We had booked 3rd class tickets for this part of the journey which means you are in an open carriage with dozens of other people, each with their own bunk. The trains in Russia are mostly clean and comfortable and each carriage has a manager called a provodnitsa who is responsible for order and cleanliness. This was a nice contrast to British trains where the only people on board are the driver and the person in the shop who will sell groups of lads vast quantities of Stella and then abandon the passengers to their fate.
It's important to note that the 'Express' part of the title for this journey was abandoned long ago and that the 'Trans-Siberian Amble' may be more appropriate with an average speed of under 50 mph. This is not necessarily a bad thing because it gives you a sense of contemplation and the kind of free time to talk, think and read that it's often hard to find in the busy shuffle of daily life. You can attempt that Russian novel you've never got around to reading, get intimate views of small, anonymous towns where the children go to school on skis and 2000 mile rivers are frozen all the way up to the Arctic Sea. The majority of the views out of the train windows are vast empty snowscapes which creep by with monotonous beauty. The bright winter sunshine reflects off the snow and the barks of silver birch trees making everything sparkle.
We were very lucky that for this journey we were sat with some really friendly Russian people and one person who spoke a little English.
One girl, Eena, was around 30 and was a nurse in an Aids Hospital in Norilsk which is an industrial town in the Arctic Circle which is known for Nickel mining. There was Tonya who was a Grandma and was from Yekaterinburg and spent a lot of the journey knitting. Then there were Artur and Ivan (my namesake) who came from Kazan, which is in between Moscow and Yekaterinburg and has a large muslim population and a beautiful mosque that we saw from train. Artur was a fireman with incredible boots. They were proper big fire-retardent boots with uber-warm felt lining. He mocked our trainers as being unfit for a Siberia winter and we feared for our toes. He also managed to beat me at chess within about 5 minutes. I sat staring at the board for minutes on end with sweat forming on my forehead from the intense concentration, meanwhile Artur would come back from making his bed and make a move which swept away my defences after 10 second's consideration.
As the guide book informed us is often the case with meeting Russian people, the conversation turned to money and the cost of living. The general impression we got was that wages in Russia for most people don't meet the costs of living. It seems that things have improved for some people since the economic turmoil of the late nineties but there was certainly anger at the epic scale of corruption in Russian society which seems to have turned from a totalitarian communist state to a totalitarian capitalist state within a very short space of time. The average worker in Russia is forced to spend half their wage on gas while the oligarchs that control the industries expolit their privatised monopolies to extract as much money from people as they wish and use it to buy mansions and football clubs abroad. As soon as we told people we were from England they would say: "Ambramovich"; "Chelsea" and shake their heads in annoyance at the state of their country.
We got a very good impression of Russian people from this journey. They are very kind, generous and open and will share whatever they have with you and go to extraordinary lengths to help poor clueless English tourists who barely speak Russian. I suppose sharing and helping other people is essential in a society where so many people have so little.
At the end of the journey Tonya inisisted on taking the time to walk us to our hotel near the station in -20 degree cold because she feared we would get lost on the way.
Photos for this journey can be found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianwhitfield/sets/72157603739778692/
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