Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"Why does the guidebook write that about Perm?" Sergei asked when I mentioned the jibe. "This city is full of history. Dostoyevsky stopped here on his way to Omsk. The Diaghilev family is from here. Chekhov of course—this is the setting for Three Sisters. And Pasternak's book. The city is full of history!"

Dostoyevsky was on his way to prison and had spent only one night here. Sergei Diaghilev fled the city and spent his life in Paris as a balletomane. For Chekhov it was the epitome of stifling provincial cities ("When can we go to Moscow?" the three sisters keep moaning), and Pasternak had been regarded as a literary pariah until fifteen years ago.

I mentioned that Three Sisters depicted Perm unfavorably, the stifled sisters longing to leave for Moscow.

"Because Chekhov had a problem," Sergei said. Sergei's English was not bad, but he preferred to speak Russian. Yelena sat behind me, translating. "He was turned away from a building because he was wearing the wrong clothes. He never forgave them for this."

This episode is not mentioned by any of Chekhov's biographers, only the fact that in 1890 he arrived by river in Perm at two o'clock one April morning and left the same day at six in the evening, on a train heading east. He was on his long Siberian trip—eighty-one days from Moscow to Vladivostok, on his way to the penal settlement at Sakhalin. Still, sixteen hours in Perm was enough for a genius like Chekhov to sum up the city as stifling.

"It's like this," Sergei said. "What if you went to a city and found a cockroach in your soup?" A big beefy man, he was hunched over the wheel, steering us through the snow. He turned heavily in his seat and faced me, his hands still on the wheel of the slowly moving car. "You wouldn't like that city, would you? You'd always remember it. 'Ah, Perm, that's where I had the cockroach in my soup!'"

"But we have no cockroaches," Yelena said.

"Five years ago, all the cockroaches left Perm," Sergei said. "Was it radiation? Did they sense trouble coming? The professors can't answer this question."

"And now we are passing Bashaya Smirti," Viktor said.

"The Tower of Death," Yelena said and pointed up ahead at a wide gray tower, like a silo with a sloping roof, attached to a gray, ecclesiastical-looking building pierced by small windows.

"There was a wave of repression in the early 1950s," Viktor said as we made a circuit around the grim-looking tower. "The Tower of Death was built then for the KGB. People were taken here for interrogation."

I asked who those suspects might be.

"People regarded as 'cosmopolitan,'" he said. "Westernized. Not patriotic. Also what were known as 'left radicals.' Anti-Stalinists."

The terrifying tower loomed like an oversized crematorium near the center of Perm, so I asked the obvious question: "Did people in Perm call it the Tower of Death?"

"They didn't say it out loud. They whispered it," Viktor said. "Under Khrushchev they said it a little louder."

I mentioned that my favorite writer about the gulag, a man who had been extensively interrogated, was Varlam Shalamov, the author of Kolyma Tales.

"This is Shalamov's centenary," Viktor said, brightening. "His father was a priest, but Shalamov wasn't religious at all. It's amazing that someone with such a huge experience of prison life didn't become a Christian."

"Unlike Solzhenitsyn."

"Yes, and unlike Solzhenitsyn, he did twenty-seven years in Siberia. At the end, he lived in great poverty in Moscow. He died in obscurity."

Solzhenitsyn was the West's most famous zek, or prisoner. Yet in her exhaustive history of the prison system, Gulag,

Anne Applebaum writes that his prison time was not onerous: "[Solzhenitsyn] was an unremarkable prisoner. He flirted with the authorities, served as an informer before seeing the light, and wound up working as a bricklayer." And Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, which she praises, she also describes as "among the bitterest in the entire camp genre."

We had left the outskirts of Perm and were headed northeast, into the snow and pine forests along an unplowed road. Aside from a few cars and heavy trucks, there was almost no traffic. The early morning darkness had lifted; we were traveling through slanting snowfall under a low gray sky.

"I want to tell you a story about the organs of power," Viktor said, Yelena translating. "I once had a chance to interview a peasant woman in the northern Perm region. She told me she had never left her village, except once. She had gone to Chernaya, a biggish town. She was very impressed because it was so beautiful. She was sitting quietly, admiring the place, when she heard someone say, 'Apoga is coming.'

"She knew the name. Apoga was the chairman of the Emergency Committee of the Cheka."

The Cheka was one of the previous incarnations of the KGB, now known as the FSB. It has undergone nineteen name changes since 1919, yet it is the same organization, devoted to spying, torture, and murder.