Riding the Trans-Siberian Railway

On a dark Sunday night, with hints of moisture floating down on indifferent passersby, I stood in front of a trio of train stations in Moscow, mentally preparing to ride the Trans-Siberian railway. The streets were gloomy — it’s a noticeable attribute that doesn’t steal from the city’s splendor and prestigious might.

In Moscow, towering cathedrals intermingle with stoic Soviet-style apartment blocks and government buildings. The stark red walls of the Kremlin lie within a stone’s throw of modern retailers and the bridge where an opposition politician was murdered. Moscow is at once terrifying and captivating, and my short visit to the capital was a fitting prelude for a trip to Siberia to round out spring break.

I stood at the confluence of Leningradsky, Kazansky and Yaroslavsky stations, mentally preparing for a journey covering thousands of miles. I would be disembarking in Irkutsk — a city in Eastern Siberia — four days later, before flying back to St. Petersburg a few days later. There were no overnight stoppages, or showers, on the way. For the next half-week I would be consigned to a metal tube on wheels, which was incredibly exciting.  

I entered Yaroslavsky station, into a well-lit hall that countered the shadowy streets outside. There was the normal hodgepodge of passengers with backpacks, beat-up suitcases, grocery bags overflowing with instant noodles and salami and the odd wooden post that induced mild irritation when it was time to pass through the X-ray machines. We walked through metal detectors that invariably beeped and whistled, but the police officers paid no mind.

After an hour of waiting, a combination of sitting on the floor and thumb-twiddling, the platform number flashed on the video board. I gathered my backpacks — one for books and one for clothes — and boarded the silver-colored train, the final step to a journey that had sparked my enthusiasm for Russia in the first place. Have you ever dreamed of something so far away it never seems possible? This was my impossible dream, now emerging in reality.

I had booked a second-class compartment, known as a kupe in Russian, and it was on the whole a rather nice setup. There were four sleeping berths. The lower berths could transform into plush blue seats. The upper berths, where I was, had enough cushion to make sleeping a relatively easy affair. There was a TV hooked to the wall above the door, personal channel controls, a large window, a table, an outlet that didn’t always work and nicely pressed sheets and blankets that were included with the ticket.

The kupe was located in the second-class train car, with other compartments spanning its entire length. Outside the compartments was a narrow, carpet-lined corridor, just wide enough to fit a person and a half. There was a handrail and windows for our viewing pleasure. The bathrooms were set at the end of the car. Despite the horrifying cliches about train toilets, I experienced no real issues besides almost falling in one time.

Life on the train resembled a neighborhood, with dozens of people living and passing the time in their own little “homes” next to one another. I was one of the few passengers taking the train mainly for the journey itself and not so much for the destination. The train was usually only a means to an end. This was made clear by my first “roommates,” an older woman and her young son returning to Yekaterinburg after a holiday in Moscow. They weren’t especially talkative, even with each other, and I gathered enough to sense they were focused more on life outside the train than within.

They disembarked in the middle of the night, part of a rather large passenger turnover at every major station. In Omsk — the city where Dostoyevsky was exiled for allegedly circulating socialist literature — I was joined by another family, this time a husband, a wife and their 4-year-old son. The man introduced himself with a firm handshake, and following a tradition I’ve found remarkably persistent in Russia, proceeded to step outside for a quick smoke before the train departed. His wife, a pleasant woman named Dasha, spent most of her time wrangling with the 4-year-old, which proved rather amusing.

I chatted a bit with Dasha and discovered they were going to Khabarovsk, a city in the Russian Far East, to see their relatives. She waxed poetic about the blood-freezing temperatures of Omsk, her hometown, and laughed when I expressed how uncomfortable I was after transplanting myself from the Arizona desert to St. Petersburg at the start of the year. (This conversation just confirmed what I learned soon after landing in Russia for the first time — people here talk about the weather as much as anything else.) Invariably, her son would chime in, wanting to play games on her phone or demanding to receive a car for his birthday. Children have the same designs everywhere, it seems.

If my compartment was the place for sleeping and small talk, the dining car was the place for just about everything else. Upon entering it, a quick hop from my own car, I was struck by the colors. The curtains and tablecloths were a deep maroon, and the flowers placed on every table bloomed every shade imaginable, from orange-yellow to a stoic dark green. For the next half-week, I came to appreciate this vibrancy as the perfect setting for drinking coffee (and some vodka, of course) and looking out the window — all while strange Michael Jackson covers played in the background.

The Trans-Siberian railway, at least from Moscow to Irkutsk in early April, is not particularly scenic. Much of what I saw was… nothing. Birch trees and shrubbery poke through the snow against the background of vast nothingness. Beyond these enclaves of snow and forest is more snow and forest, playing the role of lead actor against a stage filled by the deep horizon and overhanging sky. Pockets of evergreens did grow more prominent as the train inched closer to Irkutsk, providing a nice splash of natural beauty even as the bare hills and relative sparsity remained constant throughout.

While great photo shoots were lacking, the opportunities for reflection weren’t. The best journeys don’t need to be scenic to be worth remembering. Social media has taught us to seek the perfect and the fame-worthy. Instant gratification is its corollary. The benefits of patience, and of boredom, aren’t always appreciated. Travelling the Trans-Siberian railway is a surefire cure, because there’s only so much reading, talking, drinking and sleeping you can do before feeling the urge to find a window and relax your mind. I spent countless hours watching the Siberian landscape pass by. It was nature — unspoiled, raw and sometimes ugly. But Siberia doesn’t need a perfectly sculpted landscape to instill an otherworldly awe. The emptiness is power enough.

Time passes more slowly on a train, and the days bleed together. After crossing the Ural Mountains — the official divide between Europe and Asia — sometime during the second night, the signs of civilization dropped precipitously. Still, we passed through working areas. There were men in parkas and orange vests fixing railroad ties and people driving truckloads of supplies through isolated, muddy streets, indifferent to us because they see trains every single day. We passed near Kemerovo, the city where dozens of people died in a shopping mall fire that made international headlines. The train carried us near the border of Kazakhstan and then Mongolia. We crossed the longitudinal centers of Afghanistan and Pakistan, of India and a fair bit of Southeast Asia.

We traveled through a land of records — Russia is the largest country in the world, enveloping almost 11 percent of the world’s land mass. It holds the world’s deepest and oldest lake. We saw terrain renowned for its frostbitten winters. The train covered a distance of over 3,000 miles in four nights, a few hundred miles greater than the entire width of the United States. Irkutsk, where I disembarked, is still 2,000 miles from the route’s terminus in Vladivostok, a Pacific port. Flying back to St. Petersburg takes almost the same amount of in-air time as a transatlantic flight from Chicago to London. It’s easy to read about Russia’s size, but I only fully grasped the weight of that claim after four nights on a well-oiled train and a flight back. Russian distances belong on a cosmological scale.

There’s nothing quite like cross-country train travel. Planes favor expediency over intimacy; cars value freedom to the extreme. In a train, boundaries between the people and the country are blurred. Control is relinquished to the railroad tracks. By the time Thursday rolled around and it was time to leave, I decided I would miss the small quarters and the singular landscapes beyond. It had started to feel like home.

One of the premier books on Siberia is Ian Frazier’s “Travels in Siberia.” Frazier — a staff writer for The New Yorker — and his guide spend weeks at time in a rickety van, traveling back roads and highways to discover the soul of Siberia and the people who live there. His willingness to sacrifice his pride for a good lesson and a better story was a guidepost to live by as I crossed the same terrain by train.

Unlike Frazier, I’m not a professional writer for a magazine traveling with the help of a $20,000 advance. But like him, my quest was to understand Russia percolated with the reputation of Siberia, known to most outsiders only as a permanently frigid place with a bloody history of exile and misfortune. It was never a question of if, but rather when, I would see this infamous region for myself.

There’s a saying in Russia: It’s better to see once than to hear a hundred times. I’ve seen only a tiny sliver of Siberia — through the train windows, within the frontier-like city of Irkutsk once I left the train, and across to its fabled neighbor, Lake Baikal. Such sights don’t come easily, and discomfort is a required part of the journey — lack of showering included. But it’s better to see it once, as the Russians say. Siberia deserves that at the very least.

Written by: Nick Irvin — ntirvin@ucdavis.edu

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by individual columnists belong to the columnists alone and do not necessarily indicate the views and opinions held by The California Aggie.

Headlines about “record-breaking” temperatures dissuade readers from addressing the issue properly

Once, my father and I took a walk around the edge of Lake Tahoe. It was early April — the start of spring — but the weather was fair for that time of the year. Even the surrounding peaks were stark, devoid of the snow caps that would typically be present throughout April and into May. Waves lapped invitingly at the shore, pushing against small puddles of melting ice scattered sporadically along the beach.

“Did you know,” my father said as we kicked around the remaining slush that was tinged dirt-brown by the sand, “that this year was the hottest on record?”

We continued on in resigned silence, the words falling flatly in the dead air as I tried to wrap my head around the implication of my father’s statement.

Now, three years later, I still can’t fathom what exactly that phrase means to me. Understanding “record-high” is difficult when I’ve only experienced 20 other winters.

News’ greatest nemesis has always been science — littered with emotionless facts, nothing fails to grasp the attention of the public more than a bland scientific report. As such, news outlets have always struggled to put a human face to science. In some cases, though usually rare, attempts have been fruitful — look at Rachel Carson’s “A Silent Spring,” which eventually led to a nationwide ban on specific agricultural pesticides.

Now, however, we have found media’s true Achilles heel: climate change coverage.

It’s not my father’s fault for regurgitating some headline or another that he’d read earlier in the day, not when most articles contain flashy headlines along the lines of “Arctic Sea Ice Missed a Record Low. Barely.” or “More of the Bay Area Could Be Underwater in 2100 Than Previously Expected.” In fact, this problem spans across all outlets, from the New York Times (re: the first two articles mentioned) to The Washington Post (“Unusual, record-breaking April cold to crash into eastern U.S. Friday through the weekend”) to USA Today (“Global warming is causing an Alaskan glacier to melt at the fastest pace in 400 years”).

Such headlines are not attention-grabbing — but rather the opposite. Extraordinarily vague and containing at least one massive guilt-trip, articles that fall into this category leave their readers less inclined to discuss global warming because nobody wants to invest their time in reading about grim issues. Instead of encouraging the necessary conversation that would inspire further introspection, these headlines leave little dent on the day-to-day lives of individual readers. How many people care about what happens to an Alaskan glacier in 400 years when they have their own pressing personal troubles now?

What do I do when I hear that California’s annual fire season was two months longer despite record rainfall the previous winter? Like my father, I turn my back on the topic and refuse to listen to the damning information.

A worse consequence of writing about global warming in this manner, however, is the total public desensitization toward the subject.

Announcing 2016 as the hottest year on record — when the same was said for 2015 and 2014 — gradually loses impact on readers when we only expect the upward trend to continue the following year. Yes, this information is newsworthy at the time of its publication; yes, it’s also necessary that the public should have access to this information. But, as with the topic of climate change as a whole, the media’s addiction to hyperbole and sensationalism distances the audience from the issue and only further strengthens our desire to remove ourselves from the problem.

While we are constantly discovering more about the rate and effects of global warming, our treatment of it in the news needs to evolve as well.

I cannot speak to how to incentivize public action. Instead, let me offer a solution that would capture my attention if I were perusing the subject:

Global warming is at our doorstep, knocking. If we continue to treat it as a fearful thing, people will be inclined to hide and ignore the problem until it goes away. On the other hand, if we include personal success stories about individual or community attempts to slow climate change, readers might be more inclined to listen.

So, journalists take note: Records mean nothing if they exist only to be broken.

Written by: Erin Hamilton — elhamilton@ucdavis.edu

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by individual columnists belong to the columnists alone and do not necessarily indicate the views and opinions held by The California Aggie.

As easy as it may be to reduce the conflicts in the Middle East to “red team versus blue team,” it’s not that simple. The Middle East is a region tangled within its own cold war: the Iran-Saudi Arabia proxy conflict. There are many players in this conflict, all of whom are engaged in this power struggle between Iran and Saudi, whose origins of conflict date back to the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

After the revolution, Iran assumed a theocratic system of government that was poorly received by both conservative Sunni monarchies (i.e., Saudi Arabia) and the United States due to their new government’s anti-American rhetoric and Shia Islamic government. Given that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have been long-standing allies with a mutually dependent relationship, they both emerge as formidable opponents to the Iranian government. The tension is further complicated presently, after the rise of ISIS in recent years in addition to the Syrian civil war.

After the Arab Spring, a series of protests ensued throughout Syria, to which the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, responded with extreme violence, killing hundreds of demonstrators and imprisoning others. In response, Sunni rebel groups formed with the intent of overthrowing the government. The violence brought international attention, with Iran backing Assad’s regime (as both are Shia) and Saudi Arabia backing the rebels (as both are Sunni).

In Iraq, the Shia-led government faced the dangerous threat of ISIS, a Sunni extremist group. In response to this threat, Iran backed the Iraqi Shiite Militia to fight ISIS. Iraq is one of the few countries that’s allied with both Iran and the United States. And despite the assistance provided by Iran, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia want to turn Iraq away from Iran, but this is difficult since Iran has powerful allies in Iraqi politics. If not already complicated enough, the complexity of the conflict is only furthered with Lebanon.

Hezbollah is a Shia militia and political group in Lebanon with a significant amount of power. They have backed Assad’s regime (Shia) in Syria by fighting against the rebels (Sunni), much to the displeasure of Saudi Arabia (Sunni). This is not the only aspect of Hezbollah that has angered Saudi Arabia, however, as they are involved intimately with Iran, receiving millions in monetary and weaponry funds. They have assisted in recruiting, training and arming a range of new militant groups with the intent of advancing Iran’s agenda.

To word it in the most facile of ways, one could consider the conflict as Iran, Hezbollah and Assad’s regime versus Saudi Arabia and the United States. However, there are still two key players wedged in the middle in the fight for a stable, democratic government: Iraq and the Syrian Democratic Forces.

After the expulsion and near-eradication of much of ISIS, Iraq now stands at a crucial point after years of war and violence. Will Iraq be able to rise as a stable, functioning democracy united with its Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish populations? The prime minister of Iraq is intent on achieving this, but the odds seem unlikely. As a state allied with both the U.S. and Iran, each side will try to sway them in a particular direction, including Saudi Arabia, due to its very tense relationship with Iran. Iran has assisted Iraq in pushing back ISIS, and now that ISIS is near the brink of total eradication, Iran’s extensive reach of power poses an issue for Iraq. Both Iranian and Saudi influences in Iraq could inhibit this democratic movement, as both have strong affiliations to two different sects of Islam that have a history deeply rooted in conflict with one another. If Iraq fails to democratize or continues with its current system of government, one could expect to see them embroiled in the proxy war for years to come.

The Syrian Democratic Forces face a similar battle. The SDF is a rebel group primarily composed of Sunni Kurds who have been instrumental in expelling ISIS from the region. Not only are they in the fight against ISIS, but they are also in the fight for democracy. The rebel group, which opposes Assad, advocates for secular democracy in Syria. If successful, this could radically change the course of Syria and the lives of many Syrians who have been suffering for years in what has been labeled the worst refugee crisis since World War II. If Iran and Hezbollah continue to extend their support to Assad’s regime, it would make the fight to democratize onerous, as they would be up against two very powerful groups. Despite much resentment for Assad, there is still a vested interest from Iran to ensure that a Shiite government formulates, as this would allow Iran to further extend its power in the region.

It’s easy to connect the lines between political alliances and Sunni and Shia labels, and as much as these labels dictate these alliances, it’s not about religion; this is about political control. The issue lies in the fact that, historically, these two labels have proven to be a source of much division. Labeling “Sunni” and “Shia,” much like “Red Team” and “Blue Team,” is a swift way to create opposition. Saudi Arabia and Iran, both as major players in the region, are fighting for political supremacy, and the easiest way to do so is to take an already divisive label and draw lines between the various countries’ religious affiliations. This is a power struggle, and these labels presently appear to be the most efficient means to ensure that struggle persists for years to come.

Written by: Hanadi Jordan — hajordan@ucdavis.edu

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by individual columnists belong to the columnists alone and do not necessarily indicate the views and opinions held by The California Aggie.