So the trains weren’t built to satisfy the needs of the passengers. They were built to satisfy the whims of people in the Kremlin, and to satisfy the personal agendas of the managers and technocrats putting that whimsy into practice. This is central planning. And anybody who advocates central planning—from Gennady Zyuganov to Sidney Blumenthal—should be made to get down on his hands and knees and lick the Irkutsk-to-Vladivostok train. The trip had its compensations, however, even without a pair of prominent political figures lapping the couplings. I’d bought a whole compartment so I could loll around in my boxer shorts while keeping myself hydrated with Stolichnaya. Though this didn’t taste exactly like the Stolichnaya we get stateside. Stolichnaya may have a paint-thinner subsidiary. There was a shabby dining car about half a mile up the train, and, though the galley was dirty enough to start a worm farm, the food was good. I don’t know what the food was, but it was good. It was a bird, I think, and had a great flavor, and I only got a little sick afterward. I’d brought my own food along, too, purchased in Irkutsk’s Martha Stewart grocery. And when the train made its brief stops, I could go to the market stalls that lined the station platforms and buy fresh bread, homemade pickles, smoked fish, and—even in Ust’-Urluk, on the frontier of Outer Mongolia—Pepsi. I also bought carbonated Russian mineral water. This tastes like Spic-and-Span, but I could shake the bottles and use my thumb to direct squirts of household-cleaner- type liquid at the cockroaches eating Hong Kong tea biscuits under my bunk. Whether everyone’s better off in Russia these days, I still don’t know. But the people in the market stalls certainly were. In 1990, Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank, reported on this same rail trip, saying: “At isolated rural stops, peasants burst onto trains to buy oranges, apples, and milk from a train staff eager to pocket additional rubles.” Now the bursting was in the opposite direction. The stops came every few hours at little cities which appeared without preamble in the wilderness: Ulan-Ude, Mogocha, Birobidzhan. They are ugly little cities, with immense factories where suburbs usually are, and everybody lives where you’d expect the stores and offices to be. So devoted to standardization were the Soviets that high-rise concrete worker housing was built even in Siberia, with nothing but land in every direction. The cities of the
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