THE TRANS-SIBERIAN EXPRESS: A RAIL JOURNEY FROM MOSCOW TO VLADISVOSTOK

As I waited to board the Trans-Siberian Express in Moscow's Yaroslav station, I leaned back against a wall and peered up at a cold white bust of Lenin perched atop a pedestal in the middle of the terminal.

With all of the changes I had read about in Russia, I hadn't expected to see him around so much. Yet here he was again in another prominent place staring into space with his usual stern expression of defiance. Watching as hundreds of waiting Russians milled about indifferently under this once venerated face, I wondered if many other prospects regarding the sights and experiences of this journey would be as far off target as my expectations of seeing little of Lenin.

I had hoped this trip would give me a greater understanding of Russia than what I had gleaned from books and articles. However, as I surveyed the passive scene around the pedestal, it occurred to me that this journey might afford as many questions as answers about this enigmatic country. With the first Cyrillic syllable from a scratchy boarding announcement, I grabbed my pack, clenched my ticket stub in my teeth, and joined everyone else in a tidal rush through the doors of the terminal to the waiting train.

Lugging the pack into the jammed aisle of my assigned carriage, I smiled amusingly at how different reality always turns out to be from preconceived notions of foreign travel.

If anything, I had expected the start of this railway journey across the vast expanses of Russia to be somewhat more orderly, perhaps accompanied by soothing background strains of Rachmaninoff or Tchaikovsky. Instead, here I was bumping and shoving through the crowd on one of the most exotic trains in the world with Michael Jackson being piped into the carriages from a local top-40 radio station.

After about three selections from the Thriller album I was finally able to locate my correct compartment, toss my pack in a heap on my bunk and settle in.

A few minutes later the sound of the engine whistle echoed down the platform and the train sluggishly edged forward, pulling out of the station with me speculating about the shape I'd be in after a few days of Slavic disc jockeys counting off the hits. Fortunately, the top-40 broadcast died out just past the city limits, but the already revealed penchant of the Trans-Siberian for tampering with preconceived ideas was to continue all the way to Russia's Far East. Spanning an incredible seven time zones from Moscow to Vladisvostok on the Sea of Japan, the Trans-Siberian railway stretches 5,800 miles, nearly a quarter of the way around the world.

While taking this journey is considered by many to be one of the few true rail adventures left in the world, it is not for everyone. It's one of those curious endeavors in life which you're glad to have over but you're nonetheless glad you experienced; a trip you somehow remember with growing fondness as the period of time between its completion and the present widens.

Having been conditioned by train travel in the United States where terrain can change during the course of a dining car meal, I remained glued to my compartment window for the first couple of days of the journey, anxious to see as much of the mysterious Russian steppes as I could. Flowing past the carriage window was a land of broad fields sprinkled with wildflowers and bordered by white birch trees; a wavy, open countryside of pastoral beauty and agricultural promise but also lacking much in the way of topographical relief, a landscape kind of like Nebraska.

As the miles passed and the tedium of the steppes began to sink in, I found myself drifting in and out of light naps, an occurrence I thought peculiar considering how much I had looked forward to this trip. Mindful of the fact that the course to Vladivostok would take a full seven days and nights, I was coming to realize why travel writer Paul Theroux in his book, "The Great Railway Bazaar," compared the passage to being in bed for a week with a high fever.

The route is so long, and the rhythmic clacking of the train rolling along the tracks is so hypnotic that time on the Trans-Siberian tends to melt into something of a blur with one day running into another.

These influences, coupled with the Russian practice of keeping railway schedules by Moscow time, act to thoroughly confuse the synch between your body's internal clock and the mind. The result is a fuzzy sort of "train lag," which slowly heightens with the crossing of each time zone on the way to the Sea of Japan.

Early on during the trip I had tried to shorten the hours by reading, playing chess, or taking repeated walks through the length of the train.

But, along with most everyone else, I discovered that aside from looking out the window and watching the constant ribbon of Russia stream by, the most effective, often involuntary device for quickening the passage of time was sleep.

With a good portion of its passengers dozing away in a snoring-accentuated state of suspended animation, the train makes as many as ninety stops across Russia. Only one or two a day, though, at larger towns like Sverdlovsk and Omsk are long enough for passengers to hobble out, stretch and perhaps buy from a sparse, amusingly odd variety of goods with such assorted offerings as dried fish, Snickers bars, unhomogenized milk, and Pepsi available at station kiosks. Other than that, the train continues a steady, or as a bleary eyed Russian soldier struggling with English and staring vacantly out a window succinctly put it, "monoto," progression to the Far East.

It is possible to break-up the trip by taking a few days off in places such as Novosibirsk, the largest city in Siberia, or more attractive Irkutsk with its Decembrists houses and location near sparkling Lake Baykal, the deepest freshwater lake in the world.

For me, the idea of making an unbroken journey across this enormous, wide sky country had an appeal all its own. As the train ambles on at an average speed of about forty miles an hour to the east of the Ural Mountains, the landscape gradually changes from open steppe to what the Russians call taiga, unending forests of birch and pine trees extending to the horizon in every direction.

When you recognize that Siberia, that part of Russia east of the Urals, takes up enough space to contain all of the United States and Europe combined, you get some idea of how seemingly infinite these forests appear. Although broken by hundreds of rivers, occasional cities and small ramshackle hamlets along the rail line, Siberia gives you the distinct feeling that to somehow tumble off the train would simply be a drier version of falling off a ship in the middle of the ocean.

Seeing this immense, silent wilderness and thinking of the thousands of individuals, Dostoevski, Solzhenitzyn, even Lenin and Stalin among them, exiled to Siberia since deportations began toward the end of the sixteenth century, one gets a fleeting grasp of the despair and acute feeling of isolation confronting those sent from the populous West.

Despite having studied maps prior to this journey, I was particularly surprised by how relatively constant the terrain remained, not only on the steppes, but all the way to Vladivostok. The portions of the route along the shores of Lake Baykal do, indeed, justify many a Russian's pride in the near pristine beauty of the glimmering lake, and the route through the tunnels and winding around the low mountains of eastern Siberia is dramatic, but I cannot say there were any sights remotely approaching the knock your socks off caliber of, say, the Grand Canyon.

The impressiveness and natural beauty of this rail journey lie more in its sheer length and the dark, unfathomable forests along the way. The first proposal for a railway across Siberia carne from an American entrepreneur, Perry McDonough Collins, in the late 1850's. Owing to provincial politics, unending financial squabbling, and the engineering difficulties associated with the gargantuan project, this first and several subsequent proposals failed. It was not until the 1880's during the reign of Tsar Alexander III that initial construction of the railway took place.

From that point, due primarily to the extremely severe climatic conditions in Siberia, the line from Moscow to Vladisvostok was not finally completed until the 1920's. Although the rail line is an awesome engineering marvel, one of the most interesting aspects of the Trans-Siberian is the unique opportunity it gives a Westerner to independently see a large slice of Russia and learn about the country today, a country that has continued its wrenching course to change since I took this journey in August.

Whether taken during the warm summer months or during the bitter, snow swept Siberian winter this rail trek will starkly illustrate as no T.V. or news report can the rough conditions and contradictions that are so much a part of Russia.

Contrary to my misgivings in the Moscow train station, this journey did allow me a broader view and an enhanced understanding of this confusing country. But, as I had anticipated, the rail trip also exhibited many baffling realities. The glaring contrasts and rock hard living standards in Russia are abundantly obvious to any Trans-Siberian traveller.

In this the first nation to put a man in space the number of farmers swinging sickles in the fields still vastly outnumbered the relatively few tractors viewed throughout the trip. And, in this country where the government for decades devoted obscene percentages of the gross domestic product to creating such modern military machines as the MIG-25, able to fly at three times the speed of sound, the consequent dismal state of consumer production is evidenced by shortages of such basic goods as bread and soap.

Among the people of this land, a land so rich in natural and human resoures but so poor in many other ways, there is a saying that "Russians love to suffer" .

In viewing the long swath of Russia covered by the Trans-Siberian, one comes to believe there is some truth to the adage. A few Russians I spoke with did express a determination to better their economic lot. But, in the face of their tough living conditions and the myriad bureaucratic barriers still standing in the way of capitalistic initiative, most of the Russians I met exhibited a kind of patient stoicism and resigned acceptance that things are simply the way they are. The inconsistencies which permeate Russian life extend from national concerns to the more mundane and were illustrated by the accommodations on the train itself.

Contrary to my expectations, the carriages on the Trans-Siberian were immaculately kept by gregarious, potentially formidable women attendants who had berths at the end of each car.

After witnessing the wrath one of these pravadniks brought down upon a smoker who had absent mindedly thrown his cigarette butt in the hallway, the shipshape state of the train car became less of a puzzle. To avoid a similar tangle with the attendant myself, I immediately resolved to be exceedingly careful about litter for the duration of the journey.

I have no doubt that everyone else on the carriage did the same. Depending on one's preference, bookings can be made in either first class - two to a compartment, or second � four to a compartment.

Remembering previous rail excursions with compartment mates preoccupied with such pastimes as examining fungal infections of their feet, I opted for first class passage. I luckily ended up at various stages of the journey with three different Russians all of whom were exceptionally pleasant, spoke varying degrees of English, and had no foot problems.

As I was the only native English speaker on my carriage, and surprisingly on the train as far as I could tell, the opportunity to pick up a little Russian and immediately try it out on my fellow travellers turned out to be an enjoyable, occasionally comical way to pass the time. While the train carriages were quite comfortable, other areas were in such awful shape that the only thing to do was shrug and laugh them off.

This was the case with the dining car and food which were all I had been forewarned they would be; culinary territory only for the very brave.

Upon viewing the interior of the dining car on my train, I was amazed to see that the whole place, tables, seats, windows, everything, had a thin coating consisting of roughly equal portions of grease, nicotine, and remnants of meals probably served when Brezhnev was in power.

I stuck my head in the kitchen and nearly cracked up upon seeing the cook, a rather ample woman (who come to think of it looked a bit like Brezhnev's daughter) wearing "a crumpled white chef's hat, a burnt-out cigarette hanging from her lips, sitting asleep on a large up-ended pot with her forearm and head resting on the edge of a sink over-flowing with dirty dishes.

That sight, set jiggling along the tracks amidst a constant din of flies, was all I needed to decide that I would rely on the samovar at the end of my carriage and the food I'd thought to bring along.

I was awakened and nearly thrown from my bunk by the gravelly screech and sudden lunge of the train recoupling carriages in a railway yard as it had done a couple of dozen or so times before on this trip.

It was just before dawn. I lifted my head from the pillow, cleared the window with a dirty bandanna, and faintly saw through the morning fog and drizzle that the station clock read 10:50 P.M., Moscow time. Half asleep, I tried to figure out what day it was by recounting them on my fingers.

Looking forward to a hot shower and a square meal, I then smiled contentedly in confirming to myself, "Today we hit Vladisvostok!" As I glanced over to see that the sleeping Russian in the opposite bunk remained nearly comatose just as he'd been for the past twelve hours, I wondered for a moment how long he could stay under, then drifted back to sleep.

About three hours and a hundred and twenty miles later, I stirred again, rose a bit to make sure that the Russian was breathing, then sat up and waited with great "anticipation for the first signs of the east coast. Riding on the Trans-Siberian on this rainy morning, I thought of the Moscow train station which now seemed a world away.

Somehow, I felt like much more than a mere seven days had passed. During that time I had met many Russians, most on a fleeting basis as they shuttled for a day or two between cities.

Despite the knowledge that our meetings were inevitably once in a lifetime encounters, all had been warm, friendly and anxious to help me with advice on travelling in their country.

It was odd to think that only a few years before my country and theirs could have bombed one another to oblivion. Finally, the Russian awoke, groggily rubbed the sleep from his eyes, sat up straight and immediately began slicing a cucumber and bread for a sandwich, half of which he cheerfully offered me. The train lumbered up another rise just as it had done hundreds of times since leaving Moscow.

The crest of this one, though, revealed a broad panorama of cloud draped whitecaps stretching off in the distance into misty open water. Momentarily placing our sandwiches on a small compartment table, the Russian and I shook hands congratulating ourselves on reaching the shores of the Sea of Japan.

Two days before, I couldn't wait for this trip to end so I could get off what was then "this damn train". Now, I was actually having feelings of nostalgia about the journey. As a final long blast "from the engine whistle died away, the Trans-Siberian slowly pulled into the station in Vladisvostok, while everyone hurriedly gathered their bags, exchanged a few addresses and said their goodbyes.

I slung my pack over my shoulder and joined the crunch leading off the train. Walking along the station platform, I thought of the thousands of miles of this trip, and how each element of it, even the grease coated dining car, was part of the experience and overall adventure of the journey.

I then turned around and stepped away from the current of the baggage-laden crowd rushing to the terminal. Looking back to survey the length of the train, I wondered what the trip would be like in winter.

From a 1994 article by Scott Shelton for the Virginian Pilot (Norfolk). The journey was taken in 1993.