A dead nerpa. Unknown photographer.

The only one of Baikal’s endemic seals, called nerpa, that I saw in the wild was dead. It was on a beach near a town called Ust-Barguzin, a settlement on the edge of Lake Baikal. To get to Ust-Barguzin from Ulan-Ude was a two hundred and sixty five kilometer slog over battered pavement and, at the end of the drive, just before the town, up an axe-notch dirt road that was sliced through the trees around it. The town itself is peaceful. It sits a few kilometers away from the lake, with well-stocked grocery stores and a small school. It was unclear to me if the dogs that ran around in its streets were strays, had owners, or existed in some communal in-between state, but they seemed to be happy and healthy. Though we didn’t see any propellor planes bump their way down its knobbed-dirt surface, a small airstrip services the town, making it feel, somehow, that it is less far away from the relative metropolis of Ulan-Ude than it really is. 

As in any discussion of a Russian town, it should be noted that we did not see Ust-Barguzin in January, when the ice on the nearby lake is thick enough to pull train cars over. I loved the few days that we spent in the town, with its proximity to the lake, but I very well may not have if the walk to the lake put me in danger of a hypothermic death. 

On our second day in Ust-Barguzin, after a trip up to Barguzin, a town inhabited by two of the Decembrists, we spent the afternoon on a beach. A man named Evgenii Dmitrivich, a local hunter and fisherman with seemingly endless knowledge about the lake, joined us while we were there. 

The beach at Ust-Barguzin. Unknown photographer.

Over the previous few days, we had spent a lot of time on our bus and the beach, stretching endlessly out around the bay that Ust-Barguzin sits near, was tantalizingly open. It didn’t take very long at all for us to all have kicked off our shoes and we romped up and down the beach, racing each other along the waters edge and diving into the lake. The lakebed was sandy, with a shallow slope, and we ran out into it and launched ourselves forward and sat submerged for a moment before sprinting back out onto the sun-warmed beach.

The nerpa was on the beach near where we were swimming. Decomposing, with its skull bare to the elements, the dead seal spoke, somehow, to the purity of the lake. Baikal is old and deep, with a sixth of the world’s fresh water. It is clean enough, too, that you can drink its water straight, putting your mouth into it with no fear of disease. Around it sit unrelenting, vast forests, the type that a person could walk in circles in until madness showed them the way out. The beach itself was empty of people and, save for two washed up bottles, I didn’t see any trash in the few hours we spent on it. And in the middle of all of that raw, unknowable majesty sat death, too, untamable and permanent, far outside of human control.

After we had our fill of frolicking up and down the lake’s edge we converged upon a campfire and a few logs for a picnic of roasted hot-dogs and a spread of vegetables. While we ate we joked amongst ourselves and listened to Evgenii Dmitrivich tell us stories of his existence on the edge of Baikal. 

At the end of the day, when we left to go home, our bus had sunk into the sand. It took pulling it with Evgenii Dmitrivich’s gray adventure-van while six people pushed from behind to get the bus unstuck and, as we bumped down the dirt track back to Ust-Barguzin, I found myself chortling. The bus, a lumbering Hyundai, had been an intruder, and the lake had, in its own way, made it known that it didn’t belong there, in the land of big, raw trees and little, baking seals. 

Our coupe on the Trans-Siberian. Owen Yager photo

I’m starting to write this post on the first morning of a train ride that will take us from Irkutsk, on the western shore of Lake Baikal, to Moscow. We got on this train some twelve hours ago; in total, we will be on this train for three days and eight hours. 

We flew over this span before, on a redeye out of Moscow that carried us easily across this trans-continental nation. On that flight we were above the clouds the entire time, leaving Moscow on a drizzly evening and landing in Ulan-Ude, on Baikal’s eastern flank, in a bright morning. It was clear, when we landed at an airport with one baggage claim and a few rusted-out hulls of old Soviet propellor planes, that we had crossed some vast distance, but already this train is doing more to show me how broad that distance truly is. 

Our train churns endlessly. This far north the sun, a little under a month off from the summer solstice, sets late and rises early, and I, with it in my face, woke up a few times early in the morning. Each time, before I went back to bed, I looked out of the window at an unbroken vista of trees and sky and grass. 

The train stops every so often at a town, sometimes for only two minutes, sometimes for almost an hour. We move slowly as we approach these platforms and we, looking out, can see villages similar to those we became familiar with in Buryatiya. There are cows in some of them, or goats, and the cars that go by are battered by long years of hard work in a climate that does not want them there. Already, though, there are differences between these villages and the ones that we walked around in Buryatiya. Some of them are visible on the surface. The houses that huddle into hillsides outside of the train have greener yards, the result of the more fertile soil that lies hundreds of miles away from the harsh steppe on the Mongolian border. I don’t know enough yet, really, to write on this but we’ve spoken and read on the ethnic histories of Buryatia and Slavic Rus, and we’ve hinted at the ethnic diversity that exists across Russia and the former Soviet Union. Though we cannot see these from the windows of our train cars, a more visceral understanding of scale of the country that we’re traveling across lends a new understanding to the richness of ethnic difference and history that is here.  

A purer understanding of the size of this place lends itself to the thoughts that I’ve developed, sometimes brashly, on a Russian national identity while I’ve been here, too. We spent eight weeks in Moscow and St. Petersburg, cities that I had always thought of as Russia’s cultural epicenters. Though I understood, at least on an intellectual level, that there was much, much more to Russia than those two cities, it was easy to forget that in trying to forge an understanding of this country. 

In the last two weeks in Siberia, and in this train ride, I’m finding myself humbled by the realization that it is impossible to distill Russia into a summarize-able statement. I saw victory day ribbons flying in Ulan-Ude as well as in Petersburg that would point to a strong sense of nationally unified patriotism, and impassioned students protesting, in the face of riot-ready police, the renewal of Putin’s government the day before his inauguration in early May. Whether a taxi’s steering wheel will be on the car’s left or right is a coin flip in Irkutsk and a battered fire-fighting helicopter sits on a dirt air strip next to Ust-Barguzin, but Porsches are a dime-a-dozen in Moscow, a city with four full-size airports. 

In reflecting on that difference, I’ve found myself chuckling at the idea of a Russian student studying in New York and Chicago, or New York and Los Angeles, and saying that he or she understood the United States. To pretend that Oklahoma, or Atlanta, or Utah’s endless red stone does not exist and contribute inextricably to whatever it is that is the United States’ national identity, its sense of self, is utter folly. 

I’m coming to terms, on this train ride, that I won’t get to see a lot. I won’t understand Sochi, or Vladivostok, or Arkhangelsk. But, while I’m on this train, for the next two-point-something days, I can see a little more of it than I could from the air, and acquaint myself with this country a little better than I could if I hadn’t seen these few thousand miles. 

The snow thawed, slowly, and after a few weeks we could explore with only a light layer, but the earth was still carpeted with dead grass. By our fifth week here, in the few days before we went to Petersburg, buds had appeared on still brown trees and grass was turning green, but spring still felt like a far-off dream.

View of Moscow in spring from the top floor of MGU’s main building. Owen Yager photo.

Over the five days when we were gone, though, spring hit with unbridled strength. Our train back from Petersburg arrived in the morning and, walking to our dorms from the nearest metro stop, I couldn’t stop smiling. I couldn’t see the birds that were singing through the burst of green that had erupted in the trees, and flower stalks were hinting at further explosions of colors.

I’ve spent a lot of time out in the city since then, marveling at the transformations wrought by spring. Flowers appeared all over the city, some through natural growth and many through careful plantings, abutting sidewalks in spirals of purple and white. Walking itself has taken on a new joy. I spent a Friday evening – the sun is setting late, now – strolling along the river, passing lovers sitting on the embankments and being passed by kids on skateboards and hockey players roller-blading to pass the days until ice sets in again, one of a thousand people. In Park Kultury (or Gorky Park) one of Moscow’s huge open spaces, a few days ago, I watched a fountain, lit up from beneath in rhythmically shifting colors, dance to a score of classical music. On one side of it, a column of public ping-pong tables was in use while people sat one the edges of the fountain and chatted softly. 

Spring on MGU’s campus. Julia Braulick photo.

Walking through the city has been changed, too, by the new opening of buildings. Music tinkles from inside of windows that have been thrown open and sidewalks are covered in tables. They, crowned in coffees and salmon-covered plates, invite you into the cafes that they sit in front of, and its hard to say no. Looking at the people around those tables, too, the arrival of spring is clear. In the wealthy neighborhoods at the center of the city (a favorite of mine to explore has been Tsvetnoy) they sit leisurely, just as fashionable as they were in March but with designer t-shirts instead of designer jackets. Dogs, mostly ones that could fit in a pocket, join them with some frequency.

I heard, when I was at Carleton, about the heat that falls upon the city in midsummer. That will come eventually, maybe by the few days that we spend in Moscow after our return from Siberia. For now, though, I’m rejoicing in this full throated spring, spending long afternoons wandering aimlessly in the city and making the most of the last few days that we have here. 

Regardless of our past experience with urban transportation systems, we’ve all gotten used to moving by train here. There’s a station, Universitet, that’s a fifteen minute walk away from our dorms, and we’ve each been using it as a jumping off point for our adventures in this city almost daily. We’ve gotten to know other stations, as well, and each of us have found our favorites. I, for example, am of the opinion that Ploschad Revolutsii (Revolution Square), one of the stations abutting Red Square, is the most beautiful. It is filled with bronze statues depicting ideal Soviet citizens. Some of their knees or noses gleam from passerby constantly rubbing them for luck.

View down one of the Moscow metro stations. Owen Yager photo.

The comfort that we’ve developed with public transit has come into play in our travels outside of Moscow, as well – we’ve been on a slew of trains and a bevy of overpacked buses, including on a recent excursion to Murom. Six of us went to Murom to work with some English majors there (the Murom Institute’s English department is well connected, historically, to Carleton), leaving on a train at Tuesday evening. For four and half hours we rumbled eastward, stopping for twenty-four minutes at a platform in a small town. The train was swarmed by people selling sets of tableware and a few stray dogs begging for the scraps of the onion and egg pirozhki that a market on the other side of the tracks was selling. I walked up and down the platform, stretching out my legs, and then I, along with the conductors waiting at the car doors and the people puffing cigarettes, bundled back onto the train and we trundled on. 

We got to Murom late at night, were received warmly and given lovely rooms, and spent the next day working with Murom’s students and receiving a tour of the town, along with a lesson on the histories of both the town and the university. 

After a little under twenty-four hours in Murom, though, our time drew to a close and we said our goodbyes at the city’s bus station. The station was the start of a five hour odyssey that was, more than anything, a testament to the possibilities of blind luck. The bus was scheduled to get into Vladimir, where we’d been a few weeks before, fifteen minutes before a long-distance train passing through on its way to Moscow stopped for two minutes. We knew that we likely wouldn’t make the connection before the bus left late because the driver was finishing his cigarette. When, after that, we waited in line for a few minutes for a gas pump, the six of us had all but given up hope that we would make it through to our connection.

View from the bus to Vladimir. Owen Yager photo.

We forgot about that, though, on the ride to Vladimir. The road was small and winding, letting us watch buildings with windows framed in painted wood drift by. The sun was setting. 

A little after darkness fell, our bus drove across the river in Vladimir and rolled to a stop outside of the train station. In a light rain, we sprinted across a parking lot, dodging idling cars, and dashed through the station. As the last of us walked onto the platform, the train to Moscow pulled in, too, for its two-minute stop in Vladimir. 

As I’m sitting down to write this, the TV in our dorm’s common room is playing a Russian news clip in which a journalist with a microphone goes walking down a line of people waving Syrian flags and holding pictures of President Bashar Al-Asaad – a contrast from the rebel-centric media that we see in the States. That doesn’t relate to much in this post; rather it’s just a note about different presentations of fact in the US and Russia. 

Last week we were in Vladimir, a city of some 345,00 people that sits about 120 kilometers from Moscow. Our train arrived late on Friday night and, when we stepped out from the station, Moscow’s midnight roar of revving motorcycles and Audis was replaced by the drone of a single Lada puttering out of the station’s parking lot. 

After a Saturday trip to Suzdal, a tourist-fueled town of 10,000 people dotted with churches, we spent Sunday getting to know Vladimir a bit before the evening train back to Moscow. Our day there was focused on holy sites. We didn’t have time to see Vladimir’s Golden Gate, unfortunately, but it was on the docket too.

The field that we walked through, seen through trees near the Svyato-Bogolyubsky nunnery.

Part of the reason that we didn’t have to time to get to the Golden Gate was that we spent a long time at the Svyato-Bogolyubsky nunnery and the nearby Church of the Intercession on the Nerl, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Church of the Intercession is small and slender, crowned with a single dome in the Russian Orthodox style and built in the middle of a floodplain abutting the banks of the Nerl river. The plain, when we were there, was flooded. It’s bordered by the railroad tracks that come from Moscow and a few of us walked along them a ways, looking for a place with some sort of an isthmus for us to cross, and then we turned around and went back down the other way. After perusing some few hundred meters in the opposite direction, we found what seemed to be a road covered by a few inches of water. A few ideas were floated about how best to cross it before we took off our shoes and socks and rolled up our pants. The water was bitterly cold and we stopped on the other side of the ford and hopped around to get more blood flowing into our feet. 

After our feet had dried enough we put our socks and shoes back on and walked across the plain. The day was gorgeous, crisp and blue, and it felt good to be out in an open place with clean air after our first month in Moscow. Spring green hadn’t yet arrived and varied hues of brown dominated the field, but it was warm enough that we were able to take off our jackets. We followed a vague path and passed a few other parties coming back form the church. A biker rode past us once. 

The Church of the Intercession of the Nerl, seen just a little before we arrived at the banks of the Nerl.

We had to cross another bit of water as we drew close to the church, but it wasn’t as big as the first ford. On the banks of the Nerl, though, we found what would be our foil: the bridge across it was, according to a few people we asked, under water, and the river was too broad for us to cross. When we turned around, I didn’t feel defeated: even though we hadn’t been able to go into the church, I felt like I understood a bit about it through the long walk out to it and besides, the walk itself had felt sacred.

Moscow State University’s main building at night. Owen Yager photo.

On the top floor of Moscow State University’s main building, a 790 foot Stalinist behemoth, sits the Earth Science Museum at Moscow State University (Muzei Zemlevedeniya MGU,  in Russian). I realize, as I walked around the museum, how odd it was be looking at something as viscerally terrestrial as a collection of rocks while suspended in the sky, but I forgot about that when I looked out over the city. To the West, the university’s library, a burly white and gold building, sits squarely in front of the Soviet apartment blocks that make up one of Moscow’s endless neighborhoods. To the East stretches Moscow. A long promenade, snowed over until the last few days, reached from my feet, or the building’s, to the edge of the Moscow River’s closest curve. Its end points to, just above the opposite bank, the stadium where the finals of this summer’s World Cup will be played. Beyond that, the city expands. To the left of my view stood skyscrapers of the new business district, called Moscow City. A picture of that skyline could be captioned as one of London or Beijing or New York or Minneapolis and no one would never notice the difference. It’s the right half of the view, ensconced by the river, that matters. The city there is a collage of new buildings, old buildings, and new buildings that are supposed to look like old buildings. Bits of refracted light mark the domes of the Kremlin and the rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Looking out from that top floor, it was clear to me that the university at which I was studying was in a city with a capital C.

Moscow State University’s library, seen from the main building’s top floor. Owen Yager photo.

Looking towards the center of Moscow from the top floor of Moscow State University’s main building. Owen Yager photo. 

This city is a far cry from Northfield, with a river splitting which small college’s turf you’re on and visible stars, and it’s the cities that set this experience apart from our other eleven terms at Carleton. Inside each, though, Carleton and MGU don’t feel that dissimilar: each is, for all of the differences that other posts on this page have outlined, still a college. Here, as at Carleton, students can live in dorms and can eat at dining halls. There are academic buildings and athletic complexes, administrative offices and residential areas. The campuses both have their well kept green spaces and, I presume, both explode into bloom in late April. We have an urban iteration of the Carleton Arb as well, a set of trails that run down through a little strip of forest to the banks of the Moscow River.

The collegiate differences that do exist mostly seem to stem from our environs – here, the city surrounding us extends a constant invitation to partake in it, whether by wandering through the Kitai-Gorod neighborhood or nestling into one of the cafes that seem to sit on every corner in the city. At Carleton, students partake of the realities of Northfield, whether by working at schools or getting a Friday night burrito at El Tri, but the bulk of our lives, or at least mine, is limited to the range between the Weitz and the banks of the Cannon as it weaves through the Lower Arb. Here, though, we’re all finding the city to be a classroom and a social epicenter; a constant stimulus; a source of physical, mental and emotional engagement that is begging to be explored more.