully presents it. With
black hair and a darker complexion, the man appears to be from the Caucasus—which
means he is sadly accustomed to visits like this. After a string of terrorist attacks in recent
years, Russia's uniformly unpleasant police spend much of their time interrogating people,
mostly men, who have darker skin, suspecting they come from the North Caucasus region,
a hotbed of Islamist radicalism. In the United States this kind of profiling is illegal, or in
the rarest cases allowed but hugely controversial. In Russia, it carries on unencumbered by
laws or debate.
A crackly march begins to blare from the station's old speakers. This moment of cere-
mony seems lost on the majority of people in the vast station—many of whom are asleep
on benches. But this is an important ritual: the most famous Trans-Siberian train, the No.
2 Rossiya, is boarding to begin its six-day journey to Vladivostok. Russian train stations
play music to mark the departure and arrival of the most famous trains. The Red Arrow, the
best-known overnight train between Moscow and St. Petersburg, pulls out of St. Petersburg
to the tune of “The Hymn to the Great City.” That train is also known for its departure time .
It leaves both cities moments before midnight. That allowed businessmen during Soviet
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