Click on the cities to read Steve Nettleton's latest dispatch from along the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

Listening to Russia

Heading east on the famous Trans-Siberian Railroad, we search for what matters most to ordinary Russians

By Steve Nettleton
CNN Interactive Correspondent

CNN Interactive Correspondent Steve Nettleton is traveling east across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railroad in advance of the March 26 presidential elections. His dispatches from towns and cities along the way will report on what ordinary Russians beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg are thinking and feeling during this uncertain time in their nation's history.

(CNN) -- Heading east from Moscow, a great trail of iron ploughs the vast fields of Siberia. It punches a 5,778-mile (9,198-kilometer) corridor through ancient, rolling mountains, ice-covered plains and ranks of leaking, dilapidated military and metal factories.

It is the longest single rail journey in the world: Russia's Trans-Siberian Railroad.

Passengers on the Trans-Siberian Railroad can travel from Moscow to Vladivostok in seven days

Decreed into life by Czar Alexander III in 1891, the railway chugs across the immense spine of Russia, weaving through the nation's great mining centers, skirting the world's deepest and oldest freshwater lake, hugging the border with China and ending at Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan.

In seven days and seven time zones, passengers pass through a living museum of Russia's forgotten cultures: from survivors of the feared gulag to Siberia's the Starovers, or Old Believers, who separated from the Russian Orthodox Church 300 years ago in revolt against the church's proposed liturgical reforms; from monks preserving an enclave of Tibetan Buddhism to a dwindling population of Russian Jews still living in Stalin's failed attempt to create a Jewish "homeland."

From Moscow to Vladivostok • Listening to Russia • On the vodka express from Moscow to Yekaterinburg • Yekaterinburg: a town of two czars • Siberian smelting pot • A refuge for Russian casualties of capitalism • Lake Baikal: the great blue eye of Siberia • A day at the races in Russia's Buryat Republic • Russian Buddhism flowers in Buryatia • Old Believers end isolation in Siberian borderlands • Disenchanted, resigned voters in Russia's Far East launch presidential election • Russians bear heavy load on 'ice road to China' • Emigration to Israel empties 'homeland' for Jews contrived in the Stalinist era

From the heavily populated steppes of European Russia to the unknown fringes of Asian taiga, city names such as Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Ulan-Ude, and Khabarovsk fly past in a blur of cultural color before they are swallowed by the gulf of empty space.

Cut off by its inhospitable climate and sheer distance from European Russia, Siberia is Russia's "Elsewhere," says author Colin Thubron.

"Even now the white spaces induce fantasies and apprehension. There is a place where white cranes dance on the permafrost, where a great city floats lost among the ice-floes, where mammoths sleep under glaciers," he writes in his latest book, "In Siberia."

Siberia comprises about one-twelfth of the world's landmass. Inside its remote borders, much of the Soviet Union's secretive past now lies open to be seen and heard by outsiders.

En route, the Trans-Siberian Railroad skirts Lake Baikal, the world's largest freshwater lake by volume

Along the railway that serves as an adhesive preserving this great territory, one can see at once the large patchwork of peoples that make up modern-day Russia.

It is a fitting journey at election time. As Russia prepares to choose its next leader, what matters most to the often-ignored, diverse collection of people east of the Ural Mountains? In a place where the environment is harsh and the economy in disarray, what hope do Russian citizens have for their future?

Even an epic train journey across Siberia cannot provide all the answers, but perhaps it can give us a hint.