Lisa Dickey - Bears in the Streets

I have a project that I am in the early stages of planning… The basic idea is a trip across Russia by car, St. Petersburg to Vladivostok (maybe the other way around). I plan to take two to three months to complete the journey, stopping in big cities, small towns and villages. I want to shoot a very personal b&w photo essay, a sort of photo journal that documents the people, places and experiences that will make up the trip…

How can you help? First of all, ADVICE. Have any of you been out to the far reaches of Siberia? What can I expect as far as roads? (Are there any?) PLACES TO GO. Do you have any ideas on places that I should definitely see or someone I should meet along the way?… CONTACTS. This will be a real road trip. I am trying to put together a list of friendly faces, a place to crash for the night, or just someone who knows the area…

By this point, I was hyperventilating. What an adventure this guy was going to have! I was afraid to read further for fear he hadn’t written the words I was desperate to see. Fortunately, he had.

Lastly, and this is a biggie, I am looking for candidates to be my traveling partner…

Here is the scoop. I need someone who’s fluent in Russian. I speak some but not enough to attempt this trip on my own. I will cover all of the expenses for the trip and get you back to Petersburg. This offer is directed at but not limited to journalists…

It will be a long and hard trip, with no luxurious hotels or fine restaurants (well, maybe one or two restaurants)… Anyhow, spread the word, I am sure there are enough crazy people out there…

He must pick me. In all my months in Russia, I’d spent very little time outside Moscow or St. Petersburg. I was desperate to see more of the country, and this trip would be a great opportunity to write—and, let’s be honest, sell —stories from the road. Sure, it would be weird to travel with a total stranger; for all I knew, this Gary Matoso person was a kook, or worse, an overcaffeinated alpha male. I didn’t care. I was ready to pack my bags and hop the next train for Siberia. All I had to do was convince Gary that I was the perfect travel companion, using a passel of carefully picked white lies: I e-mailed him that I was fluent in Russian (not quite, though I was getting there); an accomplished writer (false); and, most important, unflappable (way false).

There were several candidates, but lo and behold, the photographer picked me. Forget boho St. Petersburg—I was going to the hinterlands and beyond.

Gary wanted to start with a remote lighthouse he’d heard about at the farthest southeastern tip of Russia, so we booked flights to Vladivostok for September 1, 1995. From there, we planned to meander back to St. Petersburg, stopping in 10 to 12 cities along the way. Our goal was to find an interesting cross-section of people to profile, then post photos and stories to a website as we traveled.

This last part sounded bold, futuristic, and quite possibly insane—at least until Gary arrived in St. Petersburg with an unusual piece of equipment. Standing in my kitchen, he pulled out a 35 mm Nikon camera with a hardware attachment roughly the size of a Buick, then snapped a photo of me. He ejected a little diskette, popped it into a slot in his Apple PowerBook laptop, and when my face magically appeared on the screen, I actually shrieked.

Not only had I never seen this technology, I’d never even heard of it. Digital cameras weren’t widely available in 1995, but Gary had scored an expensive prototype from Kodak—and this, he told me, was the real motivation behind the trip. He wanted to demonstrate how these newfangled digital cameras could be used to create documentary projects on the brand-new World Wide Web. If all went well, our website, which we dubbed “The Russian Chronicles” (having decided “A Trans-Cyberian Journey” was a little too cute) would be one of the first real-time Web travelogues. [1] The original website, including its quaint advisory that “this site is best viewed using Netscape 1.1N or later,” is still online: http://www.f8.com/FP/Russia/ . Please note that some of the links referenced in this work are no longer active.

We set off the next day for Vladivostok with only the barest notion about how the next few months would unfold. I’d managed to scrape up contacts in a few cities, mostly Russian friends of friends intrigued at the idea of hosting actual Americans in their rarely visited towns. The rest of the time we’d be winging it, asking everyone we met whether they happened to know anyone in the next town over, as we made our way across the country on the Trans-Siberian Railway. (We’d quickly given up on Gary’s idea of driving once we learned there were few decent—meaning paved—highways in the Russian Far East.)

Over 12 weeks, more than 5,000 miles, several screaming fights, and approximately 6,000 vodka shots, Gary and I created a portrait, in words and photographs, of the lives of contemporary Russians. In the course of the trip, we had adventures beyond what we’d ever imagined.

We spent four days on a research ship on Lake Baikal, watching freshwater scientists collect species that exist only in that magnificent lake. We stood by in awe as a Buryat farmer slaughtered a sheep for us, slicing open the animal’s chest and plunging in his bare hand to pinch shut its aorta, then prepared a feast of mutton and vodka that went on until the sun rose. We attended services in the last remaining synagogue in Birobidzhan, the capital of Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region, listening in confusion while a self-styled rabbi named Boris exhorted elderly women in headscarves to pray to Jesus Christ. And we watched with delight as two closeted gay men in Novosibirsk put on a spectacular drag show for us in their living room.

It was truly a once-in-a-lifetime trip. Which was why, in 2005, I decided I wanted to do it again.

Gary couldn’t join me this time because of work commitments, so I brought in another photographer, David Hillegas, to make the trip. Washingtonpost.comagreed to publish our updates as a daily blog, and a communications company called I-Linx sponsored us with a few thousand bucks and a satellite phone. I didn’t tell the Russians I’d met in 1995 that I was coming back, opting instead to surprise them. Miraculously, through a combination of decade-old hand-scribbled notes, Google, manic perseverance, and stupid luck, I found almost everybody we’d done stories about on that first trip. The only exceptions were an elderly pensioner in Chelyabinsk (who was likely no longer alive) and a truck driver. Everyone else, we were able to interview and photograph.

In 2005, people seemed better off, materially and financially, than they’d been ten years earlier. Most were enjoying fruits of middle-class life that were previously out of reach: trips to Turkey, cell phones, Visa cards, Italian leather shoes. Many seemed more at ease speaking to me than they had before. In 1995, just four years removed from the collapse of the Soviet Union, people in Russia had seemed to be in a state of existential shell shock. By 2005, they were settling comfortably into their new capitalist reality, members of a growing middle class in a country that had arguably never had one before.

Even before that trip ended, I knew I’d want to go again in 2015. But when the time drew near, I decided to do things a little differently: I wanted to go alone, rather than with a photographer, and write a book instead of blogging. Apart from that, I’d do the same trip, and see all the same people, as before. I was eager to find out how everybody’s lives had changed, now 20 years after that first visit.