Russian Odyssey

This is the (as yet unpublished) article I wrote about my trip to Japan and Russia in March and April this year.


The Wild East

“Welcome to Russia. Enjoy your stay – but watch out for our criminals!”

With a firm handshake and an amused grin, the 7ft tall Russian frozen shrimp technician I had met on the ferry from Japan left me standing on the dockside. Wondering whether the police or the mafia would be the first to relieve me of my money, I took a breath of oily air and stepped into Vladivostok, the gritty navy city at the eastern edge of the largest country on the planet.

I needn’t have worried. Inevitably in a nation of this vast scale – twice the size of the United States – there is sometimes too much and sometimes too little law, but this is a problem for Russians rather than travellers. Russians seem to relish passing on warnings about their “bad” countrymen, but the worst people I encountered as I crossed the country were surly waitresses and unhelpful museum attendants. Even the one taxi driver who tried to rip me off was half-hearted about it. After we had established I wasn’t going to pay what he was asking, he shrugged his shoulders, smiled cheekily and pointed out the much cheaper minibus to the airport.

My journey started in Tokyo. The neon-lit buzz of Japan’s capital feels half a world away from Vladivostok’s faded Soviet grandeur, but in fact Russia is Japan’s nearest neighbour. There was a time when the quickest route from Europe to Japan was through Russia on the 5,772-mile Trans-Siberian railway. Today mass air travel has turned the seven-day train journey – the world’s longest – into a novelty. But it remains an affordable way of seeing the breadth of Russia and getting a flavour of how much more fun travelling was before the jumbo jet.

Having decided I was going to travel all the way across Russia overland, it didn’t seem right to fly across the Japan Sea. So I opted for the 40-hour ferry crossing from the tiny port of Fushiki on Japan’s windswept north coast to Vladivostok.

The four-and-a-half-hour train journey from Tokyo to Fushiki feels like a trip backwards in time through the five decades of the Japanese economic miracle. A sleek bullet train speeds you away from the capital, where an endless human river flows around gleaming skyscrapers. Gradually the trains become slower and emptier, the buildings thin out and the pale mountain ranges in the distance loom larger. At the same time your fellow passengers become more curious about sharing their carriage with a foreigner and you get occasional glimpses of the slowly dying traditional way of life. Old women working in sodden rice fields, wearing broad-brimmed hats fastened under their chins with a scarf, look up in bemusement as the train passes.

After such quintessentially Japanese scenes, it is a shock to reach the ferry port, which is Russian soil in spirit if not in law. Burly, unshaven Russian men bustle around winching second-hand Japanese cars and huge piles of tyres onto the rusting Polish-built ship, the MV Rus. Although this is technically a passenger ferry – and boasts such delights as a nightclub, cabaret bar, sauna and beauty salon – most of those aboard are returning home with cheap cars either for themselves or to sell. In contrast to Japan’s obsessive efficiency, here there is no real sense of urgency. By the time the vessel was ready to leave, two-and-a-half hours late, it had Hondas and Nissans strapped to every inch of deck space, including a couple in the (now dry) swimming pool. As the ship pulled away from shore in the grainy half-light of dusk, many of the Russians on deck threw coins into the sea in a wish for better fortune on their return.

The ferry provided a good introduction to Russia and the tough-but-friendly attitude of Russians. When I made the crossing there were only three other foreigners onboard: a young Canadian student, a Kazakh and a middle-aged Japanese man accompanying a leggy Russian blonde. Despite its proximity, Vladivostok is not a popular getaway from Japan – most Japanese people have safety qualms about visiting the United States, let alone Russia. The ticket price includes all meals, which are typically Russian affairs involving good salads and soup, excellent bread and questionable meat. I met several intriguing fellow passengers in the dining room, including the giant frozen shrimp technician, who looked like he was going to extort money when he bent down to sit at my table, but instead chatted affably about England’s football team and the British technology being installed in his father’s gold mine. I ended up partying until the small hours in the ship’s 80s-styled nightclub with the Canadian, a Russian Eminem look-alike and an Armenian-born car fanatic involved in Vladivostok’s illegal drag racing scene.

In the grey light of dawn the ferry steamed past large floating chunks of ice and we arrived into Vladivostok. I felt I had come to the end of the world. Vladivostok is edgy in every sense of the word: just 100 miles from North Korea, the city was closed to all foreigners until 1990 and it still has a reputation as the capital of Russia’s “Wild East”. Nonetheless its seaside location gives it a certain rugged charm – imagine a Blackpool where the candyfloss is laced with vodka and the donkeys buck.

You wouldn’t visit Vladivostok for the architecture, unless grubby Soviet-era concrete tower blocks and crumbling shop fronts are your thing. Even the most nostalgic reformed communist would have to admit it is not a beautiful city, but its setting on a steep hill overlooking a wide natural harbour is breathtaking. The city’s name – it means “Rule the East” – points to its historical strategic importance and today it is still home to Russia’s rapidly rusting Pacific Fleet. Many of the sights revolve around military hardware: an old Soviet submarine, a museum of border guards and (best of all) the city’s old hilltop fortress, which has an array of tanks, anti-aircraft guns, sea mines and missile launchers that school parties are apparently free to clamber over.

In Vladivostok I had my first encounters with the Russian stereotypes I was to meet again and again on my trip: sullen shop assistants, bored bureaucrats, genuinely friendly strangers and pushy prostitutes. One night two “chamber maids”, dressed up to the nines, knocked on my hotel room door at 9pm and offered to “change my towels”. On another occasion I was taking photographs of the old submarine on Vladivostok’s waterfront when a tall, slightly drunken man in his 30s started shouting and walked over to me. But instead of shopping me for illegally taking pictures of Russian military secrets, he smilingly introduced me to his girlfriend and gave me an “American” cigarette as a souvenir of our encounter, despite my protests that I didn’t smoke. Russia is like that: you are guaranteed to meet some colourful characters if you veer even slightly off the main tourist track.

The Trans-Siberian railway (the Transsib to veterans) has rightly passed into travellers’ lore. The longest of its three routes, between Moscow and Vladivostok, crosses eight time zones and spans a continent. Unless you break your journey along the way, you will spend over a week on just one train. With rare exceptions, tickets are not sold outside Russia, China and Mongolia. Lots of specialist agencies offer Trans-Siberian packages but it is not difficult to book yourself when you arrive in the country. Demand varies throughout the year, and trains along the two routes to and from Beijing are always very popular, but you can usually get seats on the Vladivostok-Moscow line just a few days in advance.

It is almost irresistible to wax lyrical about the Trans-Siberian – the perfect fusion of imperial ambition, engineering genius and poetry – but it is at heart a regular train route for mostly middle-class Russians who cannot afford to fly. Nonetheless there is an excited buzz on station platforms whenever a long-distance train pulls in. Passengers jump off and run to kiosks to buy beer and vodka, families joining the train marshal huge piles of baggage and children, hawkers lining the platform sell everything from freshly caught fish to hot stews, and fur-hatted carriage attendants (called provodnitsas) nonchalantly oversee the chaos.

Travelling second class, I shared my four-berth compartments with hawk-eyed entrepreneurs, motherly babushkas, a psychology lecturer and even a uniformed Russian soldier who kept me awake half the night with his snoring. There were very few other foreign travellers onboard until I got closer to Moscow. The Eastern European-built trains are not luxurious, but British rail operators could learn a thing or two from them. They run continually night and day without – in my experience – any delays, and the toilets actually get cleaner the longer you stay on the train. Confusingly, but sensibly, the Trans-Siberian runs on Moscow time along its entire route. This requires some careful mental calculations – your ticket may say the train leaves Ulan Ude at the relatively civilised time of 9pm on Sunday but in fact it departs at 2am on Monday.

Siberia in winter has a grim beauty, like a capricious ice queen. From the comfort of your heated train carriage, you glimpse frozen lakes, shadowy mountains and snow-covered plains glowing like ghosts of a landscape in the twilight. Human life is concentrated along the railway tracks, so you also see drunkenly leaning telegraph poles, immense long-abandoned industrial complexes, ruined churches and footprints in the snow leading to lonely log cabins. Siberia covers one-twelfth of the Earth’s landmass and is richly endowed with natural resources, but its remoteness and wildness make settling outside a big city only for the determined or desperate. Nature continues to wage its own Cold War on the long-suffering people of Siberia, with frequent but unpredictable snowstorms and midwinter temperatures dropping as low as –40C along the train route.

My first stop was Ulan Ude, a mid-Siberian city that reminds you of modern Russia’s hidden diversity. It is the centre of Russian Buddhism and proud capital of the “Buryat Republic”, something of an administrative fiction but one rooted in ethnic reality. After the pale-faced monotony of Vladivostok’s streets, it was a surprise to see so many people who looked Mongolian in Ulan Ude. One young computer technician I met told me he supported the Russian national football team (when not following Manchester United) but took umbrage when I described him as Russian. “I am Buryat, not Russian,” he retorted. Siberia’s largest ethnic minority group, Buryats were originally nomads of Mongolian descent before they were absorbed into the rapidly expanding Russian state. They tend to dress more flamboyantly than Russians and they smile far more frequently, making the city friendlier and less drab than many of its neighbours, despite its evident poverty.

Most travellers visit Ulan Ude for two reasons. It is near Russia’s most important Buddhist site, a solemn Tibetan monastery called Ivolginsk Datsan, located on the freezing plains outside the city; and the world’s largest sculpted Lenin head peers across its main square. Both attractions are powerful symbols. The monastery, which the Dalai Lama has visited several times, tells you that Buryats are different. But the imperious Lenin head reminds you that the Russians are still in charge.

From Ulan Ude the railway sweeps around the southern shore of Lake Baikal before reaching the city of Irkutsk. These are Siberia’s two biggest draws. Irkutsk would be an attractive city anywhere in the world but after three-and-a-half days of Siberia’s bleak wastes it feels like an imperial capital. It’s not for nothing that it used to be known as the “Paris of Siberia”. Weather-beaten 19th-century wooden houses line the back streets, the central markets buzz with traders selling imported Chinese goods, and wide boulevards with names like Karl Marx Street are filled with expensive designer boutiques. While in Irkutsk I witnessed a solemn passing-out parade for young Russian military cadets, and was reassured by how deliberately bad they were at goose-stepping.

But for most Trans-Siberian travellers Irkutsk is primarily a stopping-off point on the way to Lake Baikal, an ecological treasure with a magical beauty. Baikal’s scale is immense: it is the world’s oldest and deepest lake, contains about one-fifth of the Earth’s surface fresh water, and is home to thousands of species found nowhere else. These include the world’s only freshwater seals, which manage to be desperately cute despite looking like over-inflated beach balls with wrinkly faces painted on. Listvyanka, the tourist village huddled on the lakeshore that caters for visitors from Irkutsk, is as depressing as any rundown British seaside town. But the moment you gaze out across Baikal, your heart leaps. Its vastness swallows up perspective and momentarily makes modern Russia’s disdain for its environment seem trivial. The lake freezes over to a depth of several metres from December to April, meaning you can walk across it, providing the creaking and cracking sounds don’t put you off. Russians don’t worry about trifling things like thin ice, and you often see them walking their dogs, having picnics and even driving lorries on the frozen lake.

From Irkutsk the Trans-Siberian route passes through the cities of Novosibirsk and Yekaterinburg, where a newly built cathedral consecrates the site on which the Bolsheviks murdered Tsar Nicholas and his family in 1918, before arriving in Moscow. Russia’s capital has plenty of its own charms – from the astounding Russian art collection in the Tretyakov Gallery to the original dog spacesuit in the Cosmonauts Museum – but I found myself missing the paradoxical warmth of Siberia and Siberians.

In the end what you take from a journey on the Trans-Siberian railway is the privilege of having been permitted to peer through Russia’s back windows. This, after all, is a country we know everything and nothing about. Passing through places marked by the suffering of the gulags and the dangerous idiocy of the Cold War is a grave history lesson. But the biggest revelations are the people you meet. Russians have an image problem: most of the time, the men look like they are about to hit you and the women look like they are about to betray you. And most Russian restaurant staff have perfected service with a scowl – locals told me the only eatery where you are guaranteed a smile is McDonald’s. But once you break the ice (vodka helps) Russians will sit up all night with you drinking, sharing their food, swapping jokes and setting the world to rights. Russia’s daunting immensity is condensed into human hopes and fears, and the vast country suddenly feels much smaller and much closer to home.