I think I shall dream about it for as long as I live: lying drowsily on my bunk in a warm compartment, with my sleeping four-year-old son’s arm draped over me, and the pleasant, predictable motion of the train drawing us farther and farther across the snow-covered immensity of Siberia. Quietly, from the bunk above us, my wife Dee whispers to me about the ice on Lake Baikal, and the effectiveness of her Russian felt boots against the cold, and the 19th-century dissidents, the Decembrists. And all I have to do is stay awake long enough to grunt in polite agreement at the end of her sentences.
This unforgettable train journey across Siberia had its origins in a BA lounge at Heathrow, several years ago, before our son was born and when Dee and I used to travel purely for our own enjoyment. We were just settling down when a man came over and said he begged to differ about something I had written recently in a London newspaper. People often disagree with me, but they’re rarely pleasant about it. He was very pleasant.
Not long before, he reminded me, I had written an article describing how the frizzy-haired dictator of North Korea had travelled to Moscow by train because he was terrified of flying. He was accompanied by a small army of security men, food tasters, doctors and chiropodists. I suppose he never knew when he might have a bunion emergency. ‘He looked out from his luxurious compartment at the barren wastes of Siberia,’ I wrote. ‘Have you been to Siberia?’ the man asked. I hadn’t. I just assumed the wastes must be pretty barren – to us journalists, that’s what wastes habitually are.
The man’s name was Tim Littler, from GW Travel, which specialises in luxurious and sometimes distinctly adventurous train journeys: the Cape to Cairo, some spectacular parts of India, and of course Moscow to Vladivostok, across the wastes of Siberia. If Dee and I took one of his trains we would find, he said, that they weren’t barren at all.
It’s taken us several years to do it, and our number has increased by one but, finally, here we are, cosseted and excellently fed, with our little boy Rafe spoilt and petted on all sides. And Tim is absolutely right: Siberia is glorious in the winter, and the landscape, far from being dull, is unforgettably beautiful.
But the most unforgettable part is Lake Baikal. If it were somewhere more easily accessible to Westerners, this would be one of the most famous stretches of water on earth. The guidebooks say that by comparison the Great Lakes of North America are like shallow puddles, and they’re right. Baikal is the oldest and deepest lake on earth, with getting on for a quarter of all the earth’s supply of fresh water in it: enough to flood the entire world to a depth of 7in.
At present, it’s all locked in by a layer of surface ice 4ft thick. In Tsarist days they ran trains over it on special tracks. Peering down into its clear aquamarine depths, you can spot the fish cruising around. At 60ft or so the water temperature is above freezing, and they just stay deep all winter.
The people from our train are a remarkably enterprising lot, and many of them, Dee included, are buzzing around on the ice on snowmobiles. I just potter round with Rafe, sliding and pretending to skate. I’m wearing the old-fashioned felt boots that Tim Littler and his crew have dished out. Whenever I’ve read about felt boots in Russian novels I’ve always felt sorry for the peasants who wore them. Not any longer. Mine are warmer than any footwear I’ve ever tried. They have no soles, only felt, and I could stay out on Lake Baikal all day in them without getting cold feet. They have another advantage, too: they don’t slither on the ice. Those of our fellow passengers who preferred their own boots all have to walk with the anxious care of ancients. We felt-boot wearers run and slide without fear.
Irkutsk is a revelation, too – a genuinely cultured little city, with hundreds of the glorious 19th-century wooden houses that Russians regard with amused contempt, and we Westerners look at with admiration. The Tsars used the city as a dustbin for some of Russia’s finest artists and thinkers, condemned to exile here for decades, or for life, for failing to support the autocracy. In a side alley, not far from the station where our train is parked like a big tourist bus, lies the Volkonsky House, built in 1838 by one of the key figures among the Decembrists, the high-principled military officers who tried to create a constitutional monarchy by staging a coup in December 1825. It failed, and they were forced to march the thousands of kilometres from St Petersburg in chains. With extraordinary devotion their wives came out here to join their exile.
The Volkonskys turned their house into the cultural and social centre of Irkutsk, and it is still here, with much of the old furniture, kept as a living museum. Tim Littler has organised a concert for us, of the music which Maria Volkonsky, the Princess of Siberia, used to perform here in the house. Time and space, in the golden light of the candlesticks, seem to have shrunk to nothing. I agree: there’s nothing featureless about Siberia.
John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on BBC World News, available in 200 countries and territories worldwide, and on selected British Airways flights.
