S.L. Sanger
TRANS-SIBERIAN EXPRESS -- A LOOK BACK
Sanger and Hoyt in Moscow, 1984
A LOT OF YEARS AGO Dick Hoyt and I crossed Siberia on the train called in those days the Trans-Siberian Express. When we boarded the Soviet ship MV Khabarovsk at Yokohama for the voyage across the Sea of Japan to Nakhodka we were more or less New Deal-style Democrats. By the time we boarded the train in Leningrad for the short trip to Helsinki after a few weeks behind the Iron Curtain, attitudes had changed. I had become, speaking for myself, not a hardcore Reagan Republican, but friendlier to the incumbent president’s belief that what really truly impressed the Russkies was brute force.
But this comment is too political for what is intended to be a straight-forward account of a very long train ride in the spring of 1984 through a very foreign country, a time I remembered in years to come as “The Orwell Summer.” Neither Hoyt nor I were strangers to foreign travel. Dick had lived in many countries pursuing his occupation as a middling successful writer of comic thriller novels, some set in the U.S., others in foreign locales. I was a job-hopping newspaper reporter, currently in Seattle at the Post-Intelligencer, working on mostly military subjects. During the past couple of years I had been on assignments to Western Europe and South Korea as well as a side trip to Tahiti. I had lived in England for a time between jobs in Honolulu and Seattle. I was 48, Hoyt about five years younger. We met in 1967 in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin’s city room. We were dog-face grunt reporters, newcomers to the Islands. Both of us were typically reporter-cynical with good senses of humor. We shared a rural background, Hoyt from eastern Oregon and I from eastern Iowa. Neither of us came from money, not by a long shot. We liked women, which helps to explain why we both had been divorced twice.
By 1984 Dick had published half a dozen novels. He began with a sardonic private eye and edged into comic thrillers with an international flavor. I admired his guts when he quit a secure teaching job at Lewis and Clark College in Portland to become a fulltime novelist. The Russia trip was Hoyt’s idea. He decided his next novel should be about a gang of semi-lunatic dissidents who steal Lenin’s head from his tomb next to the Kremlin wall and hold the head for ransom. The plot required riding the 5,900-mile length of the Trans-Sib. Hoyt wanted to experience it personally for the sake of authenticity. He didn’t want to go alone so one night he called from Portland and asked me, “How would you like to ride from winter into spring?” I jumped aboard.
The plan was to stop in Honolulu for a few days, overnight in Yokohama waiting for the ship to the Soviet Union, cross Siberia to Moscow for a few days’ stay, a couple of nights in Leningrad, on to Helsinki and from there to New York and Seattle. Around the world.
I was appointed travel arranger, which meant hiring an agent experienced with the Soviet way of dealing with tourists. I went to Klineburger Worldwide Travel in Seattle, which was able to deal directly with Intourist, the Soviet agency handling in-country visits by foreigners. First, application for a Soviet visa, fee of $35 and about a month needed for approval. The visa required specific information about time in country and any plan for overnight stops along the Siberian route. We were told by the travel agents not to smile for the visa photo. If we did the Russians would tell us to do it over. I wondered if a smile made a photo easier to forge.
The arrangements didn’t seem too onerous, although time consuming. We needed visas for Japan, but apparently not for our brief stay in Helsinki. We left Seattle April 20 bound for Honolulu and a brief stop to see old friends from our reporting days and then on to Tokyo and Yokohama. It looked like a difficult night ahead in Yokohama without a place to sleep until a kindly American retired Air Force sergeant steered us to a hotel. We were to sail in the morning.
MV KHABAROVSK
THE MORNING OF APRIL 24th, a Tuesday, on schedule at 11 a.m., the Soviet Intourist passenger ship MV Khabarovsk departed Yokohama harbor sailing north along the east side of the island of Honshu, through the strait between Honshu and Hokkaido and into the Sea of Japan. Next port: Nakhodka, Soviet Far East. A voyage from late Tuesday morning to late Thursday afternoon, 500 miles. Cost: $443 in 1984 money. Dick and I shared an 8x10 foot cabin on the main deck of the 333-passenger vessel. Double-decker bunk, shower and toilet. The cabin was clean. We assumed our cabin was bugged and had fun carrying on mock conversations about the greatness of the Soviet Union. This routine lasted until we left the USSR. Silly, I suppose, but we firmly believed that Russians were obsessed with eavesdropping. We praised Russian women, Russian bread, Russian literature, Communism, everything Russian.
Dick and I walked up to the Northwest Airlines counter at Seattle-Tacoma airport to check in. The agent looked at our tickets and asked, “How are you guys getting from Tokyo to Helsinki?”
THE SHIPBOARD FOOD was decent and plentiful. A typical meal was four courses. An early lunch on the first day was salted herrings with sour cream and cucumbers; soup; meatloaf with an egg; cherries for dessert. Hoyt and I, being hayseeds, ate dessert first. The rye bread was excellent. In fact, bread throughout our time in Russia, was outstanding and one of the few Soviet products which lived up to the constant bragging.
Piped-in music and Russian language in our cabin was annoying, but occasionally there was jazz and snatches of Bob Dylan. The ship’s library was monotonous with Communist propaganda. The smell from the head was odious. The ship’s bars were fine except for at least one surly bartender. The library emphasized Communist propaganda, most of it related to Lenin. Two English-speaking Intourist people, Boris and Olga, who seemed to pay particular attention to Hoyt and me, were helpful and sometimes chatty.
The first hints of nausea arrived about six hours into the voyage. The ship had been pitching and rolling violently. I decided to have some tea but skipped the sponge cake. Belatedly, I took two Dramamine tablets. Five minutes later, an unstoppable urge to vomit struck and I barely made it to the head. I felt better. Too bad about the salted herring.
In two hours, I was capable of facing a light supper of blood sausage, cucumbers, tomatoes and fish mixed with potatoes. The coffee tasted good. Hoyt had adopted the Russian custom of heavy on sugar in tea and coffee. Boris dined with us but Olga was out of action with mal de mer. Boris asked if we ever saw Soviet films. “Not lately,” we said, not wanting to mention anything about Sergey Eisenstein, a film-maker we assumed might be on a list of some sort. Boris was effusive about American movies he had seen, including “Cleopatra,” “Funny Girl,” “My Fair Lady.” Again, he asked why we were crossing Siberia. “On holiday,” we told him.
Hoyt and I stood on the main deck watching the sunset from the port rail. Dick wondered how come two guys who met in the Star-Bulletin city room years before wound up watching the sunset from the port rail of a Soviet ship bound for an appointment with the Trans-Siberian Express.
The next morning, on deck for a pre-breakfast walk we saw a man taking notes we thought might be Paul Theroux. Hoyt was a big fan of Theroux, especially his “The Great Railway Bazaar.” Breakfast could have been worse. Sliced ham, raw turnips and cucumber, excellent rye toast, omelet with garlic and cheese, cherry juice. Coffee. The food abroad was not cause for complaint from us. Boris and Olga, as usual, dined with us. Boris continued his popular culture conversation. Irwin Shaw, the American novelist, somewhat to our surprise, was popular in the Soviet Union. Boris listed “Rich Man, Poor Man,” as a top novel. Dick wondered if Boris had read Shaw’s World War II novel, “The Young Lions.” He hadn’t.
The Intourist duo, during breakfast, talked us into paying a $10 premium to go 1st class from Nakhodka north to overnight in Khabarovsk, where we would board a westbound train for Moscow, with overnight stops in Irkutsk and Novosibersk. Boris and Olga were pleased we forked over the extra 10 bucks, which, after all, didn’t add much to the total $700 train bill, which we considered a fantastically good deal considering the distance of 10,000 kilometers Nakhodka to Moscow.
“HARD CLASS” COST
The $700 included train fare in “hard class” (aptly named) for the Russia portion as far as Leningrad and from there on to Helsinki. In Russia, we were 12 nights at Intourist hotels with breakfasts, with transportation to and from train stations and hotels, all part of the $700. Other meals and purchases were separate as well as the expenses for two nights in Helsinki. My airfare, totally separate from Intourist: Seattle-Honolulu, Honolulu-Tokyo, Helsinki-New York and New York-Seattle was $1,689.
After breakfast, we followed the example of our shipmates and retired to the aft bar, which was unusually empty of Russians who were usually there drinking vodka and playing cards. Ella Fitzgerald on the jukebox singing “Why Not Take All of Me?” Next was Barbra Streisand, “A Woman in Love.”
The night before, Hoyt had gone to this bar and ordered a vodka. I was sleeping off the effects of seasickness. The woman bartender brought him an orange soda. He asked again for the drink, stressing vodka, even pronouncing it in the Russian manner, “wodka.” He got nowhere and finally gave up. Later, he consulted his Russian phrase book for a clue as to why he didn’t get the vodka drink. He decided it was a cruel joke. An example of Russian anti-American intransigence, we assumed.
BORIS, ALWAYS READY for cultural conversation, asked if I knew any Russian words. Of course, I did. Piroshky, pelmeni, borscht. I remembered them from frequenting Russian cafes on Clement Street in San Francisco in years past. Boris was pleased. The ship’s library was another source of culture. Appreciative books and booklets about Lenin predominated. One adoring author wrote he was happy that he had looked “at the same sun that shone for him and saw the stars that glittered over him.” Another emphasis was the ordeal of Leningrad during the WWII German siege. Boris said a favorite author was Boris Terertitzov, which sounded like a fake name. Later, I realized our Boris, the serious Intourist guide and family man, had a seventh-grade sense of humor. I also saw books by Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Tolstoy. The late Soviet leader Y.U. Andropov was prominent as was “Interkosmos,” a publication featuring Yuri Gagarin, the cosmonaut.
At lunch the dessert of chocolate ice cream was excellent, grainy like homemade. Lunch itself was typical, meaning plentiful and tasty. Oscar Mayer baloney, borscht, boiled fish and potatoes, cherry compote and orange jello. I missed coffee. Russians apparently view coffee and tea as something unusual at everyday meals – at least aboard MV Khabarovsk. The sea was rough and the ship rolled hard frequently. At dessert time Olga looked uncomfortable and packed it in.
INDIANA ED
AFTER A THREE-HOUR NAP and a “wodka” in the aft bar, Hoyt and I, at tea time, met the most memorable character of the entire sea-land trip – a skinny guy who looked like a fragile version, even an effeminate one, if that’s possible, of Marlboro Man. He was an American in his mid-40s, very opinionated and eager to rant. We eventually nicknamed him “Indiana Ed,” an eccentric from Indiana, Pennsylvania. Our first meeting with Indiana Ed was brief but memorable. We saw a lot of him by the time we got to Moscow. He was traveling with his son, Jeff, a shy boy of 15. We referred to the son as “the Silent Valet” since he rarely spoke and was seemingly devoted to his dad. Ed and his valet had spent the previous six months in New Zealand and Fiji. They were on their way, eventually, to either Prague or Budapest, where mysterious Ed seemed to have ancestral antecedents. He was vague about his occupation and source of travel funds. We thought he might be “a defector,” a Kim Philby (in our exaggerated imagination). A defector from what we had no idea.
We cut Indiana Ed short because it was time for the premier social event of the voyage – dinner with the ship’s captain. A fancier menu than usual. Calamari and caviar, shoe leather beef steak, boiled tongue, red wine and cognac. The captain was missing. We had to make do with Boris and Olga. It was the last major meal of the voyage. We drank a couple of toasts, which baffled Boris and Olga. “Here’s mud in your eye.” “Here’s looking at you, babe.”
After the cognac, Hoyt and I stood at the starboard rail and gazed at the bluish-snow covered mountain slopes along the Hokkaido shore. We were entering the Sea of Japan. The sea was smooth.
The day ended with a drink-befuddled musical party staged for the passengers by the ship’s crew, a night of dancing and singing. The trumpet player was not bad. The crew members, far into drink, not an unusual condition for Russian men, were emboldened to ask the Aussie and New Zealand girls to dance. They did, giggling and blushing. Boris was present, happy and even more talkative than usual. Hoyt assumed Boris was so upbeat and glad about everything because he was “going to get laid tomorrow” after the ship berthed at Nakhodka.
THE NEXT DAY, Thursday, April 26, the last shipboard day, we awoke to the ship’s foghorn. Hoyt began the day by throwing a hardback copy of Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” to the floor of our cabin. The novel was a loan from my friend Rebecca, a serious reader. “Faulkner uses too many pronouns the reader can’t attach to characters. Confusing,” he almost shouted. Hoyt has been spending much of his time taking notes on his impressions of fellow passengers, conversations, people and place, menus. Hoyt was a serious writer. Not of serious books but he took the act of writing non-serious books seriously.
After breakfast at Restaurant Vladivostok, we hit the aft bar for a resumption of the Indiana Ed experience. Ed and son had been traveling for months, with somewhere in Czechoslovakia his likely destination. Ed was taciturn about his occupation and other details of his background but not about his opinions. He filled us in, nonstop, over little espressos followed by Kirin beer. Ed had a sophomoric philosophic streak. I asked him if he thought he would go home someday. “I don’t really know. I don’t even know if we will reach Nakhodka this afternoon.” I told him that was abstract thinking for so early in the day.
New Zealand’s South Island, where he and Jeff spent five months, “was country like what doesn’t exist anymore. Clean, fresh, pure. Sixty million sheep and three million people.” He railed against automation and machines which displace human labor. I wondered if he were critical of modern sheep-shearing methods. “I don’t like the feel of modern life. You can’t touch what you do.” He was beginning to sound nonsensical.
Would marrying a rich woman be one way of avoiding the pressures and disappointments of modern life? “The price is too high,” he said. “She would take not only your freedom, but also your balls. I haven’t had a woman in three years. Any woman who has been with another man is trouble.”
The Silent Valet, normally shy, suddenly became animated talking about catching a rainbow trout in New Zealand and filling a dinghy with abalone.
His dad resumed. “I’m not interested in China. I’m uneasy when surrounded by people who don’t look like me.”
We recessed for lunch. Green salad, potato borscht, pelmenyi, rice pudding, ice cream and, surprisingly, coffee.
NAKHODKA
After a nap, we felt a slowing of the ship’s forward motion and less vibration from the screws. MV Khabarovsk was entering Nakhodka harbor on time as the overcast day brightened. Boris warned us not to take any photos of the many ships in the harbor. Along with the rest of the passengers, we rushed to the port rail for our first view of the Soviet Far East.
Nakhodka looked like a town built for working. In 1984, the town was only 25 years old and its architecture emphasized utilitarian. It was a muddy scene and everything looked as if built in a hurry. A jumble of buildings that looked like small factories, many railroad tracks, red banners and billboards, mostly Lenin, a few of Marx. As we waited at the station for the train to Khabarovsk, a trainload of workers passed, large, flat and expressionless faces pressed against the rail car’s dirty windows to stare at us.
Before we reached the station, though, we had to be processed through Soviet customs. The search of our luggage was stern and thorough. The guards look a long skeptical look at William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying,” and Heinrich Boll’s “Irish Journal,” and another serious examination of Hoyt’s notebook. We had no idea why the intense scrutiny occurred. Neither Faulkner nor Boll, both Nobel Prize winners, had an anti-Communist reputation and Hoyt’s notebook seemed harmless. A critical study of Hoyt’s map of the Soviet Union puzzled us even more. The guard pointed angrily at Sakhalin Island north of the Japanese home island of Hokkaido. Hoyt’s map indicated Sakhalin was Japanese, yellow on the map, which was wrong, as we learned later. It was a geopolitical lesson. Imperial Russia had lost the southern portion of Sakhalin to the Japanese victors in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, a bitter memory. Stalin, when he and Franklin Roosevelt and Churchill met at Yalta in 1945, successfully regained all of Sakhalin in exchange for agreeing to enter the war against Japan.
The Russian guard furiously scratched out the Japanese designation for Sakhalin and demanded to know where Hoyt had bought the map. “Powell’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon,” Hoyt told him. The guard waved us through.
At the train station, we were in danger of being stranded in Nakhodka because I had left our tickets in a suitcase. Boris, who had escorted us to the station, smoothed things over and we boarded. We liked our compartment and for the first and only time on a Russian train, the dining car meal was decent. Beef steak, cucumbers, rice and coffee. Perhaps I was wrong about coffee being a rarity.
A disheartening scene greeted us when we raised the window shade of our compartment the next morning as the train made its way north along the Manchurian border through country that to us looked medieval, not modern. The country was flat and boggy with huts seemingly half-buried in mud. In the small towns, all the factories appeared to be making either cement or gypsum, considering the gray dust that covered everything. The only appealing view was of the silver birch trees, leafless but with clean white bark.
We looked forward to breakfast, hoping it was something like the ones aboard the MV Khabarovsk. Breakfast could have been worse: Russian tea (chai) heavy, dark and sweet, Oscar Meyer wieners (old, shriveled), but excellent dark bread with cheese and mustard that rescued the wieners. As we ate, the scenery changed from gray dust to something more scenic, like the foothills of the Northwest’s Cascade Range. We passed a graveyard in a stand of birches with the graves marked by wooden crosses about four feet high. On the train, we were dazzled by Russians with shiny metal teeth.