1) Unbreakable Union

As I lay on my back in the bustling train car, I did everything I could to appear tranquil. I was in my little train bed with my eyes closed before most people had even boarded. My heart thumped maniacally in my chest, and I exhaled slowly to try to control my nerves. It didn’t work. Nothing worked. While I lay there, knowing that I would pass the night in a paranoid daze with very little sleep, I placed my arm on my stomach and held up my train ticket for the attendant to easily snatch without any personal interaction. My eyelids were shut like the lips of a vise, and I prayed that it would help me melt into the very wall.

I reflected that sneaking into Russia illegally was perhaps the stupidest stunt I had ever tried to pull under the nose of one of the world’s authoritarian governments. And to boot, I was stealing across the border of a country that was paranoid out of its wits about Western spies. I had brought along my passport, absolutely useless without a Russian visa, except only perhaps to show to the police to convince them of who I actually was in case…

I blocked the thought out of my mind. It would not happen. It could not happen. I was going to Moscow for a single day–I would arrive in the morning, and leave in the evening. In and out. It would be easy to go unnoticed, even in a city patrolled by half a dozen types of police. My freedom depended upon one thing alone–that nobody recognized me as a foreigner.

I stared down at the giant “Vancouver Canucks” label splayed across my chest in shining, obvious white lettering. Oops. Bad choice of attire. I pulled the scratchy, train-issue blankets up to my chest, and glanced around to see if anyone had noticed. The last thing I wanted to see was another half-tipsy Russian giving me a thumbs-up and yelling “Pavel Bure!”

I was riding platskart. The entire train car was one long barracks, so that a dozen extra beds could be packed into the sleeping area. Sleeping arrangements were very common on Russian trains, not as in the rest of Europe where the trips are are often short. Almost any distance covered in the vast expanse of Holy Russia was at least twelve hours by train, and required beds.

Platskart was third class–the way that ordinary Russian people rode the train. The car resembled a refugee camp. Old men fumbled to change into bed clothes, and poured themselves glasses of warm vodka to drink over cards. There were fat ladies chopping up sausage for their children on tiny train tables, and old ladies petitioning for help to stow away their luggage. The smell of beer wafted through the car as men opened tepid bottles and slugged them down. They would duck into the room at the end of the car and reappear five minutes later with the wet smell of cigarettes hanging on their fingers. And the train attendants, known as provodnitsas, were circulating furiously, bringing pillows and bedding to everyone and taking their tickets.

I reviewed my plan. I was going to go the whole time without talking to anyone. Anything I mumbled in choppy Russian would instantly betray me a foreigner. There was a group of men sitting right near me, babbling drunkenly and playing cards, but I knew they would not bother me. I was going to spend the full twelve hours pretending to sleep, without making eye contact with anyone; without entering any situation which may require me to speak.

It was all going wonderfully until someone sat down on top of me.

“Izvi-NIETzsche!” he said, as he jumped up in surprise. “Excuse me!”

He stumbled to regain his balance. He was a white-haired man with his shirt hanging open; he smelled like a vodka factory. His friends laughed at him as he rejoined the card game. As he slurred an apology, I smiled at all of them and tried with all my might to look half-awake. I turned to the wall. My heart threatened to leap out of my chest; blood pounded through my ears. I closed my eyes and tried to hypnotize myself to sleep. It didn’t work. All I could think about was how much I did not want to spend the night in a Russian prison.

This latest feat of idiotic traveling was made possible by a political glitch in the modern visa system. As of 2008, the Russian Federation did not have border controls with the Republic of Belarus, its small neighbour to the west. This made it possible, as the Lonely Planet noted, to travel in between Belarus and Russia without a visa for a short period of time, so long as no police officer caught you doing it. As I leafed through my travel guide, this fact piqued my curiosity, and I smiled confidently and knew that I would never try something so ludicrous. Yet it sat there on the page, silently beckoning to me, waiting patiently for the day when I would invoke it out of pure necessity.

And this night, I was praying to the gods that the rules had not changed, and that Russia was still pretending that Belarus was not a separate country.

If the clock were turned back twenty years, things would be a little different. It would be 1988, the Berlin Wall would still be standing, and all the land to the borders of Poland would be part of the Soviet Union. The KGB would be standing guard, and Mikhail Gorbachev would be the General Secretary of the Communist Party, the second most powerful man in the world.

Since those days, politics have altered the playing field. The breakup of the USSR was the most recent imperial collapse in history. Overnight, fifteen new independent nations were created: six in Europe, including Belarus and the Ukraine; five in Central Asia; three in the Caucasus. And the rest–a land still vast enough to stretch from the shores of the Baltic to the islands off Japan–was reincarnated as the Russian Federation.

“Yup, that’s what the breakup of the Soviet Union means to me…a big visa headache!”

Katrina chuckled and held my hand as we walked together towards the Russian embassy. She was a beautiful girl, born to young parents in Minsk the year the Berlin wall came down, two years before the Soviet Union finally imploded. Her country, Belarus, was younger than her.

“It’s alright dear,” she said. “We just have to be patient. And don’t be pushy. Russians don’t like it when you’re pushy.”

I had been to this embassy before. Last time I spent two days getting the correct fee in American dollars and filling out the application, only to be told that I needed the original of my invitation letter.

“But when I came here in 2006, all I needed was a photocopy!”

The Russian lady behind the glass looked at me with indifference.

“I’m sorry. The rules have changed.”

That fiasco cost me $150. That was the charge for shipping an invitation letter, issued by one of Russia’s hotels, from Moscow to Minsk. But it arrived on time, and I was able to go to Moscow and meet up with my mother and brother. Now I needed a second visa, and therefore a second invitation letter. But since I had a full two months to get it, I relaxed. I knew that I had more than enough time.

“I can’t believe it’s been thirty days and it still hasn’t arrived! What do we do?”

“I don’t know dear. It seems the post has lost track of it.”

I swore and oath to the sky and held my head in my hands. The trip of my dreams—-to go across the Trans-Siberian railway east to Mongolia and China—-was about to be thwarted by the extraordinary incompetence of the post-Soviet post.

“Well, they have another letter waiting for me in Moscow, but how can we get it here??”

Katrina and I had been planning for some time to go by rail across Russia to China. Under no circumstances would this trip fail. I would not let it. We rushed to the DHL office in central Minsk. Katrina, my avid translator, argued for a great length of time with a flightly blonde who was working there. DHL, that great engine of world transport, told us that the fastest the letter would arrive no matter how much we paid, was a week.

“Sorry. It’s a holiday!”

Tomorrow was July 3rd, Independence Day in Belarus. You might expect that Independence Day was the day that Belarus became independent from the Soviet Union and began its new path as a sovereign nation. This isn’t so. Independence Day in Belarus is the celebration of the day the Red Army liberated them from the Nazis.

The subtle message seemed to be that Belarus and Russia weren’t really two different countries at all.

“One week! That won’t do! We have to leave in a week! And it takes them seven days to process my visa. We need it now! And if I rely on DHL, it will be too late and we will have no time to see Siberia. And my visa says I have to be out of Belarus by July 15!”

Katrina looked distraught. “Well what do we do?”

“This is ridiculous!” I shouted in frustration. “Best American shipping company in the world, and it takes them seven days to ship a piece of paper to a city twelve hours away! For God’s sake Katrina…it would be easier if I went to get it myself!”

After I spoke those words, both of us froze. I had meant them only in jest. But now that I thought about it…

————

I lay in the dim lights of the train car. From time to time the engine halted, and I heard the metal clank of a boarding passenger on the train stairs. Each time we stopped at a station, I prayed silently for the train to lurch forward again and start moving. The good part was I was not simply relying on the Lonely Planet’s 2005 edition. On my earlier trip to Moscow, I had been through this gaping hole in the border, and I rolled into Byelorusskie Station the next day without ever being stopped. But my mind wandered. What if this train got stopped? What if they checked randomly? What if they ‘changed the rules’ ? What if I got taken off the train by steel-faced Russian policemen and marched into a cell? How would I explain it to my father over the telephone? Would I ever see my girlfriend again?

Suddenly I felt two large hands clutch the front of my shirt. A barrage of Russian assaulted my ears as I was shaken violently awake. I opened my eyes–and beheld none other than the drunken man who had sat on me earlier, his shirt still hanging unbuttoned and open. I gaped at him like a mute.

No sooner had I opened my eyes that he began to look a bit embarrassed, as though he had just bent over me and shaken me awake by mistake. His eyes were glazed with vodka.

“Izvi-NIETzsche!” he said. “Isvi-NIETzsche.”

He returned to his bunk to play cards.

I laughed tears of joy. I could have kissed the man! Here I was, shaken furiously awake by my shirt collar, and it had not a thing to do with visas, passports, prison, or deportation! My assailant was not a policeman, nor a border guard, nor an OMON soldier, nor a whistle-blowing provodnitsa. It was just a shirtless stereotype, at home in his natural habitat, shaking me awake just to see what I would do.

I didn’t give more than half a glance to the chuckling crowd who had just observed the whole spectacle. I couldn’t say one word. I pulled the blankets up once again over the crumpled symbol of the Vancouver Canucks on my t-shirt, and resumed my silent prayers that the night would henceforth pass uneventfully.

————

I got my invitation letter right away.

I walked up the yard and missed the hostel completely. Eventually I entered what clearly used to be a large block of flats, of Soviet design. They were characteristically large square apartment blocks, at least three or four stories, which looked out onto a courtyard that was adorned with metal children’s play equipment. An unnoticeable paper sign lay behind a smudged window.

It read ‘Comrade Hostel’.

The crooked staircase was wretched and smelled like animal piss. It ascended three unnecessary floors, which the architects left as empty, squandered space. The aqua-blue paint on the walls was peeling. The whole building looked like it should have been demolished years ago. At last I came to a door with a half ripped sticker saying “Hostelworld.com” plastered to it. And aside from that indication, there was no way to know that I was at the right place.

I walked out with the invitation letter in my hands not thirty seconds after I walked in. I didn’t give the guy working at the desk the chance to look at the passport photocopy and realize that I was, indeed, picking up an invitation letter in the capital of the very country that I needed it to get into. I strolled outside into the morning sunlight, and relaxed in a park in China Town, a part of Moscow that has never had any Chinese population whatsoever. On the bright lawn, I sat and opened my backpack, snacking on my indigestible breakfast of crackers, cheese, and kolbasa sausage.

My train was leaving in fourteen hours. I now had all day in Moscow, and nothing to do–my only guideline was that I did not speak to anyone. I strolled down the street to Red Square, and saw the bright onion domes of Orthodox Cathedrals on my left; the glittering Moskva river snaking off behind them. Around the bend shone the candy-cane whorls of Pokrovksy Cathedral, improperly known in the West as St. Basil’s. The red brick glowed, along with the white and orange paint; the nine domes stood majestically against the morning sky.

I sat on the grass across from the Cathedral, carefully noting any policemen or guards in my line of sight. They didn’t bother me. Unlike a few years ago, they would approach us to grab our passports and extort us for money. I stretched out on the grass beneath a tree, with my back to the red walls of the Kremlin, and opened a book by David Remnick called The Last Days of the Soviet Empire.

————

“Citizens of Russia!” Yeltsin’s voice was stern and measured. The silver-haired politician had just marched down the steps of the White House, the Russian parliament building just around the bend in the river from the Kremlin. He climbed atop a T-72 tank of the Taman guards, shook the hands of the bewlidered soldiers, and gave his address to the thousands who had assembled.

“The legally elected president of the country has been removed from power…We are dealing with a right-wing, reactionary coup d’etat…Accordingly, we proclaim all decisions and decrees of this committee to be illegal…We appeal to the citizens of Russia to give an appropriate rebuff to the putschists and demand a return of the country to normal constitutional development.”

He spoke with clarity and gravity, addressing not so much the swarms of Russian demonstrators, but the cameras pointing at him from below the T-72. Around him, covering the steps of the White House and spilling over onto the driveway, were thousands of ordinary people. The red, white, and blue Russian tricolour–the old Tsarist flag–was waved above the crowd by a man sitting astride the arm of a cherry-picker. They had come to support Boris Yeltsin, their only hope of resistance.

The year was 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev had ruled the Soviet Union for six years. When he began his term in 1985, he immediately called for glasnost (‘openness’) and perestroika (‘restructuring’). He was doing what the West thought impossible–reforming the system from the inside. Overnight, the authoritarian hand of the Soviet Union dropped away. Freedom of speech was established; Party Congresses were broadcasted on national radio and television. Gorbachev initiated market reforms, and he pulled the troops out of Eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall crumbled.

While the West celebrated the end to hostilities of the Cold War, the old guard in the Communist party fumed. Most of them remembered the bitter and costly battles of the Second World War, and what their countrymen had sacrificed to build the USSR into the world’s second superpower. They watched as the democratic Gorbachev unraveled Soviet military might in Eastern Europe, and drove the Soviet economy into the ground.

Gorbachev was ready to do away with Communism forever. In two days he would return to Moscow to sign a new treaty. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics would become the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics. He was about to reincarnate the entire Soviet system as a Western-style social democracy.

But first, he needed a vacation.

Gorbachev was relaxing in Foros, in his magnificent dacha built on the Black Sea, when the KGB arrived. They were the first agents of the coup in Moscow. A committee of eight of the old guard, including ministers that Gorbachev himself had appointed, had taken control of the Kremlin and declared a state of emergency. They were preparing to return the country to its old state, where dissent was silenced and at least the shops had enough food. His captors asked Gorbachev to give his support to the committee and make it legitimate.

It is here where most polite versions of the story do not translate the exact phrases that Gorbachev used. Katrina tells me Russian swear words are among the dirtiest in the world.

The KGB entered the newspapers and television stations in Moscow. Tanks rolled in the streets. By the dawn, the radio had broadcasted the state of emergency, saying that Gorbachev was too physically ill to respond to the situation. The Emergency Committee took power.

At his dacha outside Moscow, Yeltsin strapped a bulletproof vest on before donning his suit. He was a new radical politician–one who believed that Gorbachev hadn’t gone far enough. He had been elected the president of the Russian Federation, the largest of the fifteen republics within the USSR. And unlike Gorbachev, he had been elected by the first truly democratic elections to be held in Russia since 1917. He hastened to the White House, the parliament building of the Russian Federation with his aides. He was going to barricade himself inside and use the building as a symbol of resistance.

At noon, he went on the radio.

“Soldiers and officers of the army, the KGB, and the troops of the Interior Ministry! Countrymen! The country is faced with the threat of terror. At this difficult hour of decision remember that you have taken an oath to your people, and your weapons cannot be turned against the people. You can erect a throne of bayonets, but you cannot sit on it for long. The days of the conspirators are numbered…Clouds of terror and dictatorship are gathering over Russia, but this night will not be eternal and our long-suffering people will find freedom once again, and for good. Soldiers, I believe at this tragic hour you will make the right decision. The honour of Russian arms will not be covered with the blood of the people.”

Tanks sent from the Kremlin surrounded the White House, sent by an elite division known as the Taman Guards. Already thousands of demonstrators gathered to support Yelstin. Men pleaded with army officers not to shed their blood. Girls climbed onto the tanks. Old ladies shrieked into the windows for the boys to turn around and get out. The tank drivers sat bewildered on their tanks, unsure of what to do. One of the officers, named Sergei, received a call from Yeltsin’s deputy.

“You know the people who ordered you to do this are criminals?” he said.

Sergei did not know what to say.

“What do you think? Will you help us?”

That was his key phrase. Sergei realized at once what he was being asked to do…support Yeltsin, betray the military, and risk death for treason.

“I will help.”

The crowd roared as the tanks slowly began to point their barrels away from the White House. The soldiers had turned. They were now ready to defend the parliament and the resistance of Boris Yeltsin.

————

Across the Soviet Union there was subtle rebellion against the coup. The regional commander of Leningrad refused to send in his tanks to occupy the city. A hundred thousand people staged a demonstration of support in Yeltsin’s hometown. The young staff at the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta were told by their editor-in-chief to print the official line of the coup leaders, and nothing by Yeltsin. They refused. They printed Yeltsin’s statements on the second page of the paper, right after those of the putschists.

One of the coup leaders, Gennady Yanayev, was asked to give a press conference. He had been awake all night, drinking vodka heavily and preparing for the hard hours ahead. He had been dragged into this mess at the last minute by coup enthusiasts; he perhaps now he was regretting his decision. He was frightfully nervous; his hands were shaking of their own accord.

After the press conference, he ordered the people at the news station Vremya to edit out his trembling hands, the laughter in the hall, and the scoffing reactions of the news correspondents. They edited nothing. Vremya aired that night, and the Soviet people got to see the spokesman for the new order, drunk and nervous, barely able to read his statement because of his shivering hands.

At the White House, the people had placed the rebel tanks behind a makeshift barricade. They waited outside for two rainy nights, determined not to go inside. Yeltsin and his team were using them as human shields. They were betting on one desperate chance…that the coup leaders would not dare create a river of blood in downtown Moscow, on live international television. The young men in the tanks sat waiting in dread of the moment the order might come.

“Is there really someone here who wants to storm the White House?” Yanayev asked.

He was holding a meeting with the coup members. Things were not going so well. Gorbachev had not cooperated, the army was not fully responsive, and Yeltsin was shaming them all. The Emergency Committee had already lost faith in itself. To this question, no one responded. Every man stared at the floor.

Yelstin received a call from Kryuchkov, another member of the Emergency Committee. He suggested that they both fly to Foros and resolve it all with Gorbachev. The troops were ordered back to their barracks; the crowd surrounding the White House erupted with joy. The coup had ended. They had won, and they were all alive.

Back in Moscow, Gorbachev gave a press conference. He talked like he always did–about the renewal of the Party by the defenders of true socialism, who had routed the putschists. At the end, his aide Yakovlev approached him.

“You have just given the worst press conference of your career,” he said. “The Party is dead. Why can’t you see that? Talk about ‘renewal’ is senseless. It’s like offering first aid to a corpse!”

He was right. Two days later, Yeltsin passed two decrees. One suspended the activities of the Russian Communist Party. The other gave the member republics the right to secede from the USSR if they so chose–which they did. The following day, on August 24th, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary. And with that, Communism–the spectre that haunted Europe–vanished on the night breeze as quietly as it had come.

————

I strolled to the White House, now the House of the Administration of the Russian Federation. It was massive and robust–the characteristic features of Soviet construction. It was built to look as glorious and imposing as the Party that commissioned it; propaganda turned to stone. I looked at the double-headed eagle, the resurrected symbol of the Russian Tsars, shining golden from the highest point of the building. And as I examined the building closely, I could make out scars, worn into the white stone, from where the hammer-and-sickle once stood.

I had been thinking all day about something called the ‘Great Man’ theory of history. It is the theory that the most powerful leaders in the world, male or female, are the determining forces in history. Believers in the theory say the world would look completely different if it were not for the will and agenda of individual men: people such as Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, or Genghis Khan. This is contrary to the theory which true Marxists themselves believe: that it is the material conditions of the population as a while, not the individual, that determine the character of revolution. By this logic, if Napoleon had been shot by an English cannon early in his career, another hero of the same stature would have arisen in his place.

The Great Man Theory is currently not in vogue in Western academia because of its undemocratic connotations. And it is certainly true that there is more to the history of the world than the decrees and actions of a few powerful individuals. Yet as I pondered the story of the end of the Soviet Union, and Yeltsin’s courageous defiance, I realized that at the most critical moments, the course of history is actually decided by personal mettle. The coup members were so hesitant they could not even name a leader–one soul brave enough to take responsibility for the actions of the committee. When it came time to address the nation, it was Yeltsin’s speech atop a tank to Yanayev’s waggling hands.

I recalled a quote from Henry David Thoreau, something he had written in his diary in the mid nineteenth century. He was talking about great masses in history, and how the historian tries without success to make them meaningful. “It is for want of a man that there are so many men,” he wrote. “It is individuals who populate the world.”

————

The day was waning. In the fading light, I sat in a garden across from the Kremlin. I watched old ladies walk past with shawls and old bags on wheels, saying “beer, cigarettes; beer, cigarettes.” One of them approached me. I thanked the woman and said no. Maybe later.

Her old face wrinkled into a smile. “Oh, I have to catch a train later. You better have one now.”

I popped open a Starry Melnik, my favorite Russian brew, and watched the amber glow of the sunset against the walls of the bright yellow government buildings inside the Kremlin. The McDonalds on the tier beneath me was packing up with people to buy American burgers at American prices. McDonalds opened their first shops in Russia in 1990, when it was still the Soviet Union. I thought of the American businessman who woke up one morning and thought it would be hilarious to put a McDonalds–an archetype of American capitalism–across the street from the world epicenter of Communism.

To my right, Russian teenagers on a park bench lit cigarettes and played with their cell phones. Titanic Russian special policemen walked bored throughout the park, ignoring the open beer bottles they saw. As the light faded, little garden lights began to glow, as did the water fountains nearby. A group of American college students bantered loudly, a few girls went off in search of a place that would serve them a White Russian. I could have told them that their search would have been totally fruitless, but I did not.

I couldn’t speak to anyone.

In the darkness I took the Moscow metro back to Byelorusskie station. Across the street there were rows of construction and a man reading a magazine in a one-bulb shop. I sat beneath the awning of an Orthodox church, shut down for construction, and pretended to play with my cell phone while I eyed the seedy characters inhabiting the alleyways not too far away.

When the anointed hour came, I got up and marched into the railway station. Now it really counted. I was in another country illegally, and no one could do a thing if I reached Minsk safely. When I arrived at the station, I instantly saw Russian policemen standing about the train platforms looking bored. They hadn’t been there this morning.

For an instant I almost swerved in my step. I could turn around and spend the next night and day in Moscow, I thought. I’ve stayed up all night before. And then I could just buy another train ticket…

I realized I could not buy another train ticket. I would have to show my passport.

My heart in my throat, I walked calmly towards my train past the idle cops. In front of me, one was looking at the passports of a man and his family. They were a shade of brown–Armenians or Georgians probably. I prayed it was not a general inspection, and I decided to treat it like it wasn’t. I walked past them. I caught a glimpse to the right of a Provodnitsa opening a man’s passport.

I breathed. I didn’t have a problem looking relaxed. My nerves were swimming in a lake of beer.

I gave my ticket to the provodnitsa, and she told me my seat number. I boarded the train and found my sleeping quarters without saying even as much as a grunt to anyone, in a routine I had practiced already two dozen times in my head. On my train bed, my form still, my mind racing, my heart pounding in my chest, I felt the train lurch to life; I felt the fingers of the provodnitsa snatch my ticket from my outstretched hand.

I barely slept. I could not say the hour when my nerves finally became exhausted; when I finally faded into oblivion. I did not know I was safe until I saw the shine of the two Stalinist towers of the Minsk Gate, standing tall and pale in the clear Belarusian dawn.

————

“I’m sorry, the visa won’t be ready in a week. Fifteen working days.”

“WHAT?”

“Fifteen working days. That is the policy.”

I tried not to explode.

“But when I came here just two months ago in April, it was done in a week! Look, I have the original invitation letter, just like you said!”

“I’m sorry. The rules have changed again.”

I submitted my application and passport, and walked outside with Katrina to laugh my frustration to death. What could I do? The entry visa requirements to this country changed on the wind! And what’s worse, it would be twenty-one days before I could get into Russia, and there was no way they could extend my requested stay. I would have to get from Moscow to the Mongolian border in nine days; I would not have time to see much of Siberia.

But what really caught my eye were my dates of departure. After my little illegal adventure in Russia had passed without incident, I was going to have to stay ten days over my Belarusian visa before I got my passport back. I would have stay illegally in Belarus, the only post-Soviet country where the KGB were still the KGB.

My one way out of Belarus was the train to Moscow. The only way to get out of the country without being noticed was through that very same hole in the visa system that I had just jumped through. I laughed when I realized that the trip of my dreams—across the trans-Siberian to China—was made possible only by the political ghost of the Soviet Union.