Chapter 1: The Sleeping Land

‘Russia! Why ever would you want to go there?’

‘Are you really planning to take a group of schoolgirls to Russia?’

Eyes rolled and heads were shaken in disbelief or sorrow at this misguided, if not downright harebrained idea. Surely there were other more sensible places to go, easier to get to and safer, and—you name it!

It was 1989, and even though the USSR’s ‘evil empire’ image was wearing off a bit, and the ‘iron curtain’ was slowly being pulled aside, Russia was still thought to be a daunting land of endless ugliness with not much worthwhile to see (except perhaps the Hermitage), and stodgy, humourless, if not downright scary people. And it was still the home of communism, a word that for many still evoked memories of ‘Reds under the bed’ scare mongering and dramatic stories of spies and sinister happenings—the stuff of Western propaganda and fear over the long years of the Cold War—so it was possibly an understandable reaction at the time. But things were changing.

We had been planning our ‘goodwill’ tour to the Soviet Union for a year and would be spending all of our four weeks there in the Russian Republic, with the exception of a couple of days in Uzbekistan. But just getting to the USSR was a trek in itself. After flying from Canberra to Sydney, then on to Japan, we were stopping for a few days en route in Tokyo before taking the train to Niigata. It was from here that we would enter the Soviet Union, flying into the city of Khabarovsk in eastern Siberia.

The flashing neon-and-advertisement-filled streets of the frenetic Japanese capital were to prove a marked contrast to the commercial-free cities we were about to see, but the significance of this was to hit us even more profoundly on our return journey when we flew out of Leningrad—then totally unsullied by neon lights and billboards—and back into the flash–flash, buy–buy glitz of Singapore.

We were buoyed with enthusiasm as we hurtled on one of Japan’s famed Shinkansen (bullet trains) from Tokyo to Niigata, in the north of Honshu Island. As we were lumping all of our bags off the train our first disaster struck: one of our students hesitantly came up to me and uttered the fateful words,

‘I have lost my money belt … and everything in it.’

The 16 girls on the trip were all from year 10 and above, and were aged 16 or older. As agreed and discussed ad nauseum, they were carrying their own documents, the most sacrosanct rule on our travels being, ‘Thou shalt wear thy money belt at all times’. It seems, however, that this 18-year-old knew better, and had taken hers off and put it on the seat beside her—and left it there! We scurried back on to the train and searched madly everywhere, asking and gesticulating to anyone we could find, but to no avail. Time was moving on and we had to make it to the airport for the once weekly flight to Khabarovsk and she had no passport, no visa, no plane ticket, no money—nothing. After a crisis meeting, we decided that the staff would all need to go on with the group and, sadly, she-of-the-missing-money-belt would have to be dispatched with the guard on the train back to the Australian Embassy in Tokyo.

We held out a faint glimmer of hope that, provided we were contactable, if everything turned up she could possibly rejoin us but if not, there was no option: she would have to return to Australia. There were tearful farewells from the girls, and we thought that would be the end of the sad and sorry matter. But, as it turned out, this seemingly simple incident was to dog us for much of the trip.

In Niigata, when the transfer we had booked failed to eventuate, our improvisatory skills were tested again in what turned out to be good practice for things to come. There was nothing else to do but squeeze on to a local bus to get to the airport for our two-hour flight across the Sea of Japan and over Siberia’s coastal mountains to the Russian city of Khabarovsk. It was here that we were to pick up the Trans-Siberian Railway. At the time, the better known Pacific coast city of Vladivostok was still closed to tourists who could not be allowed to go poking around such a strategically important naval port!

The train was to trundle us across Eastern Siberia for three days and around Lake Baikal to Irkutsk. From there we would make a southern detour, flying to the desert republic of Uzbekistan to see Tashkent, Samarkand and, we hoped, Bukhara, historic centres along the old Silk Road. On our return to the Russian Republic, we planned to visit Moscow and Leningrad (as it was called at the time) and come home via Singapore.

It was a trip that would take us across huge distances and centuries of history and, for many of us its impact would last far longer than its four short weeks. Little did I know that, for me, it was the start of a two-decade journey of discovery.

Nor was there any way of knowing, as I stepped off the plane in Eastern Siberia on that mid-summer day in June 1989, that the country itself would soon be plunged into its own climactic journey of discovery, with the downfall of communism and the Soviet Union itself, and the rebirth of a new democratic capitalist Russia. As it turned out this, my first trip, was taking place at a pertinent and poignantly historic point in time: we would be seeing the communist system and the country it had dominated for 80 years in a state of collapse.

Siberia

What evocative images and emotions this one word can convey: of freezing landscapes and impenetrable forests, isolation, hardship, exile, and the horrors of the gulags. Is that what Siberia is? We tend to associate the word Siberia with banishment, and with the horrors of the salt mines and the gulags of Stalin and the Soviet era. But to generations of Russians it had been a place of exile long before that.

In Moscow’s great Tretyakov Gallery there is a haunting painting by Isaac Levitan called Vladimirka, or, The Road to Vladimir. It shows a deserted, drably monochromatic landscape seemingly trapped under a vast, unforgiving sky. A road disappears into nowhere and, almost lost in the desolation, is a small shrine at which stands a lonely supplicant, presumably, like many others, pondering his fate before trudging into the great featureless unknown. The road leads to Vladimir, a city east of Moscow, and continues across the Urals to Siberia. The emptiness is palpable, as is the hopelessness and desperation of the seemingly endless journey so many took as they trudged along the road to Vladimir into exile. Many who opposed the authority of the tsars, like those in the Decembrist uprising of 1825, had been forced to take this fateful road, rarely to return. Painted by Levitan in 1892, the work depicts with great poignancy what Siberia has implied to Russian people over centuries.

Siberia: not a separate country, not even a republic, but that vast expanse of Asiatic Russia stretching from the Urals to the Pacific. High mountain chains to the south—with exotic names like the Tien Shan and Hindu Kush—divided the Soviet Union and Russia from China, Mongolia, Afghanistan and Iran. These, along with the Caucasus Mountains between the Caspian and Black Seas, formed a great barrier locking Russia and the Soviet Union behind their towering peaks. Physically, they block any relief of rain or warmth that winds from the south might bring, so the lands to their north are kept dry and cold. Over the centuries, they have also formed a human and cultural barrier, blocking many developments and influences from the world beyond.

North of these high ranges, the land slopes gradually down across the great plains of Russia to the Arctic Ocean, like a gigantic plate tilted up on its southern rim. This means that nearly all of Siberia’s rivers flow down to the north. Fed by the run-off and heavy snow of the great southern mountains, they become huge rivers like the Lena, the Yenesei and the Ob. But they have also a huge problem because, for much of the year, the Arctic Ocean is frozen, blocking their mouths with gigantic plugs of ice. Their water therefore banks back and freezes, forming the marshy tundra of the Russian Arctic. Man has built barriers across these gigantic swiftly flowing rivers with vast dams and pipelines that channel the force of all of that water to drive enormous hydro-electric power stations. But, sadly, this great source of power is a very long way from where it is most needed—in European Russia. Siberia is a long way from anywhere.

South of the frozen tundra, where the earth becomes warm enough for trees to sink their roots into something other than permanent ice, is the taiga, a great belt of conifers that encircles the globe at this latitude, spreading across the north of Canada and Scandinavia as well as Russia, like a gigantic band of Christmas trees. As you move further south, the coniferous pines, spruce and larch are intermingled with deciduous trees like the beautiful birch and aspen. These vast forests provide a wealth of timber for Russia to sell, and to use domestically as fuel and as a major building material. Wood is evident everywhere you go, from the heavily treed landscape to the wooden houses and piles of firewood for the long winter.

The Arctic tundra and the taiga are the natural habitat for many of Russia’s native animals. The masters of the forests are the wolf and the magnificent, golden striped Siberian tiger—an animal now at risk of extinction because of human encroachment. These lands are also the home of exotic furred animals like the sable and mink that were trapped and later farmed, their coats becoming a symbol of style and luxury throughout the world. These furs, along with caviar from the sturgeon fish in the great rivers, became ‘Russian gold’.

Beneath the frozen lands are even greater riches. In areas that are incredibly difficult to mine, are some of the world’s largest reserves of oil and gas; in fact so much oil is in Siberia that its full extent is probably not known. It has been the mainstay of the economy for years, with income from oil and gas largely keeping the Soviet Union afloat throughout the economically stagnant years of the 1970s, and in the years since. Sadly, in a country with very little environmental concern or control, the huge oil operations often left devastation in their wake, much to the detriment of the landscape, the wildlife and the indigenous peoples who had once scratched out a living in the area. The future of Russia may depend on this great Siberian treasure-trove but, unless there are efficient ways to get the timber, oil and other resources out of the vast frozen lands of Siberia, much of the region’s great wealth lies dormant and of little value.

In the Mongolian language, Siberia appropriately means ‘Sleeping Land’.

It was the coming of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the longest railway line in the world, that woke these vast tracts from their long, quiet slumber. Running over 9,000 km eastward from Moscow, this great engineering feat was completed in just 13 years between 1891 and 1904. The train took about seven days to make the full journey, connecting European Russia with Siberia and the Far East and creating a lifeline for the entire region. Everything came in by train: not only goods and people but also services like shops, medical surgeries, libraries and theatres. Trains travelled across the country like moving towns, bringing most of the things that the people needed, and making life slightly less difficult for the otherwise isolated communities.

On their return journeys, these life-giving trains could take the huge resources of Siberia—timber from the forests, and fuel and minerals from the far north—back to the major markets in the west. Towns, timber mills and industrial centres began to spring up along the great railway line. Other major routes were developed, like the BAM railway (Baikal Amur Mainline), another huge project to the north of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which was started in the 1930s but never fully completed. The new rail links replaced the treacherous and difficult means of transport along the rivers and roads, and made the eastern lands of Siberia places of rapid economic development and population growth. The train line, that great artery bringing life to the ‘sleeping land’, had turned Siberia into a huge source of wealth—it had made it valuable.

Igor

Our gateway into Russia and the Soviet Union was Khabarovsk, in far Eastern Siberia and, waiting to take delivery of us at the airport was Igor. He was to be our tour escort for the next four weeks and, as such, was a compulsory and very essential part of any tour in Soviet times.

A slight young man, probably in his early thirties, Igor had pronounced features, with penetrating dark eyes that stared earnestly out of a thin face, and dark wavy hair that tended to be wispy and fly about somewhat. He looked rather gaunt and often seemed a little forlorn or woebegone—very much in line with one’s image of the tormented Russian. I certainly would not have classified him as a ‘hunk’ but the girls seemed to think that he was OK: perhaps they thought he was cute, or maybe their mothering instincts took over. Little could I know when we met in Khabarovsk that, four weeks later, he would flee from us at the airport in Leningrad, worn ragged and no doubt delighted that his Australian ordeal was over.

It turned out that Igor was just what we needed; he was knowledgeable, dependable, very experienced, and a true battler when ‘little problems’, as he euphemistically used to call what often turned out to be major disasters, cropped up. He was highly educated and, though a maths teacher by training, also had an avid interest in and knowledge of all areas of the arts, especially poetry. He epitomised, in many ways, the intelligentsia of his home city of Leningrad that saw itself very much as the country’s centre of culture and refinement. Like many Russians, he knew a number of languages as well as his own; his command of English was excellent and he spoke good French and reasonable German. He was, he said, partly Uzbek, so knew a little of that language too. We were planning to visit Uzbekistan, so that was useful news.

Igor was also a proud young man, and I was frequently angered by the treatment he received in his own country. It was, for example, extremely hot for much of the tour, especially when we were in the south, and we needed to pour cold drinks into ourselves whenever we could find them. The only place these were available was at the beryozkas—shops specifically for foreigners that would only accept hard (foreign) cash. As a Russian, Igor was not officially permitted to have hard currency, so could not buy cold drinks for himself. I tried to get around this by buying a number and distributing them around—always trying to send one in his direction—but I felt that it was a very humiliating situation for him to be in. This turned out to be a common problem for, such was the treatment of Soviet citizens in their own country, that foreigners and their money seemed to take precedence over and have access to goods that were not available to Russians—even if they could afford them.

Surprisingly, considering the hundreds of ethnic groups in the Soviet Union, Igor—himself part Uzbek, presumably part Slavic and probably also from a Jewish background—seemed not too happy about some races or, more specifically, skin colours.

In the east, Russia borders China and Mongolia, and the central republics are almost part of the Middle East, so many of the ethnic groups look quite markedly oriental or Middle Eastern, and most of them have their own distinctive language and customs. Moreover, the Tatars, or Mongols, who occupied Russia for about three centuries, not only had a huge influence on its history and architecture, but left a lot of Tatar blood throughout the largely Slavic population. The range of ethnic groups within the country was particularly apparent in Siberia. In the train and on the platforms of the towns where we stopped we would see a great mixture of people of Mongolian, Chinese, Middle Eastern, and Slavic appearance. But none of these people was really ‘black’.

The extent of Igor’s feeling became very clear when, on getting onto one overnight train, he became extremely agitated about a very dark young man standing in the corridor.

‘If he is in our compartment,’ he said vehemently, ‘I refuse to go in there.’

Fortunately, we were spared an embarrassing scene as it turned out we were in different compartments. On chatting to him—at an acceptable distance from Igor—he turned out to be an erudite, multilingual Nigerian doing postgraduate studies at the Moscow State University. This is a renowned institution to which only the very highest standard of students can gain admission, but that mattered not a jot to Igor—he was black! We were saddened by this attitude but it epitomised, perhaps, a general ongoing racism simmering not far under the surface, as it does in many countries, including our own, though we may not wish to admit it.

Regardless of any such attitudes, most importantly for us, Igor turned out to be a real fighter on our behalf—and we certainly needed him to go in to bat for us time and time again, as the tour company for which he worked often let him down badly. The biggest hitch was that someone had seemingly forgotten to book our flights. In a huge country, in which we were travelling a number of long legs by air, and in which the planes were always chock full, this posed quite a problem. The result was that we were stranded again and again. The various officials we had to do battle with, not wanting to appear inept, or for that matter helpful—which would have been even more out of character—stonewalled and performed at their officious worst. We would go into what became a triple act: the Australian Embassy in Moscow, with whom I developed an invaluable hotline, would do whatever they could to get us out of wherever we were holed up; I would do my angry lady bit; and Igor would chip away at the local powers-that-be. Ultimately, however, he was the one in the hot seat; it was he who had to haggle and cajole, first to get us on the road or, more literally, into the air again, and then rearrange all of our other bookings. The continuous stress of doing this cost him dearly and by the end of his four weeks with us, Igor’s health was suffering and he was wracked with severe migraine headaches. It was to his credit that he battled on, sometimes against great odds. We would eventually find some way out of each predicament, but in the meantime our carefully planned itinerary would be shot to pieces. Such were some of the joys of travelling in the fading days of communism!

Like many things in the Soviet Union at that time, efficiency and reliable organisation seemed rare—or totally non-existent. We came across a number of dedicated people like Igor who worked hard to do the right thing. But when things went wrong, which they did almost daily, everything had to be resolved in Moscow, which, when you are in the far east of the country, is a long way away. The problems of a huge centralised state were exacerbated by the fact that the whole country was slowly grinding to a halt, even though it was still regarded as one of the world’s great super powers. I could not see how the Soviet Union would be a threat to anyone; based on my experiences, it would not have been able to find its way out of a brown paper bag!

First stop Khabarovsk

On arriving at the Khabarovsk airport, it was quickly apparent that this was no international hub but, nonetheless, the officials were suitably severe and carried out their duties very earnestly. They stood us, one by one, under the overhead mirrors that all Immigration checkpoints had, and most still do in Russia. Presumably, it was ‘all the better to see you with,’ and they stared long and hard at us, our passports and our visas. Some of the girls found this rather unnerving, and stood fidgeting nervously under the intense scrutiny, saying to me under their breath, ‘Is something wrong?’ as the eyes of the invariably young male officers seemed to flick interminably from passport to person. Perhaps it was just ‘male interest’, as the staff members of more advanced years did not seem to receive the same searching scrutiny. It could well have been that young Western females were something of a novelty in Khabarovsk at that time.

The oh-so-officious Customs brigade were equally thorough, making us empty everything out of our bags—the only time I have ever had to do this on arrival in Russia. Perhaps they had time on their hands or just wanted to seem super-efficient, but they examined the lot—possibly curious to see what people from faraway Australia would be carrying. They were particularly keen to inspect any written material we were bringing in, especially magazines, though we were not quite sure what they were looking for, and they probably weren’t either as none of them could speak—or, presumably, read—English. The assumption was that they were after seditious material, and they were rather concerned about an article in Time magazine, gesticulating ominously at one picture. They kept it, just in case—possibly as a souvenir. It could have been that they were hopeful of coming upon some saucy Western pictures to confiscate, but sorry—wrong type of group! We eventually made it through the arrival rituals pretty much intact, and were at last officially in Russia—and the Soviet Union.

Khabarovsk is about 300 km from the Pacific coast, on the other side of a high mountain range and about 800 km north and of Vladivostok. It is an industrial centre and had, at that time, about 600,000 people, a city double the size of Canberra, our home town. But as we wandered its wide tree-lined streets and open squares, passing the ubiquitous wooden houses that we were to see throughout the country, it seemed a rather quiet, sleepy place. Igor, who had never been this far east before, clearly thought it was the Styx or, in the Australian term that we taught him, ‘the back of beyond’.

The city is situated on the River Amur, which forms part of Russia’s border with China. Looking across this mighty waterway, the girls were excited and astounded to realise that across the mountains, which we could just make out in the distance, was China itself. They were also amazed to see what passed for a beach in this part of the world. Being summer, the locals were lapping up the chance to sunbake along the riverbanks, palely spreadeagled on any bit of sand—or, often more accurately, mud—that they could find, trying to soak up the precious few days or weeks of sun and warmth in an otherwise bitterly cold place. A few even braved the undoubtedly still icy water, some in the skimpiest of swimming costumes that barely extended around their rather portly bodies.

My most vivid image of Khabarovsk, and the one that had the greatest impact on the girls too, was its huge memorial to the Great Patriotic War (as Russia’s involvement in World War II is known in that country) in which the Soviet Union had battled Hitler’s Nazi forces for four long years, from 1941 to 1945, at huge cost. The memorial was an extremely long, curved, black marble wall with a gigantic red granite block in the centre into which was carved the hammer and sickle, the insignia of the Soviet Union. Covering the black marble, in small gold print, were the names of the 22,000 people who had been lost from this city alone. What made it so moving, however, were the two children, standing stiffly to attention, guarding the eternal flame that flickered in the centre of the monument. Meticulously dressed in full school uniform, they were watched over by a solicitous soldier. Every 20 minutes, the children standing guard would march smartly off to one side, to be replaced by two more who had proudly and patiently been waiting their turn. We were told that there was no shortage of children anxious to volunteer, despite the fact that it was the middle of the school holidays and it was quite a warm mid-summer day, so great was the honour of doing guard duty. This was the first such memorial we had seen in Russia and our girls stood silently watching the scene, overwhelmed not only by the immensity of the monument and the myriad of gold names, but also by the moving solemnity of the scene taking place in front of them.

We were to see reminders of the Great Patriotic War everywhere. A few days later in a small village, one of the girls noticed red stars on nearly every gate—in some instances in twos and threes—and, on asking, was told that each star was in memory of a family member who had lost their life during the war. At nearly every war memorial or eternal flame we visited, we came across wedding groups. Apart from oohing and aahing (and, it has to be admitted, often giggling) at the usually ornate and excessively frilly bridal gowns, our girls were struck by the fact that on their wedding day, it seemed important for these very young couples to take the time to lay a wreath, or sometimes just a single gladioli, in honour of those who had died. The war touched all of Russia—and still does.

The great green train

From Khabarovsk, the Trans-Siberian Railway was to take us to the city of Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal. The train was to be our home for three days, and would trundle us gently through the rolling countryside of southern Siberia, through forests, across rivers and past numerous villages and towns.

Our train, like all the others we saw, was a distinctive dull green with a great Soviet hammer and sickle insignia on the front. If I shut my eyes for just a second, I could imagine it hurtling through a freezing landscape sending snow flying high on both sides, its blazing-red crossed banners streaming heroically above the roaring engine with the feared Bolshevik leader, Strelnikoff, charging through the country devastating all before him just as it was in David Lean’s 1965 epic film Dr Zhivago. The film dramatically depicts events preceding and after the 1917 Revolution and the subsequent Civil War between the Reds (the Bolsheviks) and Whites (basically those opposing the new regime). It had made for a good starting point for us for this part of Russia’s tumultuous history.

We had no streaming red banners, but we did have a huge throbbing engine to haul the train’s many carriages through thousands of kilometres. It was so long that when we were going around a wide curve of track, we could look out of the window and see not only our engine and front carriages, but also the guard’s van. Our walk to the dining car, far up the train, provided plenty of good exercise, but the times at which we ate—according to the train’s clocks—were very odd indeed. All of the trains’ clocks were set to Moscow time, for the efficient running of this extensive rail system—but to the puzzlement of the passengers. As Khabarovsk was seven hours ahead of Moscow, according to the train’s clock we would be eating our breakfast at midnight and our lunch at 6 a.m. This accentuated just how far we were from Moscow, and how enormous Russia and the Soviet Union were. It is said that ‘the sun never sets on Russia’ and in view of the fact that the country stretches nearly halfway around the globe, across about 170 degrees of longitude, this is largely true; when the people in the Far East were turning in for the night, those on the Baltic were just getting up that morning. Of course whether there is any sun to actually set is another matter entirely, particularly in Russia’s north, well inside the Arctic Circle, where there is precious little light, let alone sun, throughout the long, excruciatingly cold winter months.

The huge east–west extent of the country means that there is a nine-hour time difference between Moscow and the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Far East. This provided a very practical lesson for the girls on the effect of longitude on time, as they stared at the clocks and then at their own watches, their minds whirring. Each day, as we moved west, we gained about an hour and had to dutifully put our watches back until presumably, had we travelled all the way to Moscow, they would have shown the same time as the clocks there.

We were travelling ‘hard class’, which was second or economy class, but with sleepers. The narrow beds would have been a bit of a problem for the overly stout but, though quite firm, were reasonably comfortable and had clean blankets and linen. With four berths in each compartment, two up and two down, it was certainly fairly snug, especially as we each had at least one biggish suitcase. With a lot of pushing and shoving we managed to stuff everything we could under bunks or into various nooks and crannies, and piling some cases end on end to create rather unstable pyramids with the potential to collapse if the train lurched or stopped abruptly. It became quite an acrobatic feat climbing over people and various other obstacles just to get in and out of the compartments, but that became part of the fun. There were no such luxuries as having your own toilet or basin, but there was a European-style toilet at one end of the carriage and an Asian-style one at the other, and though not five-star quality, they were better than many I have struck.

As with all Soviet long-distance trains, along the side of each carriage ran a corridor, with little seats that could be flipped down, either for short-term travellers, or to sit on if you wanted to watch the world go by. The train’s world—its workers and the hundreds of passengers—padded up and down this corridor on their way to and from the dining car, to have a bit of a constitutional or just to stickybeak at their co-travellers. This provided a very good opportunity for people-watching, and the range of passers-by gave us an overview of the country’s varied and colourful population. The conductors also regularly made their way through the carriage, sometimes bringing hot water for tea or coffee that, much to the girls’ delight, we drank from glasses that fitted into the ornate metal holders which were provided on the little tables in each compartment along with the plastic flowers. It is a sad reflection on the urge of tourists to souvenir such things, that these novel and distinctively Russian metal holders are now rarely seen on the trains.

Our group of girls, reduced to 15 with our ‘Japanese loss’, and our 6 staff occupied six compartments. The girls took up four of these, but there was a spare bunk in the compartment I was sharing with another staff member and Igor, and our different travelling companions added considerable colour and interest to the train trip.

The first of these was a fresh-faced young man looking very smart in full army gear, complete with one of those high Russian military, visored cap that makes its personnel look so imposing. Here was a member of the fearful Soviet army, our nemesis for decades, and he just seemed like a shy young boy.

‘He looks about the same age as my older son, Hamish,’ I said to my friend—and that turned out to be the case. He spoke no English and we had no Russian, and Igor was no help for he had exempted himself from any form of fraternising, opting to sleep instead. We therefore had to resort to drawing little pictures on a notepad, and with a bit of assistance from a dictionary, role-play and crazy gesticulations we made considerable progress.

Our soldier’s name was Andrei, he was 19 years old, and was doing his compulsory national service in Vladivostok. He was on his way home on leave for a few days to see his mother and girlfriend—he showed us her picture, touchingly blushing bright scarlet as he did so. When he came out of the army, he told us, he wanted to be a lawyer. It was officially not permitted to photograph members of the military, so I asked if he would mind if I took a photo. Only if it was with the other teacher, he gesticulated and then posed, very formally, with his arm stiffly around her, and a rather coy look on his face. Before departing in the middle of the night and disappearing into a black nothingness in, seemingly, the middle of nowhere, he took off both his shoulder epaulettes, wrote his name on them, and gave one to each of us, along with a big hug. It was a very genuine and moving gesture. This was certainly not the type of experience I had expected on my first face-to-face meeting with a member of the Soviet army.

Somehow, I have never felt intimidated by a military or police presence in Russia, despite all their bristling guns. One of the fondest images I have from the 1989 trip is, in fact, of an otherwise stern-looking policeman taking a tearful, small girl by the hand around Moscow’s Red Square trying to help her find her mother, all the while calming her and gently mopping up her tears. Were these really the feared enemy?

As soon as Andrei, our soldier, got off the train we were joined by a young woman with a baby and a large sack-like bag. She was very slight and bird-like, with long black hair neatly tied-back and was wearing a white dress with a bright floral pattern, such as we were to see frequently in the south. But it was the baby’s appearance that struck me. It was fairly young and there was something very odd about its shape. Then it dawned on me: it did not have that bulky bottom most babies have. It was not wearing a nappy! He, as the baby turned out to be, was wearing towelling leggings with nothing underneath and, whenever he leaked, mum would dive into the sack and get another pair of leggings. She whipped off the dripping ones then hung them around the compartment on the curtain rods, or any other available place from which to dangle things. This was bad enough but what, I thought, is going to happen when the baby does more than leak? That was, of course, a certainty in time. When it did, miraculously out of nowhere, dad appeared; he was clearly travelling even more hard class than we were and had no bed at all. He whisked the offending leggings away and reappeared some time later with them wet, but clean(ish), to add to the growing number adorning our compartment. Some decoration!

The baby was reasonably quiet by baby standards but, whenever he did cry, the mother dipped his dummy into a magic bottle, then stuffed it back into his mouth and peace would return. What was in the bottle we could only guess—probably honey—but Igor had all sorts of lurid suggestions. He was clearly not into babies, and thought the whole business was truly gruesome. When, later, we were in a cottage in a wooden architecture museum and he saw a cradle with a pulley attached so the ‘cradle would rock’, he commented dryly, ‘Just what we needed on the train.’

We didn’t try our picture-conversation with the young mum—she was too busy mopping and feeding—but we did find out that she and her husband had been turning up to every train for days, hoping that there would be two places for them. That was how full the trains were. As for Igor, he was right out of his comfort zone. I tended to agree that the hanging nappies were a bit grim, but in such situations one has no option but to see the funny side and go with the flow. I was just able to maintain my humour until we got to Irkutsk, but was then very pleased to be leaving our increasingly pungent compartment, glad that we did not have another four days to go like the mother and baby and the dad down the train, who were travelling all the way to Moscow. What the compartment—and the towelling leggings—would have been like by then did not bear thinking about.

Our soldier had not been the only member of the army on board; it turned out that there were mobs of them, travelling possibly in the same nether regions of the train as the baby’s dad. Unlike our soldier, they were out of uniform and, presumably, were not ‘officer material’, as Andrei had appeared to be from his demeanour as well as his dress. But, like him, they were very young and were off on leave. With time on their hands they were not at all averse to a bit of fraternising, and soon discovered our girls. After much manly chiacking and daring between them, about eight of the gamer ones piled into one compartment with all 15 of our charges, cramming into every space they could find, a wall of legs dangling down from the top bunks, as they all chatted away. This was no mean feat, communication in the normal sense being virtually impossible, as no one had any language in common. However, we would hear gales of laughter coming from their direction, and they seemed to be having great fun, whiling away the long hours as we rattled our way across Siberia. Surely not much harm could be done: with 23 of them crammed into one compartment there was no space, let alone privacy, to get up to anything. Igor, however, became increasingly alarmed at all the fun and games along the corridor.

‘The girls, they are flirting,’ he pronounced. ‘There will be trouble!’

‘Come on, what harm can come of it; they are just having fun,’ I replied, trying to calm him.

‘Just you see,’ he said knowingly, ‘Western girls are different. They flirt! Last year I was with a group of French schoolgirls. They flirted, and one of them got violated.’

‘Oh, how awful,’ I said, ‘was she raped?’ to which, fixing me with a firm look, he repeated definitively, ‘She was vi-o-la-ted,’ stressing each syllable very clearly, as if this was to be questioned no further. Then, after a suitably dramatic pause, he added, ‘in the Caucasus’. Now to be vi-o-la-ted was bad enough—but in the Caucasus!

Nevertheless, I thought it necessary to go and have words with our charges.

‘Igor says you are flirting.’

Innocent eyes were trained on me. ‘What, us? Never!’ But it turned out that his fears did perhaps have some basis, not that anyone was ‘violated’, but some hours later the laughter and chatter were broken by loud male shouts and then the smashing of glass, as one of the young soldiers, clearly a bit overwrought, threw a tumbler dramatically to the ground where it smashed into smithereens—a classic Russian theatrical gesture!

‘There, I told you so,’ said Igor triumphantly. ‘I knew there would be trouble.’

The soldiers were smartly dismissed, and the girls commissioned one of our staff, affectionately nicknamed Contessa, as their official protector. She had a much-feared reputation at school but once out of the classroom they realised she was a good sport and, whenever trouble seemed to be brewing, they would call on her to do her fierce teacher act.

It was felt that a further ‘little talk’ was in order, so we had a bit of a chat about cultural differences. The chief problem seemed to be that Australian girls are very open and outgoing, and when passing anyone, whether they know them or not, are apt to give a cheery smile, perhaps accompanied by a ‘Hello’ or ‘G’day’. That may be all very well at home, but in some cultures a big friendly smile can be, well, a bit of a come-on. Another staff member—it pays to be able to call on a variety of skills—had attended school at a convent, and told the girls about the sins of having shiny reflective patent leather shoes (not a specific problem we had, with most of the girls wearing very un-shiny sneakers) and about lowering one’s eyes demurely when passing the opposite sex. So they planned a strategy and from then on, whenever anything male was seen approaching, the girls would chorus, ‘Man ahead—eyes on your toes, eyes on your toes,’ and they would all trip primly past. They had learnt that it does not always pay to be too friendly!

During the time that they were still ‘fraternising’, however, one young soldier must have become enamoured of a particularly fluttery young lady, and he performed one of the most ludicrously romantic, and retrospectively funny (and dangerous) gestures I have seen. The train had pulled in at a rather large town where it was stopping for fully 12 minutes, so everyone dashed off for a bit of a stretch, to walk along the platform and survey the large array of things for sale: souvenirs, drinks, various types of food and ornate, extremely rich creamy cakes, such as Russians love. It is a rather risky business getting off a Russian train if you do not intend staying off, as they slide out of the station with not so much as a hoot, and it is easy to be left behind—as we had been at great pains to point out to the girls. However, the trains are always dead on time, so, as long as you know the departure time and watch the clock, it is OK. Trains may not whistle when they plan to leave, but fortunately some do so on arrival if the situation warrants it.

Our train had stopped on an outside set of tracks, leaving another set of clear lines between it and the platform. About halfway through out stopping time I heard an ominous, distant whistle and realised what was about to happen.

‘Back on the train, back on the train,’ I yelled along the platform, at which all of our party scooted across the tracks and clambered back onto our train. The young soldiers did likewise. Then, after the second train had pulled in, much to my surprise, one of them climbed back, between the wheels of the newly arrived train, and onto the platform. Some minutes later he reappeared, lay flat on his back and wriggled under the adjacent train, bearing aloft in one hand a very big, very ornate, very creamy cake, lavishly adorned with mock red roses. On making it safely back on board, he got down on his knees and proceeded to present this magnificent concoction to she of the fluttering eyes. Never was there such a romantic gesture! It did not get him far, however, for he was soon to be banished with his colleagues.

Our three days on the train passed quickly enough: keeping the peace with love-struck young soldiers, coping with a leaking baby, sleeping, and going in shifts far down the train to the dining car to eat pleasant enough meals of soup, fish or meat, and ice-cream or cake. We had been able to keep the young soldiers at bay, but another one of our girls, who happened to be Indian, had caught the eye of the headwaiter. We were just starting one meal when the train stopped in the middle of nowhere, as it did frequently for no apparent reason. The gallant waiter leapt off, picked a bunch of the wildflowers growing along the track, clambered back on board and presented it to the astonished young lady with a deep flourish—along with her soup and a huge smile.

Timber, timber everywhere

Despite all this activity, there was ample time to gaze out of the windows at the world passing by. We were not travelling through the dense taiga, with its endlessly dark conifers, but in a warmer band of mixed forest. As it was mid-summer, everything was green and shimmering, especially the birches. The sunlight filtered down through their translucent leaves, striking the gleaming white trunks with their curious scrawny black markings—as if they were slender white canvases waiting for nature’s scribblings. We have silver birch trees as features in our gardens at home, but imagine a whole forest of them! The birch forests have a gentle dappled light quite different from the sombreness of dense pines, but when dark green conifers are scattered between the birches, they make a dramatically contrasting backdrop, accentuating not only the lightness but also the seeming fragility and gentleness of the birches. And on the few occasions when we were able to walk between the trees we found a carpet of delicate wildflowers under foot—bluebells, buttercups, forget-me-nots, lupins, lilies and a host more—which added to the delicate stillness and aura of these beautiful forests.

As I was to experience on other trips, the impact of the birches is even more accentuated in autumn, when the trees turn to a glowing yellow and then deep orange. It appears as though the whole countryside is ablaze, not with the glaring reds we associate with trees like the spectacular Canadian maple, but with something gentler and subtler: the soft gold of the birch. If you are there during this season, and are lucky enough to come across these glistening forests as the backdrop to the gold and blue domes of so many Russian churches, the effect is quite magical.

The birch features in much Russian folklore; baby’s cradles are made of its soft timber, and birch wood or birch bark abound in many of the ornate items the people traditionally spent the long dark winter months carving, and which are now sold throughout the country as souvenirs. Many local Russian cemeteries are set within birch groves, with the gravestones scattered between these beautiful trees, where they seem to almost disappear into or become part of the forest. How much more natural, peaceful and at one with the countryside than the stark rows of headstones dominating many of our cemeteries in Australia. Lying hidden among the birches, the Russian is ‘at home’.

Before the coming of the railway, however, the great forests if Siberia were home to very few people. The population had consisted of scattered indigenous groups, most of whom were nomadic herders living in wooden cabins or tents not dissimilar to those of the North American Indians. We did not visit any of the traditional forest settlements in Siberia itself, but were to see something of their lifestyle in a display at the Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad. Our young local guide was keen to show us everything—in excruciating detail—and, having dutifully learnt his spiel by heart, he recited it like a gramophone record that had to grind relentlessly through every track. We stood in front of display after display as he explained every stitch, leaf and minute detail. Eventually we came to a model of a timber hut set deep in the Siberian forest. Outside the hut was a girl, and at the door stood a man blowing a very long horn.

Pointing to the figures, our indefatigable guide intoned, ‘This be daughter. This be father. This be horn. When daughter reaches the puberty, father goes into forest and blows the horn.’

That was just too much for our party of girls, who had been remarkably long-suffering, and they dissolved into laughter at the thought of their fathers telling potential suitors, ‘Come and get it chaps!’ The forest girl’s dilemma, however, would have been that she had a very limited choice of ‘mate’, which was no doubt also why her father had to go out and blow the horn. Not many people lived in the forests of Siberia; it was just too cold and too remote.

Any settlements tended to be by the rivers, and as we rattled along on the train, we saw waterways everywhere, fed by the thawing of the heavy winter snow. Big rivers, small streams and rivulets all gushed along, eventually to join forces and make their way towards the great north-flowing waterways. In the past, it was the rivers that provided the main form of transport, so villages and towns were all built along their banks. But with the coming of the Trans-Siberian, when many more people and industries moved into Siberia, the new towns and cities proliferated along the route of the railway line.

The houses we saw from the train as we flashed past varied from simple cottages to quite large, two-storey homes but nearly all were built of wood and had elaborately carved shutters, so important to keep out the cold and snow during the long winter months. At the back of each house stood a wooden barn and a huge woodheap: timber was clearly still an important source of fuel. Around each cottage was invariably a green, grassed area, and at its centrepiece was an immaculately kept and flourishing vegetable patch. Most houses also had a flower garden and some fruit trees, probably apples. As we whizzed past, we could see that in nearly every garden women, most wearing headscarves and gumboots, were working away energetically. We even spied one very with-it gardener resplendent in a bright yellow and black striped bikini; she was not going to miss one minute of the precious sun. Grazing nearby were invariably a couple of cows, possibly also delighted to be outside for a few short weeks before going back into their barns for the rest of the long, cold year—if cows have such emotions!

The one seemingly jarring note in these otherwise picturesque village landscapes—but no doubt one of the most important features for those who lived there—was that out of the wooden shingle roof of nearly every house sprang a high television aerial. It might have been a faraway region, but the wider world had arrived, not only with the train, but also with television.

Rattling along to the north of Mongolia we at last reached Ulan Ude, where the line joins up with the Trans-Mongolian Railway coming through from Beijing. We were to leave the train in Irkutsk, and the last few hours of our journey were to be the most picturesque of our journey. By now it was more mountainous and the tops of some of the peaks still bore snow and we gazed out of the windows with anticipation as the train wound its way around the shores of Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world, and one of the most scientifically interesting.

Irkutsk

We piled off the train in Irkutsk, where we were due to spend a couple of nights, happy to be away from the confines—and in my case the increasing stench—of our compartments. This important Siberian city is 65 km downstream from Lake Baikal on the Angara River, which flows out of the lake and eventually into the Yenesei River. The source of this river is guarded by a single rock, around which there is a local legend that did not quite fit with the girls’ approval, for good reason! According to this legend, if a man wanted to find out if his wife had been faithful while he had been off hunting, he would take her out and leave her on this rock. If she managed to make it back to shore it meant that she had been faithful during his absence, but if she didn’t survive the icy and swiftly flowing river, she must have cheated on him—in which case she was no loss anyway! We thought it best not put to anyone to the test by leaving them on the rock when we visited Lake Baikal ourselves, the day after our arrival in Irkutsk.

The lake was forlornly shrouded in mist and a number of rust-covered fishing boats remained tied up at the wharf. We were, however, able to walk in the birch forest, see our first wooden architecture museum with its examples of old Siberian buildings, and to visit a village similar to those we had been seeing from the moving train, complete with shuttered wooden houses, flower and vegetable gardens and the ever-present cows. There were red stars on nearly every gate, showing the huge war losses sustained, even in this remote area.

Irkutsk had been established in 1651 as a fortified Cossack garrison and, two centuries later, had become the home of many of the Decembrists, who had lived in exile in the city after finishing their terms in the gulags. In December 1825, in St Petersburg, this idealistic, liberal-minded, but not very well organised group of aristocrats and intellectuals had had the nerve to voice their opposition to the reactionary policies of Tsar Nicholas I. The revered poet Alexander Pushkin was not in the capital at the time and was lucky not be among them. He thus avoided the plight of so the many of his colleagues who were executed or exiled for daring to oppose the views of the tsar in their attempt to bring some long overdue liberal reform to Russia.

The Decembrists and other highly educated political exiles helped to turn the city into a far-flung centre of culture with a number of institutions of higher learning, museums, galleries and stately brick and stone mansions, some quite grandiose. The city also has many imposing, ornately decorated churches and, it was interesting in 1989, when communism was still the order of the day, that these were clearly very well attended, practising churches. Babushkas (grandmothers or elderly women) swept away with their birch brooms, making sure everything was spic and span. People moved around freely, lighting incense sticks in front of their favourite icons and, in one church, our group came across a full-immersion, group christening for children of all ages. Conducted by two elaborately dressed young priests, the ceremony was accompanied by impassioned chanting and praying. Religion was certainly alive and well in Siberia.

Irkutsk was then an industrial centre of 800,000 people and it was here that, for the first time, we saw rather grim, poorly clad people from a work-weary industrial world and were met by young children who appealed to us for coins, badges and other trinkets. Away from the stately homes, most people seemed to live in wooden houses, not unlike those in the villages we had seen. Some may have been larger, but they still had the same log frames, shingle roofs and ornately carved wooden shutters. In one square we saw one member of a family after another coming out of a house, each carrying a large bucket, which they filled with water from the public pump, suggesting either that their water was ‘off’—or, more likely, that they had no running water. This city, like the whole country, was a place of great contrasts. Whenever we witnessed such scenes our girls began to think more and more about, and comment on, the implications of what they were witnessing—and to appreciate more fully what they took so much for granted in their own homes.

Irkutsk is at the centre of a large and varied region, and it was here that we came across a magnificent folk festival, not for tourists, as you see in Western Russia, but for real—for the people themselves. Groups from towns and villages from the surrounding area were dressed in their ornately embroidered and brightly coloured folk costumes, complete with swirling skirts, traditional flowered scarves and bright red boots. The little girls looked resplendent with their big butterfly hair ribbons, and the demeanour of the older women suggested not only a festive sense of joy but possibly also a longing for a lost lifestyle. Even the horses were all togged up, with embroidered and studded harnesses and ornately painted circular hoops rising regally above their necks.

It soon became obvious to us that the groups were all predominantly women, and most were middle-aged or older.

‘Why are there so few men?’ one of our girls asked.

The sad fact is that there are very few men left in the older age groups in Russia. According to one devastating statistic, 80 percent of Soviet males born in 1923 did not survive the Great Patriotic War which killed a large percentage of one, or even two generations of men, leaving a huge population imbalance and a whole generation of women with no husbands. When we stay with Russian families there is very often a babushka living with them, but we have never come across a grandfather—they are just not there. War took nearly all of Russia’s grandfathers.

Time of troubles

It was in Irkutsk that our troubles began, and they came on two major fronts. It all started when Igor found out, on our first day there, that our flight to Tashkent had not been booked, that all the flights were impossibly full, and that we were, in effect, stranded. We had paid in full, well in advance, so I was furious and wanted to lash out at someone. But who? Certainly not poor Igor, and fury gets you nowhere anyway. So what to do about it? That evening I made the first of many calls to the Australian Embassy in Moscow. I had sent them details of our itinerary, in case of emergencies, and wanted to let them know that we were no longer on schedule, and to ask if there were any strings they could pull in Moscow to get us back on the road—or more specifically into the air.

It was quite late at night in Irkutsk by the time I got through to the Embassy on the antiquated hotel phone, but it was still mid-afternoon in Moscow. But the call, which had been intended to try to overcome one problem, ended by landing us in another potentially worse predicament. As I was saying my farewells, the officer on the other end of the line made a comment, seemingly as an afterthought, that sent me reeling.

‘By the way, an Australian student passed through Moscow yesterday. I think she might have been one of yours.’

‘What do you mean “passed through”?’ I blurted. ‘What do you mean, “one of ours”?’

‘Well, she was sent through from Tokyo, and we sent her on to you in Irkutsk.’

My mind flashed back with alarm to the girl with the lost money belt on the bullet train in Niigata, en route through Japan. Now, in a lone phone booth late at night in Irkutsk, I had a terrible sinking feeling: was this the student who had “passed through”? Being on the Trans-Siberian Railway was tantamount to being on the moon communications-wise, especially before the days of mobile phones. No information had reached us about her being returned to us and yet it seemed that she had left Moscow the day before! Where the devil could she be? It is not everyone who has had the privilege of losing a student for a couple of days—in Siberia!

Poor Igor was extricated from his bed, and it took ages for him to phone every hotel in Irkutsk. Nothing! It then transpired that the local airport had been closed for some technical reason and that all planes had been diverted to Bratsk, a city by a huge dam downstream on the Angara River, about 500 km to our north. It was here that we eventually tracked her down. Apparently, after considerable intervention from home, she had flown from Tokyo to Moscow where she had been attached by Intourist (the state committee for tourism, which ran all tourist activities in Soviet times) to a German tour group. The big problem was that nobody had told us about any of this! What if I had not phoned the Embassy in Moscow? What if, with our bookings having gone awry, our paths did not cross? The possibilities did not bear thinking of. I was pretty annoyed that our instructions had been over-ridden, and became more and more angry as time wore on because of the major difficulties that resulted from this, disrupting the trip right to the end. The problem was that when she eventually flew in from Bratsk she still did not have all of the necessary documents: her passport and visa had been replaced but, what turned out to be of prime importance, she had no flight ticket home.

‘Just go along to the airline office and they will replace it,’ she had been told.

Igor, however, knew better. He rolled his eyes, shrugged his shoulders, and said gloomily ‘It will not be as easy as that.’ And he sure was right! Trying to get that ticket took nearly all of his and my time in both Moscow and St Petersburg, and added greatly to our trials. Never was it so clear to me how disastrous it can be to lose an airline ticket—and if you do, let it not be in Russia!

That hurdle, however, would have to wait. In the meantime, we had to get the group out of Irkutsk. At least, due to our stranding we were still there when our ‘stray student’ eventually reached us from Bratsk. If we had moved on as scheduled, she may have ended up chasing us around the Soviet Union for most of the trip.

We had to make it further than Siberia and, the next day, Igor and I went into battle, haranguing various local offices and thumping on desks. Despite the fact that they could not understand a word I said, it gave me a chance to vent my spleen and I am sure the ‘emotion’ got through! As the day wore on, we slowly moved up through the ranks of officialdom until we at last reached the person in command—he with clout. By late the following night, after many ultimatums, and intervention from higher authorities in Moscow—thanks to the Embassy doing their bit at that end—it was agreed that some poor sports team was to be put off their flight the next day, and we would be able to get as far as Tashkent. Little did we know then that this whole crazy scenario would be repeated there—but at least we had had some practice!

While all this ‘negotiating’ was going on, the rest of the group was doing some more fraternising, but this time in a more ordered fashion than the high-jinks with the soldiers on the train; a social get-together with the local friendship group had been formally arranged. As Australians travelling anywhere in the Soviet Union, we found we were a bit of a novelty, and particularly so in Irkutsk. To our surprise, many people knew quite a lot about our country, as the school syllabuses seemed very broad and internationally inclusive, and many courses had units on Australia. As a result, rather than just associating us with the kangaroo—which is about the only thing people from many other countries know about us—the Russian students were even aware that Canberra, not Sydney, was our capital city, which is a very rare find. This was well before the Sydney Olympics in 2000 that brought Australia to greater international prominence, before which many people around the globe still had difficulty even differentiating us from Austrians. (A few still do!)

To many Russians, Australia is a magical, faraway, sunny place they can only dream about. They had a riddle:

‘Which is closer, Australia or the moon? The moon of course—you can see the moon, but you can’t see Australia.’

Some stereotypes, however, had even hit this remote part of the world, with one little Siberian girl sending me a letter saying, ‘Ever after seeing the film Dundee the Crocodile I have had castles in the air about Australia’. Wouldn’t you love to meet a crocodile called Dundee! I was also staggered, on turning on the television in Irkutsk, to see Kylie Minogue doing her thing. Few people at that time, however, had actually met an Australian, and in Irkutsk we were an even greater oddity than we were in Moscow and Leningrad.

Meeting an Australian—and practising their English—therefore seemed to be the main items on the agenda for the local friendship group’s get-together. This was our girls’ first youth meeting, and I was told it was a great success. I could not attend myself, as I was ‘in negotiation’ with various officials. Our students sat at tables with a couple of members of the local group, who came from the local Komsomol (the Young Communist League). It seems that they chatted about all sorts of things they had in common while nibbling away at cakes and sweets and drinking cordial. It sounded very proper—and this time at least they had some language in common, as many in their group spoke English. Then the dancing started, complete with flashing lights and games, including the one when couples dance together on pieces of paper that keep being torn in half. This was familiar to some of the staff who, undoubtedly showing their antiquity, remembered it from the innocent days of their youth, but it was quite novel to our far more sophisticated young ladies—and they thought it was great fun!

The next day, when we were still stranded—and Igor and I were still negotiating—the fraternisation took a more informal turn when the local group arranged a boat trip along the Angara River. Some fascinating discussions apparently took place between our students and the Komsomol members. These covered all manner of topics such as different political systems, education, social conditions, pay, parties, drinking, sex, birth control—the lot. The young Russian students were keen to discuss some pretty heady issues and even our staff members were impressed by their breadth of knowledge and depth of thinking.

We had heard nothing but criticism of Mr Gorbachev throughout our trip, with people blaming him for the parlous sate of the country, and it seemed he could not please either side of the political spectrum. The liberals thought he was too slow in introducing reform and the hard-line communists thought he was going too far. This surprised us, as he was held in such high regard in the West, so the staff were interested to hear what these young students from the Komsomol youth group thought about the changes brought about by glasnost and perestroika.

‘The collar is just as tight and the chain is just as short,’ said one young man, ‘but we bark a lot.’

I have come across this type of cynical humour many times in Russia—in their writing, comedy, puppetry, clowns, and in their way of joking away a difficult situation. They seem to use satire not only to make fun but also to give what is probably a fairly accurate assessment of a situation. The British often use satire in a similar way, but I feel it means something more for the Russians; in the days when open criticism was disallowed it was not only a way of quietly commenting on and expressing their opposition to things, but was also one of their major survival mechanisms.

One of the leaders of the youth group, a dashing young man in his early twenties called Vadim, clearly saw one of our younger, more glamorous staff members as the epitome of Western womanhood, and took rather a shine to her—and to her Greg Chappell cricket hat that was very much in vogue in Australia at the time. There was no way he was going to get either—and anyway, she needed the hat for our upcoming stint in the desert! He persisted in trying to charm her, and following the youth meeting—presumably after priming himself sufficiently to pluck up the courage—was to be heard whispering pleadingly through the keyhole of her room, ‘I vaant your bo-dy,’ over and over again!

It was more amusing than disquieting, and it is highly likely that poor love-lost Vadim felt rather foolish the next day—if he remembered his amorous overtures of the previous night, and when we at last left Irkutsk he failed to appear with the rest of his colleagues to bid us, or her, farewell.

By this time, and perhaps fortuitously, as the youth group had more ‘activities’ lined up for us if we had been further delayed in Irkutsk, we had managed to get our group onto a flight, though not direct to Tashkent—that would have been far too easy! Instead, we headed in completely the wrong direction, going north to Bratsk, the town from whence we had retrieved our ‘mislaid student’. Looking down from the plane over the gigantic dam on the Angara River, not far from Bratsk, allowed us to appreciate more fully the vastness of Siberia’s forests and the magnitude of its hydro-electric power projects.

From Bratsk we flew south to Alma Ata, the capital of the Republic of Kazakhstan. We were getting closer and closer to the great mountains which separate Siberia from the rest of Asia, and the further south we flew the drier the land became. On landing briefly at Alma Ata we could see, glistening in the distance, the towering snow-covered Tien Shan range, a reminder of that great natural barrier, on the other side of which was China. Then, with another short flight, we at last made it to Uzbekistan⎯and to the cities of the legendary Silk Road.