The Russia Left Behind

I have not yet been to Russia, but when my friend Sean LaFreniere and I drove into a remote part of Ukraine from a remote part of Poland and hit roads so deteriorated they looked and felt like they’d been shredded to ribbons by air strikes, Sean said “we’re in Russia!” He insists that this place—outer Western Ukraine on the road to the town of Sambir—is exactly like the long dark stretch of road between Moscow and St. Petersburg.

I wrote about that journey in my book, Where the West Ends. And now Ellen Barry has written what reads like a haunting companion piece about the actual stretch of road between Moscow and St. Petersburg for The New York Times Magazine.

Her piece is extraordinary, as are her photos.

At the edges of Russia’s two great cities, another Russia begins.

This will not be apparent at next year’s Winter Olympics in Sochi, nor is it visible from the German-engineered high-speed train. It is along the highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg — a narrow 430-mile stretch of road that is a 12-hour trip by car — that one sees the great stretches of Russia so neglected by the state that they seem drawn backward in time.

As the state’s hand recedes from the hinterlands, people are struggling with choices that belong to past centuries: to heat their homes with a wood stove, which must be fed by hand every three hours, or burn diesel fuel, which costs half a month’s salary? When the road has so deteriorated that ambulances cannot reach their home, is it safe to stay? When their home can’t be sold, can they leave?

Clad in rubber slippers, his forearms sprinkled with tattoos, Mr. Naperkovsky is the kind of plain-spoken man’s man whom Russians would call a “muzhik.” He had something he wanted to pass on to Mr. Putin, who has led Russia during 13 years of political stability and economic expansion.

“The people on the top do not know what is happening down here,” he said. “They have their own world. They eat differently, they sleep on different sheets, they drive different cars. They don’t know what is going on here. If I needed one word to describe it, I would say it is a swamp, a stagnant swamp. As it was, so it is. Nothing is changing.”

Driving the highway, the M10, today, one finds beauty and decay. There are places where wild boars roam abandoned villages, gorging themselves on the fruit of orchards planted by men.

There are spots on this highway where it seems time has stopped. A former prison guard is spending his savings building wooden roadside chapels, explaining that “many souls” weigh on his conscience. A rescue worker from the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl is waiting, 27 years later, for the apartment the Soviets promised him as a reward. Women sit on the shoulder, selling tea to travelers from a row of samovars. Above them, pillars of steam vanish into the sky, just as they did in 1746, the year construction on the road began.

This part of Russia should not be the back of beyond. It’s the single stretch of road between the country’s two largest cities. The road from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Deadhorse on the Arctic Ocean is in better condition than this. (I know, I’ve driven it.)

It’s not just the roads in rural Russia that have fallen apart. The society itself seems to have slipped back into the 18^th century.

What struck me most about Ukraine is how it looks like the West, but it’s not. It’s like an alternate universe version of the West, what our civilization might have looked like had history gone another direction. Russia and Ukraine actually went that direction.