The train passed the official border between Europe and Asia. We were now 1,777 kilometers from Moscow. Unlike the budget travelers – such as the couple from Hackney with one-way tickets - on the same line I took back in 2002 who celebrated anything under the sun that’s slightly out of the ordinary just to kill time, my travelling companions this time seemed much more of a mature type – nothing like this could excite them. In fact, they’re fast asleep in the cabin.
I found it difficult to close my eyes. It was 2am. It had turned freezing cold in our cabin, in which the temperature had dropped below five centigrade. I thought we were in the middle of August! I put on my jacket and a spare blanket from the unoccupied upper bunk above me. But it was still very cold. I shivered into sleep, and was constantly woken up by the stomach pain caused by the low temperature through the early morning.
At 4am, the train stopped at Tyumen. I gave up trying to sleep in the cold and got out of bed. Looking out the window, I could only see darkness. Are we in the middle of the taiga?
At this moment, Tyumen evoked numerous images in my exhausted head. It was a historically significant town as the first Russian fort in Siberia founded in 1586. It was also seen as a nothing-happening place by Anton Chekhov who reluctantly stayed for a short while here. He didn’t seem to speak highly of it. It was probably too far detached from his comfortable life in Moscow – he was writing to his friends and family every three to six days during his rail journey, not something you would do if your emotional energies are fixed on the travelling.
Deeper into the taiga, Anton Chekhov mourned: ‘The worst of it is that in these little provincial places there is never anything to eat, and when you’re on the road this becomes a matter of capital importance! You arrive in a town hungry enough to eat a mountain of food, and bang on your hopes; no sausage, no cheese, no meat, not so much as a herring, nothing but the sort of tasteless eggs and milk you find in the villages…’
It’s amusing to see reflections of the privileged when they’re left to their own disposal in the middle of wild Siberia. For the modern-day travelers, food can be the least relevant thing in their life here. As Tyumen became a booming town of oil rich oblast (region) that stretches all the way to the Arctic Circle, the most distinguished and courageous of the travelers today have been the migrants from central Asia who have gone thousands of miles to seek betterment of their lives by working on a job in the oil industry.
My friend Kylych is among them. He’s been working right here in Tyumen. I met him six years ago on the 1,680-kilometer Turkestan-Siberian rail journey back to Novosibirsk in Russia. He was travelling to meet his long lost elder brother who had gone to work in Russia. For seven years, his elder brother didn’t write nor call, leaving his parents assume his death, until one day they received a letter from him congratulating his parents of having a daughter-in-law and a granddaughter. He’d wanted to achieve something in his life before getting in touch with the family again.
Kylych admired his elder brother’s courage. He wanted to see his brother again, and find out possibilities for him in Russia. He boarded the train in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, and crossed the border to Kazakhstan. (The Turkestan-Siberian line has extended to Shymkent in south Kazakhstan and to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan when Kazakhstan became independent in 1996.)
Kylych was on the train when we got on in Shymkent. It was hard to imagine this railway was once nicknamed “The Forge of the Kazakh Proletariat” and was a flagship project of the Soviet Union (built to facilitate the exchange of Central Asian cotton with Siberian grain and to stimulate industrial development). As soon as we got on, we were faced with endless verbal abuse. We were told by the carriage controller that our seats were in fact triple-booked. Tickets back to Moscow were all sold out at the Shymkent station, and so we had let two local men – who were friends of a Tatar friend - buy tickets for us. We trusted them and thought they just wanted to be helpful. But the tickets they got for us were ghost tickets. Before we could come to the sense that we were lied to and tricked big time, the carriage controller kicked us out of our cabin, shouting relentlessly in Russian.
It was through Kylych that we understood that our tickets weren’t valid. If we wanted to travel all the way to Moscow, we must pay five times more the usual price, which was over a thousand of dollars in cash. Kylych knew that you must play the same game to win in this situation which is repeated along this rail trip all the time. To help us, he said to the carriage controller: ‘These foreigners require passport copy of yours and they want to take you to the embassy to resolve this issue.’ Words said, we were thus spared the charge of the much-dreaded “foreigners’ fees”.
Nevertheless, without valid tickets, we weren’t given seats and had to sleep in the corridor, i.e., the smoking area of the train throughout that harsh three-day journey through the barren Kazakh steppes all the way to central Siberia. I began to wonder when my physical energy would be exhausted and it felt like soon. Kylych’s friendship kept us going. From time to time, he would offer us to have a sit-down on his seat in the wagon and buy me ice-cream from the stations to cool down. The Kazakh and Uzbek travelers who were also staying in the tiny smoking corridor were kind, too. One of them, called Anvar, a jobless pharmacist, offered his watermelon to me when I burst into tears after hours of containment inside the corridor. When I asked where he came from, he said:‘My father is Uzbek. My mother is Tatar. I speak Russian, but I don’t really know who I am. I think I might be Jewish.’
While visiting his elder brother, Kylych found ways to earn for his education. He worked extremely hard. When he graduated as a major in English, he taught English at schools and in a university. When he got married, he realized that he needed a much better paid job. Thus the continuation of his working life in Russia.
A lot of Central Asian people have and are moving to Russia. About 1.5 million of Kyrgyz citizens are out of Kyrgyzstan now and half of them have obtained citizenship of other countries (such as Russia, Kazakhstan, Arabic countries, America and Europe). Most of them have chosen to move to Moscow and Yekaterinburg. People do any kind of jobs there: Building work, catering work, cleaning, working in markets and factories. Kylych is one of the luckier people because he is skilled and is well-qualified to work as an interpreter.
In the beginning years, Kylych mainly worked as an interpreter for humanitarian organizations and the UN for a while. But one day he heard from an old friend who’s been working in Tyumen for Chinese National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC).
‘This is a big company with clients like the Russian petroleum TNK and BP (British petroleum). I dared my friend to invite me to work there with him. I meant it as a joke. But he took me seriously! In his next letter, he told me that he had talked to his employer about me and that they are waiting for me. I couldn’t believe it – an effortless great opportunity had come my way! It didn’t take me a long time to consider leaving home for work. I bought myself an air ticket straight to Tyumen.’
‘The work site is 900 kilometers from the centre of Tyumen and I was picked up at the station and flown there by a helicopter… I was much excited at the prospect of starting a new working life in the middle of the taiga!’
‘But of course, I was confronted with snow…and lots of it… It was April but I felt very cold. In Siberia, spring comes only at the end of May.’
‘Before going to the taiga I’d imagined that I will be working in an office in the town centre of Tyumen and I’d extravagantly bought elegant costume with expensive ties. However, all I was introduced to were thirty trailers on sledges that the company had bought to use as offices. My office clothes became nothing there… In fact, I was told that I will work in the swamp area with four hundred others! I almost fainted with shock. I’d never seen a swamp in my life! The swamp in taiga is known to be bottomless. I was so, so scared that I wanted to return home. But my friend persuaded me to give myself some time to adjust before I decide whether to leave.’
‘The swamps are deep…In winter we heard vehicles sunk in swamp because of thin ice. Bigger vehicles draw them up. We also heard in some Russian seismic companies vehicles with workers sunk in the swamp. It is impossible to help them in winter if vehicle sinks. There are bears around -Sourberries are the only berries in the swamp area and bears like them very much…’
‘Half of the thirty trailers (on sledges) were for offices, a kitchen and a dining room and others for housing for the Chinese chiefs/specialists. We were all living in tents, even in the middle of the winter. Tents were brought from China and they were special for cold climate. There were two kinds of tents: those for ten persons and those for four. When I was new, the camp supervisor accommodated me in a ten-person tent where I was living with nine wood cutters (chainsaw operators).’
‘When I first entered the tent, I was truly afraid - there were many Russian and Tatar men, sitting around, playing cards and smoking in there. It was dim, with only two lamps, and extremely smoky inside the tent (which has only four windows closed by special plastic tiles) and I coughed an awful a lot. They all stared at me. One of them showed me my bed. It was the kind of bed that I saw when I was in the kindergarten – it’s lower and has patterns of teddy bear and colorful balls. There were also a lot of cuttings of naked women from magazines on all four walls of the tent. During the first night, I couldn’t sleep till the morning because of the thick smoke of tobacco, the cold – even there were three oil heaters - and the men laughing loud around me.’
‘There was one basin and water was kept in plastic bottles for washing in the morning. The only old man who was the wood cutter’s assistant cleaned the floor and said to everybody not to throw garbage. Later we made timetable for cleaning our home-tent. Life started for me in the taiga…’
‘I was among the eight translators from Kyrgyzstan in this company. The Russian petroleum TNK and BP have two representative supervisors – an Englishman and a Russian - who lived in our camp and always inspected our activities. Thus we translators are much needed.
‘At first I couldn’t adapt to the Chinese accent and felt very frustrated. But gradually, I became accustomed to working with the Chinese chiefs there. Later the logistic department chief got me to work as his assistant and interpreter. We lived together in a four-person tent, which was our office. He taught me how to distribute materials and clothes and then he totally gave me this work. I acquired good experiences in managing the place, organizing and planning. I also learned a little bit of the Chinese language.’
‘Another Chinese chief, the store chief, by the name of Yang Zhengyu, supported and trained me and later gave me his duties. Another Chinese chief Zhang Zheng who lived with me also gave me some of his duties. I ended up doing most things in the camp: to distribute protective clothing to workers, to control and maintain food supplies, to improve camp’s infrastructure, to check conditions of the tents and trailers and order necessary materials for the workers.’
‘I met a lot of people of different backgrounds. The men drank a lot of thick black tea and sometimes invited me to have some. Sometimes, some young people from the village came to work in a group, and they prefer to live together. Some men were ex-prisoners, and no surprise, some were racists. There were also some very violent men around.’
‘The company I worked for in Tyumen was successful in the first few years until the Russian government departments put pressure from all sides. The forestry department first gave permission to work in swamp area. Later they come to inspect the swamps and fined the company millions of roubles. And then they laid down restrictions to hire foreign workers. Evert two to three months, lawyers, immigration officers and the police inspected our camp. They checked our documents for illegality. Some Chinese specialists run away to the woods from the camp when the officers come to inspect. The visas of those Chinese were expired. Usually our company lawyer paid fines for them officially in Moscow and renewed visas. There was a skill shortage and most of the experienced workers came from China.’
‘Throughout my time here in Siberia, I continued to tell myself that the only thing that’s important is the salary which is much better than in Kyrgyzstan. I should work there, because I did not own a home at that time - My family lived in a rented flat. I always wanted to buy a flat of my own. I worked very hard, and I became the key person in the camp there. After one and a half years of working in Siberia, I bought the flat where my family and I still live in.’
‘Many migrants from Kyrgyzstan are working in Russia in much worse conditions than me. They’ve virtually become slaves. They work in construction. I saw and talked to them in Tyumen when I visited the immigration department. They said their boss charges them a lot of money for preparing documents for them and providing them space – not beds - to sleep on in the humid basement of his own house. Both men and women were put in the same basement. They are only given food but not wages. Some of them were beaten by the boss when they asked for money. They told me that they asked him to give back their passports so that they could run away from him. I’ve met so many Kyrgyz migrants in this situation in Siberia.’
‘And so tragically, many Kyrgyz guys died working in Russian. Their deaths had gone up since the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A lot of them died on the building sites. Other Kyrgyz migrants were killed at the hands of the much-feared skinheads, most of whom live and develop in Moscow and St Petersburg. Everyone knows that the neo-fascists get support from Russian politicians. (I haven’t heard of skinhead attacks in Siberia. But many local people hate Asians and they call us “black”.) In 2002, my brother also met skinheads in Togliatti when he went home by bus. He said there were six to seven young Russian men on the bus. They hit my brother with iron sticks and beat him all over his body. Nobody on the bus helped him. As a result he had many injuries to his head and hands.
The fear of violence and death has become a central feature in the life of many of Russia’s ten million migrants. ‘There’s a saying in Central Asia: Each fifth train from Moscow to Bishkek brings back one dead man of Uzbek, Tajik or Kyrgyz origin. When I worked as an interpreter in the Kyrgyz villages for UN in 2005, I heard in each village that five to six young men who’d migrated for work died each year.’
In December 2008, Salokhiddin Azizov, a 20-year-old Tajik migrant was beheaded by a group of skinheads on the street of Moscow.
‘People in Kyrgyzstan are shocked to hear about these horrendous murders. But the economical crisis pushes people to leave home. Huge plants have already collapsed. Government have sold them to the rich for small money and they resale them for higher amount of money. There is no job around and if you get one, the wages are low. The price for food and clothing - most of which are imported from countries like China, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Russia and CIS (post Soviet) countries – is on the rise, day by day. So does the price of petrol. And land is very expensive. It’s also expensive to build houses or flats – building material is expensive. So people go to Russia to earn to pay for basic things like food and housing.’
‘Now a lot of young people prepare their documents to get Russian citizenship. People with better skills and qualification go to Russia to earn better money. Some young people left and went to work in Siberia. Some parents went to earn in Russia, leaving their young children to be looked after by their aging parents. When they find good job, and find a better place to live, they invite their brothers and sisters to live and work there.’
Photo: 1) Shavkat from Uzbekistan; 2-4) taken by Kylych on a helicopter when he was sent to work in the middle of the taiga.
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