23 Jul From Khabarovsk to St Petersburg on the Trans-Siberian Railway Part 2 of 4
[Continued from Part 1]
Irkutsk
We pulled into Irkutsk’s beautiful railway station on the west bank of the Angara at around 7pm, K5185. A tour company guide was there to drive me to Vladimir and Valya’s fairy tale house just five minutes away across the river. What a change from the tenement flat in Khabarovsk! They are both organic chemistry researchers and teachers at Irkutsk’s prestigious university and the aroma from an enormous pot of black currant jam Valya had on the stove was welcoming.
I showered and headed for an internet cafe. On the way I passed an imposing nineteenth century red brick building on the corner of Karl Marx and Gagarin streets which turned out to be the Krayevedcheskiy Museum. It was open, so I went in. Everything was in Russian but I got the drift. With a vast collection of archaeological artefacts, ethnographic exhibits, and natural history specimens it was clearly showcasing the cultures and landscapes of Eastern Siberia. After a brief tour I found an internet cafe nearby and checked the news over an omelette.
Big mistake. I spent the rest of the night on the dunny just outside my host’s bedroom, embarrassed. Next morning I was reluctant to do any sight seeing but Vladimir was keen for me to go to the Baikal Museum in Listvyanka. I think he was also keen to get me out of the house. I shuffled off apprehensively and bravely took a tram, hoping to get to the bus station. It reminded me of the Brisbane trams Clem Jones retired in 1969. At the bus station I somehow found the right bus but when it became overcrowded and smelly I found a cab. Alexi, the driver, spoke enough English to offer me a return fare, which was reasonable, so off we went. It took me about twenty minutes to persuade him to slow down to a speed that wasn’t terrifying. Afterwards he described the other terrifying drivers on the road as ‘Russians’. Perhaps that was why he had a revolver in the door pocket.
At the museum I was set upon by an English-speaking member of the staff who offered me her services as a guide. I accepted since my experience at the Krayevedcheskiy would have been much better with an English-speaking guide. This certainly proved to be the case for the Baikal Museum. The lake is 1,620 metres deep at its deepest and below 5m the water temperature is 3.6oC. A virgin sturgeon takes twenty-one years to mature and freshwater seals can dive to 200 metres. In the Soviet era, grayling earned its place as the fish of choice for cosmonauts and Olympic athletes. Sourced from the cold, pristine rivers of Siberia, this delicate, protein-rich fish is prized for its purity, digestibility, and nutritional balance — ideal for those operating at the limits of human endurance.
In the depths of Siberia’s brutal winters, when rivers and lakes freeze solid under layers of ice, the Angara River stands as a rare exception. Fed directly by the immense and thermally stable Lake Baikal, the Angara’s headwaters remain ice-free year-round. This open water becomes a vital winter refuge for water birds such as swans, ducks and goldeneyes. While the surrounding landscape lies locked in permafrost, the Angara flows on, offering warmth, life, and sanctuary in a frozen world.
When my guide noticed I was carrying a copy of Colin Thubron’s In Siberia, she went to great lengths to deny his claim that 1,300 people had died in the 1862 Lake Baikal earthquake. I was surprised she had read it so carefully. Later, I found references that confirmed Thubron’s claim and wondered why she was so offended by the account – perhaps a mix of professional rigor, regional pride and post-Soviet sensitivity to perceived Western exaggeration.
The day was overcast and still with an almost seamless transition from blue water to blue mountains to almost blue sky in the east as we drove away from a part of the world that couldn’t fail to inspire wonder in even the hardest heart. We stopped for a vendor selling smoked omul. Alexi insisted I buy some, and so after a short tussle, which I lost, I bought three for 200 roubles, about A$60. Safely back in Irkutsk, Valya served one for afternoon tea with boiled potatoes, sliced onions and sour cream, an acquired taste at best. They appeared again for breakfast, this time with pancakes, crumbly scrambled egg, sliced onion and sour cream. Fortunately, this was followed by pancakes with homemade strawberry jam and cream – delicious. Omul was not for me, and I was reminded me of one of Colin Thubron’s astute observations: Baikal’s ‘waters seem to cherish the strange, but kill the ordinary. In part their intense oxygenation accounts for this’.
On a flight from Shanghai to Paris twenty years later the cloud cover dispersed just as we approached the southeastern corner of Lake Baikal and there it was again with all its mystery. I was reminded of how much more there is to travel when you have the luxury of not flying. As we passed to the south of Irkutsk the clouds closed and it was gone.
Train 9 for Moscow was scheduled to leave at 4.20 pm so there was plenty of time to visit Irkutsk’s Regional Art Museum featuring Russian and Western European art from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, as well as Eastern art from China, Japan, and Mongolia. There was a foggy Monet view across the Thames to the Houses of Parliament and a colourful collection of Ping Pang and Pong pictures; however, they left no time to visit the Volkonsky Museum.
The story of Princess Maria Volkonskaya is one of quiet heroism and enduring dignity. Born into Russian aristocracy, she chose to accompany her husband, Prince Sergei Volkonsky, into exile in Siberia after his involvement in the Decembrist uprising of 1825. Arriving in Irkutsk in 1827, she gave up a life of privilege to live in harsh conditions, devoting herself to charitable work and gaining the deep respect of the local community. Over time, her presence took on near-legendary status – her grace, compassion and resilience a bright light in Irkutsk’s cultural memory.
I regretted missing the princess but was happy to be at the station in plenty of time to install myself on the train to Moscow. My bliss was briefly pricked when I found I no longer had a cabin to myself, but I soon found my new companion wouldn’t be a vodka-swilling nightmare. He was a German neurosurgeon with an interest in trains and, having been to an acupuncture conference in Beijing with his GP wife, was travelling home to Karlsruhe via the Trans-Mongolian leg of the Trans-Siberian. That’s a detour! It’s a 1,700 kilometre two-day trip from Beijing to Irkutsk before you even start.
We left Irkutsk, K5185, on time at 4.20 pm – 11.20 am Moscow time. We were in Angarsk an hour later. It is an enormous petrochemical complex with processing facilities and storage tanks as far as the eye can see. Not unlike Jubail in Saudi Arabia. But unlike Saudi Arabia where the hot conditions generally favour petroleum transfer and transport, the Siberian facilities are designed to operate during freezing winter conditions meaning all above-ground pipelines must be either insulated or heated. The tanker wagon loading facilities handle gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel and bitumen. Between Khabarovsk and Irkutsk there had been incessant eastbound tanker trains many with more than 100 wagons. Ulrich, my new German friend, remarked there had been an enormous number crossing Mongolia as well.
With Angarsk behind us we repaired to the diner. It separated the first and economy sections of the train and not long after being seated we were accosted by an East German who had overheard Ulrich attempting to talk to a waiter in German. Dietmar from Dresden was travelling in economy and desperate to tell his story. He had signed up for an economy homestay tour (€30/night for five nights). There was only one bed in his Irkutsk homestay and he had been invited to join his hostess in the bed while his host slept beside them on the floor. Amusing but sad. Russia has a long way to go.
In the three days it took us to reach Moscow I learnt a lot about my travelling companions. Dietmar was a Dresden postman with a slight speech impediment, which made his German even more difficult to understand, but there was more to him than being a postman. He was not only a plucky traveller but more than that he was a ‘Wagnerian’. So much so he believed contemporary conductors played Wagner too softly to avoid the ‘Nazi’ slur.
He told a wonderful story about the Dresden Opera House. It had been smashed by the Bomber Harris raids in February 1945 and for decades its charred ruins had stood as a silent witness to its wartime devastation. Rebuilding began in earnest in 1977, under the East German government, with a commitment to restore the opera house to its pre-war glory. Architects and artisans pored over original blueprints, photographs, and fragments, using traditional materials and techniques wherever possible. At the same time, modern technologies were discreetly incorporated to meet contemporary safety and technical standards. The restoration was meticulous: frescoes were repainted, sculptures were re-carved, and the iconic Neo-Renaissance façade was reconstructed stone by stone. The interior’s red-and-gold grandeur was faithfully revived, including the stunning ceiling murals and chandelier.
On 13 February 1985, exactly forty years after its destruction, the opera house was reopened with a performance of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz – the very opera that had inaugurated the original theatre in 1841. This was not open to the public but the following evening’s performance of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, conducted by Wolfgang Wagner was, and Dietmar queued for four days and got a ticket. That’s what I call a Wagnerian.
I recounted the story of my 1990 visit to the Komische Oper in East Berlin for a performance of The Marriage of Figaro. It is still one of my favourite performances ever. I couldn’t remember the conductor. Dietmar immediately suggested Harry Kupfer. I looked it up afterwards. Kupfer was the director. The conductor had been Rolf Reuter.
Despite being a neurosurgeon in the Städtischen Klinikums Karlsruhe, Ulrich was passionate about motorcycles even though many of his patients were motorcyclists. Nor had this cooled his enthusiasm for his own Kawasaki version of the BSA A7 and every time we spotted a local bike with sidecar, which we did frequently, he went mad. Most, he thought, were copies of the 1940 BMW R20 which were now being made in Russia, exported back to Germany and sold for about €5000.
The overnight leg from Angarsk, K5143, to Krasnoyarsk, K4098, was just over 1,000 kilometres however the spectacular views of the mighty Yenisei greeting us in the morning light made it worthwhile. Colin Thubron was also mesmerised by its majesty, and having spied a steamer heading north, on a whim, bought a ticket for the Arctic Circle, a mere 6,000 kilometre detour. Now that’s freedom. The Trans-Siberian was not a speedster but I couldn’t help feeling that as we closed in on Moscow I was in too much of a hurry. I was crossing the very path once walked by early humans on their arduous journey from Africa to Alaska. Beneath the steel rails and forests lay one of the oldest human highways on Earth – silent, buried, but still shaping the contours of our shared past.
Siberia, often thought of as a vast frozen wilderness, is central to the story of human migration and survival. Conventional wisdom has it that early humans left Africa’s Rift Valley around 1.8 million years ago and moved through Central Asia and on into Siberia. From there, some eventually crossed into North America via the Bering Land Bridge. Along the way, in the Altai Mountains, they met and interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans – making the region a rare meeting point of three early human species. Five days later I was in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg where I was able to admire the Pazyryk Carpet from the the Altai Valley south of Novobrisk. It is the oldest known knotted rug in the world, having been preserved in ice for over 2,000 years.
Colin Thubron’s trip down the Yenesei took him to Yakutsk where he met Russian archaeologist Yuri Mochanov who claimed to have found two-million-year-old stone tools embedded in ancient strata. If verified, these artefacts would predate the accepted timeline of human migration from Africa. Such a discovery suggests the possibility that humans – or human ancestors – may have left Africa much earlier than we think, or that primitive toolmakers existed independently in Asia. Though controversial, Mochanov’s claim reminds us there are still a few twists in the tale of man.
The Ural Mountains mark the boundary between Siberia and European Russia. Nestled on the eastern slopes, Yekaterinburg, K1816, is 5,000 kilometres from Siberia’s East coast and 1,400 from Moscow. Travellers may sense the change. But it is best known for its darkest moment when Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, their five children and four loyal attendants were murdered by Bolsheviks in the basement of a merchant’s house in July 1918, bringing a brutal end to the Romanov dynasty and, eventually, the birth of the Soviet Union. The city, then called Sverdlovsk, carried that stain through the Soviet years but has since reclaimed its name and history. Today, the Church on Blood stands on the site of the execution, part of a national reckoning with a past both imperial and revolutionary.
Of course, the murder of the Romanovs was just the start of the systematic violence that would define Siberia in the Soviet era. After the Civil War and especially following World War II, the region filled with Gulag labour camps, where millions were imprisoned, exiled, and worked to death for crimes as small as a careless word. The same cold silence that once surrounded the Ipatiev House settled over Norilsk, Vorkuta, Kolyma and countless forgotten outposts, where suffering was buried beneath snow and silence. Yekaterinburg was not just the site of a royal murder; it was the opening scene in a long Siberian tragedy.
The next stop was Perm, K1436. In the film version of Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, the eponymous hero and his family flee revolutionary Moscow by train, heading east through the frozen vastness of Russia toward the fictional town of Yuryatin, often thought to be based on Perm, which sits on the western slopes of the Urals. The journey marks a crossing – not just of geography but of worlds – from the collapsing certainties of the old order into the raw, uncertain frontier of Civil War era Siberia. In David Lean’s 1965 film adaptation, this eastward escape gains visual grandeur as steam trains plough through snowbound forests and haunted landscapes. Yuryatin, straddling Europe and Asia, becomes their temporary refuge, a place where love briefly reclaims its space amid the chaos because Yuri’s lover, Lara, just happens to be in Yuryatin as well. Years later, in one of the film’s final scenes, Yuri’s half-brother Yevgraf, now a Soviet general, speaks to a young woman working on a hydroelectric dam – Tanya Komarova, who he believes to be the daughter Yuri and Lara, conceived during their time in Yuryatin. She doesn’t know who her parents were but carries a balalaika (perhaps the balalaika of the theme tune) and a quiet grace that evoke the memory of a love lost to history.
What is it about the Russians? How can they be so cruel and then produce literature like Dr Zhivago and War and Peace? The stories of Prince Sergei Volkonsky, exiled to Siberia after the Decembrist revolt; of Nicholas II and the Romanovs, executed in a cellar in Yekaterinburg; and of Yuri Zhivago, a fictional man crushed between idealism and state violence – all raise the unsettling question of whether there is a particular cruelty in the Russian experience. Siberia, vast and indifferent, becomes the stage on which these tragedies unfold: a place of exile, erasure and endurance. But the cruelty seen in these stories does not spring from the Russian people themselves – it flows from a long history of autocratic rule, where power has often been preserved by fear and the individual sacrificed to ideology or survival. Geography, invasion and centuries of trauma have shaped a political culture in which repression has been seen as necessary, even righteous. Yet these same stories also reveal a deep humanity: the Decembrist wives who followed their husbands into exile, the quiet faith of the Romanov daughters, and Zhivago’s poetry amid collapse. If cruelty exists in Russian history, so too does compassion, and maybe it is in the tension between the two that the true character of the Russian soul emerges.
[Continue with Part 3]
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