In Putin's Footsteps : Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia's Eleven Time Zones (9781250163240) by Khrushcheva Nina; Tayler Jeffrey

Author:Khrushcheva, Nina; Tayler, Jeffrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan

7

NOVOSIBIRSK

A STORY OF SCIENCE AND SERENDIPITY

TIME ZONE: MSK+4; UTC+7

“Can you fix a town in twenty-four hours?”

“Yes, we can.”

“How?”

“Putin just has to say that he is going to visit not only Novosibirsk; he needs to say that he is going to visit the whole region, and decide on a town later along the way.”

—A contemporary Russian joke

On the train to Novosibirsk, we shared a compartment with a young fellow best described as lupine: he was tall and wiry, with a pointy nose and close-set eyes; from his white tank top protruded arms covered in tattoos. If he resembled a wolf, he also looked like a hardened criminal itching to pull out a knife. With his lanky legs stretched across the floor, he controlled access to the door, thereby blocking the entrance of a grumpy porter in a dull gray uniform. Avoiding eye contact with him, we huddled next to the window, staring hard at the sea of white flowers blanketing the steppes outside—a healing sight for eyes often wearied by Russia’s endlessly repetitive vistas of forest, steppe, and hardscrabble villages. Yet it turned out that this sea would have had something other than a healing effect on us had we dived into it, covered as it was, in places, with water hemlock.

The flat landscape of this, the West Siberian Plain, was a pleasing sight, though it eventually turned tedious, subjecting us to sky and earth, earth and sky, with nothing to catch the eye. Welcome variety came during our train’s brief stops at tiny wayside stations, at which locals sold pies, pickles, jam, and even furs and whatever else they could come up with. But soon the fields disappeared, forest intruded, and the stations became larger and more orderly.

Our lupine compartment companion eventually pulled out not a knife but a laptop. He turned out to be a shy hardware engineer named Igor, who, warming up after hours of travel, told us he worked for a company that made air conditioners, with offices in Krasnoyarsk and Novosibirsk.

“I’m going all over the country,” the “criminal”-cum-computer geek said. “Omsk is okay, they say. It has more sunny days than any other place in Russia. But Novosibirsk is the best. It’s Russia’s third largest city and perhaps, on the whole, its most sophisticated.”

Four hundred miles deeper into Siberia than Omsk, prosperous Novosibirsk, with a population of 1.6 million and set amid taiga, fascinated us. Not that it was without its own contradictions. In places, cracked sidewalks cried out for Sobyanin-style cobblestones. On the banks of the Ob River, which cuts a magnificent azure loop through the city as it surges north, sits a dilapidated port befitting an outback Siberian town. Amid new structures gray concrete blocks crop up, recalling the Soviet past—and, of course, Lenin Square spreads a formidable expanse of cement; arising in its center, a mighty, if weathered, bronze statue of its namesake towers above lesser bronze figures depicting workers, peasants, and soldiers. As always, the Russian double-headed eagle makes its appearance on

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