Ethnographic Expedition 2008. Part VII

August 10–17, 2008

Ulan-Ude

The city used to be called Verkhneudinsk. They’ve reconstructed a surprisingly garish-looking arch with a double-headed eagle here. The arch wasn’t exactly notable for its beauty even before the revolution, and it looks like an affront to good taste after being reconstructed in concrete.

Buryatia is a sort of Russian Mongolia. Where else would you see mantras on the hills?

Om mani padme hum

This is the land of Buddhism, the steppes, and energy in the plural form.

No heating, no el. energies

Some lampposts are decorated with a rat—it’s the year of the rat, after all.

A completely surreal four-story-tall Lenin head looks over the city’s main square.

Buryatia

Almost all the local Russians treat Buryats like second-rate citizens and call them nalim, or burbots. The contempt is barely disguised. When you hear the way people talk, you wonder how they manage to coexist at all.

Ulan-Ude likes to decorate its balconies with ornaments.

The handle on the municipal trash cans is incredibly touching: someone thought of the street cleaners.

Ulan-Ude’s Buryat policemen, by the way, are unbelievably polite. So much so that it’s really conspicuous.

The employees of a Rosneft gas station on the outskirts of the city actively abuse their privileges to everyone’s satisfaction: they run their employee discount cards in exchange for half the amount of the discount.

Bichura

Bichura is a rural town with a population of ten thousand. The locals claim their Communist Street is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest rural street anywhere in the former USSR. It may or may not be the longest, but it is 13 kilometers long.

Entire families of Old Believers were once exiled here, hence the term Semeiskie (“family”) for descendants of the exiled. There are very few Old Believers left today, but they decided to build themselves a church. The local authorities said there was no land available for it, even though there’s nothing but steppe all around—the Russian Orthodox Church still dislikes heterodoxy. So Semeiskie grandma Tatiana Fokeevna offered up her garden plot as the site for the new church.

Fokeevna herself makes a living selling real beeswax candles, which she makes by hand at home.

The expedition’s first Land Cruiser flipped over not far from Bichura (everyone survived).

This is the absolute middle of nowhere. Exiling people here would make just as much sense today.

Keep your money in a bank! Sberbank of Russia.

For the first time ever, I saw a real-life wooden traffic sign. An old bra was attached to the back. Unfortunately, there was no one around I could ask to explain this fact.

Bridge in critical condition

Tarbagatay

A couple of hours’ drive away is the village of Tarbagatay, where the Decembrists were exiled. A cheerful place—even the people on the signs radiate happiness.

Chita

Also an excellent exile destination.

They keep all sorts of creatures behind bars here. The logo of the Chita Zoo features a curious animal that’s some sort of mix between a shrimp, a seal, a platypus and an antelope.

We invite you to visit the Chita Zoo. Zhuravleva St., 75.

The border with China is close by, so even the sculptures are being vigilant.

The bus stop can be identified by the benches set out along the sidewalk.

The Ministry of Emergency Situations PSA really tugs at the heartstrings.

Adults! Think about what you’re doing!

The decorative grates around the tree are welded together with brackets so that they don’t get nabbed for scrap metal.

The vehicle traffic lights are hung too high.

And the pedestrian ones too low.

It’s a dump, in a nutshell.

Central Snack Bar. Open.

On the way out of Chita, the expedition picked up a German named Phillip who was hitchhiking across Russia. And approximately one hundred kilometers after the city, the asphalt abruptly ended.

And one thousand kilometers of total nightmare began. Strictly speaking, as of today there’s still no road connecting the western and eastern parts of Russia. The Amur Federal Highway, which opened to through traffic in 2004, was supposed to solve this problem. On this magical highway, drivers are expected to guess who’s driving in front of them, all while keeping an eye out to make sure there isn’t a truck coming straight at them out of the dust.

Only some heaven-sent rain can provide visibility on this road.

The road’s quality can be judged by how people prepare to take this route. And most of those who use it are “shuttlers” (people who shuttle cars over from Japan to resell them). First of all, shuttlers never travel alone, because they often get robbed. Secondly, they reinforce their cars with plywood shields and cover them with tape to make sure they retain some sort of presentable appearance. A second car is hitched to the first with a drawbar. That way, you can bring over two cars in one trip.

Need it be reminded that all Japanese cars are right-hand drive? European cars begin to disappear somewhere around Novosibirsk. The further east you go, the fewer chances you have of seeing a left-hand-drive vehicle. Cars with the steering wheel on the right are dangerous in Russia for two reasons: first of all, the driver has a more restricted view of the road when passing on the left (passing on the right is forbidden by law); second, the headlights of right-hand-drive cars blind oncoming drivers (the light is supposed to be directed towards the side of the road, but here we have the oncoming lane in its place instead). Even the low beams of a right-hand-drive car feel like high beams, causing significant suffering in the evenings.

And I haven’t even said anything about the shame. There isn’t a single family in the Far East where at least one man hasn’t “shuttled a Japanese” at least once in his life. Half the adult population east of the Urals is engaged in bringing over used Japanese cars. The Japanese drive them for a couple of years and then offload them to us. And the entire eastern part of Russia drives used cars. It’s embarrassing.

A highway is a complex feat of engineering. You’ve got the embankment, then layers of crushed stone and concrete, a base layer of asphalt, and the final road surface layer. There are asphalt plants along the highway, which gives reason to hope that one day the road will be completed. Half-finished segments are protected from damage with boulders—the layer needs to harden properly.

Cops are stationed only on the few semi-completed stretches, where everyone speeds up to a hundred despite the preemptively installed money-making signs that limit the speed to twenty.

Today, the entire highway is outlaw territory. You can drive drunk, you can shoot at the signs. No one cares.

Urkan Creek

Gas stations, cafés and tire shops are few and far between. The rule is simple: you see a gas station, you fill up. True saints keep on working in these half-deserted villages decimated by alcoholism.

Roadside cafés can be divided into two categories: the first serve utter garbage, the second are utterly delicious. Sanitary norms are nonexistent everywhere. People leave ten-ruble notes on the walls of the tasty places.

No nose-blowing

Several hundred kilometers of washboard proved to be too much for my Range Rover. Parts of its exterior trim began to fall off: the bumper, the side panels, the rubber door seals. After which the interior began to hum and vibrate.

I had to find out what was going on with the car. Our next stop turned out to be right next to a settlement called Yerofey Pavlovich. The roadside café had the most picturesque outhouse I’ve ever seen behind it. No one has actually gone inside in a long time—it’s impossible—so the entire swath of forest about two hundred meters out is thoroughly covered in shit.

Yerofey Pavlovich

Truly wonderful people work at the auto repair shop by the railway station. They agreed to fix my car, and since it was already late, they fired up a banya located right on the premises for the expedition’s participants.

The next day, I found out that all the shaking had caused Moumousique’s aluminum engine mount bracket to break. The engine had dropped down to the skid plate, which I’d installed in preparation for the trip. In addition, the dust cover had come off the drive shaft (in plain English, this meant there was no driving the car until it got repaired).

Ethnographic Expedition 2008

Yerofey Pavlovich is the first and patronymic name of the explorer Khabarov, after whom Khabarovsk was named. The town services the railway station, which recently got itself a new building with dogs’ heads.

The creative work of railway employees.

Don’t climb across the tracks under rolling stock!

The appearance of someone with a camera on the town’s streets caused quite the stir. The Chinese border is still close by, and there are enough problems—funding is insufficient, and it’s always easy for someone from the capital to criticize. I talked to some local border patrol boss, and then to the deputy head of the local administration. They all wished me luck but left somewhat unconvinced that I was actually this interested in road signs.

The wall of the post office reminded me of the wall of a store in Qatar with personal ads just like these.

Post Office Yerofey-Pavlovich 676000. Notice: house for sale on Pervomayskaya Street. Everything you need on site. Fertilized and productive vegetable garden. Notice: now accepting applications for assistant locomotive engineer training courses. For sale: 1999 Toyota Raum. Notice: postal worker position available. New school supplies in stock at Diana and World of Childhood!

The past and present of Yerofey Pavlovich.

The future of Yerofey Pavlovich.

Children are the future of Russia

Moumousique’s disassembly and diagnostics took an entire day. In the end, it turned out that nothing could be repaired on site—they don’t even have dust covers of the right diameter here. So a decision was made to try and get to the nearest railway station where the car could be loaded onto a flatcar. Unfortunately, such flatcars don’t stop in Yerofey Pavlovich.

Moumousique was loaded into the back of a truck and sent off to the next station. There, we found out that processing the shipping paperwork takes a minimum of three days. The next morning, we flagged down an empty car hauler on the highway (they’re always empty heading east). A great guy who had brought his wife and daughter along with him for the first time agreed to give my British bolt bucket a lift to Blagoveshchensk.

“I’m Hauler Gena.”

For the first time in my life, I got to ride in the cab of an American truck, which has an entire train compartment behind the driver’s seat. Hauler Gena entertained me with nonstop stories the entire two days it took us to get from Yerofey to Blago. They would have made an excellent book.

The east was becoming more and more far.