Under communism, public transportation in Eastern Europe was one of the egalitarian trappings of the worker’s paradise–a cheap, swift way to get from place to place in countries where automobiles were scarce or banned.
Now, with tight money, bad roads and cars a highly taxed luxury, public transportation remains a widely used necessity.
From Russia’s Metro, the gold-plated mother of all subways, to the wheezing, open-bed trucks shuttling dust-covered Albanian laborers to road construction sites, public transit in Eastern Europe provides an honest view of these countries’ workaday world.
In the early 1930s, Josef Stalin saw the construction of the Metro as an opportunity to show off what could be achieved under socialism.
Construction workers, Red Army soldiers and students labored on the subway, whose stations feature muscular Socialist Realist statues, mosaics of marble from the Caucasus and gold-leaf ceiling frescoes, all the work of the Soviet Union’s best-known artists.
The first seven-mile stretch of track, through downtown Moscow, opened May 15, 1935.
A favorite among Moscow’s 120 stations is the Komsomolskaya, named for the Communist Youth Organization that helped build it. Chandeliers light a palatial gold-domed hall supported by neoclassical marble pillars. Ceiling mosaics depict glorious moments in Russian history.
A Metro didn’t come to St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city, until the early 1950s. In this swampy city of the czars, crisscrossed by canals, workers had to dig to 500 feet, twice as deep as normal, to find soil firm enough to support the lines. Some areas simply cannot be reached by subway. Last December a 1,600-foot-section of tunnel, stressed by frigid weather and the weight of the soggy soil, collapsed.
One enters Metro stations by descending on an escalator into a long, dark tunnel that provides no hint of the artistry below. Especially in St. Petersburg, the dankness, dim lighting, roar of the mammoth escalator and the sea of fur-hatted, stone-faced commuters paint a grim picture of Russian life.
In a glass booth at the bottom of the escalator lurks one of the elderly women charged with keeping order. In the past, these fearsome figures even stopped young men from whistling. Now, the women seem superfluous and bored, their function less clear. The platforms are home to colonies of kvasschiks, vagrants named for their drink of choice–kvass, a foul beer-like brew.
More than 6 million passengers travel each day on the Moscow Metro. At about 10 cents for a plastic token, the Metro is one of the cheapest train rides in the world. And it’s reliable–trains arrive about every three minutes, and reach speeds of up to 55 miles per hour.
Compare this to the dangerously overcrowded and breakdown-prone trams and buses here and in the republics of the former Soviet Union.
In Ukraine, when an electrified trolley bus in Kiev detaches from its overhead power line, all able-bodied male passengers–pile off and rock the bus until the arm swings back in line.
In the Balkans, Sofia, Bulgaria, has had a gaping hole where its subway system should be for a decade.
Lack of funds, construction problems and lately, squatters living in the tunnel have kept the Metro from becoming reality.
So, buses and the tram are the only modes of public transport.
Traveling in Europe, Americans often notice that their sense of personal space is larger than Europeans’. Nowhere is this more evident than on a tram headed for downtown Sofia in 90-degree heat during rush hour.
Though Bulgarians don’t seem to mind–“The tram gives me a sense of camaraderie,” according to one commuter–foreigners may well decide that a barrel over Niagara Falls is more roomy and comfortable than a Sofia tram ride downtown.
Easygoing drivers, displaying their own camaraderie and perhaps fear of being berated by a grandmotherly baba for closing the doors too quickly, pack passengers onto the spartan, dusty, orange metal cars until the last air pocket–usually under someone’s arm–is occupied.
Then one of several things could happen. A ticket-checker, usually a pensioner wearing cat-eye spectacles on a chain, may ask passengers to produce the 5-cent, postage stamp-sized ticket from the farthest reaches of their wallets and insist they’ve used it twice.
An early-morning shopper sometimes gets on, carrying a dripping dead chicken by the feet. The power might fail in the woods, forcing the elderly and the high-heeled to trek the 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) to town.
Or, someone will start to sing. This is what awakened me one hot summer to the charm of Bulgaria–though I never learned to love the tram.
For long distances, buses are much more widely used in Eastern Europe than in the U.S.
For example, buses are the only east-west public transport in the Balkans–between Bulgaria and Macedonia, Macedonia and Albania.
Sometimes, this is because there is no rail link. Until six years ago, travel between countries in this region was restricted. Since then, there has been little public money for railroads.
When there is a choice, people in this region express their preference for buses or trains with a zeal usually associated with American proponents of manual transmissions.
These arguments usually center on the largely mythical kinds of people they believe one finds on trains or buses.
If you take the train, the King of the Gypsies will get on, said a Bulgarian man, interrupting plans for a trip to Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast. He will weigh 100 kilos (220 pounds). He will have three mustaches and two gold earrings in each ear. And he will be carrying an enormous Coke, which he will spill in your lap. Take the bus.
Train proponents, on the other hand, cite the slow transit in buses. A six-hour trip from Sofia to Skopje can take eight hours or more with the driver stopping frequently for repairs and coffee and cigarette breaks.
The all-night train from Sofia to Belgrade is timely, costs about $20 and is the only rail link with former Yugoslavia. It offers few amenities but features a ringside view of the behavior of the Balkans’ most notorious residents, the Serbs.
On one recent trip, Serbian militia boarded the train around midnight to check passports and travel documents. All night long, they could be heard ejecting protesting passengers at each remote stop.
Foreigners on these trains may find themselves greeted by a boot to the door of their compartment, a flashlight beam in the face and a none-too-cheery “get up.”
But in the morning, a steward had instant coffee ready and a Serb soldier shared a chocolate bar while he patiently explained how most of the territory on an outdated map of Yugoslavia would soon belong to his countrymen.
In Albania, former dictator Enver Hoxha banned private autos in the 1960s. Though this was one of his less-evil idiosyncrasies, it meant that when his regime fell in 1991, Albania was a land of students and bus drivers.
The open trucks and an occasional oxcart dodging the tangle of Chinese-made bicycles on the streets of the capital of Tirana are deemed too dusty for anyone except laborers, and, in this largely Muslim country, are for men only.
On the bus from Tirana to Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, a Macedonian college girl extended an invitation to sit down after a tense moment with a woman who staked out her seat by throwing all encroaching luggage into the aisle.
In perfect, unaccented English, she said she had never left Macedonia, a country one-quarter the size of Lake Michigan.
OK, now tell me what America is like, she said.
It was nearly midnight and snowing. The 1965-vintage bus could go no faster than about 20 m.p.h. There was gum on the armrest, and something that had been in the seat cushion was sticking into my back.
The ride from Tirana to Skopje, a grueling 110 miles on one of Albania’s newly established private bus lines, cost about $8, and I was getting what I paid for.
At times like this, sometimes one longs for a car.
But, explaining to a Macedonian student what American students do over spring break, why fewer people in the U.S. smoke and how tall the Sears Tower is in comparison to the Balkan mountains, private transport seemed boring–and a little lonely.
