The train station in Sukhumi is freighted with the historical memory of Stalinist architecture and the bitterness of failed post-Soviet conflict-resolution efforts. The railroad from Adler, in Russia, hasn't run through to Georgia since the war in the early 1990s. However, the possibility of restoring rail service was discussed in the final years of Shevardnadze's presidency as a potential confidence-building measure which would have had the added benefit of restoring a Russian rail link to Armenia.
Blogger cyxymu posted some thoughts and photos about the railway running through Abkhazia in 2007. By 2008, Russia's deployment of railway troops to the region with the stated goal of restoring the lines was seen as a prelude to last August's Five-Day War. And this year, Georgia condemned the transfer of control of the railway to Russia as "robbery."
When I was in Sukhumi earlier this year, I took the long walk from downtown to the train station and took some photos (below); and posting them gave me an excuse to translate the Bol'shoi Gorod article below, which I first noticed when I was a devotee of the publication back when I lived in Moscow and it used to be the city's free weekly.
Moscow-Sukhum, Car #26
October 11, 2004
Bol'shoi Gorod, № 32 (116)
This is the train from the TV. The train was running along the seacoast as the Channel One newsreader explained that this was the first Moscow-Sukhum (as the Abkhaz call their capital, notwithstanding that it's "Sukhumi" in Georgian) passenger train in 11 years and even called it a "window to Europe." A week later, because of this "window," two presidents - ours and Georgia's - quarrelled at the meeting of CIS heads of state. Saakashvili didn't like that Russia was establishing contacts with unrecognized Abkhazia, but Putin responded by saying that railroads are a business, and the government wouldn't interfere. The presidents agreed to disagree, and we got to ride the Moscow-Sukhum train, which departs from the Kursk Station once every two days.
Upon closer inspection, the train turns out to be two passenger cars hooked onto the train to Adler - an economy-class [плацкартный] car and a sleeper car, numbered 25 and 26. In Rostov-on-Don they latched on another two cars, bot those turned out to be practically empty. Just as it should be on a train to a resort area at the end of the season. But the train cars headed to Sukhum from Moscow were crowded: the economy-class one was completely full, and the sleeper car was more than half full. At the border all of these carriages were hooked up to a locomotive, and then it finally became a train.
Later on, one of the conductors told us that, when they ran it for the TV cameras, the train had one more carriage, a fifth one, beautiful and modern. It carried the head of Russian Railways Gennadii Fadeev, his entourage and the journalists. Wine and vodka flowed like rivers. Afterwards, articles appeared with headlines like "Five Carriages into the Future," "The Road of Life" and "Train of Hope."
That carriage was then removed to the depot in Moscow. In the remaining carriages were light fixtures which turned on and off on their own, doors with handles falling off, stuck windows and restrooms with rusting toilets. There was no toilet paper, but there were purple soap remnants.
It was mostly Russians in the sleeper car. I shared a compartment with a retired colonel named Nikolai Leonidovich. In the next compartment over were a young couple and a stern old man, also military. After them were some quiet old folks, and after them were three Abkhaz guys. They were transporting a large, black Sony television. "We get TVs [in Abkhazia] shipped in from Turkey, but they're low-quality ones," one of them explains.
"You should write about the TV set," I get instructed by Andrei, the half-drunk guy who is riding with his wife and the old officer in the compartment next to mine. "About how three Abkhazians are hauling a huge black television from Moscow." The guys from Sukhum learned from the TV that there is now a train on which they could take a TV home. The train was in the TV; now a TV is in the train.
Andrei has round, unshaven cheeks, which make his good-natured visage resemble a pear. Under his white T-shirt, he already has a ponderous belly. Andrei was lured to Abkhazia by the schoolbook map of the USSR's climatic zones. On that map, the subtropics crawled north in a narrow band along the Black Sea coast right up to Sukhumi. Andrei is hoping to prolong his summer by 10 days. Andrei's wife Alla has a specific task to accomplish on this trip - to conceive a child. They've got it all planned out - down to the fact that the place they're staying in Pitsunda is well-guarded, because it belongs to President Ardzinba's son.
My compartment-mate Nikolai Leonidovich had also gone to Abkhazia to make a baby. And he had made one - a son, 17 years ago. At the time he had been serving at the nuclear test grounds on Novaia Zemlia. The summer there lasted a month. But the salary was 1,000 rubles a month [huge by Soviet standards], and he got free package vacation tours. Nikolai Leonidovich still goes to the Moscow Military District resort [in Sukhum]. Basically, this means a vacation on a military base. Even Tengiz Kitovani's paramilitaries couldn't capture the two military resorts.
The train got its first police inspection near Rostov; it's second, in Lazarevskoe. The officers looked at everyone's passports and asked people about the purpose of their trip, both times carefully studying the large, black television. Between Adler and the Vesioloe, on the border, the conductor collected all of the passengers' passports, explaining that they had to be checked in the computer.
The customs guy made us turn all our bags inside out. The passengers, who had already been without their passports for a half hour, were visibly nervous. If you wind up without your passport in Abkhazia, there's no way to get back into Russia other than using mountain paths - there is neither a Russian consulate nor a Russian embassy in the unrecognized republic, even though 80% of the residents are Russian citizens. After the customs guy, a border guard passed through the carriage, returning passports. Apparently to everyone.
We passed over the border, the bridge across the River Psou. From the train windows, we could see the entire journey that people have to make when traveling into Abkhazia not on the train: a long, cement road with border and customs posts, two on each side. Lots of people were hauling large packages of goods. During tangerine season, the border turns into a madhouse. I imagined my carriage-mates stuck in a crowd of Abkhaz peasants with their large, black television.
After the landscape of Sochi, which in recent years has started to look like a suburban Moscow cottage subdivision, Abkhazia rewinds time by 15 years. But there's definitely a screw loose in the time machine. The Stalin Empire architecture of the Soviet resorts, familiar from childhood, gapes with broken windowpanes. Late-Soviet-era high-rise apartment buildings with "improved floor plans" stand half-destroyed. The upper floors are burned out, but people still live on the lower floors. The private room-rental business is bouncing back bit by bit, but there are still plenty of gutted single-family homes. Vacationers are concentrated in the few resorts which more or less survived the war, or else they rent rooms from people they knew from before the war. When the train arrived, all the arriving passengers were met by people with cars. I remained alone on the platform.
As the train from the TV made its way through Abkhazia, people came out of their homes and waved at us. The local cows, which have grown somewhat wild after 11 years, are also not used to the railroad - I was told they frequently wander onto the tracks and get run over.
My photos of the station from May of this year:
Taxi stand.
IMG_2920, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.
Someone has poached the Soviet coat of arms from this locomotive.
IMG_2933, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.
IMG_3056, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.
Kiosk advertising beer, with a sign proclaiming that it's "open" - I didn't knock to check.
IMG_3055, originally uploaded by lyndonk2.
Abandoned kiosk advertising "Hot and cold beverages"; "Coffee
Cocoa Tea Juices Water Cocktails"; and "Soft-serve Ice-cream".
