by Guido Olimpio, Paolo Valentino
As the protagonist of history and literature (from Pasternak to the Orient Express), the railroad serves to fight and flee from terror: people, weapons, help
the secret, not secret, weapon of this war. It enabled some to prepare and carry out the aggression, moving large numbers of troops from one end of Russia’s vast territory to the other. But he allows others to resist, transports weapons, food and soldiers to where they are needed, and delays surrender by the day.
Weapons and soldiers’ wagons
Even before the invasion began and even more so afterwards, the train played and continues to play a crucial role in the Ukraine crisis. Any transhumance of the Russian army depends on the railway line. Indeed, the Kremlin Army has numerous brigades tasked with managing transport logistics, and in the weeks leading up to the X Hour brought a large part of the expeditionary force with special convoys. Then they had to get the vehicles off the trains, which caused major problems, symbolized by the endless line of vehicles 40 kilometers long, as many sections of the line beyond the border were unusable. More. Surprisingly, in early March, one of the two armored trains still supplied to the Moscow Armed Forces appeared in Mariupol: double locomotive, wagons with machine guns and others with platforms on which armored vehicles were placed. We can call them veterans: they have already served in Chechnya, the Caucasus and Crimea, were renamed Baikal and Amur and kept on duty by order of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. According to some analysts, this is an indicative choice, since it indirectly confirms the intention to reactivate an old Cold War program: a train capable of accommodating longrange missiles, possibly also with a nuclear warhead.
umbilical cord
On the opposite front, the state train and the real umbilical cord that keeps Ukraine and its people alive: from East to West to save tens of thousands of refugees or to export what the country can still produce under war conditions. From west to east to deliver antitank and surfacetoair missiles or western drones to the Kiev army, causing enormous problems for the invaders. The man who operates this miracle machine is a young man of 37, who until February 24 was only the head of the Ukrainian railways, briefly manager. Now Oleksandr Kamyshin is in charge of war operations and is probably Russia’s most wanted number one. It was he who secretly organized and ensured the success of the train rides of the premieres of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia, which a few days ago expressed their solidarity with President Zelenskyy. A real joke for the Russians, for whom the convoy was invisible.
The thread of history
Could it have been different in Russia and Ukraine, where the train crosses all history, literature, politics and national imagination? What makes the train so present in the Russian consciousness is the infinite space of eleven time zones. In Russia, a train journey is not measured in hours, but in days and nights, time for reflection, introspection or interpersonal relationships. And perhaps nowhere in the world does Francesco Guccini’s description more accurately than in the countries once ruled by the Tsars: The train too seemed a myth of progress / rolling across the continents.
The train brought Russia into modern times. The train shaped its military and political history for better or for worse. By train, Tsar Nicholas I sent imperial troops in 1848 to put down the Hungarian uprising. And it was on a sealed train organized and financed by the command of the German army that Lenin and a group of Bolshevik leaders, including his lover Inessa Armand and future head of the Comintern Grigory Zinoviev, arrived on April 4, 1917 from San Petersburg Crossing Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and Finland: Lenin took the lead in the revolution, seized the Winter Palace and, once in power, immediately concluded an armistice with Germany. Also in 1994, Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn chose the train to return home from his twentyyear exile, crossing all of Russia from Vladivostok to Moscow.
From idiot to Zhivago
The train fascinated all the great Russian writers. under a train in Obiralovka station, which Anna Karenina puts an end to in Tolstoy’s immortal novel. Prince Myshkin returns to Russia by train after years in a Swiss clinic in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is full of features: from the luxury trains, to the freight cars on which the evacuees of the October Revolution are crammed, to the military convoy of Strelnikov, first Lara’s shy husband and then ruthless Red Army general. But the fascination does not escape the foreign authors who speak of Russia or Russians: on the Orient Express, Jan Fleming plays in From Russia with love the clash of James Bond with the infiltrator Nash and the other agents of the MGB, precursor of the KGB. Slavic historiography is also no stranger to the myth of the railway: the whole history of Russia is often seen as a long railway stretch leading from the past to the future. And that has fueled arguments about where the country went wrong.
The Gorbachev trail
The intellectual debate in the years of Gorbachev’s perestroika was very much about finding the moment when the Soviet train went the wrong way. Whether with Stalin in 1929 or later, in 1956 in Budapest or 1968 in Prague. Not indifferent dilemma. Because, as historian Andrei Zorin says, if you get lost on a road, you don’t have to go back, you can take the first turning and look for another. But when you’re on a train and the story is a platform, you have to go back to where you started to catch the right one. A sentence that contains all the drama that we are experiencing these days.
March 20, 2022 (Modification March 20, 2022 | 08:34)
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