Soviet Russia’s secrecy and paranoia are legendary to the point of
caricature, but they were also real: information of all kinds was so strictly
controlled that ordinary Russians were uninformed, or intentionally
misinformed, about politically sensitive areas. The Far East contained
many such zones, including important mines, gulags, and military bases.
Because Primorye and southern Khabarovsk Territory were effectively
sandwiched between China and the Pacific coast (which was deemed
vulnerable to Japanese and American infiltration), security was
particularly tight there. As a result, Markov was going from one
forbidden zone to another; this was a place that he and many of his fellow
draftees may not have even known existed. Despite nearly two decades of
relative openness, this is apparently still the case, if for different reasons.
When a literate young Muscovite, bound for a prestigious American
music school, was asked about Primorye in July of 2008, he said he
hadn’t heard of it. “Maybe it’s near Iran,” he guessed.^3 To the more
straightforward question, “Are there tigers in Russia?” he answered, “I
think only in the circus.” For many Russian urbanites, “Russia” stops at
the Urals, if not sooner. Beyond that is Siberia—a bad joke, and after
that, well, who really cares?
In the minds of most Russians, the Far East lies over the edge of the
known world and is, itself, a form of oblivion. For any European Russian,
whether ordinary worker or privileged member of the nomenklatura,* a
one-way ticket like Markov’s was tantamount to banishment. His was the
same route undertaken by hundreds of thousands of exiles dating back to
Czarist times. Some of the country’s most notorious prisons and labor
camps were located there, including the dreaded and, for many years,
unmentionable Sakhalin Island, a frigid and lonely sub-planet from which
many never returned.
Regardless of what he knew beforehand, Markov’s nonstop train ride
from the thickly settled shadowlands of the Iron Curtain to the vast and
empty wilderness hugging Asia’s Pacific coast would have been radical
and disorienting, not to mention interminable. The journey from
Kaliningrad to Khabarovsk, the regional capital of the Far East, takes one