It came upon me powerfully, momentarily and quite unexpectedly. Perhaps a couple of vodkas at a bar by the railway station in St Petersburg were to blame. But all at once I realised that if I were a 50-something Russian living in the former Soviet Union today, I would be a communist. It happened a few weeks ago. I was boarding the overnight train from the city formerly known as Leningrad, to Moscow. In a short, spine-tingling moment I understood something to which my mind had been closed all my adult political life: the thrill of the communist ideal.
My train was due to leave at five minutes to midnight. Around this time there is a tight cluster of departures from St Petersburg to Moscow. Along an almost ruler-straight railroad across flat marshes and forests, the journey of some 500 miles can be accomplished without hurry by overnight trains taking about eight hours — time to get a good night’s sleep — and the sleeper services on Russian railways are clean, comfortable and cheap.
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