Wandering Around Looking Up Cameron Hummels' Notes on Science and Travel

Siberia to the Urals; Rubles and Cyrillic

We reached Moscow this morning after an overnight train from Kazan; however, this post is not about Moscow. This post is to fill you in on our last week or so in Central Siberia and the Ural Mountain region.

We left Irkutsk last Saturday on an overnight train that took us to Krasnoyarsk, the third largest city in Siberia. Krasnoyarsk is much more metropolitan than Irkutsk, and Erika and I both instantly liked it. After trying locations of two purportedly inexpensive hotels with no luck (Krasnoyarsk is not too much of a tourist town), we ended up splurging and going to the Hotel Krasnoyarsk (not really splurging, as this is Siberia after all). What we didn’t realize was that this hotel is the very center of the city, with people identifying locations based on their distance and orientation to it, so it ended up being a great place for us to stay for a night. Across the street was the Opera Hall, the Yenisei River, a series of colorful fountains and a slew of shikebab (called shashlik) and beer (called peeva) bar-cafes. Excellent!

The mighty Yenisei River flows through Krasnoyarsk, contributing significant wealth to the city as a trading port. The Yenisey is the 5th longest river in the world at 3,500 miles, as long as the Mississippi-Missouri River system, with headwaters in Mongolia and draining into the Arctic Ocean. It is even featured on the 10 ruble banknote with a view we saw from our hotel in Krasnoyarsk. Tourists can take several day river cruises along its waters, but we were already fixed on our plan of taking the train the whole way across Russia.

Speaking of rubles, they are the national currency here, currently going at about 1 American Dollar = 31 Russian Rubles. Each of the banknotes has a different city highlighted: 5R = Novgorod, 10R = Krasnoyarsk, 50R = St. Petersburg, 100R = Moscow, 500R = Arkhangeslk, 1000R = Yaroslavl, etc. It is sometimes a bit upsetting to ask how much something costs and here a price in the hundreds or thousands. Sometimes it is easy to think of costs in foreign prices as “some” money, without heed to how much things actually cost–but that is a good way to spend all your money fast. E and I have been pretty good about always figuring out equivalent prices before making purchases.

After our time in Krasnoyarsk, we took a 32-hour train to Yekaterinburg. Originally we had planned to go to Novosibersk, the 3rd largest city in Russia (after Moscow and St. Petersburg), but in the end it seemed like there was very little to see or do in industrial Novosibersk, so we skipped it. This particular train was a bit different from our previous trains, as it was “firmenhy”, which indicated it was a higher-quality train (cleaner, newer, faster, and a bit more expensive). All of the firmenhy trains also have unique names; ours which began in Krasnoyarsk and went all the way to Moscow (we didn’t take it that far) was called the “Yenisei” (like the river in Krasnoyarsk).

Aside from the firmenhy train designation, there are four different classes of train travel: First Class (SV), Second Class (Kupe), Third Class (Platzkart), and Fourth Class (obschiy). In first and second class, the train car is split into little cabins of two and four beds respectively. In third class, there are no enclosed cabins but bunks all over the place (more like 6 per cabin-like area), and fourth class just has seats. Erika and I have been riding second and third class throughout our trip, depending on what was available on the trains that best fit our itinerary in each city. I personally prefer third-class because it means getting to talk with other passengers more and it is usually about 66% the price of second-class.

Anyway, the train we took from Krasnoyarsk to Yekaterinburg was a firmenhy train where we had 3rd class beds. It was a lot of fun. You might think that on such a long train ride you’ll have tons of time to yourself and you’ll get bored. But I was never bored. I was either eating, exploring the train, playing cards/chess, reading one of the books I brought (Chekhov’s plays and Bulgakov), or most likely talking to the other passengers. We were invariably the only tourists in our train car (if not the whole train), so it was interesting to hear everyone’s stories, and they were always interested in hearing about us crazy Americans. People wanted to know about our families, where we lived, what we did, why we were making this trip, etc. I’ve learned pretty well how to hold this basic conversation in Russia now after several instances of it, but I have problems keeping the conversation lively after that.

Every few hours the train stops somewhere along the route to pickup/dropoff passengers, and people will get out to grab a beer or some food at one of kiosks at the various stations. Occaisionally, however, certain station stops become famous for some unique product that the townspeople come and sell on the platform. Sometimes it is fruit, or berries, but it’s best when it is freshly smoked fish! One of the stations near Lake Baikal (Sludyanka) was teeming with villagers selling smoked Omul, a delicious fish similar to Salmon that lives in the Lake. Another station on our trip to Yekaterinburg was selling a different oilier fish, but it was still very tasty and super-cheap. A whole 12-inch smoked fish cost about $3!

On Tuesday, we finally reached Yekaterinburg, the fifth largest city in Russia, sitting on the border between Europe and Asia. It has an interesting history: it was the location of the murder of the Czar and his family by the Communists during the revolution; it was the place in which the U2 plane debacle occurred at the height of the Cold War; and it is the hometown of former Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Like many cities in Russia, it has two names. The Soviets changed the names of cities to suit their causes. St. Petersburg became Leningrad; Volgagrad became Stalingrad; Nizhny Novgorod became Gorky; Yekaterinburg became Sverdlovsk. Despite the official name of the city being Yekaterinburg named for Katherine the Great, its Soviet name of Sverdlovsk remains on the train schedules, statues and some official documents.

Our visit to Yekaterinburg began with a visit to the Church of the Blood, a church that was built at the site of the Romanov family murders. During the revolution, the Bolsheviks ousted Czar Nicholas II and his family from Moscow and imprisoned them in cells in Yekaterinburg in the Ural mountains, nearly two thousand kilometers away. Later in 1918, fearing a monarchist government revival, they had him and his family murdered, burned and buried in a mine shaft. The man responsible for the plan, Lenin’s right hand man at that time was named Yakov Sverdlov. Thus, Yekaterinburg was renamed Sverdlovsk, to celebrate the Soviet leader responsible for the murders.

Now that the Soviets are out of power, the Russian government recognizes that it was pretty crummy to have murdered a bunch of innocent people, even if they were nobility standing in the way of the proletariat. The government has officially rebuked those responsible. The Church has gone further, though, as they have canonized the entire murdered family, making them saints. This, I cannot understand. Yes, it was wrong for the Czar and his family to have been killed, but does that mean they get to be saints?! Don’t saints need to have three miracles or something like that? Isn’t this watering down the saint brand a little bit? Well, anyway, they’re saints and the Church of the Blood is the main church celebrating them as such.

My Russian language abilities are pretty basic, consisting of 4 months of instruction, which means I can read, write, speak and listen at about the level of a 4-year-old. Russian is a challenging language, not just because of the different character set, Cyrillic, but because of 6 different noun cases, and lots of strange constructions that we don’t have in English. For instance, to say “I like X”, you say “X is likable to me.” I spend a lot of my spare time here perusing my English-Russian Dictionary. Erika has been really good about learning the character set and reading street signs, as well as learning how to order foods in Russian. Today she learned “I would like a blinni with honey, please.” Here is a USSR-themed restaurant in Yekaterinburg. In Russian, “PECTOPAH” is pronounced “RESTORAN”, but it still looks pretty funny to Westerners unfamiliar with the cyrillic character set. Pectopah…HAH!

While in town, we also visited the Military Museum of Yekaterinburg. Despite claims otherwise, there was very little in English, which made for difficult going for E and me. As you know history museums can be pretty dry in their written descriptions of events and items, and the same goes for Russian history museums, which meant we were pretty lost in museums without English texts. Fortunately, this museum did have something quite interesting: a small exhibit on Gary Powers and the downing of the U2 plane at the height of the Cold War in 1960. For those of you who don’t know, Gary Powers was a pilot in a secret American spy plane flying over Russia at very high altitude who was shot down near Yekaterinburg. The Americans lied and claimed that the U2 was a weather plane that had mistakenly gone unpiloted into Russian territory, but Stalin had Powers questioned extensively and it blew the lid off of an American spyplane campaign. This museum had pieces of the U2 plane as well as some items from Gary Powers’ emergency kit (Russian phrasebook and Rubles). Interesting!

Next post I’ll get to talk about Kazan and the Republic of Tatarstan, as well as Moscow, where I currently sit. See you then!