Siberian Memories

translated from the Esperanto by the author
Leland Bryant ROSS

     (In the photo, I am the tallest of us four children; I was then 14.) We enjoyed the voyage, played a lot of chess on the deck, with pieces, almost childlike in height, that we had to carry from one square to another on the huge board. (I particularly recall that I enjoyed playing with a Soviet girl of my age, Natasha, whose dad had been recalled to Moscow from the Tokyo embassy, and I dedicate this little memoir to her.)

      We disembarked in the little port city of Nakhodka, since at that time Vladivostok was taboo for foreigners (or at least for American tourists). From Nakhodka we traveled by train to Khabarovsk, then to Irkutsk, and after that to Moscow and finally Leningrad in the course of our 17-day transsoviet itinerary.

Although I remember several details from here and there throughout the moments of that trip, for example:

• that the customs inspector at Nakhodka asked my father (quite affably) who his favorite Soviet authors were, and my father equally affably replied, "Dostoyevsky ... and Pasternak."
  
  
• the good meals and strange soft drinks — "beefshtex" and "leemonahd" — on the train (and the one time, the evening before Moscow, when the meal or perhaps the water was bad and we got sick en masse)
  
  
• the interesting kiosk in the Khabarovsk train station, where I acquired inter alia an English-language children's biography of Lenin, pub. 1955, with two or three pages of praises for Stalin at the end of the book
  
  
• the brightly painted light-blue shutters of the unpainted log cabins in the Siberian villages, and the blue and orange decorations at the Siberian cemeteries
  
  
• the first time in my life that I ever saw an actual human corpse — it was floating beside a dock by the shore of Lake Baikal
  
  
• the absurdity, grandiosity, and decrepitude of our rooms — the so-called Presidential Suite — at the Hotel Ukraïna in Moscow: two telephones (but no phone book); two television sets to watch a solitary channel on; and two bathrooms whose fixtures had all come loose from the floor and the wall
  
  
• the panoramic view from the window of our hotel room in Khabarovsk (or was it Irkutsk?), and especially the majestic, nearly carless, empty boulevards
  
  
• our visit to an Orthodox church in Irkutsk, where my father (a Baptist minister) tried to discuss, through the interpretation of a religiously illiterate Intourist guide, the theological sociology (or vice versa?) which forbade women to enter the icon room, and where I gazed in wonder at several legless men, perhaps wounded in the war, who lounged about on boards on casters in the courtyard
  
  
• the motorcycles with sidecars that were the main kind of automobile in parts of Siberia, often carrying six or eight people; and the bus that got us from Irkutsk to Lake Baikal, that seemed to have the engine of a baby Fiat, and barely managed to climb even rather modest hills — we came back to the city in a much more impressive vehicle, a state-of-the-art hydrofoil ferryboat
  
  
• when the conductor threatened my father with confiscation of our movie camera if he didn't start obeying the Soviet law against taking photographs through the windows from train corridors — as a result of which thereafter we only took photos through the windows of our compartments, which was probably even more spylike ...
  
  
• how the female conductor on the train from Leningrad to Helsinki surreptitiously sold a glass (with a beautiful silver holder) belonging to the railway to my mother for USD $1.00
  
  
• the lack of good chess sets for sale at GUM Department Store
  
  
• and finally, the generally monochromatic appearance of the Soviet Union, where there was little paint (and much of what paint there was was gray, apart from the red stars and neon Lenins), so that when we had passed into Finland and saw a billboard advertising and Coca-Cola® we had the impression that the very sky had got bluer
  
  
• ... and so on ...

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