Vladimir Yakunin: The Treacherous Path: An Insider's Account of Modern Russia

Of course, as soon as my departure was announced, newspapers across the world filled up with idle, mendacious criticism and innuendo. My family, my home, my friends; everything and everyone in my life seemed to be fair game. Even now, if you google my name you will mostly find reams of speculation and rumour; in this book I want to tell you a much more interesting story.

You will perhaps not like everything I have to say, and some of it will surprise you, but if you want to understand why Russia acts like it does, or why Russians think like they do, then this book will be a good place to start. If nothing else, I want readers to at least begin to interrogate some of the opinions they currently hold about my country. I do not do this because I am animated by a blind nationalism, or from a pugnacious desire for an argument, or because I am some kind of Kremlin stooge (to do so would simultaneously make me a hypocrite and insult your intelligence), but because I believe that we live in times imperilled by a fatal lack of understanding between the world’s leading nations. A profound danger that, it seems to me, is only made more severe by the reluctance on the part of all the participants to enter into any form of mutual dialogue. I am aware of how this book might be received in the West, and yet still my modest hope is that these words will go some way to ameliorating that situation.

I sometimes get the feeling that many in the West think that Europe ends at the borders of Belarus and Ukraine, and that what lies beyond those lines is an unrecognisably strange land. The kind of territory that on the maps made many hundreds of years ago would have borne the motto: ‘Here Be Dragons’. It is an odd way of thinking about a nation that has for centuries played a central part in the history of Europe, combining this with its role as a bridge between East and West. (I see Russia as a European nation, but not necessarily a Westernised one.) But to many in the United Kingdom – perhaps since the days of the ‘Great Game’ over a hundred years ago – Russia has been wreathed in layers of myth and misapprehension (Winston Churchill said of it that ‘It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’, and sometimes it seems as if there are many in the West who still believe this to be true).

Of course, like all other nations on the planet, there are things we say or do that are incomprehensible or confusing even to our near neighbours. Some of these tics have been thousands of years in the making, while others are the result of more recent events in our history. Along with many thousands of my generation I have retained, for instance, the habit of thinking of almost every endeavour in which I am involved as a collective activity – so much so that when we recount the events we still habitually prefer to avoid using the pronoun ‘I’. We were brought up in a world infused with this ethos – socialist values were embedded into almost every public interaction. (I am after all a product of the Soviet Union; I know that many consider me obsolete. Whether this is something to be mourned or mocked I leave to you to decide.)

But then at the same time, my experiences of, and relationship to, the political system that governed Russia and much of Eastern Europe for almost three quarters of a century are radically different to those of my sons, just as they will have a very different perspective on this era to someone born after 1991. I would never assume that all Britons, for instance, thought the same way; that age or class or geography or economics did not have important roles to play in ensuring that the United Kingdom was home to a kaleidoscope of different perspectives and opinions. Russia is no different. Indeed, I wonder whether its gargantuan scale, its dizzying ethnic and religious diversity, might make it even harder to generalise about what a ‘typical’ Russian outlook on the world might be.

If there is anything, however, that does perhaps set us apart it is that we are still, to a great extent, grappling with the consequences of the fall of the USSR. Those of us who had grown up as proud citizens of a superpower (even if we were well aware of its many flaws), whose heads had been filled with stories of the advances and glories of the Soviet regime, spent the ’90s living in a land we barely recognised.

We were told we had liberty, but for most people this counted for little when they were poorer than they had ever been. I was more fortunate, but hated seeing our prestige and influence diminish. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Americans came to visit full of polite words and kind smiles, but we knew they saw us as citizens of a defeated country. Our living standards had been demolished, our history was being repudiated before our eyes, and we were being treated as an impotent second-class nation whose opinion no longer mattered.

This sense of loss and hurt, which left many people looking back fondly on the Communist era, has never been truly appreciated by other nations. Do not mistake me; though I cherish the values of compassion and solidarity on which I was raised I am not nostalgic for the Soviet Union. But someone who does not make an attempt to comprehend Russia as it was then, in the hard years after 1991, will, I think, struggle to understand much about Russia as it is now.

The following chapters do not constitute a classic autobiography, in which the account begins in the cradle and carries on in exhaustive detail up to the present day. Instead they are made up of a number of key episodes in my life, which I will expand to allow me to reflect on the wider context in which they occurred, so that Russia’s story runs in parallel to my own. It will be arranged in the form of flashbacks, each prompted by a dramatic or meaningful moment during my time at Russian Railways, which will allow me to roam freely across Russia’s vast geography, to examine its history and to introduce many of the book’s major themes.

But before I go any further, I want to explain why the railways occupy such a unique place in our consciousness; and also to try and give a sense of how looking at its railway system might help you understand something of the way in which my country’s magnitude has conspired with its history to present Russia with a unique set of complexities, challenges and contradictions, which demand in turn an equally particular brand of response. It is one thing, I have learned, to look at maps or pictures, it is another thing entirely to see at first hand the conditions and characteristics that make Russia like no other nation on the planet.

There was one thing that many of the hundreds of thousands of those Soviet citizens who were condemned to those gulags situated in Siberia’s remotest corners did not realise when they first arrived. The tangled skeins of barbed wire that surrounded the camps were not the main barriers to escape. These barriers could, with a certain amount of ingenuity and determination, be penetrated. What really stood between the inmates and freedom was geography.

They were surrounded by a wilderness so vast that escape was almost impossible: countless miles of inhospitable terrain lay between their new quarters and the nearest settlement; they were almost as lonely and isolated as it is possible for a human being to be. The sheer size of Russia was sufficient to keep them captive.

If you settled into an aeroplane in London and flew for ten hours you would be able to step off in the United States, India, perhaps even China. Countries on the other side of the world. But if you were to take a ten-hour flight from Moscow, the chances are you would land somewhere like Vladivostok – many miles away, and yet still part of the same country. Today the Russian Federation covers over a ninth of the world’s land surface and spans eleven time zones. Its population of 146 million includes some 200 discrete ethnic groups who between them speak over 100 languages. They live, variously, in cities and steppe, in arctic and sub-tropical temperatures, but they are all connected by the railways, which have played an enormous role in the process of enabling the heterogeneous people of Russia to cohere into a single, unified, state.