Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia by David Greene Page A

“Trans-Siberian” journey. But long trips between cities that are far apart, and that take you a good distance from west to east or east to west, can also safely be called “Trans-Siberian.”
    There is a haunting past. The rails were constructed largely by migrant workers and prison laborers, many of whom, in the words of American Paul E. Richardson, who writes about Russian culture, died “from exposure and from infectious disease, from typhoid to the bubonic plague.” The railroad, once built, was also convenient for Joseph Stalin, who used it to transport exiles to Siberia. By the hundreds of thousands, the Kremlin could send government critics, lawyers, doctors, religious leaders—really anyone it chose—to the dreaded gulags in some of the harshest conditions on earth. Stanley Kowalski was a gulag survivor. His daughter described the tortures of the train her father experienced in her 2009 book, No Place to Call Home . The Polish army officer was captured by the Soviets in 1939, and transported by train between prisons several times—one journey took him across nearly all of Russia on the Trans-Siberian, in a red boxcar with little light:
    The train . . . made unscheduled stops in deserted stations or empty fields where, if lucky, [prisoners] might be allotted their daily ration of food: a piece of bread and fish. Water, on the other hand, was becoming a rare commodity. At some stations, the inmates would pound upon the barred doors, demanding something to quench their thirst, but often their pleading was to no avail. Amidst these surroundings, the weak had little chance of survival.
    Especially striking was how in the midst of all this cruelty, Kowalski remembered peeking out cracks in the wooden walls of the boxcar to marvel at Russia’s landscape. Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia, he recalled, “could take one’s breath away. At first glance, all one noticed was the unadulterated beauty of the blue-green water reflecting the majesty of the mountain peaks beyond. The scent of pines completed the exhilarating experience.”
    Even as Stalin used the Trans-Siberian as a veritable death train, he was hard at work punishing other people by making them construct new railroads. In 2012 Lucy Ash, a reporter for Britain’s Guardian newspaper, unearthed remnants of Stalin’s “deadly railway to nowhere,” a thousand-mile Arctic route connecting western and eastern Siberia. “The labor force was almost entirely made up of ‘enemies of the people’—prisoners convicted of ‘political’ offenses.” Gulags were created every six to eight miles solely to house construction crews. “Prisoners built their own wooden barracks but the unlucky ones in the front units had to take shelter in canvas tents.” Ash estimated three hundred thousand people were “enslaved” to build the project and nearly a third of them died doing it. Many of the slave laborers thought that by building a railroad they were contributing to something important, thus experiencing that elevated sense of purpose Shishkin wrote about. Therefore the cruelest part? The project was abandoned. The Russian woman showing the Guardian reporter around the remnants of the rail line put it this way:
    Of course it was wrong to build the railway with slave labor. But once they’d started it and there were so many victims, I think abandoning the project was also criminal. I lead excursions and tell people about what happened. One man, a former prisoner, made a special trip up here and he just started crying when he saw the rusty engines and old tracks. Many of the prisoners believed they were fulfilling a useful and necessary deed, and all of it was just destroyed. It’s heartbreaking.
    Amazingly, the Trans-Siberian route that saw so much hardship and death is now traversed by some of the world’s best-off people. One of the trains that speeds along the track is the Golden Eagle, a luxury liner offering the best caviar and cabins outfitted with