Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia
by David Greene
(Alma Books, £12.99)
An American radio journalist David Greene travelled on the Trans-Siberian railway – Russia’s ‘spine’ – talking to ‘ordinary’ folk about their cares and worries and about the state of the country. He is inquisitive, fascinated by Russia, and has a happy knack of getting people to talk frankly to him, despite the risks.
The conversations he reproduces here give a strong sense of a country adrift. The Soviet Union was a place of certainties. Those who opposed the state knew that their fate would be imprisonment, exile, or worse, while loyal or acquiescent citizens could expect jobs for life, free health care and free education. The Soviet state organised people’s lives for them and in doing so gave their lives meaning.
The new Russia, by contrast, offers no certainty, no security. It combines two of the worst aspects of the Soviet Union – stifling bureaucracy and vast, unaccountable security services – with widespread corruption and gangster capitalism. Unlike the Soviet Union it does not give citizens a sense of identity or belonging. In this country, there is “little to be proud of”, Greene concludes. Ideology, he notes, has given way to fatalism and confusion.
The onion domes of the churches that greet him in cities on the way to Vladivostok give solid expression to the religious revival the country has experienced since the fall of communism. But the return to religion may also reflect a desire to seek a meaning in life, a path through the chaos.
Despite the wrenching changes of the last two decades, a strong strand of continuity links the new Russia with the former Soviet Union. Soviet formality lingers on. In a restaurant one evening Greene’s wife asked a waitress for some butter to spread on her roll. Although her colleagues cooked with butter, the waitress explained that she couldn’t serve it to diners: it wasn’t specifically listed on the menu so she wouldn’t know how much to charge them for it.
Autocracy
Greene’s interviewees seem to prefer autocracy to democracy. In the cities, and in the depopulated countryside, people tell him that Russia needs a strong leader (someone “like Stalin” says Taisiya, a 69-year-old Siberian mother and environmentalist) to stamp out corruption.
There seems to be a general belief that only an autocrat can hold together a vast and diverse country (not for nothing is Putin’s party called United Russia), while the popular mind associates democracy with the calamitous decline of Russia under Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s.
Some of Greene’s most powerful passages describe the misery of life in winter in polluted industrial eastern Ukraine. The imposition of sanctions following Putin’s military adventures there – and the fall in the price of oil – may well hasten his political end. The gathering recession will further impoverish the people we meet in this engrossing book. And it may only worsen the deep sense of powerlessness afflicting them and their fellow Russians.