The next morning, at 9:48am, we were stopping at Kirov for ten minutes. The precious ten minutes! I bought my favourite Siberian fried bread with cabbage inside. Don’t I miss its greasy and solidly floury texture!
Despite it being a major transportation hub along this railway and a center of machine building, metallurgy, light, printing and the timber industry, Kirov doesn’t have that much to offer to tourists. Thus few people got off.
Time for lunch. Urnaa and Gunje put out their Russian-style hard bread and canned food – minced meat and fish – from Hungary. I don’t remember any Mongolian travelers eating like this – they usually like their own food.
‘Have some!’ I put out my Siberian fried bread.
‘Vat’s this?’ Gunje asked, turning the bread up and down. They’ve probably never bought food from the stations out there through Siberia.
Gunje was curious and tried one piece of bread. She chewed hard and nodded agreeably.
All of a sudden, some Chinese pop music was playing on the train broadcast in the background. ‘It’s Taiwanese pop!’ I said surprisedly. Gunje didn’t fancy it much. I was wondering why the staff put on this music – there was no Chinese-speaking passengers except me at the moment. To be fair to the majority, which are Russian-speaking passengers, a few Russian pop songs were put on later, to keep them entertained.
The Chinese conductors walked up and down the corridor. One of them looked in his late teens. He was constantly sweeping and cleaning along the corridor. ‘The Chinese trans-Mongolian train runs only once a week. I go on the job once a month – one week there (Beijing to Moscow) and one week back (Moscow to Beijing). When we get to Moscow, we are only given one night’s break, and then we have to travel back again, on the job.’
‘We work day and night, you will see. Our job is to serve you. During the summer things get very busy because there are many more passengers, unlike now – it’s a little quieter.’
‘You must be earning good money running a flagship train like this,’ I said.
He sneered, smilingly: ‘Don’t talk about the money. It hurts my feelings! It’s too sour!’ He continued with sweeping the floor, and turned back to me: ‘We staff are earning 1,800 yuan (£163) per month which is insufficient to live in price-soaring Beijing today.’
The other conductor from Beijing, Mr Yan, was smoking a pipe in the corridor between the wagons. He looked in his fifties. He was always attending to the fuel on the side of the corridor. ‘It’s gonna get much colder in the evening,’ he told me.
Back in the cabin, I tested out my cabin-mates’ knowledge of the railway.
‘Do you know when the Russians started to build the railway?’ I asked Urnaa curiously.
‘Nineteen…nineteen…,’ she replied, but she couldn’t find the word “century” in the phrasebook.
By mid nineteenth century, Russia found itself lagging behind the great powers of Europe. The capitalist states were warming up to engage themselves in a global contest for raw material, market and industrial productivity. In the gradual carving up of China by the powers, Russia saw that there were advances to be made.
The tsar appointed Nikolai Muravyov as the governor general to Eastern Siberia. He drew the border with China along the Amur River and Ussuri River, and ruled Siberia as a base from which to extract the natural resources from the Asian part of Russia.
As the imperial empires grew in the second half of the nineteenth century, railways became an increasingly important means to such expansion of power. The right to build railway in a country meant a step to expropriating natural wealth of the country. Muravyov became the leading advocate of a railway that would become the trans-Siberian rail to connect European Russia to the then-called Far East.
Meanwhile, the factor adding to the idea of building the railway was Russian ruling class’ deep anxiety of the growing rural unrest created by widespread poverty and famine. The rulers looked to the immense Siberian hinterland as a solution to its problems, such as food shortage and over-population in towns. Thus, Russia’s rulers, for the first time, lifted restrictions on internal migration to the under-developed, under-populated western and southern Siberia. The construction of the railway became unavoidable.
In 1881, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated and succeeded by his son Alexander III, who embraced the idea of empire much more and was thirsty for new territorial advances. In 1886, Alexander III responded to a petition from the governor general of Irkutsk and said it is time that something is done to develop Siberia. In spring 1891, Alexander III officially announced the construction of a Trans-Siberian Railway, from the Urals to the Pacific.
Between 1860-1890, under the new freedom of migration, around 500,000 people had moved to Siberia. The completion of the railway drew more people in – in the two decades since1891, over five million people migrated and settled in Siberia.
‘Siberia is really the land of the poor, the migrants, and the exiles,’ I said.
Urnaa looked at me, and shrugged her shoulders. I gathered that she didn’t understand me at all. But she leaned close to me, and wanted to show me something on her mobile phone.
‘This is my son,’ she said. It’s a video recording that she’d made of her son on her phone. He is 25-year-old, and is working as a store driver in Budapest. In the phone video, he was filmed on the night job, driving along avenues in Budapest. She was in the lorry with him, talking, singing and laughing. I could see the true happiness on her face when she talked about her son.
‘I have another son, 21-year-old. He lives in Ulaanbaatar and his wife has just given birth to a baby son. I can’t wait to see my first grandson!’ She spoke with excitement in her eyes.
‘Is this why you are going back to Mongolia to visit the family?’
She nodded, still indulged in her contagious joy. I looked at Urnaa and thought silently: I envy Urnaa! She is 45 and already a grandmother now! How fortunate she is! And how self-fulfilling it must be, to work for the well-being of the family and to be depended upon and looked up to…
Then Urnaa decided to turn off the Chinese music on the train broadcast and listened to the Mongolian folk music on her mobile phone. She turned it up for me to hear the music.
I tried out my Mongolian to Gunje: ‘Ta kheden nastai ve? (How old are you?)’
She giggled, but she understood me. She said: ‘I’m 42. Very old now. I spent too much time work in Hungary!’ I can understand how she feels. Half of her thirties was spent toiling in the garment factories. She felt time has passed her by.
‘My first job in Budapest is in Chinese restaurant. It’s terrible. Terrible place,’ Gunje told me, ‘The boss work me like a dog. Or, like a rooster. She call me Gong Ji. Do this, Gong Ji! Do that! Gong Ji!’
‘Gong Ji? That sounds like a Chinese name,’ I said.
‘Yes, Gong Ji means rooster in Chinese,’ Gunje said, laughing. I realized she meant Gong Ji with first tones - Of course, rooster.
‘Why did your boss call you that?’
‘Because she can’t pronounce my name in Mongolia,’ Gunje answered, mimicking the way her boss spoke to her: ‘Chop! Chop! Chop! Gong Ji! Chop Chop!’
Time passed quite quickly in the cabin. It was 5:30pm and we had just arrived at Perm – a city of boredom according to Anton Chekhov, the Russian short story writer who travelled on the trans-Siberian railway in 1890 to reach the desolate far-eastern island of Sakhalin to investigate the prison system there. This grim image must have come from Permi’s hidden history behind the banality of its provincial appearance. Its labour camp Perm-36 is the only one of its kind – Gulag – left to be witnessed in Russia.
The Chinese conductor Mr Yan, a history wizard as I found out, knows all about it. ‘Perm 36 is called ITK-6 camp and is actually located in a village…I don’t remember the name…about 100 kilometers north-east of Perm (It is Kutchino),’ he told me, ‘The camp was built under Stalin in 1946 to produce timber at first. Russia lost too much production during the Second World War, you see.’
‘In the early 1970s Russia converted this camp into the place of incarceration and punishment for political prisoners. There were thousands of people there. I heard that there were more than a hundred camps during the peak time. The total number of prisoners was more than 100,000. It was extremely harsh. The prisoners spent their years cutting down trees, chopping wood and repairing roads. They sent the lumber down the river, to help rebuild Russian citie, you see. The camp kept going for years. Can you believe it – it was only closed down in late 1987, not that long ago!’
For unknown reasons, Perm wasn’t part of the trans-Siberian railway at the beginning. The original rail building plan was to go to Irkutsk, and then eastwards to Baikal, then through the Amur, Ussuri regions all the way to Vladivostok. The plan was later altered to include cities like Permi, Yekaterinburg and Tyumen as a response to the needs of the industrialists in the region.
At the station, we had only ten minutes to buy snacks for the evening. I rushed out and tried to find some fried bread again. But this time I had no luck.
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