Seedy Journey : Exotic Trans-Siberian Express Is Tawdry Relic of Glorious Past

ABOARD THE TRANS-SIBERIAN EXPRESS —  With the collapse of the Soviet empire and the birth of new capitalist classes in China and Russia, this train, once a czarist dream of glory, has become a 4,876-mile bazaar on rails, a mirror of the changes that grip the old Communist world.

On a recent trip, the Chinese merchants aboard the Moscow-bound train braced themselves as it pulled into Mariinsk, a rough little town in Siberia.

Russian customers thronged the snowy station, their expressions fierce and desperate. When Chinese traders waded into the mob with armloads of colorful parkas, sweaters and gloves to sell, greedy hands reached for the goods. “How much? How much?” strident Russian voices demanded.

A gang of hooligans in the crowd encircled a trader and attacked. The man fell, clutching his wares and fending off the blows of steel-toed boots until his partners broke through the pack.

“Trade is war,” one of the rescuers said later.

The trading began midway through the six-day journey from Beijing to Moscow, and for the most part was conducted with cunning and calculators rather than boots and fists.

The first half of the journey--through northern China and Mongolia’s wind-swept Gobi Desert--was tranquil. The trading frenzy set in when the train crossed the Russian border and entered Siberia.

At station after frigid station, even in the pre-dawn hours, clots of frantic, fur-hatted Russians waited for the train then swarmed from carriage to carriage, skidding along icy platforms, jostling for position.

The crowds seemed more frantic at every stop. Toward the end of the trip, many Chinese traders just haggled through the windows, striking deals in sign language or broken Russian, grabbing fistfuls of rubles thrust upward from the crowd.

For some Russians, these platform scenes are a painful reflection of the chaos invading their lives.

“This country has become a ‘bardak,’ ” said police inspector Sergei Pavlovich Kochnev, using a Russian word that implies a madhouse.

Others are more philosophical.

“This is the beginning of a new economy,” said Valery Dyachenko, a retired military officer from Ulan Ude, near the Mongolian border. “Maybe this is what your Wild West was like.”

Like the American West, the Trans-Siberian attracts colorful characters. Veteran wanderers spin tales of falcon smuggling in faraway places. Survivors of China’s Cultural Revolution pass the time by doodling profit-and-loss charts and discussing Hemingway.

A silver-haired Queen’s Messenger from London takes tea while homesick Russians in the next carriage toss back vodka and belt out ballads of brave sailors and valiant revolutionaries.

The journey began at dawn in Beijing. Sleepy travelers from Russia, Poland, France, Finland, Australia, Mongolia, China, Germany and the United States jostled aboard under the watchful eyes of policemen in quilted coats. Traders wrestled immense bags down narrow corridors and into cramped compartments.

The train was full and most of its more than 300 passengers were in four-bunk compartments in carriages with communal bathrooms. Only two of the 13 Pullmans offered “deluxe” accommodations: two-bunk cabins with a semiprivate washroom. A pair of attendants kept the samovars boiling in each sleeping car. Three conductors, four mechanics and an engineer completed the crew.

The train picked up speed about an hour out of Beijing. Frosty green fields slid by. Ice-crusted ponds glittered in the morning light. Mule-drawn carts seemed to float in the pale mist.

After Zhangjiakou, an ancient city where Beijing-Moscow tea caravans once crossed the Great Wall, the landscape grew more arid and austere. Farmed for millennia, the Chinese earth looked old and weary against a silvery winter sky.

By nightfall, the train crossed the border from China into independent Mongolia, where the Chinese dining car was replaced by a Mongolian one listing meat dishes as “Hot Animal Foods.”

Most Chinese travelers avoided this dining car--and the Russian one that would replace it at the next border. Rather than choke down unpalatable foreign food, they brewed tea and boiled noodles in their cabins. They also smoked furiously, and a haze of cigarette and noodle fumes clouded their carriages from morning to night.

Russian passengers also avoided the dining cars, but for reasons of economy rather than taste.

Most found the prices--$1.50 for a meal on the Russian dining car--out of reach. Instead, they snacked on bread, smoked fish and boiled eggs bought at stops along the way.

The relative affluence of the Chinese reflects, in part, the commercial energies unleashed in China’s long march to free enterprise. Many Russians, just beginning the plunge into capitalism after 70 years of Communist Party rule, believe they are growing poorer by the day.

“China was always in second place,” said conductor Nikolai Terlekov, who has worked on the railroad since 1947. “Now, suddenly, we see Chinese who live better than we do.”

The Chinese peddlers of today are the third wave of traders on the Trans-Siberian.

Poles and Hungarians pioneered the business in the late 1980s when their countries eased travel rules. Then Kremlin restrictions eased and Soviets moved in, catering to a black market that has been starved of consumer goods for decades.

“The Russian traders came (to China) and they bought things that we throw away,” said a Chinese merchant who uses the Westernized name King Bright. “We looked at this and said, ‘Here’s a chance for “

The Chinese, who buy their goods wholesale from factories, got into the business last year and now dominate the trade.

King Bright looked at his load of factory-reject “goose-down” parkas and smiled. They’re filled, he confided, with chicken feathers. “Nobody in China wants to buy these coats,” he said.

By dawn on the second day, the train was well into the immense Gobi Desert. Passengers gawked at herds of wild, two-humped Bactrian camels and shaggy Mongolian ponies seeking fodder on the frigid steppes.

In the old, Cold War days, this was one of the worst stretches of the trip. Mongolian customs officials ripped film out of cameras, loudspeakers in each compartment blared regulations, abusive attendants yanked sheets and pillows out from under sleeping passengers at 5 a.m.

These days, passengers snooze or snap photos with impunity as the train passes abandoned Soviet missile and air bases. Cattle graze near hardened hangars, snow-covered ammunition dumps and empty runways that testify to Mongolia’s strategic importance before it left the Kremlin orbit.

When the train reached Siberia the next day, homesick Slavs happily toasted Mother Russia and her landscape of colorful gingerbread cottages, stands of birch trees, snow-drenched hills studded with firs and frozen rivers.

Passengers flocked to the windows as Lake Baikal came into view. It stretched to the horizon under a pale Siberian sun gleaming behind a high, thin haze. Cold, clear waves crashed onto the snowy shore in late fall, but the 400-mile-long surface will be frozen throughout the winter.

Siberia was long a land of exile and punishment. Convict labor played a big role in the building of the railway, most armed with only wooden shovels as they battled permafrost, swamps, tigers, disease, brutally harsh winters, brief but pestilent summers, bandits and isolation.

The Trans-Siberian was built to bring the riches of Asian Russia--the gold, diamonds, furs, coal, silver, iron and timber of Siberia--to European Russia and to transport Russian troops to the Far East to counter the influence of China and Japan.

The first cornerstone was laid in 1891 under Czar Alexander III, who added “Most August Founder of the Great Siberian Railway” to his many titles. Today, the line stretches beyond Beijing to the Pacific, a distance of 5,658 miles. Branch lines link Moscow and Beijing via either Manchuria or Mongolia.

On Day Four, the express made its 10-minute stop in Mariinsk, the Dodge City of Siberia. While one Chinese trader was being mugged, another was paid with rubles so badly counterfeited that they looked like they came off a photocopying machine. A third had a sweater snatched from her hands. A Chinese sleeping car attendant leaped gallantly onto the platform and retrieved it.

After Mariinsk, new characters appeared on the train.

One was a bleached blonde in a miniskirt--unusual garb for the Siberian winter--escorted by a tall man with a forbidding face. The price of her favors was $10.

There were also gangs of men who stalked from carriage to carriage through the snowdrifts piling up between cars, peering into compartments with hungry eyes. Some hawked cigarettes or cheap watches; the business of others was not clear. But within hours, two locked compartments had been robbed.

Terlekov, the conductor, said thieves and prostitutes began working the train late last year as the Soviet Union unraveled.

The Trans-Siberian’s heyday as a railway bazaar may be ending. The ruble has plummeted, steeply eroding profits, and baggage limits are being enforced for the first time.

Marcin Przech, a young Pole who was one of the pioneering traders, said the chaos in which traders thrive--the lack of currency controls and duties--won’t last forever.

“The old system’s collapsed and a new one hasn’t taken its place. It’s a special moment,” he said. “I keep telling my friends who go to Russia: ‘Make money as fast as you can there.’ ”