Soviet insignia remained affixed to our olive-green cars, though I noticed newer Russian emblems on some trains.  Ironically, most if not all of the engines and cars of the Trans-Siberian Railway came to be made, during Soviet times, in Czecho-Slovakia, the nation founded by the legionnaires who seized the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1918.  From the windows of the train, one spotted some arresting images, such as the lone soldier, an AK-47 resting on his shoulder, standing guard at a very primitive wood-and-barbed-wire gate standing between two mud-rutted roads that appeared to lead nowhere.  Primitive homes of peasant families dotted the lonely landscape, surrounded by endless green or golden fields hosting mounds of hay, men slicing its golden shoots with long wooden scythes, and smoke from crumpled chimneys curling upwards to meet the soft, white clouds descending from low mountains.