We keep going west, crossing the Urals. Many things in the European Russia are the same as in Siberia, such as the service stations with banyas we love, and stolovayas with borscht, pelmeni, buckwheat, and Putin on TV. Some things are different, though. Just like we noticed in Yekaterinburg, there are way more international shopping chains, motorways, and urban landscape in general. (We also bump into a big store with hiking equipment, so I buy a large solid raincoat that can be put on a human wearing a backpack. I lost my raincoat in Tomsk and now I’m happy again because I don’t have to put garbage bags over my backpack anymore.)
There is more of everything, including people and cars. Even though there still are mostly trucks on the road, passenger cars are not rare anymore. Sometimes, drivers of small cars give us a ride too. Also, we meet our first Russian person who speaks a foreign language. (Somewhere near Krasnoyarsk, we actually might have met a guy from China who knew Mandarin. But the present driver in the European part speaks English as a second language because he thought it was a good idea to learn it. And he decides all by himself to speak it with us.)
 |
| Russia seems to be an endless birch forest |
Gulag museum at the Perm-36 camp
As we are traveling fast, it’s hard to keep track of time and the time
zone we are in. But we are doing our best. It appears we are the only ones who
care, though. A truck driver who gave us a ride once stops at a service station
at night and tells us to wake him up at 9 AM so that we can continue together. We
put up a tent nearby. It’s way past midnight, so we are wondering why the
driver wants to have such a short sleep. However, we get up at eight and come back
like he said. He looks sleepy and grumpy.
“You’re back already? I said nine!”
“But it is nine….”
“Damn, I meant Moscow time… It’s seven.”
We now need to hurry. The time left on our one-month visa is getting considerably shorter. We still believe we can make it to a gulag museum in the Urals, though, so we venture a detour from the straight line to Moscow.
This time, we are lucky: we easily catch rides up to Perm even though the weather is rainy and wet. Only then it gets harder: we are somewhere in the suburbs and need to cross the city and get 100 kilometers north. The weather spoils even more and when we are crossing a huge bridge across the vast Chusovaya river, the sky is as leaden as the water. The prefabricated concrete buildings of the gray city in the distance don’t make the scenery any nicer. What a lovely day to be traveling to a gulag.
The days are shorter now, so when the night falls, we are on a country road somewhere north of Perm. It’s raining heavily, so we decide to continue tomorrow. We roast our sausages for dinner in a wet wood, fighting for the campfire with the rain. The next morning, we make sure to get up very early; it’s still raining. But we are still quite lucky. We get to an intersection of country roads, and a local driver buys us coffee and gives us a ride up to the village of Kuchino where the Perm-36 camp is located.
The museum tour guide says this used to be one of the less horrible gulags. He also says only criminals used to be placed here; no political prisoners. Only much later I find out that this is not true. It is a part of a new narrative endorsed by the new operators of the museum after 2015: in fact, political prisoners indeed were imprisoned in this camp too. However, this fact is becoming controversial these days for political reasons (once again). The museum has recently been taken from the original operator by the authorities for being too critical of the Soviet lawlessness.
However, the exposition shows the atrocities and the absurdity of the Soviet regime clearly. There are photos of camps in Magadan where people would work and die in inhuman conditions, photos of tiny women in shabby clothes logging in winter, caricatures by an imprisoned artist, and a collection of objects that served as pretext to imprison some of the victims: a picture of the tsar family, newspaper with Stalin’s eyes scratched by scissors, a ripped banknote with Lenin’s portrait…
 |
| Author: Eufrosinia Kersnovskaya |
 |
| Remains of a gulag in Magadan |
 |
| A prisoner's crime: ripping a photo of Molotov (that's the guy who made an alliance with Hitler) |
 |
| Not liking Stalin was also a crime |
Even though the Perm-36 camp is west of Urals, so technically in Europe, it leaves its mark in the dark story of Siberia that is unfolding before us as we are traveling across the country. And it will by far not be the last part of the story.
But now we need to get through the country back to Perm. Even though we are not very far, the villages here feel more remote than those on the Trans-Siberian line. Many wooden houses are abandoned and crumbling. I’m wondering where the people went.
Contest for the longest waiting
We only have 9 days left on our visa but it seems that the hitchhiking luck is with us again: by night, we are back in the city. The luck leaves us the very next day, though. We get up early, hoping to get at least to Kazan. It’s 700 km, but for Russia it’s not ambitious if we push a bit. It’s raining again. Our first ride is 15 km. The next guy is going 20 km, so we let him go. We are stuck under a bridge, it's 5°C and still raining. Then we get a 50 km ride. Then we are stuck for a couple of hours on a bus stop; still 5°C, still raining. A driver stops: he's going half a kilometer, so we let him go. The next driver is going 30 km and wants money. The third one stops to tell us he's not going anywhere at all.
An elderly bum comes, also a hitchhiker. He started somewhere west of Baikal and has been on his way to Moscow for a month now. That doesn’t feel particularly reassuring even if you take into account that being drunk doesn’t exactly help to get rides.
By night, we’ve made it up to Izhevsk: 300 km in total. We still have 8 days left but I’m getting a bit nervous. Vojta says, in his typical defeatist way, that we won’t make it out of Russia on time. That reassures me a bit: Vojta’s gloomy predictions are never right, so I believe he’s as wrong as always. I still hope we will be able to see Moscow and St. Petersburg and visit Vojta’s friend in Dubna. All that without hitchhiking at night.
 |
| When you're camping far behind a graveyard, there's nothing like finding out there actually is an old grave under your head |
The next day, we finally make it at least to Kazan. It has a nice mosque, a castle, and historical buildings rather than just concrete housing estates, so I would wish to stay longer. But the stamps in our passports have no mercy.
We eventually get our luck back and get to Moscow without getting stuck much. Actually, at a certain distance from the capital, nobody is going anywhere else. So we soon get a direct ride and there is no point in stopping in Nizhny Novgorod, the last major city before Moscow.
 |
| Kazan |
The different Russia
Moscow is big. It’s bigger than any city we’ve seen in months. Getting anywhere takes a lot of time. The Red Square is also big. We are still in a hurry, so we don’t enter any buildings and just walk along the broad streets past colorful houses. The downtown is touristy. There are fancy restaurants that sell other things than pelmeni, borscht, and buckwheat. Not all statues feature Lenin. There is a plenty of stores with souvenirs and a considerable share of the souvenirs features Putin. There are Putin magnets, Putin matryoshka dolls, mugs with Putin, and statues of Putin riding a bear, including one as big as a middle-sized dog.
We manage to get to the suburbs through the maze of subway and bus lines; we camp just outside a graveyard as there is no better spot. The next day we continue to the town of Dubna to see Vojta’s friend. Weather is nice to us this time: it stops raining for a while.
In Dubna, there is an institute of nuclear research. Everything in the town revolves around the institute. Vojta used to do a research program in here, and his Czech friend Pavel has been working here since. He lets us stay in his place: I now realize it’s been a month since we’ve last stayed indoors. We are less shabby than we’d expect after weeks of camping, though, probably thanks to banyas and mild weather. Pavel takes us with him to a bar with his Czech colleagues: after a month in Russia, this is the first time we get drunk.
We continue to St. Petersburg. It’s not the very shortest way to the EU, but we are now confident that we can make it. This time, our planning works and we arrive in two days. We can now finally stop rushing and enjoy all our time left: the border is very near.
 |
| Ferry across a river on the way from Dubna to St. Petersburg |
Finding a Couchsurfing host in St. Petersburg is surprisingly easy, even though we contact people at the last minute as always. For maybe the third time in the entire journey, there are two different people willing to host us. We feel sorry again we don’t have time to meet both. Eventually, we are staying with Kostya, a young student.
His world seems to be different than the world of people we used to meet on the road. He speaks English, has international friends, is interested in arts, volunteers in social work, and is very active. He believes he can contribute to a change. Kostya seems to be a calm, thoughtful person.
During his summer holiday, he did a hitchhiking journey through Siberia because he wanted to know his country better. He spent several months on the road and has been to remote parts of the country: more remote than we’ve been to.
“Are you planning to continue and to make a similar journey next time?” Vojta asks.
“I don’t think so. It’s been enough,” Kostya says. “The travels were very long, actually. Russia is so big! …I don’t understand why Putin wants to make it bigger. It’s so huge already,” he adds.
It’s the first time we hear somebody to be critical of the president.
Unfortunately for us, Kostya is very busy, so we can’t discuss with him more. We spend our remaining time roaming around the city, looking at the huge palaces, vast squares, and items featuring Putin. It’s raining all the time but we don’t really mind because we have a dry, cozy safehouse at Kostya’s place. The city looks gloomy under the gray sky, but it’s very much alive. There are many young people on the streets, buskers (when it sometimes stops raining), and hipstery cafés. Even though in general, the city is fancier than any other Russian city we’ve seen before, there still are stolovayas with borscht cheaper than groceries in the supermarket.
We meet up with a friend I know from a study exchange. Roxy lives abroad, but fortunately for us, she’s now back home visiting her family. We talk about our travels and about Russia. Roxy belongs to the same world as Kostya, but feels way less hope.
“Russia is fucked up,” she says. “I’m tired of all that. I like my country but in the current situation I prefer to live somewhere else. There is no freedom, everybody is getting poorer and there’s no way how to change it. All the people I know are leaving too. Most of my friends are gone. There is almost nobody left. My parents are also thinking about leaving. Maybe to Kazakhstan; even in Kazakhstan there is more freedom than here.”
 |
| The choice of callendars for 2018 isn't particularly wide |
8 hours before the deadline
Exactly one month after entering Russia, we say goodbye to Kostya and are heading to Estonia. We were also considering going through Finland which is as near as Estonia, but our families are impatient for us to return, so we’ve decided not to take the detour. The border with Estonia is just 150 km from here, so we are pretty confident. In the world’s biggest country, 150 km is nothing.
We arrive to the border town of Ivangorod 8 hours before the expiry of our visa. Our time management makes me proud: we have more time left to the deadline than when I was handing in my master’s thesis.
We take our time, though. We realize we are entering the Euro zone, so from now on, everything will be way more expensive. We buy some supplies in the local grocery store and spend the last rubles in a cozy stolovaya for a big lunch. Goodbye cheap borscht, buckwheat, and large weak tea from a dispenser.
I’m now sure I will miss Russia and its endless birch forests, sausages with horseradish, and brutally honest conversations. Entering the EU also means we are almost home. The idea of our journey coming to an end feels almost scary.
At evening, we cross a bridge over the river, next to two castles facing each other from the opposite sides of the border. There is no line and nobody cares about the missing registration we were, according to some sources, supposed to make when we entered Russia. A grumpy lady in the booth stamps our passports without asking questions. The Estonian officers care about us even less. And that’s it. This was the last border we had to worry about.
 |
| Russia and Estonia |
