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The FSU Scroll: Field Notes From The Edges of Empire
Not a memoir, not a manual, not history, and not this is a scroll. A lived document that uncoils across frostbitten steppe and borderland camps, where drills turn, deals twist, and dignity is held together with duct tape and vodka-stained humor.
From Ukraine to Sakhalin, from mud-choked rigs to government saunas, these field-earned ledgers reveal how people survive, adapt, and build in places where permits arrive after the pipelines are already pumping. Some of it reads like farce, some like heartbreak, much like both at once.
A generator resurrected with foil and candlelight becomes a choir, a pickup patched with tape and faith passes inspection, and a nation under strain shows a resilience that still shakes the world today.
This is not a sober account, but it is an honest a record of compromises, improvisations, and grit at the edge of empire, remembering what the spreadsheets never could.
From Ukraine to Sakhalin, from mud-choked rigs to government saunas, these field-earned ledgers reveal how people survive, adapt, and build in places where permits arrive after the pipelines are already pumping. Some of it reads like farce, some like heartbreak, much like both at once.
A generator resurrected with foil and candlelight becomes a choir, a pickup patched with tape and faith passes inspection, and a nation under strain shows a resilience that still shakes the world today.
This is not a sober account, but it is an honest a record of compromises, improvisations, and grit at the edge of empire, remembering what the spreadsheets never could.
213 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 3, 2025
About the author
Tinker .
3 books1 followerTinker is an adventurer and explorer who has journeyed through the world collecting field notes from places most people only read about in books. A historian by instinct and a field engineer by trade, he has spent decades navigating the blurred lines between chaos and creation — from oilfields to icefields, and from the fringes of empire to the edges of reason.
As the founding General Director of the Poltava Petroleum Company in Ukraine and later a project leader in Sakhalin, he witnessed firsthand the absurdities and triumphs of building modern industry on shifting ground.
His work led him across some of the world’s most remote and unpredictable frontiers, where the tools were few but the wit was sharp, and where camaraderie often meant the difference between failure and legend.
The FSU Scroll: Field Notes from the Edges of Empire is his first major work — a hybrid chronicle drawn from those years, written with equal parts grit, humor, and respect for the people who made the impossible work.
As the founding General Director of the Poltava Petroleum Company in Ukraine and later a project leader in Sakhalin, he witnessed firsthand the absurdities and triumphs of building modern industry on shifting ground.
His work led him across some of the world’s most remote and unpredictable frontiers, where the tools were few but the wit was sharp, and where camaraderie often meant the difference between failure and legend.
The FSU Scroll: Field Notes from the Edges of Empire is his first major work — a hybrid chronicle drawn from those years, written with equal parts grit, humor, and respect for the people who made the impossible work.
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