Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

VLADIVOSTOK, so far from Moscow—almost six thousand miles—still retained many of its Soviet trappings: a gesticulating Lenin statue, a decaying GUM store, government offices with patriotic heroes in bronze waving from the roof, and that enduring Soviet trait, stone-faced bureaucracy. It had always been a city of delay and death, and now it was poverty-stricken as well, distant, out of touch, and underfunded. Beset by woolly sea fog, and yellow slush and black snow in early February, it couldn't have looked grimmer when it had been the fearsome railway junction for prisoners and slave laborers, victims of Stalin's Great Purge, sent to be worked to death in the far northern mines of Kolyma and Magadan. Some didn't make it that far. The great poet Osip Mandelstam (and many other prisoners) died in a nearby transit prison. His chief crime had been to write a poem in which he satirized Stalin as a ludicrous brute, in lines such as "His fingers are fat as grubs" and "His cockroach whiskers leer" and "All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer / The murderer and peasant-slayer."

The new Russia showed in Vladivostok's dreary casinos, the Mercedes dealership, the girlie shows that catered to sailors, and the piles of Russian tit-and-bum magazines that were sold by shivering old ladies in ragged overcoats all over town. Ignored and neglected, a decaying city and a navy base at the edge of the frozen world, Vladivostok had become one of the Siberian centers of skinhead gang activity. These chalky-faced and blue-headed thugs in boots and black leather jackets were straight out of A Clockwork Orange, even speaking an argot similar to that which Anthony Burgess had fashioned for his characters from Russian: droogs and chelovek and glazzies. But the skinheads were meaner and racist, with Hitlerian views. They swaggered the slushy streets, looking for dusky foreigners to beat to a pulp, and misspelling English graffiti (WITE POWER was one) with spray cans on walls, along with swastikas.

But just when I thought that this icebound city represented nothing more than a glacial point of departure, I was sitting in the hotel bar and the gods of travel delivered to me a horse's ass. He was a honking Englishman, almost unbelievable in his prejudices and pomposities, fresh off the plane from Moscow for a business meeting, monologuing to his Russian friend, who was either very tired or else, like him, drunk.

"What you need to do is to bring back the monarchy," the Englishman said in the screechy confident voice the English use on foreigners. He thumped his table and looked out on the thawing city of muddy slush, the wind blowing off the steppe.

"Da," the Russian said with no enthusiasm.

"Romanovs aren't hard to find. And Putin is useless, the place is corrupt. Mind you, I like corrupt countries—at least one knows where one stands. Get the czar back on the throne, if you see what I mean. Get him out and about, shaking hands, a proper figurehead like our queen."

"Da,

" the Russian said, but it was more of a question.

"But England's finished. It'll take twenty years to recover from the damage Blair's done. He's destroyed the place completely. They don't give a stuff about the general populace. Blair's wrecked it."

The Russian seemed to be dozing and didn't reply to the squeaking, grinning voice, the middle-aged Englishman in full cry, wailing about his destitution as an aristocrat.

"We're the fifty-first state. We're just an appendage of America. It's pathetic. But look—Vladivostok! We've flown seven hours and we're still in Russia. It's amazing. This is still Europe!"

I was going to say, Europe? But I thought: No, this is too good to interrupt.

"Soviets don't interest me. Soviet history is a bore. Borodino! That's more like it. I was there the other day. Lovely. It's all been preserved. Russia is monumental. Did I say I didn't mind the corruption? I don't mind. It gives an edge to the country. But Britain—you can have it. Viktor?"

"Da?"

"Bring the czar back!"

That was the second night, after I'd recovered from arriving in the dark, at the faraway airport, and quarreling with the taxi drivers, who demanded $100 to drive me here. When I refused, they drove away, leaving me standing in the snow; but who doesn't have a rapacious-taxi-driver story?

Killing time at the post office on the third day, I saw a young woman of twenty-two or so, rather earnest and plain, wearing a heavy coat, sitting at one of the littered wooden tables, hunched over, making a fair copy of a letter that began, Dear Sirs! I wish to introduce myself to Philip Morris Company...

"Maybe I can help you," I said. "Are you looking for a job?"

My eye fell on another line: I have unique vast experience to think outside the box.

"Who are you?" she demanded, scowling at me. "What do you want?"