The gauge of history

AT TWILIGHT on a clear early-autumn evening, Moscow’s Yaroslavsky railway station is an alluring place: all floodlit modernist turrets, gaudy tiles, folkloric decorations and a fairy-tale castle gate, like a triumphal arch, opening the way to the north. The playful station (vokzal in Russian) reflects the sparkling origin of the word in London’s Vauxhall, the 17th-century amusement gardens beside the Thames. Russia’s first railway line, built in 1837 by Franz von Gerstner, a Bohemian engineer, started in St Petersburg and ended in Pavlovsk, an English-style summer retreat for the Russian aristocracy.

Yaroslavsky station was designed by Fyodor Shekhtel, Russia’s finest architect, in the art-nouveau style. He modelled it on a wooden pavilion he had built for the International Exhibition in Glasgow in 1901. The station opened a year later when the line was extended all the way to Archangel, the first port in the Russian empire to conduct trade with England in the 16th century, and an entry point for early travellers to Russia from Europe. Around the same time, Shekhtel was decorating the Moscow Art Theatre, where Anton Chekhov’s plays were staged. In that era, the Russian intelligentsia considered itself an integral part of Europe. Now, Russia has seldom seemed farther away.

The journey from Moscow to Archangel is 1,134km (705 miles; see map). It takes more than a day: plenty of time for conversation, reading and reflection. The four-berth compartment is warm and cosy. The rhythm of the train is accompanied by the calming sound of tea glasses clinking on the table of the compartment. Tea is served by Elena, the plump attendant, whose life is entirely the train. “We live on the train for 15 days at a time. We sleep on the train, eat on the train, wash our clothes on the train. We meet and marry people who work on the train and when we get stressed, we knit,” she says. She has been doing the job for more than 20 years.

Railways cut deep through the Russian psyche, and train journeys are woven into the nation’s cultural life. They tell its story in ways large and small. A kink in the railway line from Moscow to St Petersburg, for example, is where—or so it is said—Tsar Nicholas I’s finger got in the way of his ruler when he drew a line between the cities. Whatever the truth of that, over the centuries railways have represented the will of an authoritarian ruler, the supremacy of state power, the boom of private capital, the modernisation of the country, the terror of Stalinism and the mania for ruinous grand projects of Soviet times. All Russian history is there.

Soldiers, civilisers, poets

Railways are often referred to in Russian as “threads”. They tie the country together and, in previous decades, civilised it. Vissarion Belinsky, an influential 19th-century thinker, found a strange consolation in watching the first railway being built. “I stand and watch, and it gives my heart some relief: at last we too will have one railway,” he said. At last, he felt, Russia would be like Europe.

Trains propelled the country into the modern age, breaking social boundaries, spreading culture and making the population more mobile. Sergei Witte, the railway chief from the time of Alexander III, saw trains as “social mixers”. “A railway”, he wrote, “is a ferment that causes cultural brewing, and even if it encounters a completely wild population on its way, it can quickly civilise it to the necessary level.” Towns that were bypassed by the railway line were destined to turn into backwaters.

These bringers of modernity, like many others, had military roots. One of the first lines from Warsaw (then part of the Russian empire) to the border of Austria and Hungary, its strong ally, was used by Nicholas I to send Russian troops to help suppress a Hungarian rebellion in 1848. Lenin, who arrived from Germany by train to lead the Bolshevik revolution, considered railway stations, along with telegraphs, as major targets to be seized. After the revolution, armoured trains were used in the civil war by both sides: Trotsky turned one into his mobile headquarters. It is partly for defensive reasons, one theory goes, that Russian railway tracks have a wider gauge than European ones: whereas Russia could transport its troops to its borders, a train with foreign troops would not be able to roll into Russia. (To this day, a train journey from Russia to Europe involves a change of wheels.)

The job of railways chief was one of the most important in the country. Witte was also chairman of the Russian council of ministers under Nicholas II; Trotsky, who held the job after the revolution, was also in charge of the Red Army. Nikolai Aksenenko, the railways chief under Boris Yeltsin, was considered as a presidential candidate. Today the Russian railway monopoly, which employs 800,000 people, remains a semi-military organisation. “We have military ranks and are not allowed to go on strike,” says Elena, the train attendant. “If a war starts, we will be the first to be mobilised.” In the train’s strict hierarchy its “chief” travels in a special carriage, which is called his “headquarters”.

What makes trains weigh so heavily on Russia’s consciousness is the sheer size of the land mass. European railway journeys, with their short distances between stations and the constant sight of human life outside the window, leave little time or space for thought or soul-searching. In Russia, however, train journeys are measured in days and nights rather than hours. It takes six days to travel from Moscow to Vladivostok, a distance of more than 9,000km. All one sees is forest, occasionally interrupted by a clearing or uncultivated fields cloaked, in winter, with snow. You can go for hours, sometimes days, without seeing a settlement or a soul. “In western Europe people die because their space is cramped and suffocating,” Chekhov wrote in a letter. “In Russia they die because the space is an endless expanse.”

As a result, trains rumble through Russian literature and poetry with remarkable frequency. Rail travel occupies the same place in Russian culture as the road trip in America. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina meets Vronsky at a railway station at the beginning of the novel and ends her life under a train. (Tolstoy, too, happened to die at a station.) In Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago”, the comfortable, softly upholstered trains at the beginning of the novel give way to the freight trains in which Zhivago and his wife escape a Moscow devastated by revolution and civil war.

In “Moscow Circles”, a late Soviet prose poem, an alcoholic intellectual reflects on history, philosophy and love as he travels by elektrichka—a suburban train—from Moscow to the provincial town of Petushki. The town becomes a Utopia “where birds never stop singing and jasmine never stops blossoming”. (In the end Venichka, the narrator, oversleeps his stop and wakes up heading back to Moscow, where a gang of thugs murder him.)

The vast horizon outside the window contrasts with the confined space of the compartment, which makes the perfect environment for long conversations between strangers—a device widely used by Russian novelists. In Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata”, the main character tells fellow passengers on the train the story of how he came to murder his wife. The Russian philosopher Fyodor Stepun, exiled after the revolution, noted how different Russian carriages are from those in western Europe, “both in the sound of the wheels and in the domestic atmosphere that reigns in them”. His trains turned into homes, with a coal-fired furnace providing tea at any time of the day or night. “An hour or two into a journey, a lively discussion is heard from every compartment. On the white tablecloths appetising food is laid out—golden roasted poultry, thin pieces of pale veal, white pots of black caviar…” Sadly, the modern restaurant car features tables with soiled blue cloths, where a drunken waiter serves a piece of rubber chicken and mushrooms drowning in sour cream and cheese.

A line to freedom

The other people in the compartment, a young couple from Archangel with a four-year-old child, strike up a conversation almost without prompting. Vladimir, who works in a shipyard, starts by talking about injustice and corruption. Someone has taken the money he paid for the repair of his car and vanished with it. A local policeman asked him for a bribe of 10,000 roubles ($150) before he would investigate. The conversation turns to local politics in Archangel. “We have everything we need to live well: fish, timber, furs. We could survive without Moscow. If we had a leader, we would go our own way,” he reflects.

An hour into the journey, the train passes through the village of Khotkovo. From here it is only a few miles to Abramtsevo, an estate once owned by Savva Mamontov, a 19th-century millionaire, philanthropist and railway tycoon who was responsible for building the line to Archangel under concession from the government. Mamontov was born in 1841 in western Siberia, one of nine children of the rich merchant who built the first part of the northern railway line from Moscow to Yaroslavl. He belonged to the new elite which, by building social and cultural institutions, came to transform Russia into a vibrant European country: not just by copying European ways, but by uncovering in Russia the enormous potential that made it part of the continent in its own right.

After spending time in Milan researching the silk trade and taking singing lessons, Mamontov started a private opera in Moscow which presented Fyodor Chaliapin to the world and first performed Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Snow Maiden”. At home he composed and staged his own comedies for his family and friends, competing with another amateur from a rich merchant family—Konstantin Alekseev, better known as Stanislavsky, who transformed the art of acting. Stanislavsky wrote of Mamontov: “We, the children of the great fathers and creators of Russian life, tried to inherit from them the difficult art of being rich. To know how to spend money properly is a very great art.” Mamontov was described as a Russian Medici—someone who created not just art, but the atmosphere in which it could flourish.

He turned Abramtsevo into an artists’ colony where traditional Russian themes and folk motifs flourished. The nation’s finest painters, including Viktor Vasnetsov, Mikhail Vrubel and Valentin Serov—all sharing an interest in the subtle beauties of Russian antiquity—flocked to his estate, which nestled in a landscape of birch and pine trees with a winding river in the distance. Vasnetsov designed a small family church in Abramtsevo, a tribute to the spirit of artistic friendship that reigned around Mamontov. The artists who developed Russian themes in Abramtsevo were no less European than William Morris, who championed the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain. Their quest for Russian antiquity and its European nature pointed them north, towards Archangel.

In the 1890s, a time of extraordinary cultural and economic vitality, Mamontov invested in the extension of the railway between Yaroslavl and Archangel. He was part of an expedition led by Witte. They travelled by railway to the medieval Russian city of Vologda, sailed up-river to Archangel and then along the coast of Norway, and finally returned through Sweden and Finland. “Emperor Alexander III was fascinated by the Russian north, partly because the peasantry there represented a special, pure Russian type, pure as a result of blood and history,” Witte wrote in his memoirs. The Russian north was never conquered by the Tatars and Mongols and was free of serfdom, allowing farmers to own their land. Of all its regions, the north of Russia retained the most vivid memories of life before the Tatar invasion in the 13th century, and remained culturally close to Scandinavia.

Unlike the Trans-Siberian railway, a state project built from 1891 to 1916 that followed the track trodden by prisoners to Siberian exile, the privately financed railway to Archangel was a road to the free land, to private initiative, to the dream of Russia as akin to prosperous Norway. “The road to the north was a road to the Russian West,” says Inna Solovyova, a historian. For Mamontov the road to Archangel was as much an artistic enterprise as a commercial one. He dreamed about the revival of the north, about its beauty and riches, and wanted paintings of Archangel by his friends from Abramtsevo to decorate Yaroslavsky station.

The enterprise ended badly for him, however. In 1899, a year after the opening of the line, he was wrongly accused of embezzlement and arrested. His family and friends, including many Russian artists, came to his defence. He was acquitted, but his business was ruined.

A few hundred miles from Moscow, the train comes to a planned three-hour stop for track maintenance. All that is left of Mamontov’s times is an elegant art-nouveau wooden station in Obozerskaya, where half the population of 5,000 work for the railway. A small statue of Lenin among birch trees, a wooden shack passing for a local hospital, a pile of rotting timber in a muddy backyard and a shop testify to the lasting legacy of the Soviet experiment that eliminated people like Mamontov as a class.

The railway was more than a physical concept. In the first years of Bolshevism trains became a metaphor for the nation’s new life, roaring towards communism. “Our steam train is speeding ahead/Our next stop is the commune/We have no other path/We are armed with guns,” ran a popular song. The engine itself was an image of the future and the modernity promised by the Bolsheviks. Brightly painted carriages covered with slogans contained printing presses, libraries of revolutionary literature and even film-projectors, to show political newsreels to the masses across the country. The carriages were a precursor to television, enabling propaganda to reach even the most remote parts of Russia.

Russian history was often viewed as a track that was fixed from past to future, says Andrei Zorin, a professor of Russian at Oxford University. This led thinkers over the decades to ponder where the country had taken a wrong turn. Petr Chaadaev, an early-19th-century intellectual, lamented that Russia had made no original contribution to world civilisation because it had erroneously absorbed its Christianity from Constantinople rather than Rome. His “philosophical letter” was printed at the time of the first railway construction. Slavophiles saw the root of all evil in the reforms of Peter the Great, while Westernisers blamed the invasion of Russia by the Tatars and Mongols.

Soviet thinkers, too, were preoccupied with the right and wrong turns of history. “If you get lost on a road, you don’t have to retrace your steps; you can turn off at the next junction and find an alternative route. But if history is a railway line, you have to go all the way back in order to get on the right track,” says Mr Zorin.

Much of the energy of Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1980s perestroika generation was spent looking for that crucial point where the Soviet Union had set itself on the wrong course. For the communist reformers, that happened in 1968 when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. (In 1968, however, it was Stalin’s “great leap forward” of 1929 that was seen as the mistake; Russia had to go all the way back to Lenin’s roots, it was argued, in order to advance.) When communism collapsed in 1990, historians went even further back, fixing their sights on the short-lived era of Russian capitalism in the 1900s as the point from which they had to pick up again, as if 70 years of Soviet rule could simply be ignored.

For Vladimir Putin and his intimates the wrong turn was perestroika itself, and the Soviet Union’s subsequent collapse. It is fitting that for much of Mr Putin’s time in office the Russian railway monopoly was headed by a former KGB colleague, Vladimir Yakunin, one of the regime’s ideologues, who has ardently proclaimed Russia’s “special way” and the damage globalisation can do to national identity. As a result, Mr Putin’s men have traced their way back to the late Soviet period of isolation.

This does not bother Elena, the train attendant. “I’ve never been abroad and don’t want to go. Why would I go there?” Although her own salary has dropped by a third as a result of the present economic crisis, she still backs Mr Putin, who “brought our country up from its knees”. Stories about the fabulous wealth and vast country estates of Mr Putin’s cronies do not bother her either. “Look at me,” she says. “I am not allowed to sell vodka, but if you come and ask me quietly I will sell it to you.”

The wrong track

After nearly 27 hours the train arrives in Archangel, a city in the delta of the Northern Dvina river through which the first European traders entered “Muscovy”, and to which British ships delivered food as part of the northern convoys during the second world war. In the city’s elegant 17th-century merchants’ yard, overlooking the steely waters of the Dvina, an exhibition is dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the Soviet victory against the fascists. It bristles with Stalinist posters and slogans and makes no mention of the Allies. One prominent poster shows a Soviet rocket striking an “imperialist” in the face and declares that “Our borders are untouchable.” Underneath is a quote from Stalin: “Those who try to attack our country will be dealt a deadly blow, to stop them sticking their snouts into our Soviet backyard.”

The city that was meant to open Russia to the world now marks the frontier of an increasingly isolated country. The train terminates here, and then returns to Moscow.