Trans-Siberian Railway (Part 2: Yekaterinburg to Krasnoyarsk)
Helen got her wish to travel first class as we journeyed overnight from Kazan to Yekaterinburg. Almost fulfilling her ferrovial fantasies, we had single beds opposite each other (not bunks), hardwood-panelling, a sweep of crimson velvet upholstery and a multitude of mirrors flooding the compartment with light. This, plus the ancient samovar at the end of the carriage corridor that looked like it was an actual part of the train’s machinery and we were well on our way to Trans-Siberian heaven. We even got a decent night’s sleep.
Yekaterinburg stood out as an obvious stop on the route due to its famous Romanov connections. It was here, in July 1918, that the deposed and imprisoned Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra Feodorovna and their five children (Olga, Maria, Anastasia, Tatiana and Alexei) were murdered by the Bolsheviks, ostensibly to stop them being rescued by opposing forces in the Russian Civil War. The house of a local engineer, Ipatiev, where the murders occurred, has long since been demolished and replaced with very new church – the snappily named ‘Church on Blood in Honour of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land’ – and is now, in effect, something of a shrine to the family (all of whom were controversially canonized in August 2000).
The Church on Blood, Yekaterinburg
We didn’t feel completely at ease here to be honest. We’d visited the graves of the Romanovs in St Petersburg about 10 years ago, and it felt dignified and appropriate. Here, however, we were a little perturbed by the many information boards displayed in the church describing the victims as martyrs and even comparing aspects of Nicolas’ life to that of Christ. Several paintings adorn the walls of the church and the crypt underneath showing the family as religious icons with saintly halos emanating from behind their heads. The crypt itself was oddly rather moving, largely due to the wall-plaques with the names of victims and their ages screaming out injustice, but the muted blood-red lighting at the murder site itself was a little too garish and obvious for our liking. We had considered going out to the site where the bodies were taken, dumped, and mutilated with acid and hand-grenades, but by all accounts this place is much worse – barely above the level of a religious theme-park. Such is the level of ‘disneyfication’ that unfortunately now surrounds these brutal events….
The Romanov family depicted as saints
A stroll around town following a red-line painted on the pavement in the cold air was a useful distraction. This was Yekaterinburg’s attempt to bring all its significant tourist sights together in one easy route, albeit one with some rather bizarre attractions. As well as some rather beautiful old wooden houses, there was a random monument to The Beatles and a large concrete representation of a QWERTY keyboard stuck in a grass banking. There was supposed to be a monument to the Invisible Man as well, but we must have missed that…
Yekaterinburg tram
Helen types her initials
We toured the churches (which is fast becoming a Russia theme) and took in a couple of photography museums. The first was pretentious nonsense and the second didn’t actually have any photos. We went to the railway museum, housed in the old and immensely charismatic station, only to find that they had no trains. Still, the gaudy, bright and rather wonderful House of Sevestyanov, the 19th Century residence of a local businessman, restored to its original vivid green, white and terracotta livery was a real sight to behold, particularly with the city’s charismatic 1950’s electric trams trundling along in front of it. In the main though, it’s fair to say we didn’t get what we thought we would from the town. No doubt it suffered from our overly romanticised notion of how it might be, no doubt the really cold weather with a lot of showery rain did not improve our mood, but mainly as it felt a little ‘run-down’ in parts. That might seem an odd thing to say when we’ve enjoyed cities in absolutely dire states on this trip, but here it’s difficult not to compare to Moscow and Suzdal and Kazan. We did, however, have our best cake of the Russia trip here (sour cherries and cream).
The old train station, Yekaterinburg – now a railway museum without trains
Sevestyanov’s House, Yekaterinburg
Looking cool (because it was), Yekaterinburg
Still, on to Novosibirsk on another overnight train, this time back to shared compartments and accompanied by a taciturn young man who muttered a cursory greeting and a goodbye in response to us, but made no other attempt to communicate at all. I don’t think he was unfriendly, just completely uninterested in even making eye contact with us. We’d wanted to stop here to see a bit of the city, but use it mainly as a push-off point to visit the town of Tomsk on the local bus. First impressions were…..hmmm. Perhaps we’d picked an apartment in the wrong end of town. The place itself was OK, but surrounded by huge decaying 60’s tower blocks with many and varied plants growing out of the concrete. It reminded me a little of Pripyat, the abandoned town near to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant that has almost been reclaimed by nature, but here people were still living their lives and going about their business. Everyone knows I’m a weird fan of Soviet architecture and love a nice, massive Krushchev-built apartment block, but unlike those I marvelled at in Karaganda, here the general lack of maintenance and an overriding sense of neglect was largely demoralising. We met a very friendly fruit seller at the bottom of one of them though, who tried out a bit of English with us in response to my attempts at Russian as we sampled his plums.
Novosibirsk
Forays into the city centre proved us wrong about the place. The centre was bright and pretty cosmopolitan, complete with a hugely impressive opera house and a still-standing and immense brutalist statue of Lenin. Marvellous. A stroll round the local history museum, housed in a fabulous commercial building from 1910, was also congenial – exhibits on Siberian culture and a rare English translation of a beautifully written history of the town were most engrossing. We saw young girls on the street, surrounded by a small crowd watching them perform a dance routine to some loud music. They seemed to be having a great time. The sun came out and warmed our peaky little faces in the chilled air. It all felt great – and then something strange happened…
Helen admires Big Len, Novosibirsk
On our walk to visit the art museum, I suddenly stopped to point out something to Helen. A nondescript man with a peaked cap and small backpack 3 paces ahead of us stopped at the same time. We set off walking again. So did he. It was so obvious to both of us that we naturally just stopped walking again without even discussing it. He did too. We stared at him and he walked down to a fast-food cafe and began studying the menu outside. We wondered what was going on. Was this a possible attempt at nicking my camera (it was out and in my hand) or were we being followed, or what?
We crossed over to the other side of the street and continued walking. We caught sight of the guy again, this time stopped outside the railings of the art gallery, looking intently inside his backpack. Time to consider our options, we thought, and with an about-turn made our way back uphill to the nearest cafe, sitting with eyes firmly turned to the entrance doorway. No-one else entered. It spooked us a little, but we logicked it out. If we were about to be robbed, which we doubted, then we’d avoided it. If we were being surveilled (really? us?), then so what? We’d already been in the country for 2 weeks and were being allowed to go about our business without interference. Some kind of tailing might have been occurring all the time, but with more competent individuals we hadn’t noticed. And, if the state really didn’t want us here, we’d have been escorted off the premises already, without a doubt. It was probably a little paranoia and us being guilty of ‘bigging up our part’, so to speak, though of course we never did find out what it was about. But we relaxed, had some tea and got comfy again. The museum galleries, alas, were not so great (not when you’ve been to the mighty Tretyakov anyway)….
Excitement over, we arrived in Tomsk after an uneventful 4 ½ hour bus journey and pitched up at the lovely Xander hotel with its enormous plush bed and, wait for it, ‘dressing-gowns’! Cue squeals of delight from Helen. Somewhat knackered (we’d both been suffering from and trying to ignore some awful head-cold) we limited our forays to the site of an old wooden fortress housing a mock-up of a Soviet-era communal flat, complete with miniscule living accommodation and shared cooking equipment. As with the Soviet lifestyle museum in Kazan, there were loads of utterly weird-looking soft toys for children, including the seemingly ubiquitous ‘Cherburashka’ doll, a creature resembling a teddy bear with massive monkey ears. Sadly, no references to Tomsk the sporty Womble, after whom the town was named….
An utterly beautiful day allowed us to see the reason for coming to Tomsk in glorious sunshine. The town is famous for its old wooden houses and we carefully plotted out a route across town to take in the best. Several hours later our impressions were mixed and our mood, yet again, somewhat dampened. There are some superlative examples of well kept, elaborate and fanciful flourishes with traditional ‘lacy’ decoration built by rich merchants in the town’s heyday as a trading hub before the advent of the Trans-Siberian railway and, to be fair, they are magnificent indeed. But we couldn’t help feeling dismayed at the many more wooden structures that are clearly being allowed to rot away, many being boarded up, many more tilting to one side or another, some burnt out, some simply decaying gradually. We understand about 700 houses are protected, but that still leaves around twice that amount slowly disappearing. Not only is it sad to see, it also reduces the impression of the town to a strange mix of the incredible and the dilapidated. That, coupled with the rather forgotten British sea-side town feel the place seems to emanate in and around the city centre, left us wondering if it was worthwhile coming. We travel for the sake of experience, to see and appreciate things for what they are, but it can be hard to disassociate your anticipation of or desires for a place from your natural inclination to like or dislike it. And we never did find that bloody Womble….
Tomsk
House of the Firebirds, Tomsk
Marque House, Tomsk
Tomsk
Tomsk
Our final stop on this ‘leg’ of the route was Krasnoyarsk, another large city, but one that’s perched alongside a bucolic stretch of the River Yenisei and bordered by an expanse of very accessible countryside in the form of the Stolby Nature Reserve. To be frank, our journey here was not pleasant. Our overnight train was another shared compartment, with yet another youngish man who seemed to willfully ignore us. However, we also encountered a group of very large, very intimidating men (looked like there were around 15 or more of them) who made it clear from the start that they were not happy with our presence on the train. Whether it was our lack of Russian, the perception that we were foreigners, or worse, English, or something else, we never found out, but we were stared at menacingly, either in the corridors or off the train on the platforms, with many nods, side glances, muttered or open comments we didn’t understand etc etc. Luckily this only occurred during the morning, but we endured it for a good 4 hours or so. To say we were mightily relieved to get off is an understatement. This was the first time (hopefully the last) that we’ve encountered pretty open hostility here…..
A great antidote was our lovely apartment in Krasnoyarsk and a trip out to the nature reserve. Reached via a cable car in the brilliant afternoon sunshine we spent a few hours wandering through forest tracks to see the strange & weirdly beautiful ‘stolbys’ (Russian for ‘pillars’ – volcanic rock formations that pepper the wooded landscape) and enjoy the fresh air away from the city. What we didn’t enjoy was the plague of ticks that leaped from the foliage and invaded our every crevice. We required multiple showers to get rid of them. For every pleasure there seems to be a counter-pleasure here!
Stolby Nature Reserve, Krasnoyarsk
Stolby Nature Reserve, Krasnoyarsk
Our final port of call was the Steamship St. Nikolai, a small iron paddle steamer that had the distinction of escorting both the young Tsarevich Nicholas II on his meanderings across Russia in 1891 and the disgruntled Mr V.I.Lenin to his place of exile downriver in 1897. A lovely onboard museum guide gave us an impromptu personal tour through the ship, rabbiting-on in rapid Russian and giving our translation app a dose of the collywobbles. Still, she was wonderfully good humoured and it helped to restore our sense of perspective about the inherent decency of most human beings.
Steamship St. Nikolai, Krasnoyarsk
A very mixed bag indeed then for these largely urban and industrial destinations on the railway route, peppered with both wonderful and woeful moments in equal measure. On a positive note though, we’ve felt like we’ve glimpsed a little of the ‘real’ Russia on our many walkabouts here, which is always something we strive for, whatever mood that leaves us in. We’re hoping for more ‘wonderful’ on our most anticipated leg of the trip – a 4 day stop at Lake Baikal and its largely isolated Olkhon Island…..
Footnote: For the last week or so the weather has been largely cold and rainy and one or both of us has been suffering from a nasty bout of flu. Taken together, these have no doubt dampened our enjoyment (sometimes literally) and ability to overlook the occasional ‘less than wonderful’ aspects of travelling. Equally, and intimidating though they were, the unfortunate events on the train to Krasnoyarsk were never likely to escalate into anything else. The cheerful and domineering provodnitsa* would never have allowed it!
* A female version of the ‘provodnik’, an attendant assigned to a carriage on a train and responsible for bedding, general well-being, making sure no one steps onto the platform without permission and standing for absolutely no funny-business whatsoever. The female version in particular is not to be messed with…..
Simon (18th September 2025)
Well yet another entertaining journey, not all pleasant, but you survived. Sorry to hear about your colds. The news keeps telling us about so called spy’s. I must admit I’ve been a little worried in case you were carted off and imprisoned, thinking how would I get
you out !!! It does happen. Well best of luck with the next part of your journey. Love mum.xx
Sounds like a other varied leg of the journey, and that’s what experiencing the real russia is all about. The next leg sounds lovely, hope you start enjoying it a bit more and get over your flu soon xx
Hope you both feel better soon, and here’s to more dressing gowns! Are you saving your train photos for a special post Simon 😁
Might be…..
Hope you both feel better. Another interesting read, I still think you are both incredibly brave!
Thank you – both on the mend now