APRIL 27, 2019 – Last night I pulled from the shelf a small volume of short stories by Nikolai Gogol, translated into English. Inside the front cover I’d written, “Purchased in Moscow – October 3, 1981.” That was the day before the start of my seven-day rail journey across Russia—and seven days back—with layovers in Irkutsk and Khabarovsk. Given the duration of the trip, I’d thought it would be fun along the way to indulge in some Russian literature. For good measure, I bought an English version of Tolstoy’s work too—but stopped short of War and Peace.
As I poked my nose into The Nose before bed last night, I recalled some details of my trip itself.
Brezhnev was premier. Gorbachev was unknown, perestroika and glasnost, two obscure words locked inside lexicons. The Soviets were not quite two years into their decade-long disastrous misadventure in Afghanistan.
A few weeks before, I’d traveled all around Poland and experienced close up and first hand, the anti-communist revolution that had taken that country by storm. A principal “take-away” for me was the Poles’ pathological hatred of Russians.
As a result I decided to go to Russia itself to meet every-day Russians on their home turf. I figured the best way for me, an American, to accomplish that was aboard trains traveling the length of the vast country of czars and commissars.
In the event, I had to steal—not fill—time with Gogol and Tolstoy. Aboard the 18-carriage Trans-Siberian train, I visited with countless Russians of all ages and walks of life. The encounters far exceeded my expectations.
The train stopped scores of times in its 3,814-mile trip. Some stations were in cities I’d never heard of but with populations exceeding a million. Many other stops were at remote outposts of limited civilization.
Whenever new passengers boarded, word traveled fast that an American was aboard. As a curiosity, I attracted encounters quite easily.
With no common language but an abundance of time, we still communicated effectively. With my Russian-English lexicon, pocket world atlas, pen and paper, and self-devised hieroglyphics, we “conversed” at length. Sensitive to what topics were “no go” zones, I found indirect ways to the same topical objective.
Afghanistan was one such example. Dozens of times I asked about the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939, the crackdown on Hungary in 1956, the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Every single time my questions elicited the same “party line” response: “We had to defend ourselves.” But then I’d ask about Afghanistan. That brought a much different response–but again, everyone replied the same: “США [USA]—Vietnam; CCCP—Afghanistan.” I knew that wasn’t the “party line.”
How prescient that assessment proved to be—not only about the future of Russia and Afghanistan.
Maybe now it’s time to re-read War and Peace.
© 2019 Eric Nilsson
