“Echelon to Samarkand” by Guzel Yakhina: A journey through hunger toward humanity6 min read
“Sometimes being kind means appearing cruel.”
A train carrying 500 lives
The story of Echelon to Samarkand (Эшелон на Самарканд, 2021) takes place in 1923, when the effects of the Russian Civil War, destruction and famine are still devastating the Volga region. A train leaves Kazan carrying five hundred homeless and severely undernourished children. Their destination is Samarkand, almost four thousand kilometres away, where food and living conditions are expected to be better.
The train is led by Deev, a young veteran of the Civil War. He is impulsive, compassionate and willing to break rules in order to save the children. His opposite is Commissioner Belaya, a strict representative of the children’s commission. She believes that discipline and order are more important than emotion. Their conflict raises one of the novel’s central questions: what does real kindness mean? Is it enough to feel sorry for someone, or must kindness involve action and not helping some in order to save others?
The train slowly becomes a kind of Noah’s Ark. It carries not only children, but also the adults looking after them, the sick, newborn babies, animals, supplies, fears and memories. Every part of the journey brings a new danger: lack of food and water, disease, attacks, bureaucracy and getting lost in the desert. Deev must constantly search for the things that keep people alive – milk, medicine, fuel and help.
Yet Echelon to Samarkand is not only an adventure story or a historical reconstruction. Yakhina presents the journey as an odyssey. The physical trip is also a moral one. Deev tries to save the children, but he himself is looking for redemption. He carries the memory of war and violence and knows that he helped create the world that has produced so many orphans.
The novel is strongest when it avoids simple divisions between good and evil. Deev is compassionate, but he is not innocent. Belaya seems cold, yet her discipline sometimes saves the train from chaos. People do not help the children because they are perfect. They help because, at a certain moment, they choose to act like human beings.
In Yakhina’s world, goodness is rarely pure. It can grow out of guilt, fear, love, stubbornness or the desire to repair at least part of the damage already done.
Guzel Yakhina and her work
Guzel Yakhina was born in Kazan into a Tatar family. She became famous with her first novel, Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes (Зулейха открывает глаза, 2015). She later published My Children (Дети мои, 2018) and Echelon to Samarkand (Эшелон на Самарканд, 2021). Yakhina writes in Russian, but her Tatar background, family memory and connection to Tatarstan strongly influence the historical subjects and places she chooses. Her books have been translated into fourty languages, including Esperanto. However, the international success of Echelon to Samarkand is still smaller than that of Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes. The novel has not received the same amount of attention in English-language media, and there does not appear to be a full English edition widely available yet. The novel’s international reach first developed strongly across continental Europe, with editions in countries including Romania, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain, the Czech Republic, Serbia and Lithuania, before expanding to other European and international markets. Even so, the number of translations shows that the story of children travelling from the starving Volga region toward Samarkand speaks to readers far beyond Russia.
Reception in Tatarstan
The publication of the novel had special importance in Tatarstan. The story begins in Kazan and deals with the famine in the Volga region, a disaster that deeply affected many Tatar families but remained outside public discussion for a long time.
Before the novel appeared, the magazine Tatarstan published a long interview with Yakhina. She described the famine of the 1920s as a “black hole” in family and national memory. She also called the book a novel about humanity as a necessary condition for the survival of society. While researching the novel, Yakhina read old issues of the newspaper Krasnaya Tatariya at the National Library of Tatarstan. She later explained that these newspaper reports slowly created a larger picture of the famine.
The press in Tatarstan treated the book not only as a new work of fiction, but also as an opportunity to speak again about regional history. This opened a wider discussion about who has the right to tell traumatic history, how much a novelist may change documentary material, and whether Russian-language literature can represent Tatar experience accurately. But these debates also show why the book matters. It brought a difficult and long-neglected subject back to a wide audience.
Russia through regional and minority perspectives
Russia is too large and too diverse to be understood only through literature from Moscow and St Petersburg, or only through the experiences of ethnic Russian characters. The country was shaped by many peoples, languages, religions and regions. Tatar, Bashkir, Chuvash, Buryat, Yakut, Caucasian and other perspectives are not secondary additions to a central Russian story. They are essential parts of the history of the state.
Guzel Yakhina is a particularly interesting example. She is ethnically Tatar and was born in Kazan, but she writes in Russian and works within Russian-language literature. Her books cannot be placed neatly in only one national category. Her work shows that Russian-language literature is broader than just the ethnic Russian experience. It can also speak about Russia from regional, minority and borderland perspectives. In Echelon to Samarkand, Russia does not appear as one uniform space. Kazan, the Volga region, the Kazakh steppe, Turkestan and Samarkand are connected by railway, but they have different histories, climates, cultures and relationships with power. Samarkand is not simply an exotic background. It is the place of possible rescue. Central Asia receives the children fleeing the starving centre. This movement reverses the usual imperial story, in which Moscow is always shown as bringing help and development to the regions. Here, it is the south that feeds and saves the north.
Regional history beyond Moscow
The novel cannot replace a historical study of Tatarstan, the Volga famine or Soviet Central Asia. Samarkand is mainly presented as the goal of the journey and a symbol of hope, rather than as a fully developed world of its own. Still, the book helps readers see links between regions that are often discussed separately: famine in Tatarstan, population movements, Soviet policies toward homeless children, railway networks and the role of Turkestan as a place where food and safety might still be found.
For readers who want to understand Tatarstan, the novel shows how deeply the region’s history was shaped by the Civil War, famine and the Soviet transformation of society.
For those interested in Central Asia, it reminds us that the region was not only a place conquered and governed from outside. It was also a place where people travelled in search of bread, warmth and survival.
For anyone trying to understand Russia as a whole, the book makes one point very clear: the history of the country has never been the history of only one people or one centre.
Echelon to Samarkand is worth reading not because it offers a final historical truth. Its power lies elsewhere. It makes the reader feel the distance between Kazan and Samarkand, the weight of five hundred children’s lives and the cost of every decision made along the way.
