I came, I Warsaw, I Moscowed

The train from Poland snakes through a landscape frozen in time: Soviet-era architecture, abandoned vehicles, huge dark forests, before reaching Moscow, a city divided by its wealth and poverty

AS SOON AS WE cross into Belarus, the carriage is stormed by a unit of middle-aged women with perms and leopard-skin leggings brandishing baskets full of two things: beer and berries. “Pivo! Pivo!” they announce, shoving open the cabin doors more aggressively than the soldiers who just checked our visas.

“What about vodka?” one of the women asks me urgently. Anything she doesn’t have she can source in a minute: bread, cheese, smoked fish. “She’s asking you to invite us all into your cabin for a vodka party,” says Nadja, my next-door neighbour. “You probably should say no.”

After a while the women depart, presumably to wait for the next train passing in the night, and our carriage is hauled into a huge shed for one of the great spectacles of every train journey into the former Soviet Union.

Once the train comes to a stop, dozens of men in overalls descend on the undercarriage like mechanics at a pit stop. Under yellow lamp-light, they loosen the wheels at lightning speed, lift the train with huge hydraulic jacks, replace the wheels with the wider Russian type and lower the carriages onto the rails again before giving us the all-clear. In less than an hour we’re tearing through the Belarusian night. Polish and Russian trains alternate on the Warsaw-Moscow route, and it was our luck to have landed a carriage run by the Polish operator, the belligerently-named WARS, where the cabins are bigger and the windows can be opened. I’d found myself in a compartment with two Russian students, but the carriage attendant took pity on us and offered me an empty cabin on my own – making it the most comfortable overnight journey I’ve ever made.

Nadja, originally from Olenegorsk in Russia’s extreme northwest but studying mining in Moscow for the past few years, is returning with four others from a study trip at the mines of southern Poland. It was her first time outside Russia, and she seems bowled over by Poland – its scenery, the girls’ prodigious drinking and the “beautiful” mines they visited.

Apart from a handful of Poles, everyone on the train is from Russia or Belarus, including many families returning from holiday and regulars who travel the route for work. Others, such as Elena Grishchenko, are emigrants coming home for their summer break. Elena is married to an American. They have lived in Washington for the past three years and she already talks about her country like an outsider.

“You get used to the comforts of life, then you come back to Russia,” she laughs. “My husband, when we lived in Russia, said Russians were rude and impolite. I was always defensive, but after being in the US, it’s true. Manners is something we need to work on.”

Elena’s journey ends in the Belarusian border town of Brest, where the family are gathering at her grandmother’s house. The city has a mythical place in Soviet – and now Russian – history on account of its role as a stronghold on the front line when Germany attacked the USSR in June of 1941. The city’s fortress is famous for having held out for nine days – far longer than expected – after the Nazi invasion.

It was an unlikely defence that resulted in Brest being named one of the Soviet Union’s 11 “hero cities”, and its feat is still commemorated at an annual ceremony. The Brest Fortress, a multi-million-euro film released last year, was the first fully state-funded Russian feature since the halcyon days of Mosfilm – the Soviet company that specialised in patriotic films for the masses.

Visitors to Russia these days are taken aback by the cost of living. So are many Russians, and Elena says that explains why nostalgia for Soviet days is still a strong current in Russian society, “especially for the older generation,” she says.

“I think it was a very hard transition for them in the 1990s. Many of them liked the Soviet period more. Even if there are a lot more things available in the shops, they’re not really available, because you can’t afford them. Last September, I went to a coffee shop and paid $15 for a coffee and pastry.”

As the train pulls into Brest station, I ask Elena if I can take her picture for the paper. She cheerfully agrees. “That’s another thing I’m getting used to: the smiling. In America they smile every time someone points a camera at them. It’s not like that in Russia.” And sure enough, the second I raise the camera, her smile vanishes and she looks gravely into the lens.

There’s no sudden change of scenery between Poland and Belarus, but neither is there any mistaking that we are in one of the continent’s poorest countries – a European outcast-state ruled by the authoritarian president Alexander Lukashenko.

Many of the stations are run-down and surrounded by ugly Soviet-era factory buildings that look like they closed in 1989 and have remained frozen in time. The cars waiting at level crossings invariably include some old clapped-out Ladas or Volgas.

But what’s also striking is how little advertising, graffiti or litter you see. Irina, a French teacher from Minsk who is returning home from an Italian holiday with her daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren, was shocked by Sardinia’s rubbish.

“I was very surprised by it, because in Minsk it’s much cleaner,” she says. “I wonder is Sardinia different from the rest of Italy. I think it might be.” Taking a European holiday can be arduous for a Belarusian. Direct air connections to major cities are few, and what there is can be expensive. “We don’t have Ryanair,” says Irina. Then there’s the huge fee travel agencies demand to arrange visas.

Irina and her family took the train to Warsaw and flew the rest of the way, but they all look exhausted, cramped into their second-class cabin. “It’s the first time, and I think it will be the last time,” she says.

AT SOME POINT in the night we pass into Russia and the train starts to snake its way north through the forests and flatlands that countless armies, exiles and wide-eyed travellers have trudged across over the centuries.

I leave the window open all night, letting in the crisp night air and catching an occasional glimpse of dim light in the distance. There’s a purity to the darkness: total, all-enveloping black. Stare into it long enough and you can make out one of Chekhov’s peasants ambling home (wasn’t there one who ended up in court for stealing the nuts from the railway track? Not him, you hope). A couple of the Russians in my carriage spend hours on end at the corridor’s open windows, not minding the light rain, staring into the darkness.

There’s a whole genre of books by Europeans who travelled to Moscow in Soviet times with the highest hopes, only to find themselves growing gradually more disenchanted the longer they stayed.

For many first-time visitors to Moscow today, the process is reversed: initial disappointment turns into something more ambivalent before the city truly grabs hold of them. Moscow isn’t cut out for easy tourism. The traffic is terrible, theft is common, strangers are brusque. I could read Cyrillic, thanks to a year spent learning Serbian a while back, but without it you could spend days wandering the grand, labyrinthine metro stations.

Then there’s the wealth divide created by Russian’s variation on capitalism. Moscow is one of the world’s most expensive cities. Rents are rising faster than most people’s incomes can keep up, and the burgeoning class of super-rich can be seen everywhere: in the Bentleys that clog the eight-lane motorways; the super-chic bars and clubs where everyone arrives with a chauffeur; or in the jaw-dropping prices in exclusive shopping centres such as GUM, the old state department store, on Red Square.

Every city has an income divide, but Moscow’s is especially glaring. On the train into the city, you pass suburban homes without water or electricity. When I ask Nadja, the engineering student, to recommend some bars or restaurants, she replies, with a look that says it is self-evident: “I don’t go out at night in Moscow.” And yet for all that, it’s a seductive place – a cultural hub with endless historical interest and the cheeky dynamism of a city on the make.

The last time I was here, it was a few weeks before Christmas and the temperature had fallen below -25 degrees. In summer, the city seems quieter, less urgent, transformed by outdoor cafes, busy parks and street life. A two-hour drive through the city takes in the Gothic peaks of Stalin’s Seven Sisters skyscrapers, the 16th-century Novodevichy convent, the red-brick towers of the Kremlin and the old KGB headquarters. “You can see Siberia from there,” locals joke.

And from Belorussky station – Moscow’s gateway to the west for more than a century – you can see in the other direction. On a midweek afternoon, the departures board lists a few international trains to Belarus and Poland, but the busiest are the commuter lines to towns with intriguingly evocative names such as Usovo, Golitsyno, Kubinka, Gagarin and Vyazma.

Then, stationed unassumingly at platform 3 is a throwback to another time: the longest direct train connection left in Europe. The destination looks so unlikely, even the drunks whiling away the afternoon with a few beers in the station stop and stare when they pass it – the 17.21 to Nice.