BORIS - Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia - page 18

3 • BORIS
T HE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY is intertwined in Russian history. After years of struggle, mis-
management, and vicious battles with the land and elements, the railroad—at first, from
St. Petersburg to Vladivostok—was completed in 1916 and quickly became a symbol of
Russian ingenuity. Russians marveled at how they were able to build a six-thousand-mile-
long railroad that held the vast country together and opened up the Asian frontier. The rail-
road crossed forbidden landscapes and required complicated bridges—one of which shared
a prize with the Eiffel Tower for world-class design. Today, “Trans-Siberian” is a catchword
for a number of routes. If you travel from St. Petersburg or Moscow to Vladivostok, or from
Moscow to Beijing, you are definitely on a “Trans-Siberian” journey. But long trips between
cities that are far apart, and that take you a good distance from west to east or east to west,
can also safely be called “Trans-Siberian.”
There is a haunting past. The rails were constructed largely by migrant workers and pris-
on laborers, many of whom, in the words of American Paul E. Richardson, who writes about
Russian culture, died “from exposure and from infectious disease, from typhoid to the bu-
bonic plague.” The railroad, once built, was also convenient for Joseph Stalin, who used it
to transport exiles to Siberia. By the hundreds of thousands, the Kremlin could send gov-
ernment critics, lawyers, doctors, religious leaders—really anyone it chose—to the dreaded
gulags in some of the harshest conditions on earth. Stanley Kowalski was a gulag surviv-
or. His daughter described the tortures of the train her father experienced in her 2009 book,
No Place to Call Home . The Polish army officer was captured by the Soviets in 1939, and
transported by train between prisons several times—one journey took him across nearly all
of Russia on the Trans-Siberian, in a red boxcar with little light:
The train . . . made unscheduled stops in deserted stations or empty fields where, if
lucky, [prisoners] might be allotted their daily ration of food: a piece of bread and
fish. Water, on the other hand, was becoming a rare commodity. At some stations, the
inmates would pound upon the barred doors, demanding something to quench their
thirst, but often their pleading was to no avail. Amidst these surroundings, the weak
had little chance of survival.