!

!
!
!
!
!
!
!
Imagining 2030 Series
Taking the Trans-Siberian to Moscow
Mark Galeotti is Professor of Global Affairs at New York University and a Visiting Fellow with
the European Council on Foreign Relations.

!!

The Trans-Siberian Express isnt just a train, its a metaphor. Once, a metaphor for the Tsarist
empires determination to claim Siberia and the Russian Far East. And now? The double-headed
eagle proudly glitters on the bullet-nose of the new, high-speed trains, and the conductors on the
Moskovskaya strelka, the Moscow Arrow, wear uniforms derived from those of their imperial
forebears. But the CRH-49 locomotives are a Chinese design, built in the now Chinese-owned
Uralvagonzavod works with a loan from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, running
along a new track built by a Russo-Chinese consortium, and largely by Uighur labourers.
That said, the proud and pricklish days when Moscow thought it could pivot east yet remain the
elder brother are long gone. When Putins stroke delivered power into the laps of kleptocrats
who had never had any real enthusiasm for his imperial project, they eagerly looked to rebuild
relations in Asia and the West alike. This was just the last hurrah of Russian wild capitalism
lenders were too canny, opportunities elsewhere were more appealing, and the oligarchs and
bureaucrat-entrepreneurs behind President Shuvalovs figurehead government soon fell to feuding
amongst themselves.
It is telling that the new Trans-Siberian bypasses the old Russian imperial stronghold of
Vladivostok. Instead the line from Beijing crosses the border at Zabaikalsk. There travellers from
deeper in the Russian Far East who have taken the old Trans-Sib and then changed trains again,
can finally relax into the new carriages which will whisk them to Moscow in just four days. The
Russian flag flies over Zabaikalsk station, and Russian border guards walk down the train,
scanning passports and fingerprints with their cloud-linked terminals, but the town outside is a
monument to Chinese money and Chinese migration.
The liberal Preobrazhensky government that picked up the pieces after the collapse of Shuvalovs
self-serving regime has made a virtue of bowing to necessity. Moscow could afford neither to
subsidise nor to neglect an under-capitalised, under-populated east. Free Economic Zones and

Preferential Residence Zones have helped address both needs. With climate change opening up
new regions to agriculture, albeit neither quickly nor easily, the so-called Greening of Siberia
depends on labour and investment. While the nationalists continue to grumble about the
yellowing of Russia, no one east of the Urals is going to deny Chinas capacity to supply both.
On the evening of the second day out of Zabaikalsk, the train pulls into Novosibirsk. Its
Akademgorodok university town is now one of the most dynamic innovation incubator hubs in
Eurasia, and suddenly the complexion of the train changes, Chinese students, scientists and
businesspeople boil out of the station to the waiting ranks of taxis and busses ready to take them
to hotels, universities and meetings, to be replaced by Russians heading west.
Just past Omsk, the train acquires two unexpected and unsettling shadows, Ka-78 helicopter
gunships flitting back and forth along the track. Pilots on a training exercise, or a precaution
against terrorists infiltrating across the Kazakh border? There havent been any attacks on the line
since the bomb that very nearly derailed the Arrows sister train, the Eastern Dawn, two years
ago. That was claimed by the Martyrs Army of the Central Asian Caliphate, a group hithertounknown and, indeed, suspiciously unknown since. The general assumption was that, rather than
a pyrotechnic by-product of the messy insurgency in Kazakhstan, this might have been a warning
by Astana that Moscow should avoid meddling in its affairs.
Those passengers who recall that Patriarch Konstantin only last week called on the Kremlin to
protect Russian-speakers and Orthodox Christians across the border keep their thoughts to
themselves and quietly note with relief that those pods and canisters clustered on the gunships
stub wings do look very business-like.
A night and a day later, the Arrow reaches Kazan, capital of the Republic of Tatarstan, and
another stop that Beijing has added to the route. Passengers looking to make a quick exit are
disappointed, though. The station is closed for half an hour, blocked off by police officers, bugeyed in their augmented-awareness goggles. High above, hiss Federal Security Service quadcopter drones, their cameras capturing faces for the image recognition software engines back at
headquarters to crunch.
Then suddenly an arrow-head of police motorbikes, and a thunder of run-flat tyres as a dozen
black limousines and vans streak past. A phalanx of police cars, and as quickly the square and the
station are opened.
President Preobrazhensky is visiting for what is meant to be one of the final stops on his
exhausting mission to negotiate a revised constitutional basis for the Russian Federation.
Tatarstan, as one of the richest republics, is making a point. Tatar President Bakayev is
welcoming Preobrazhensky lavishly, hospitably, even opulentlybut with all the trappings of a
foreign guest rather than his own head of state. The talks are likely to be difficult.
But no matter, the Trans-Siberians timetable is a relentless one. Passengers finally unleashed by
security scurry to the train; a moment of chaos that quickly resolves itself, the whistles blow and
the station master salutes (no other train gets the same treatment, but there is a tradition to be
observed) and the Arrow slides out of Kazan, on the last leg of its journey.
Through Cheboksary, Nizhny Novgorod, Vladimir, the train nears the capital. In its near-thousand
year history, Moscow has been burned, conquered, shelled and rebuilt. The speculative property
bubble that followed Putins fall and whose bursting helped bring Shuvalov down has left the city
ringed by the rusting skeletons of mikrorayon apartment suburbs and prestige orbital retail parks
for which there was neither real money nor real demand. Yet once through what Prime Minister
Navalny called Moscows crown of thorns, the signs of renewed prosperity are evident,
coexisting with its rich history. The Stalinist Seven Sisters still spike their towers into the skies
alongside the Bladerunner futurism of the Moscow-Siti financial centre. But now a more

sympathetic modernisation is the fashion, traditional buildings gutted and restored as cloudconnected smarpartments, roofs once pitched to shed snow now glittering with solar panels.
Yaroslavsky Station still has its early twentieth-century charm, and the crowds converging on the
underground travelator to Krasnoselskaya metro remind you that Moscow is a metropolis of 12
million souls. But step outside, past the serried stops for the computerised trolley busses that
along with swingeing congestion chargeshave helped tame the citys notorious traffic, and it
feels like a calmer, less demanding city.
The Moskovsky Univermag department store over the road exemplifies the way the new
governments commitment to a Nordic-style social economy and consequent luxury taxes went
with the grain of the public backlash against the get-rich-quick Shuvalov years. It morphed from a
low-rent collection of cheap shops to, briefly, a temple to conspicuous consumption, where
platinum Yota cellphones nestled on acres of black velvet. Now, it is a stronghold of the novy
gipsternew hipstermovement, a constellation of coffices, coworking spaces, workshops
and boutiques for everything from bespoke data mining to craft beer.
Perhaps, just perhaps, Russia has finally shed its age-old imperial dreams that locked it into
cycles of conquest abroad fuelled by oppression at home, followed by crisis, collapse and cultural
cannibalism.