Days 288 to 292 – Mon Aug 17 to Fri Aug 21 – Tomsk

As always, our firs few hours in Tomsk are a bit of a write-off. There are bags to put in storage, accommodations to find and stomachs to feed.

The search for a cheap place to stay takes longer than we expect. Students are coming back to university already, so the not-so-low-end rooms seem to be taken up by them. We check the resting rooms at the train station, the university hotel, a posh hotel and a medium-range hotel. In the end, we end up getting a room at the first place we checked out: the resting rooms at the train station are our best bet. Unlike Irkutsk, where the rooms were rented by the hour, the rooms here can be rented in blocks of time and the price for anything between 12 and 24 hours happens to be the same. This means we can unpack for a few days.

The ladies at the front desk are friendly and curious. They have foreigners stay at the resting rooms from time to time but they can’t talk to them.

“They don’t speak Russian, and we only speak Russian,” says Nina Stephanova, the dezhurnaya who checks us in. “There’s lots of talking with hands.” She demonstrates for us. “ ‘I’ [points to self] ‘want a room’ [hands draw a box] ‘to sleep’ [palms pressed together and placed under leaning head]. We used to have a dictionary and phrasebook, but somebody took it so we’re back to the old system.”

The women at the resting rooms are responsible for checking in guests, giving us hot water when we need some for food (porridge) or drink (tea), lending us the key to the pay-per-use showers, and generally answering any questions we have.

They also hold onto the room key whenever a guest leaves the resting rooms, and pass it back to us when we return. This, for us, seems to be often, as we always seem to be coming home from a walk around town or popping out to the nearest supermarket for food for breakfast/dinner in our room.

The other guests come and go, but it’s pretty quiet. We have a private room with two twin beds, but there are also dorm rooms with 3 to 4 beds. Some guests are waiting for their connecting train the next day, other seem to be sleeping off a heavy day/night of drinking, many are doing both. Still, the ladies at the desk are on duty 24/7 and don’t put up with any nonsense from the guests, so the place is quiet and clean and the only time we notice our neighbours is when the shared bathrooms are all occupied or when we pass each other in the hall, towels draped over our shoulders or grocery bags in our hands.

On Day 289 we have a chance to actually visit Tomsk rather than simply walk through it in search of a place to sleep. We originally decided to come to Tomsk because it sounded charming, and we’re happy that the city lives up to its reputation. Even the train station area is clean and well-organized, rather than the industrial wasteland on the edge of the city. All trains and buses seem to lead to the train station, so we catch a tram downtown to visit the few streets in town that still have the old wooden buildings that Tomsk is famous for. The ornate window shutters and window frames remind us of Ulan Ude, but are much more varied and better-tended than the ones we saw there.

The second day, we take a day trip to a nearby village that the guidebook recommends as a trip to a real Siberian village. The standing-room only local bus drops us off in the village of Kolarova at around 11 am, and it only takes us 15 minutes or so to walk most of the streets in town and to realize that Arshan is a tough act to follow as far as Siberian villages go, so we decide to catch the 11:45 minivan back to town. A woman at the “bus stop” (roadside outside a tiny shop) is selling a bucket of fresh baby cucumbers and a bunch of dill – enough, I assume, to make a healthy set of pickles. I ask her if it’s possible to buy just one or two cucumbers. We’re hungry and could use a snack to keep us happy until we get lunch back in town.

“Buy one?” she says, and hands me two. “Just have some. Wash them first.”

I give them a quick rinse under the faucet of a hand-pump just outside the store. We thank her, flag down the minivan and eat the cucumbers on the ride back to town.

The weather outside is generally warmish and fairly dry, so we catch trams to the center of town and walk around most days. We drop by the art museum and walk over to the WWII memorial in a park. It’s a towering statue of a mother (Mother Russia, I assume) handing her son a rifle. Music plays from loudspeakers near the rows and rows of granite memorial that list the names of locals who died. My memory of deathrates for Canadian soldiers in WWII is a little sketchy, but Russia’s death rates from that time always seem particularly high to me. Tomsk is not a large city, and of the roughly 20,000 soldiers that left the town to fight, less than half returned.

The memorial is a popular spot, surrounded by green grass and a glade of trees, and is near a scenic viewpoint. Photographers trail after brides (“Hey, look, another slutty wedding dress,” Pierre says from time to time) as they hunt down the next great shot. New moms take a few minutes to read a book on a park bench while their babies sleep next to them in their strollers and prams.

We also visit the NKVD Oppression Museum, which documents the late 1930s, which sound to be some of the worst years of life under Stalin. The museum is located in the cells where political prisoners were held and interrogated. In the hall, there are photos displayed of a sampling of people from Tomsk who were singled out. The descriptions are brief. Poet. Academic. Priest. Arrested on this date. Executed on that date.

Each of the four cells contains different exhibits: photos from the time period, explanations of how the rules of detention worked, photos of the gulags where people were sent to do hard labour.

The front desk doubles as a kiosk, where one woman reads a book in between selling the occasional ticket and handing back change. She barely looks up when we hand her our rubles. Her colleague, a slight woman in her late 40s, is much more animated and walks the floor of the museum answering questions for visitors. After we’ve walked around for a few minutes, she approaches us to see if we have any questions and notices my open dictionary and the notepad I’m scribbling in.

She says something I don’t entirely catch, a question as to whether I’m looking up words I don’t know. When I say yes she gives me a warm hug.

Russians are not generally a huggy people, at least not with strangers, so the hug is odd and entirely unexpected. Still, I appreciate her enthusiasm for the Russian language and her job, so I give her a quick hug back. She spends the rest of our visit going out of her way to explain exhibits to Pierre and I and to share anecdotes and facts.

On one wall, we see a collection of photos, much like a yearbook montage of the headshots of that year’s graduates.

“Tower guards,” she says, and then points to a nearby photo of a tower at the border of a gulag. “Once we had a visitor who recognized her father as one of these guards.” She points to his face on the montage. “She'd always believed that he’d been one of the oppressed too, he’d always said so, but it turned out he’d been on the other side.”

At another exhibit, she explains the rules of arrest. “If a married man was arrested, his wife could avoid arrest by divorcing him. If she didn’t, she’d be arrested too.” She also explains the rules about the children of the arrested, but I only slightly understand. I believe she says that kids under 3 were not arrested, kids 3 to 15 went to the gulags but lived in the nursery there, while any kids over 15 were arrested as adults along with their parents. “It was very easy to be accused. You could be arrested for just talking to the wrong person. Let’s say the three of us were in the same place at the same time, a museum like now, and we talked for a moment about one of the exhibits and then went our separate ways. If you turned out later to be accused, I could be brought in for talking to you, and interrogated about what we had plotted during our conversation.”

We pass through all the rooms, pass the exhibit of the administrator’s desk, and past the cell with wooden bunks where prisoners slept.

“Do you find this a sad place to work?” I ask her.

She doesn’t. She explains that one of her family members was held here – an uncle, I believe – and who most likely died in the gulag or was shot. “When I’m here, I feel like I’m close to him.”

On Day 291, we have to register our passports, which the train station is unable to do for us. (The current visa laws say that you can only stay a maximum of 3 days in a new city before registering your passport with the authorities, and you have to either stay at an institution that’s capable of registering the passport or with a Russian who’s willing to do the paperwork to register you. So we pack up and leave the resting rooms at the train station to go to the Sputnik hotel, the medium-range hotel we had checked out earlier in the week.

The original price we were quoted for a room seemed quite high, but once it turned out that we didn’t need to have the breakfast and that we were fine with a king size bed instead of twin beds, the price dropped by about 25 percent. We’re not quite sure why a king size bed is drastically cheaper than a room with two twins, but we don’t feel like arguing. We enjoy a night of free showers and a tv in the room, which allows us to watch Japanese anime dubbed into Russian. On day 292, we pack up again an catch the 11:08 am train to Vladimir.