TRANS-SIBERIAN

Evening Star, Issue 22524, 17 December 1936, Page 8

TRANS-SIBERIAN

LINE THAT LINKS EUROPE AND ASIA The most deceptive journey I know is the ride on the trans-Siberian express from Ncgorcloye, on tho Soviet-Polish border across European Russia ami Asiatic Russia to Manchuli, where Manchukuo begins (writes Ifor Evans). Tho first disillusion comes as soon as tho train starts, for the trans-Siberian express is certainly not an express; it toddles along doing at its very best some 30 miles an hour, stopping at logbuilt wayside stations to pick up water or supplies for the restaurant, or for the passengers to stretch their legs ami buy food from tho peasants who somehow still evade collectivism by hawking along the line their own bread and their minute Siberian eggs. Almost one feels that in its endless journeys it has assimilated tho Slav temperament with its complete disregard for time, and that its nine days’ journey across Russia might well be extended" to a tenth without embarrassing anyone. The line which links Europe to Asia behaves as if its heredity were a cross between a suburban “ all stops ” local. Tho philosophers who study time might do well to spend a week on tho trans-siberian, for time there has values which I have never encountered elsewhere. This lies not only in the habits of the train, but in the country which streams day after day slowly past the dusty windows. Fifty miles outside Moscow you can look at a dull-groy plain with grass that looks sand-dusted as if it grew out of a desert, and in the distance low lines of trees. SAME SCENE. Three days later you can look out of the same window and see fee identical s'cene and have the vivid impression that in all the intervening hours' the train lias not moved a single mile. Ono realises what a parasitic city Moscow is, battening agriculturally on the riches of fee Ukraine. Nor does a watch help to preserve time from destruction. Somehow before Manchukuo is reached the clock must bo advanced six hours; but no one controls tho advances. So some passengers are living at 1 o'clock when others are living at 6. The restaurant, which might, one feels, bo appealed to as a centre of sanity in such a dilemma, leaps at the obscurity to advance or retard its own time in accordance with tho requirements of the kitchen. Still ono clings to the belief that this great land journey across Siberia has its romance and even its spectacular moments. For spectacle tho Jong days produce only two incidents, and one of those one does not see, for the passage of the Urals from Perm tc Sverdlovsk, the real journey from Europe to Asia, is made overnight. Yon come to Perm in the evening, a sudden oasis on the left bank of the Kama, with a white, modern station, a loudspeaker to announce tho trains, and a cheery outlook of gardens flowering in the short Siberian summer. Tho dim, yellow light of dusk lies along the wooden roofs and the log sides of the houses and huts, a mirage city despite the fact that, in tho words of the Intonrist guide book, it awns such solid things as “ a university and 10 technicians.” Sverdlovsk, where Nicholas 11. and his family were shot, is seen only as a brief row of station lights to the traveller who will stay up until 2 in the morning for thc.pleasuro of seeing them. There is one other sight, the great Lake Baikal, of which the Soviet Union is so proud that ono feels that they, and not God, created it. Days before one approaches this inland sea one is told that Lake Baikal is coming. By the time its great waters have appeared one has developed almost a “ sales resistance ” to its immensity and only retains a longing that some of the water might bo in essential places on the train. The romance lies almost entirely in the longevity of the journey, and that, like so many other types of romance, pales a little with reality. In the changing human faces, and not through the landscape, can that sense of length be reached. Around Moscow and for days afterwards, you look out on the hatchet faces of Russians who, whatever they feel, give a sense of indefinite weariness ; gradually after Lake Baikal they are replaced by tho sly, parchmentyellow faces of Mongols. Race speaks of tho distances travelled, as at length the Mongolian Desert lies to the south and the nomads come up to VerkalUdinsk, where a rail branches to Ulan Bator, the Mongolian capital. Something of the new life of Soviet Russia throws itself up against the narrow vision of the trans-Siberian passenger. The continual freight trains speak of that restless activity for construction which has possessed everyone and whoso symbol lies in tho Moscow Metro, shown almost as a sacred shrine like tho great Buddha at Kamakura. They may speak, too, of the creation of the Far Eastern army. “ TOVARICH.” On the train the spirit of “ Tovarich ” rules. All classes feed together from wagon-lits to third class, and though some of th,e “ comrades ” may nob roach tho Citrine standard of tho sartorially perfect, they seem to have a number of incredibly dirty roubles to spend, which may fill a visitor whoso exchange rate is only 25 to tho £ with a hungry envy. The waiter, too, joins in tho equaiitariau spirit and serves soup with a cigarette in the mouth. The falsest of all ways of contrasting culture would bo to judge of standards in railway comforts. If so, ono might compare tho exquisite cleanliness of tho Japanese train that takes tho Far Eastern traveller after the boundary at Manchuli, tho flower-docked dining car, tho provision of linen, the fingerbowls, and tho exquisite White Russian waitresses, all looking so like the setting for the dining room of evil capitalists in the Russian films. Even if the judgment were to bo made by trains it cannot he by dining cars only. Ono would have to note, also, the way that near tho Mancluikuo frontier the Russian passengers joining the train arc mostly soldiers, and on the Japanese train one can watch the swarthy, peas-ant-born private who walks up and down the carriage in full war equipment and bayonet drawn. Somewhere in Eastern Siberia and in Northern Manchukuo one has more than a simple train ride. It is a journey through a bleak territory where two peaceful peoples now face each other, both frightened and both in arms. From tho window of the Soviet train and from the window of the Japanese train the traveller sees the same barren country. Ho may perhaps he also seeing a place of danger in the international contacts of the world.