In his new book, "Midnight in Siberia," NPR correspondent and former Moscow bureau chief David Greene rides the legendary Trans-Siberian Railroad nearly 6,000 miles from Moscow to Vladivostok. Though already well acquainted with the country, he is interested in learning more. He wants to meet and understand not just the urban elite, but also those who are miles and miles away from cosmopolitan Moscow, literally and figuratively.
Traveling with a Moscow-based colleague, Greene makes stops at 11 stations, occasionally with excursions into smaller towns. The two have lined up people to visit at almost every stop, although Greene also embraces the opportunity to pick the brains of other characters he happens across.
Interviews include the parents of a young hockey player who was killed along with his teammates in a 2011 plane crash; a handful of charismatic little old ladies who form a renowned singing group known as the Buranova Babushkas; the son of the inventor of the AK-47, and a couple of staff members of a nationwide civil liberties organization that was raided by the government as recently as last year.
Again and again, Greene asks people how they feel about the Russia of today, and where they see it going in the future.
While its subtitle ("A Train Journey Into the Heart of Russia") implies that the book is about one specific Trans-Siberian train trip (in 2013), the reader soon learns that Greene took a similar trip in 2011, toward the end of his three-year tenure as NPR's Moscow bureau chief. Greene also peppers the book liberally with memories from his three years as bureau chief, which muddles the chronology.
He also includes many quotations from literary and journalistic writings about Russia, although these usually add texture to whatever Greene is explaining, as well as provide ideas for additional reading.
Greene frequently admits that he's enamored of and fascinated by Russia and its citizens, and it's a pleasure to spend time with someone in a place that constantly engages him so. At times, however, he makes sweeping generalizations about Russians that sometimes veer into the unwittingly condescending — a habit you'd think that, as a longtime journalist, he'd be above.
Stronger than his own slightly repetitious (and occasionally twee) philosophizing are the interviews, which provide rich insights into today's Russia — insights about the enduring nostalgia for certain aspects of Stalin's rule, a kind of cultural attitude toward hardship and a deeply ingrained reluctance to instigate change. "Midnight in Siberia" is like a 6,000-mile-long time-lapse photograph, capturing many different frames of present-day life in a vast country grappling between its past and its future.
Kim Hedges is an editor and book reviewer in the San Francisco Bay Area.
