A Woman in Russia

A WOMAN IN RUSSIA

by

Victoria del la Varis

Published by Victoria del la Varis at Smashwords

Copyright Victoria del la Varis, 2012

Certain names have been changed by the author, for the sake of certain people's privacy.

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This book is dedicated to my sister, Chimene.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Vladivostok, Far Eastern Russia

Chapter 2 - Xhabarovsk

Chapter 3 - Amursk

Chapter 4 - Komsomolsk on the Amur River

Chapter 5 - On the Train to Tynda

Chapter 6 – Chita

Chapter 7 – Krasnoyarsk

Chapter 8 - Ulan Ude

Chapter 9 - Arshan

Chapter 10 - Irkutsk

Chapter 11 - Tomsk

Chapter 12 - Omsk, City of Exiles

Chapter 13 - On the Train to Tobolsk

Chapter 14 - Yekaterinburg

Chapter 15 - Vladimir & Suzdal

Chapter 16 – Moscow

Introduction

A Woman in Russia, describes my 2010 journey across Russia by Trans-Siberian train. Abandoning for a while, my New Zealand rural and family life, I revisited Russia to learn what the country was like, twenty years after the fall of communism.

Travelling across Russia is arduous. It is the largest country in the world, at seventeen million kilometres square. I found myself in predicaments: Russian women harangued me, Russian men were confused by me. The outcome of this journey, however, was learning that everywhere humanity is the same: complex, pithy, and fallible.

I wrote this book based on my travel diary, weaving notes on Russian history, literature, and facts of Russian life into the narrative.

The way I learnt Russian is quite interesting. I began at high school and continued my studies at Auckland University, New Zealand, where the Russian Department seemed to be an institution of the cold war. My professors hid in their offices; they might have been cultivating anthrax. I never met a real live Russian. I heard them speak through headphones in the language laboratory.

In 1989, I got behind the Iron Curtain just before communism self-combusted. Four years later, in 1993, I visited Russia again. I imagined I would hop on trains and bob along in river boats, in a post-communist, liberal Russia. My timing, however, was wrong. Russia, in 1993, was deranged.

I fell in love with a farmer in 1996, and moved to the north of New Zealand to live on a farm. I continued to learn Russian by singing Russian lullabies to my baby boys, teaching them basic words as toddlers, and studying passages on Soviet scientific atheism by night, when I had finished hanging out nappies and picked up the toys. I found those difficult passages were useful to get my tongue around long Russian words.

A Woman in Russia also represents a personal victory. When the opportunity came, in May 2010, to retrace my first faltering steps across Russia – I took it.

I could not have made the second journey without the support of my husband Doug, and the strength I had acquired in the meantime, becoming a mother.

Chapter 1

Vladivostok

Population 610,000

Vladivostok is a Russian seaport city on the shores of the Sea of Japan, with sea mists, the rusty, sulking confusion that comes with shipping, vintage European buildings, and a train station lined with marble. The station is the Eastern Terminus of the great Trans-Siberian Railway that crosses all of Russia. Behind the station ocean liners dock alongside a pier and passengers disembark to purchase Russian souvenirs in a shopping mall replete with the comforts of globalization. Brand-name bags, snakeskin wallets, golf shoes, ginseng, and royal jelly await sale. Across the road in a small square, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin stands on a plinth.

The Bolshevik has a cap in his hand and a pigeon perching on his bald head. He points his finger at a building covered with neon and billboards, and it is true, the building needs a good clean. Sometimes, the pigeon prefers to sit on Lenin's accusing finger.

Sausages, salamis, cheese, and fruit, sit on trestle tables in front of Lenin. The

market-wares reveal that shortages are no more, communism is dead, raw capitalism has arisen, and, you are now in Vladivostok at the brink of the Russian realm, where everything costs!

It's a short stroll to 'The Fighters of the Revolution Square', more simply known as, Central Square.

Every May 9, guided missile systems; artillery mounts; infantry combat vehicles; military seamen; frontier guards, and soldiers of the Far Eastern District parade on Central Square for Victory Day, to celebrate Russia's victory over the Germans in World War Two.

Otherwise, just three monuments occupy the square. They honour the Fighters for Soviet Power in the Far East. One fighter operates his field gun; another stands; another strides; two clutch their rifles, and the last fighter waves his cap. There is one female fighter. She holds a bundle.

The tallest of the monuments displays a male soldier, trumpet and unfurled banner held in his hands. Presiding over Golden Horn Bay, he is the symbolic soldier who, trumpet blaring, led the Reds to victory against the Whites, in the last major battle of the Russian Civil War.

The Russian Civil War, 1918-1922

Russia, in 1918, was in a state of chaos. The Civil War that raged across Russia was a clash of two ideologies: capitalism and communism. A battle for political and philosophical supremacy was being fought to the death on Russian soil.

Russia fought in the First World War on the side of the British and the French against Germany. Conditions on the front line, and the colossal loss of life amongst the ill-equipped Russian soldiers led to desertion by the thousands. This, coupled with food and staples shortages in the cities, led to the Bolshevik revolution and the eventual withdrawal of Russia from the war. Communist Russia, the Bolsheviks said, wanted no further part in the capitalists' conflict. However, Russia had an internal battle yet to fight. Russians began fighting Russians, to decide Russia's political and ideological fate. This time it wasn't only the cities that starved: food and supplies ran out across the whole of Russia.

Petrograd (St Petersburg) and Moscow, were held by the communist Bolsheviks, but across the rest of Russia, Anti-Bolshevik forces assembled. They called themselves the 'Whites'. The Russians in the White force were former officers of the Russian army and loyal soldiers; Socialist Revolutionaries who wanted democratic reform; Cossacks and anarchists who hated the Bolsheviks; and Tsarists who wanted to put the monarchy back in place. Then there were Czechs, Austro-Hungarians, and Finnish partisans, who joined the Whites to fight the Reds.

The White leaders didn't want a communist dictatorship, they wanted democratic process. The Provisional Government, briefly established after the abdication of Tsar Nikolai I, had offered a taste of what might have been, if Lenin's Bolsheviks hadn't ousted it. When Lenin signed for peace with Germany – The Treaty of Brest-Litovst, March 3, 1918 – the Russians deserted the Allies. Lenin expected the revolution to spread world-wide. He called for workers and soldiers of every nation to rise up and overthrow their capitalist governments.

Western governments acted. British, French, and American forces landed in Archangelsk and Murmansk. Japanese troops mobilised in Vladivostok. American troops joined the Japanese and stockpiled weapons there.

The Allies promised the thousands of Czech prisoners-of-war, stranded in Russia after the peace treaty, an independent Czech state, if they continued to fight the Germans in France. The Allies dispatched the Czechs eastwards to Vladivostok, to waiting transport ships. The Czechs never made it. Russian Army deserters by the thousands, civil chaos, and rail disruptions choked the Trans-Siberian Railway. The stranded Czechs formed a legion and joined the cause of the Whites. They took over sections of the railway.

The Bolsheviks were not to be defeated. Lenin's sidekick, Leon Trotsky, proved himself a

military strategist: he galvanised a fighting force from the shreds of the Russian army. This became, 'The Red Army'.

The Civil War, Reds against Whites, waged in strategic locations across Russia – from Estonia, and Petrograd (St Petersburg), in the north, to the Ukraine in the south. From Yekaterinburg, in the Ural mountains (the frontier of European Russia), to the Russian Far East. Russians murdered each other across the steppe, in Siberian villages and towns, beside rivers, along train lines. Both sides slaughtered, tortured, torched. Both sides ransacked the produce of the peasantry. The bewildered people withheld planting their grain. Then followed starvation. The Civil War precipitated the 1921-1922 famine, in which millions of Russians perished.

July 1918, mid-summer, Russia. On the night of the 17th, in a merchant's house in the city of Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, Bolshevik soldiers shot on command, the Tsar and Tsarina, their four daughters and haemophiliac son, the family cook, the Tsarina's lady-in-waiting, the Tsar's valet, and the family doctor.

Red Army soldiers transported the bodies by horse-cart to a disused mine. They threw the bodies down the mine. An acid specialist was dispatched to eradicate the corpses, but he had a mishap and was prevented from doing his work, so the bodies were lifted from the mine and buried in a secret location in a wood.

Lenin ordered the royals' execution, because he feared the Tsar might become the rallying cause of the Whites. Eight days after the Romanov murders, the Whites did indeed reach Yekaterinburg.

Finally, on October 25, 1922, in Vladivostok, after four years of fighting, the Russian Civil War ended. The bronze monuments to the 'Fighters' on Central Square, not only embody the Red Army's victory, but they also represent Russia's tragic history of brutal communism, fratricide and regicide. At the end of the Russian Civil War, there were four million more Russian women than men.

Vladivostok's Problems

Vladivostok is polluted. Two suburbs in particular have been declared ecological disaster zones. The pollution is caused by industry and coal-power; it is exacerbated by the lack of snow to settle the dust, and by the formation of the harbour, which traps the contaminated air. Nowhere in this city is it healthy to live, according to Boris Preobrazhensky, an eco-scientist at the Pacific Institute of Geography.

At this very minute, three smoke stacks are belching smoke over Vladivostok. So dark is the sky above the apartment blocks, so decayed is the urban sprawl, that beyond the buildings clustered at the harbour, the rest of the city resembles a doomed world.

Vladivostok's smoke-stacks will continue to spew for the foreseeable future. In September 2012, the APEC Summit was held in Vladivostok. The Kremlin bankrolled a hasty lick-and-spit job of the city. Dignitaries did not see how filthy were the First or Second Rivers, or the how the human need for shelter has created towering emblems of shame.

From the 1950’s until 1991 foreigners were denied the pleasures of visiting Vladivostok. Visitors and foreign shipping were prohibited because of the city’s military significance as the Soviet Pacific Naval Base. Nowadays, though the city is once again open, tourists don’t visit the suburbs because they are full of ugly apartment buildings and broken bottles.

In 2004 the dashingly handsome Vladimir Nikolayev, a high-flying businessman with shipping

and fisheries interests specialising in the illegal export of seafood and timber, became mayor of Vladivostok. Nikolayev's mayoral victory was made thoroughly certain when his number one opponent tripped on a grenade left outside his office. It did not quite kill him.

In 2007 Mayor Nikolayev was jailed for corruption and fraud by the Vladivostok City Court. The Kremlin decided that year to clean up Russia’s corruption.

Arriving at the premises of Living Hope Charitable Trust

May 17

After collecting me from Vladivostok airport in a minivan and navigating a busy, third-world-rough, six-lane carriageway for twenty minutes, Rachel Hughes, the Director of Living Hope, turns down a pot-holed lane, through a leafy zone with quintessential Russian houses sitting amongst the foliage. The houses are made of logs. Their windows are trimmed with painted boards.

Rachel calls on her cell to say we are nearly there. She asks for the gates to be opened. We drive over a bridge which has structural bits missing. A steel gate open,s we enter the compound of Living Hope. The building is large and pink, an orangey-pink. The young man who opens the gates and closes them, is called Denis. Rachel pronounces his name the Russian way: Den-eez.

Denis is swarthy with black eyes that look in opposite directions. His face has scars and acne, and scars from acne.

He carries my suitcase of donations, staggering up the sweeping staircase ahead of me. At the top of the stairs is an enormous window. There is the river below and the trees. Girls’ dresses and tiny pairs of tights are draped over the balustrade.

Rachel follows me up the stairs, growling about everything. Firstly, she's angry about Denis being drunk. She says that Denis has had his last warning. Any more drinking and he's out. By that, I guess she means out on the street.

And then she is unhappy about the clothes in the entrance-way. She says she has told the girls before, not to dry clothes there.

We go into a wide corridor with doors on each side. My room is the first on the left.

A huge mirror covers one wall, a double bed is in front of it. A large window looks down on the dismal car park area and the steel gates. No curtains. On the opposite wall are shelves with cardboard boxes of Living Hope’s files, dated 2007, 2008. The building was an upmarket brothel, Rachel says.

That explains the mirror. I look at myself for a minute. I'm standing beside a much taller and larger Rachel, who wears boots with six inch heels. I'm wearing jeans and hiking shoes, and a blue merino jersey. I wonder what other figures this mirror has reflected.

The Russian light is sombre. I remember the institutional smell: a blend of floor polish, mouldy basement, and beef broth – the distillation of Russia. It is in my nostrils again. I am smelling it, here, at Living Hope, a shelter for Vladivostok's street-kids, set up by Rachel, a Kiwi from Tauranga, in a building where once women traded their bodies to men.

Rachel interrupts my thoughts.

'I want to use this room to teach dance classes to the kids,' she says.

For some reason, into my head springs an image of a young ballerina. But the ballerina isn't a Vladivostok street urchin. This is an image I remember from a book I won in high school, when I came first in Russian and won the Pushkin Prize. The book I received as a prize, was a Soviet propaganda picture-book, full of photos of healthy Russians and Soviet achievements. There were photos of combine harvesters, golden fields of wheat, and astronauts. And there was a photo of a dainty Russian ballerina at the bar. The long foreword described Soviet history:

But at the same time there was another Russia. A country of deep thought and bold dreams. A country rich with people of noble aspirations and generosity of spirit, prepared to make any sacrifice, to suffer any deprivation, for the people's happiness, in the struggle for victory. The revolution took decades to mature in the country. It smouldered in peasant uprisings, in the selflessness of the Decembrist-Revolutionaries from among the nobility, who came out against tsarist autocracy, in the inflamed articles by revolutionary democrats and in strikes and demonstrations by workers. All that was best, most progressive and noble in the Russian revolutionary movement was absorbed by the party of communists, the party of the Bolsheviks. Armed with the scientific theory of Marxism-Leninism, the Bolsheviks became the recognised militant vanguard of the revolutionary forces.

Born of the October Revolution, 1977

In the kitchen, I look in the pot to see what blonde Natasha, one of the four Natashas at Living Hope, is cooking. She has picked some greens from the side of the road on the way to the shelter, and she washes them and tosses them into the soup that later will be served to we three Kiwi volunteers and other Russians living at the shelter.

'These greens are full of nutrients,' Natasha says.

'The soup looks delicious,' I say, trying not to think about the filth of the road. Natasha beams at me.

This is the recipe, as Natasha, standing at the stove stirring the pot, tells me. The greens are named, ‘cheremsha.’ They are similar to spinach, but they have a garlicky smell. The soup is called Solyanka.

Natasha’s Solyanka (beef soup), with Cheremsha

2 onions, chopped

2 chopped potatoes

6 cups water

3 cups brisket, sliced

4 tsp Tomato purée

1 pickled cucumber, chopped

1 bay leaf

pinch salt& pepper

greens: Cheremsha (which taste like garlic chives), or garlic chives.

Method:Cook the onions and beef in the water for 1 hour, then add potatoes and cook gently for further 20 minutes. Add tomato purée and chopped cucumber and cook a further 10 minutes. Lastly add chopped cheremsha, just before serving.

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I have been asked by Natasha, the Director of Administration, to join them in the office at 9.30 tomorrow, for morning prayers.

May 18

It feels like food is scarce and the world is famished, because downstairs in the kitchen where they feed all the people at this place, I can't see much food. There are hunks of Russian bread, the usual grey bread with a brown crust, and the loaf has been cut into slices and then halves, as it always is, and, although I love Russian rye bread, I panic at the thought that bread is all there is.

I look into cupboards. The contents: tea, sugar, packets of dried herbs, bouillon cubes, and one packet of pasta.

I notice that David and Dillan have their own supplies for breakfast, namely: butter, Marmite and honey. Denis has made a big pot of oatmeal, (which the Russians call kasha), for general consumption. But that is it, in the culinary department at Living Hope this morning. I better get to town to buy some food, or I'll starve.

Morning Prayers

I sit on a chair, in the crowded office that resembles any office the world over with its paraphernalia – computers, calendars, pots of pens and rolling chairs at each of the four work stations. Except the days and months on the calendar are Russian words, and there is a workday-prayer scroll hanging beside the door into Rachel’s office, also in Russian, asking God for His Blessing and Guidance in the striving to be honest, hard-working, and kind to colleagues.

I wait for whatever is going to happen, to happen. In the meantime, I look at the view.

A brown river dawdles, the ramshackle bridge spans it, trees grow along the road, beside the river.