Moscow-Kharkiv: Russia On An Express Train to Hell

You can take the high-speed Sapsan [“Falcon”] train out of the bustling springtime capital, away from happening Patrik (aka Patriarch Ponds), away from Moscow’s theaters – the parterre is packed and the prices are sky-high! – from the crowded malls and eternal traffic jams – and find yourself in sunny and cool Petersburg. You stroll along the embankment, squinting into the refreshing breeze, make the rounds of Piter’s by now seemingly world-famous gastropubs or the more boisterous neighborhood drinking establishments. Piter might seem far, but it’s really right next door – just a tad over 700 kilometers. Just four hours on a high-speed train and you’ve got a whole different vibe.

And if your Sapsan was heading south rather than north, departing Kievsky rather than Leningradsky Station, that same four-hour ride would take you from Moscow to Kharkiv. I remember childhood stops in Kharkiv during trips south, although we didn’t have high-speed trains back then. The Kharkiv stop was a whole hour. Everyone on the platform was speaking Russian, and we bought deep-fried potato pirozhki, sunflower seeds, and pickles. A lifelong memory for some reason.

Now, that Moscow-Kharkiv train would take you straight to Hell. To a city where Russian bombings and shellings have destroyed thousands of buildings.

Residential towers, schools, hospitals. To a city vacated by a third of its population, as the rest, out of a stubborn desire to cling to the shatters of their past life, daily risk dying under the shatters of Russian rockets and shells. To a city under siege by a ruthless enemy who’s shown what it’s capable of in Bucha and Irpen.

A ruthless enemy? But who is that enemy? Surely not those same people strolling around Patrik, loading up on stuff at Moscow’s shopping centers, sitting in traffic and dreaming of finally getting home to their waiting families? Ordinary people – they couldn’t possibly wish death on people just like them who live in the same prefab concrete apartment buildings, who speak the same language, and who often have the exact same names. Right? Couldn’t possibly. They’re not doing anything wrong, not shooting at anyone. Just what are they doing?

What they’re doing is pretending that nothing is happening. They’re trying not to discuss what’s going on just a four-hour train ride to Hell away. It helps that, from Moscow, you can’t hear the Kharkiv cannonade, and, as for Mariupol, who knows how long the train from the capitol would take – and who cares! If you type “Distance from Moscow to Ma...” into your browser, the autofill immediately assumes you’ve got the Maldives in mind. Let me fill you in: it’s a fifteen-hour drive by car from Moscow to Mariupol. Fifteen hours at the wheel from the jam-packed theaters of Moscow to the bombed-out theater with the word “ДЕТИ” [children] written on the roof, the work of Russian Aerospace Forces. To that maternity hospital. To Azovstal, long defended like the Brest Fortress.* Defended against whom? Let’s not talk about that, better not to talk about the war – in fact let’s not even use the word “war,” since it’s not so simple, after all. Let’s dance, go out to eat, go to the theater, or just to the mall to catch a movie. Let’s at least pretend that life goes on, that everything’s just fine. Well, yes, there is some sort of special operation, and somewhere or other there are those Azov Nazis – the hell with them, that’s somewhere else, not here with you and me. And we’ve got troubles of our own, by the way: the enemies have cut off Apple Pay, McDonald’s has left, think they can starve us into submission. But we’ll show them! Nice try – we’ll be going out and having a fine time! You’d never know anything was wrong in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Nothing’s changed, almost.

A bubble. In the bubble: a plate with salad or cabbage soup, a theater stage, a movie screen, the way to work, the way home. And the fact that blood and pus are seething outside that bubble, which now constitutes the rest of the world, doesn’t seem to exist. But it does exist. It just hasn’t broken through the placenta, hasn’t come surging into the life of every one of our people, all that blood and puss. But the pressure from the outside is building, and it’s also building inside the bubble.

The trains to Mykolaiv, to Odesa, to Kramatorsk aren’t running. Or to Bucha or Donetsk. Ukraine – populated with real live people whom the Russian Army is killing every day for no reason, for the heck of it, to no purpose – is totally cut off from Russia. We look at our plate, but whatever we do, we’re not going to raise our eyes. Not an inch.

But it is in Russia’s name that the murder and destruction of Ukraine are being carried out daily under false pretenses that change daily.

And the people in the bubble will ultimately learn about the murder and destruction. The stench of death is starting to penetrate – the placenta can’t filter everything. What’s worse: the stench is becoming a part of normal life. The murder of civilians with the same name as yours is becoming normal. It’s normal not to notice that, not to talk about it, and if you do, you use bromides provided by the state that everyone knows are rot. The Biblical commandments have been suspended. Even prehistoric taboos are being scrapped, and people are looking for ways to justify cannibalism.

Don’t assume that the new normal will look anything like the old one. The poison has already entered the body, and the soul. It’s just that it doesn’t take instantaneous effect. We don’t want to think about the fact that it’s just a four-hour train ride from Moscow to Hell. We have no intention of leaving bustling Moscow for Hell.

But the tracks are there, and Hell is now racing toward us.