We boarded our train in Irkutsk at midnight (seven in the evening Moscow time) and arrived in Moscow three and a half days later at five in the morning (ten o’clock Irkutsk time). Over the course of our journey, we traversed most of the east-to-west breadth of the largest country in the world. Taking the Trans-Siberian Railway really drove home the enormity of modern Russia (and the Soviet Union before that, and the Russian Empire before that) as a continuous expanse of land, spanning time zones, climate regions, ethnicities, and cultures.

Our train from above

I was excited for the journey—trains are my favorite way to travel, since I get motion sickness easily and I find them the smoothest, as well as the most scenic. Unfortunately, in America trains aren’t nearly as common as they are in Russia. For long-distance trips, most Americans fly or take road trips, while in Russia many people would just take a train. Trains are also a subject of historical interest in Russia, to a greater extent than in America (other than among preschool-age Thomas The Tank Engine fans, of course). Along the Trans-Sib route, there seems to be a particular fascinating. Irkutsk has a monument to Alexander III in its downtown, because he was the tsar under which the railway was built. Many of the towns along the route have old-fashioned locomotives on display, and we also visited museums with exhibitions about the railway in the Baikal area.

Display locomotive

Before we took the Trans-Siberian ourselves, the longest train ride I’d taken had been an overnight from Moscow to St. Petersburg, but I had been asleep for most of the ride. This time, I’d have multiple days to spend. I was excited to see the world around me, but I was also nervous about going stir-crazy.

The cramped quarters of our cabin—four bunk beds, plus a tiny table squished in between—were a bit daunting. I felt like a monkey, clambering cautiously up to my top bunk or swinging my legs casually off the side while conversing with my bunkmate. Sneaking down to the bathroom in the middle of the night when it was dark and everyone was asleep felt like crossing a minefield. (Speaking of bathrooms, there was no way to shower, definitely the biggest hardship of the journey for me). There was, however, a hallway where I could stretch my legs, and periodic half-hour stops at various cities along the way. Making a frenzied grocery run in Omsk over the course of twenty minutes with my professor and several other students was nerve-wracking, but certainly an experience. Since we were mainly living off of easy non-perishable foods like instant ramen and crab-flavored potato chips (I like them, but most of our group found them an acquired taste), the cucumbers and tomatoes we bought were priceless. If you’ve never lain on a bunk bed eating a full cucumber like an ice cream cone, you haven’t lived.

Our cabin

Aside from what went on inside the train, the outside world fascinated. It felt oddly intimate, coasting by getting glimpses into everyone’s backyards as we passed through small villages. Many houses have their kitchen gardens up until a few meters from the tracks, and since Siberian spring comes late, we passed families out planting their potatoes or breaking sod. I also saw people herding animals, dogs sunning themselves next to the tracks, and at one point an odd and almost Aesopian-seeming collection of comrades—two goats, a dog, and a horse, trotting along together without a human in sight. The natural scenery was also breathtaking—rolling hills, snow-capped mountains, golden fields of grain as we entered the warmer climate of European Russia, scraggly taiga—all were beautiful, and we saw them all.

Siberian spring from train

The nearest metro stop to Patriarch Ponds is Mayakovskaya, about three blocks away, which opens onto another square, centered around a statue of the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Also flanking the square is the Tchaikovsky Theater and the Hotel Peking, both rather magnificent buildings. This further augments the sense of the Patriarch Ponds area as a artistically influenced, cultural place. The Bulgakov apartment museum is also on the way between the metro station and the pond, and the area around the pond contains several Master and Margarita-themed establishments such as Cafe Behemoth, named after the novel’s demonic black cat. Ironically, Bulgakov and Mayakovsky, who were contemporaries, loathed each other personally and in this neighborhood they are inseparable. A third, more neutral literary reference in the neighborhood is the statue of the Russian folklorist Krilov that is on the pond square, as well as several smaller statues showing scenes of cavorting animals from Russian fables. Each of these storybook shaped sculptures depicts a scene from one of his tales in relief, and in several places the dull brown of the metal has been polished to a mirror shine by the hands of visitors.

Mayakovsky

When I (Julia) visited the area to view the Victory Day parade with my Russian friend Katya, she told me about the rivalry between Mayakovsky and Bulgakov, as well as a lot of stories about the impact of Master and Margarita on the neighborhood. When the book was first circulating in samizdat (underground channels for banned books and other writings during the Soviet period), the Patriarch Ponds neighborhood was visited by floods of secretive tourists, cautiously investigating locales described in the book, while trying not to acknowledge that they’d read it too openly. Over the decades, as Master and Margarita has taken its place as a modern Russian classic, the modern-day design of the neighborhood has clearly embraced its literary history and Bulgakov-inspired tourists. The park around the pond even sports a sign telling visitors not to talk to strangers, cheekily referencing the arrival of Bulgakov’s ominous Woland in the area and the chaos that follows.

This sign also, unfortunately, describes the attitude of many of Patriarch Ponds’ residents and native Moscow resident passers-by, who rebuffed our advances as we attempted to interview them for this project. While not everyone was in a hurry, groups of people sunning themselves by the pond also didn’t want to chat. While Patriarch Ponds gets a lot of visitors from other neighborhoods since it’s such a beautiful area, the residents themselves are quite a posh lot, since apartments in the area are quite expensive. Contrary to our first impression, the ultra high-end stores are not meant to cater to tourists specifically, however the area also is home to many ex-pats.

These demographics are visible in the types of commercial establishments that cluster around the pond. We twice visited a cake shop on the square, which serves enormous slices of ornate layered cakes embellished with fresh fruits, nuts, and whipped cream. The cakes are quite western in style, indistinguishable from what you might find in a boutique-y dessert store in some gentrifying neighborhood of an American city. Another restaurant, serving Russian food, is Mari Vanna which also has an outpost in St. Petersburg and at least one in the United States. There are also expensive western fashion brands with outlets around Patriarch Ponds, and high-end grocery stores, although we also found a reasonably-priced pharmaceutical chain and several empty storefronts, our student guide told us that the presence of these stores in such an expensive neighborhood was probably an effect of the economic recession. In general, though, Patriarch Ponds has an internationalized and high-end flair.

Further reading here!

Cue our delegation uncontrollably giggling at such a ridiculous and bombastic statement. Of course, it’s never historically accurate to say there was only one appropriate course of events, not to mention the pesky fact that the region around Baikal was in fact inhabited, by Mongolians—an ethnic subgroup called Buryats. What’s more, plenty of parallels can be found between the Russian colonization of Siberia and other historical events. Most obviously, there’s a significant amount of overlap with American colonization of the west. Both involved expansion across a huge territory of land, viewed as both punishingly rough and resource-rich, and the displacement of native peoples viewed as primitive by the new settlers. The video on the Trans-Siberian railroad even quoted contemporary European observers comparing American colonization of the “wild” west to Russian inroads into “backwards” Siberia, specifically the nineteenth-century engineering marvels of rapid railway expansion. The way the video presented Siberian history, however biased and incomplete, was telling—and is a very common lens with which to view the region’s past.

When we visited the natural history museum in Kyakhta on the Mongolian border, many of the displays were also consistent to anyone familiar with the mythology of the American West—lots of taxidermy showing the natural diversity of the Siberian region—dioramas and cultural artifacts from both settlers and local peoples—lots of extolling of the nineteenth-century scientific achievements of Russians in the Siberian region. The various ethnographic museums and structures we visited also in some ways portrayed native Siberian culture as existing in past relic rather than in the present.

However, Buryat people and Buryat culture have more of a foothold in the region than Native Americans do anywhere other than reservations. In Ulan-Ude, Buryatia’s largest city, I noticed that about half of the people on the street appear to be Buryat, the other half Russian. However, all the advertisements for clothing or other products I saw on billboards featured Russian models. Traditional Buryat shamanism still has a significant role in the lives of many people, as does Buddhism—we visited many datsans in the course of our time in Siberia. Both have survived significant repression during the Soviet period as well as some earlier attempts at Orthodox conversion in the Tsarist period, and many modern-day Buryat people follow mixed elements of multiple religions. A cultural issue for Buryat people today is the preservation of their language—most Buryats actually speak Russian as their first language, and Buryat is becoming increasingly rare. In my intro linguistics class at Carleton, we talked a lot about language revitalization and the threat of linguistic extinction in American indigenous communities, like the Lakota in Minnesota.

Doorway at Buddhist datsan

One significant way in which the history of Siberian settlement diverges from that of the American West is the influence of forced resettlement on the region’s demographics. Since the beginning of Russian encroachment on the region, voluntary settlers have been accompanied by convicts and political prisoners. The harsh terrain and profound isolation that made Siberia ideal as a natural prison were quite visible—even in late May, there was still snow on the ground in many areas, and our bus could travel many kilometers down bumpy dirt roads without seeing a single sign of human habitation. In the tsarist period, rather than labor camps like the Soviet gulag, prisoners were merely shipped off to a certain village, checked in on periodically, and told to stay there during a period of exile often lasting several years. The nature of the terrain alone made escape unlikely, although many still managed it. There is some degree of historical commemoration of exiles to Siberia in monuments, such as a museum dedicated to the Decembrists exiled to Buryatia that we visited, and another large monument to two brothers who were part of that movement. Many early exiles stayed in the area after their terms were up, and integrated into settler society. Some descendants of gulag inmates remain in Siberia, as well as members of ethnic groups forcibly resettled to the region under Stalin, like Tatars and Volga Germans. These groups’ histories are not as well documented as that of the Decembrists, perhaps because of the greater magnitude of people affected or perhaps because what happened to them was more brutal.

Monument to exiled Decembrists

Another type of memorialization of history that was prevalent in Siberia was Soviet-era war memorials. They are everywhere in Russia, of course, just like statues of Lenin, but one thing I noticed in Buryatia was that there are almost as many memorials to people who fought (for the communist cause) in the post-revolution civil war as there are for those who fought in WWII. This intrigued me because during my assigned reading for this course, I learned that the majority of Buryats were uninterested in the Bolshevik cause. According to James Forsyth in The History of Peoples of Siberia, “the Socialist Revolutionary party gained 50.2 percent of votes in the Transbaikal elections for the All-Russian Constituent Assembly in November 1917, the next biggest vote went to the Buryat Nationalists, with 17.4 percent. Their platform was essentially “Buryatia for the Buryats” and one of their main political theses was that in traditional Buryat society there were no class divisions. In addition they declared, vainly, that their land must not become involved in the Russians’ revolution and civil war. The third-largest body of votes, 13.2 percent, went to the Transbaikal Cossack Host, while the Bolsheviks received only 8.7 percent, and the Constitutional Democrats 4.3 percent.” Many Buryats also fought with the White Army once the civil war reached their region, while a sizable number also did fight for the Red Army. Still, this type of memorialization flattens out the complexities of Buryat involvement in the post-revolutionary political power struggle and the desire of many Buryat people at that time for greater autonomy and even independence.

Monument to “those who fought for Soviet power”

Perhaps the most famous attraction in St. Petersburg is the Hermitage, a sprawling complex of art museums centered around the Winter Palace, the former residence of Russian tsars. Built by the Italian architect Rastrelli for Empress Elizabeth in the first half of the 18th century, the palace is a dizzyingly ornate Rococo confection of marble, gilt, and fresco. Although the museum is packed with works by renowned western European artists from Da Vinci and Raphael to El Greco and Goya, the architecture is just as staggering. As confirmed by our tour guide, many of the rooms are modeled off of western European predeccesors, from rooms clearly influenced by Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors to direct copies of hallways in the Vatican.

The Winter Palace’s grand front staircase

Hallway copied from one in the Vatican

Nearly everything about the Hermitage and the Winter Palace, in fact, is western. The most prominent Russian element of the decor are the beautiful vases and bowls made from malachite. But the vast majority of the architecture, and all of the art, is either from the west or copying the west. Everything is imitation Italian, French, or German. The former palace and its awe-inspiring collection of paintings really shows St. Petersburg’s role in Russia’s history—Peter the Great’s “window on Europe”.

I was also reminded of reading Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace for class last spring, and of Tolstoy’s acerbic references to a Russian aristocracy so thoroughly Europeanized that many of its members spoke their native language with a French accent. Russian nobles, as well as the few but wealthy members of the Russian bourgeoisie, often spoke French at home, vacationed in Paris, ate French foods, watched French-inspired ballets at the Imperial Theater (now the Mariinsky), and hung French or French-inspired art on the walls of their Europeanized St. Petersburg palaces and country estates. Even aside from their elite economic status, Russia’s 19th century upper classes lived in a completely distinct cultural world from the peasants and urban laborers who made up the vast majority of the country’s population.

The eventual fallout of this split world can be clearly seen in the plaques, scattered throughout the Hermitage, informing visitors that this is the staircase where the Bolsheviks stormed the palace in October 1917, that this room is where the Provisional Government was overthrown in favor of Soviet power. For me, wandering through the Winter Palace’s blindingly elaborate hallways and seeing the massive display of wealth, culture, and power, it’s quite easy to see where the Bolsheviks were coming from, and to feel the anger of Russian political radicals. There’s almost a kind of poetic justice in the modern role of the Hermitage—a nationalized treasure trove, where gawking tourists from around the world can wander around, appreciating the aesthetic of all this art, which now belongs to all of us.

The staircase where Bolsheviks stormed the palace, with commemorative plaque

Back in Moscow, I had a very different cultural experience viewing the collections at the Tretyakovskaya Galleria, which showcases exclusively Russian artists. The gallery was originally founded by businessman, art collector, and philanthropist Pavel Tretyakov. Tretyakov began collecting contemporary and antique Russian art in 1856, and donated his collection to the city of Moscow in 1892. After the revolution, the Soviet government used the Tretyakovskaya Galleria as a repository for other Russian artworks that had been nationalized, while western art was funneled towards other museums like the Hermitage, and the museum’s collection became more and more impressive. While some of the Tretyakovskaya’s works are clearly influenced by contemporary western paintings, such as Valentin Serov’s portrait work, the museum also has a wide variety of medieval icons, and later art clearly influenced by Eastern European artistic and cultural traditions. There are paintings of Russian peasants, of Orthodox priests, and of many historical events and figures in Russia’s history. The artistic contributions of ethnic minorities in Russia are also present—the Tretyakovskaya has paintings by Russian Jewish artists like Lev Bakst, while the Novaya Tretyakovskaya—the museum’s other wing focused on its 20th century collection—had a temporary exhibition of works by Armenian-Russian artist Nikolai Nikogosyan, and a series of beautiful murals painted in the 1920s by Marc Chagall for the Soviet Union’s new State Yiddish Theater.

Icon, 12th century.

Me in front of the famous painting “Three Bogatyrs”

Mural by Marc Chagall

In the 19th century, Russian artists often divided themselves and their art into two camps—Slavophiles, who focused on the unique culture of Russia and other Slavic peoples, often idealized the Orthodox Church, and believed that Russia should not emulate the west, and Westernizers, who felt that European culture was superior to Russia’s traditions and should be emulated as much as possible. In my opinion, there are flaws to both views. While the western art and western-inspired architecture I saw in St Petersburg is certainly beautiful, there’s a sort of emptiness about borrowing exclusively from neighboring countries while ignoring the fascinating, complex history of your own region. On the other hand, the Slavophile movement often found itself mired in nationalism, and left no room for artists like Nikogosyan and Chagall, who had their own contributions to offer.

Thinking about this apparent dichotomy, I’m inclined to quote Sergei Diaghilev, one of the founders of the turn-of-the-century magazine Mir Iskusstva (World of Art), and later impresario of the Ballets Russes, which brought revolutionary new ballets inspired in many ways by Russian folk culture to audiences from Paris to Indianapolis. Diaghilev felt “as if Russian Artists are ashamed to submit themselves to the judgement of Europe and only want to show that they too can paint like Western Europeans. And it never occurred to them to wonder if we are capable of teaching the Europeans what they do not yet know. Can we add a new facet to European art?”

On the train to Murom

Sure enough, the next day when I presented to a class of freshman English language majors at the Murom Institute, only one student out of eighteen had sampled peanut butter before. Having tried a lot of new foods during my time here, and at Russian department events back at Carleton, I was excited to return the favor and help expose the other students to an unfamiliar flavor. (However, I did momentarily worry that someone in the class might have a yet-undiscovered peanut allergy and we’d have a medical crisis on our hands.)

Setting up my peanut butter bar while we show pictures of Carleton’s campus

It was really fun to watch the students from Murom pile a little mound of peanut butter onto a slice of bread or an apple slice and tentatively touch the tip of their tongues to it, then almost universally smile, announce it was good, and help themselves to some more. In some ways, I think the nearest analogue to this experience coming from the opposite direction was when I was first introduced to using condensed milk as a condiment in Russian Club as a freshman at Carleton. I had literally only encountered condensed milk as an ingredient mixed into pumpkin pie custard on Thanksgiving, and I had never even tasted it by itself. When I was passed a full jar of the stuff and told to put it on my blini, I was initially cautious, but soon embraced the sweet, rich flavor and gooey texture. The mix of confusion and curiosity surrounding unfamiliar foods—both prepared recipes and simple ingredients like peanut butter—is fascinating, and often the process of trying new things yields rich rewards.

Being in Murom was one of my favorite experiences on the trip so far, because the students there were so excited to see us and so open. Murom doesn’t get very many foreign visitors, and according to one of the professors who sponsored our trip there, we were the first native English speakers most of these students had interacted with. Coming from Moscow where foreign tourists are everywhere and many residents speak very good English themselves, it was very different. Carleton has had a long-standing relationship with the Murom Institute, and students from the Carleton study abroad program have been coming here regularly since the 1990s. A Carleton graduate also worked at Murom Insitute as an English language teaching assistant with the Fulbright program a few years ago. Both the professors and students were incredibly welcoming and excited to learn, and the students were full of questions about our country and our lives back home. Everyone wanted to compare experiences, find common ground, and examine things that were different and why.

Murom is experiencing economic recession, and, as in many cities outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg, there are few job opportunities and many run down buildings. Even at МГУ, a student originally from Volgograd remarked to me that Moscow and St. Petersburg are the only cities the government really cares about—and maybe Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod, she conceded. Students in Murom had some of the same attitudes—many told us they wanted to move to Moscow, or immigrate to America. There wasn’t much to do in Murom if you were young, we were told, and no money to earn. At the same time, in many ways the students were proud of their city. They guided our tour around the town, and were very enthusiastic about proud monuments or moments in Murom’s history. Murom has Russia’s oldest monastery, and is the birthplace of the inventor of television. They wanted to show us favorite spots in a local park, or a place down by the river, or a bakery they liked. We were told several times that Murom is what “real” Russia looks like, and that “real” Russians live in places like this one, not in Moscow or St. Petersburg. This reminded me in some ways of the attitude of many Americans in flyover states, who have some degree of resentment of the greater amount of attention paid towards coastal cities. The mix of boredom, a sense of stagnation, and hometown pride is common, in my experience, in places like the small Minnesota town where my mom’s family is from. Obviously, real Americans live in New York City as well as small-town middle America, just like real Russians live in Moscow, and Murom, and rural Buryatia. But the sense of being left behind in many ways by economic and cultural growth in your country is real. While many of its buildings are more ancient, Murom has some of the same feel as a small Rust Belt city in America.

Part of the monastery

The ubiquitous Lenin Square in downtown Murom

If a traveler to America visited only Manhattan and Los Angeles, they certainly wouldn’t know that much about the lives of millions of Americans, and the same goes for someone who visited Russia and only saw Moscow and St. Petersburg. For that reason, I was glad to be in Murom and see some of the diversity of experiences in this huge, beautiful country, as well as to engage with these wonderful, enthusiastic students and get a chance to teach as well as to learn.

Carleton College and Murom Insitute students!

Church inside of Suzdal Kremlin

While stunning, Suzdal’s buildings sometimes seemed a bit like a medieval Russia theme park. Even the ordinary, traditional wooden houses are in perfect repair, with gleaming paint and completely straight window shutters. Elsewhere in Russia, you can see similar houses, but usually not in the same spotless condition. Visiting, it doesn’t really feel like a town where people live, and it certainly doesn’t look like it must have hundreds of years ago when the buildings were first contructed. Suzdal is a kind of idealized version of the Russian past—beautiful, but not entirely honest.

House in Suzdal

The Soviet past, on the other hand, is somewhat hidden in Suzdal. Like almost every Russian city, there’s a large statue of Lenin in a downtown square, which I photographed from the bell tower of one of the monasteries. Signs also bear names such as “Karl Marx Street”. In the market, I found and purchased an old Young Pioneer pin (a real collector’s item for me), hidden among more elaborate, folksy arts and crafts.

In Suzdal, it really seems like there are different layers of past Russias, piled on top of each other, some pushed to the front, some fading. None of them accurately represent the Russian present, but all of them contribute to it.

МГУ’s main building contains several dormitory wings, including the one where I am living, Korpus E. The architectural style is high Stalinist—a curious, impressive mixture of then-contemporary American skyscraper technology, Baroque decor, and Neoclassicism. Construction on the building was actually finished in 1953, the same year Stalin died. The grandness and opulence of the building was meant to show off the power of the Soviet state, and, like the beautiful frescos and marble fixtures in the Moscow metro, make art and culture accessible to the proletariat. (During this period of elaborate public construction projects, there was also a severe housing shortage in Moscow, leading to the ubiquity of the infamous Soviet-era communal apartment).

Soviet iconography is still visible in many places around campus—the hammer and sickle insignia is emblazoned in several prominent places, including on top of my dorm. This is also mirrored in public places throughout Moscow—I’ve seen dozens of Lenins throughout the city, from murals in the metro to busts to dramatic larger-than-life statues in city squares. Americans often assume that all Soviet iconography was removed after 1991, but that’s not at all the case. While many Eastern bloc states or non-Russian Soviet Socialist Republics viewed the Soviet government as a foreign oppressor, many Russians consider Soviet history their history, and a point of pride. So you’ll see very little of Lenin in modern-day Budapest or Yerevan, but he is everywhere in Moscow.