The station at Omsk, early afternoon Monday

It was soon after this, at Tatarskaya, that we left the Trans-Siberian route, to head south and then east. Most of the stations we saw were of comparable magnificence, with comfortable and functional interiors, polite service people and an electronic booking system which is quite up to modern international standards.

Omsk, on the river Irtysh, is rather more than 400 miles slightly south of east from Ekaterinburg in the Urals (where the last Tsar and his family were murdered). Dostoyevsky spent four years in a prison camp near here. Later this station was the headquarters of Admiral Kolchak's weirdly amateurish, so-called "Supreme" government of the chaotically uncoordinated White armies in the Civil War.