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The great railway bizarre
Taiga forests, first class follies and a Slavic Lolita in short-shorts enliven the train journey that has no end.

Editor's Note:Part 4 of a five-part series.
Read Part 1
Read Part 2
Read Part 3

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By Rolf Potts

Nov. 12, 1999 | IRKUTSK to MOSCOW -- The reason most travel accounts of the Trans-Siberian train are so predictable and lifeless is that they lose their edge in the attempt to be earnest.

While in the perfumed death-grip of such optimistic sincerity, many a scribe has misled his readers with dandied visions of trans-continental reverie. Some wayward writers have committed this error by weaving the view from their train window into moony reflections about how Russian literature changed their lives. Others have tried to capture the mood of the country itself by minutely analyzing everything from their new Russian acquaintances, to whimsical encounters with the dining-car staff, to any experience involving obligatory vodka-shots.

A few rail-diarists -- the desperate -- try to validate their long hours on the train by bringing in marginally relevant trivia from the sights outside: how Tomsk is full of radioactive waste; how Taishet was once a Stalin-era forwarding camp for Siberian exiles; how Perm is home to a bicycle factory; or how Krasnoyarsk churns out refrigerators and car tires.

All of this is fine. But it falls far short of the train experience itself.

This is because a train trip across Siberia takes a very, very long time, and largely transpires in a small berth that rattles a lot, features fake-wood paneling and empties into a corridor full of antsy people who haven't bathed in days. If there is anything genuine to be communicated from this experience, it will certainly have very little to do with the novels of Boris Pasternak, the cook's opinion of Yevgeni Primakov or the dreadfully inefficient see-saw factories of Zuevka. Rather, if there is any revelation to be gleaned from spending several days on a single train, it will come from the bizarre details that lurk beneath the mundaneity of the trip itself.

This is what I'd convinced myself, at least, when my cousin Dan and I boarded the Moscow-bound train at Irkutsk.

After all, 81 hours on a train is a long time, and I didn't want 100 years of journalistic preconceptions to taint my experiences before they'd even happened.

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In January of 1899, the first regular Trans-Siberian train service began to take passengers from European Russia to Irkutsk -- "the Paris of Siberia" -- a thriving university town that was home to all manner of exiles, from "Decembrist" nobles to Polish nationals to avowed anarchists. At the time, the completion of this railroad line was a triumph -- since it aided settlement to the region, consolidated Russia's eastern claims against China and Japan, and opened up Siberia's rich natural resources (such as timber, gold and coal). Just 10 years earlier, transportation conditions to the Russian Far East were so abysmal that it was actually faster to get from Vladivostok to Moscow by going east via the United States than it was to travel west across Russia itself.

In the early days of the railroad, the Moscow-Irkutsk run often took over a week to complete; our 1999 timetable put the journey at three and a half days. Since we'd traveled the first two legs out of Beijing and Ulan Bator in second class, Dan and I decided -- for reasons of both comfort and curiosity -- to splurge on a first class upgrade for the Moscow-bound haul.

At first blush, the environment of the first class car seemed a mild disappointment -- not because of the berths (which were clean and comfortable) or the provodnitsas (who were helpful and pleasant), but because of the company. When I'd first purchased the upgrade, I'd imagined my fellow first-class travelers as spy-novel grist: corpulent Russian mob-types with anorexic supermodel girlfriends; snooty French diplomats with snarling lapdogs; bespectacled English ethnologists with fascinating tales about the Finno-Urgic Udmurts of the Siberian plain. In reality, our first class car was mostly populated with elder-hostel tourists from places like Minneapolis and Tempe.

Over the course of the trip, of course, these folks would prove far more baffling and contradictory than a train-full of spies.

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