“I see what you mean by ‘boring,’” I say to Altana upon returning. Then we take a marshrutka, a routed taxicab minibus, downtown.
FREEDOM I
THE LARGEST BUDDHA in Europe lives in a shiny white temple with a square base and pointy gilt roofs, with Asian-style wooden pavilions surrounding it. “You should always circle the temple three times clockwise and spin the prayer wheels,” explains Altana.
As we circle the temple there are quite a lot of prayer wheels—light-red cylinders with golden letters on them and small grips to make spinning them easier. All of them have been touched by the fourteenth Dalai Lama, who has been here a number of times. We take about five minutes to complete the 360-degree tour. “It’s pretty hot today and it must be difficult for you, so I’d say one round is okay,” decides Altana, who always knows what’s good for me. We enter the inner room by passing through the entrance, which is marked by red columns beneath an eight-spoked Dharma wheel guarded by two wooden deer.
“What I like about Buddhism is that it’s a free religion. Everyone can do or not do what they want and you are responsible for your own mistakes,” says Altana. “In the temple, I find peace.” At the end of the main hall to the left there is a framed picture of the Dalai Lama; in the middle sits a thirty-foot-high golden Buddha in a yellow cloak with crossed legs. He looks down from his lotus throne with a serious and contemplative expression. Aren’t his facial features rather similar to those of the UFO enthusiast and shepherd of the Republic, Ilyumzhinov, who had the temple built for a vast sum of money? Pure coincidence, for sure. “You probably want to move on,” says Altana.
I ask her what she thinks of Ilyumzhinov. “He wasn’t as bad as people claim. His successor is doing absolutely nothing for progress.”
“But with his alien stories he was a bit crazy, wasn’t he?”
“Hey, that’s Russia,” says Altana, and laughs. “Anyway, politicians generally talk a lot of nonsense. Reports about aliens are by far not the worst!” Good point.
Truth No. 6:
The words “That’s Russia” explain many things for which there is no logical explanation.
LATER WE MEET Vadim and Olga, two of Altana’s friends. Vadim, on hearing that there was a German in town, definitely wanted to drink a beer with me. Immediately he tries out his language skills on me: “Heil Hitler. Sieg Heil. Hände Hoch. Das ist fantastisch.” Only one of these four expressions upsets Olga. She laughs and asks him what kind of dirty movies he watches where they say things like “Das ist fantastisch”; he looks a bit sheepish. The restaurant-cum-multi-purpose-store sells not only fake DKNY and Dior handbags, but also a wide selection of beers in thirty-two-ounce cans and two-and-a-half-liter plastic bottles. A thirsty country. We go for the Zhigulevskoye beer; the label shows a busty lady carrying two very large beers on a silver tray, with gray prefabs and a Zhiguli car in the background.
Our surroundings are less dreary. There are housing blocks painted light red, a two-lane pedestrian path populated by twenty-year-old mothers with strollers and kids on hoverboards.
The spiral path to the “Exodus and Return” monument is laid out in such a way that you have to walk three times clockwise around the cuboid work of art before actually reaching it. The memorial shows marching groups of people with hardened, tired facial features, and things that are meant to relate to everyday life in Siberian exile, among them a giant fish, an embryo, and a bomb.
We sit on the pedestal and snap open the beers. “My grandma was in Siberia,” Olga says. She is twenty-two, studied business administration, and now works as a bookkeeper. “It’s unbelievable how hard life was there. She had to process timber, more than ten hours a day. But she survived and returned here.”
The Elista before us consists of uniform housing complexes and an electric utility station. Behind them, plains stretch into the distance with isolated lights, and far, far off, a dark-red sun sinks to the horizon.
“Ten years ago all this was steppes, and we used to come here as kids for picnics,” says Altana. The place has changed; it’s becoming more modern, but still the younger generation dream of escaping, unlike their parents’ and grandparents’ generations, with their memories of hardship in exile. Olga says that she would love to live in Provence. “I love dancing,” she says, “but in Elista there are only strange clubs where you have to watch out for drunks. I was in South Korea once, there it was totally different—every night we were out and about.”
Seoul instead of Siberia—the younger people are happy they were born after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “The freedom is good; we don’t want to go back. But there are still many constraints. Hardly anyone has a job that they really enjoy,” says Olga. “And Elista really is pretty boring.” We sit for a while in silence, drinking and looking into the twilight until the sun disappears behind the electric utility. “You must be tired,” says Altana at last.
ASTRAKHAN
Population: 520,000
Federal District: South Russia
FREEDOM II
A “FREE TRAVELER” IS, according to Anton Krotov’s definition, someone who spends not more than half of his traveling time with people who are paid to cater to the traveler’s needs. He includes not only tourist guides and hotel receptionists, but also bus drivers and baristas in cafés.
Krotov is famous among Russian backpackers, a guru who founded the “Academy of Free Travelers” and has sold 150,000 copies of his hitchhikers’ guide for adventurers. I met him eight years ago on a short visit to Moscow and slept for two nights on his living-room floor.
The term “free” has two meanings for him: first, making do with as little money as possible, and second, staying away from tourist attractions. “Most Europeans just hang around the whole time in cafés and think they’re traveling,” is one of his sentences that I’ve remembered to this day. Another is: “A quick tongue will get you everywhere.” He is living proof of that one, and has even managed to blag his way to free rides on ships, long-distance trains, and freight planes.
Krotov’s most important finding after traveling almost 400,000 miles: the world isn’t such an inhospitable place, as claimed by “frightened journalists who take foolhardy risks and then report on how dangerous everything is.”
After he had experienced, hundreds of times, how hospitably people received total strangers, Krotov came up with the concept of “House for Everyone.” He rents cheap properties for two or three months in Cairo, Dushanbe, Berlin, or Irkutsk and opens them up to people who want to spend the night there for free. There are, however, conditions: clear rules and an authoritarian leadership structure is intended to ensure that living together proceeds in a civilized manner, that everyone shares the chores, and that no drugs or alcohol are consumed. It’s a socialist experiment for travelers that is in part financed by donations from the guests.
At the moment House for Everyone is located in the Babayevsky District in northeastern Astrakhan, which I reach after a four-and-a-half-hour bus trip from Elista. Krotov himself isn’t managing this project, but one of his supporters, twenty-four-year-old Alexei, is. He sent me instructions on how to get there from downtown, seventeen rubles by bus. I’m pretty tired and briefly consider taking a taxi (five hundred rubles for a twenty-minute trip, roughly the equivalent of eight U.S. dollars), but that wouldn’t feel right on the way to visit such dedicated travelers.