THE VLADIMIR HIGHWAY, RUSSIA — No lights. No road signs. Potholes big enough to swallow a farm animal. Going 80 mph through the Russian twilight and still being passed by cars and trucks.
Suddenly we zip past a couple with a child strolling down a newly paved stretch, separated from us by only a flimsy plastic barrier.
My first drive in Russia, with wife and infant daughter, was supposed to be a simple jaunt to see old friends. It turned out to be a crash course in a white-knuckle driving culture.
The Vladimir Highway that links Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod, Russia's fourth-largest city, consists largely of four spottily paved lanes with crumbling shoulders or none at all.
This is a country that sends men into space and nuclear submarines to the ocean floor, but is still struggling to digest fast cars, open roads and the most basic rules of safety.
Known as the "Vladimirka," the road has special significance in Russian history; in czarist times it was the main route for prisoners banished to Siberia. In "Crime and Punishment," Dostoyevsky describes manacled Russians shuffling eastward for hundreds of miles along the Vladimirka.
Our own punishment began soon after we set out eastward for the city of Vladimir, 120 miles away. At Moscow's city limits we slowed to a crawl, wedged in among thousands of Russians taking advantage of one last weekend of good autumn weather.
Creeping through Balashikha, a soulless Moscow bedroom suburb, we passed stoplight after stoplight. SUVs, hulking over our rented Volkswagen and packed with weekend trippers, peeled out at green and screeched to a halt at red. Gridlock ruled.
And then there were the pedestrians -- men and women, most of them elderly and loaded down with bags of potatoes or beets from their tiny subsistence garden plots, nervously waiting for a break in the traffic before shuffling across.
When not dodging pedestrians, I found myself careening around unlit plastic construction barriers, seemingly placed at random.
Still, at least it meant something was being fixed, and it might have been tolerable if slowing down was an option. But to go slower than 80 mph was to risk being rear-ended or shoved off the road by a semitrailer doing 90.
White lines didn't seem to matter much in the constant lane-switching. Keep right and pass on the left? Forget it; at least two dozen semitrailers must have passed us -- on the right.
