In Siberia

by Colin Thubron

In Siberia, a startling examination of contemporary Siberia, is a departure from the existing body of literature that references or discusses Siberia. Written by a British travel writer who is older than the average Russian male and objectified for his Westernness, In Siberia is also an exploration of how people try to reconcile their past with their hopes for the future against the backdrop of a turbulent political landscape, and a stagnant economic one. Thubron weaves his tale of his journey across Siberia around relevant history and background, as well as fascinating encounters with Siberia's
inhabitants, to produce a stunning portrait of a land that defies
characterization.

Thubron writes that he set out across Siberia "to find a core to Siberia,
where there seemed none; or at least for a moment to witness its passage
through the wreckage of Communism -- to glimpse that old, unappeasable desire to believe, as it fractured into confused channels, flowed under other names. Because I could not imagine a Russia without faith."

Thubron did find an amazing amount of faith among the abject poverty, barren
land, and desperation of Siberia -- faith that the proud history of Russia
will usher in another era of Russian dominance, faith in the promise of a
better life in the future, spiritual faith, faith in science and math. He also found that Siberia's transition from Soviet wasteland to free state
has been especially painful. Although capitalism and democracy promise
freedom, Thubron finds that the current inhabitants of Siberia are fighting a
difficult battle to see just what good can come of the newest "ism" that has
been thrust upon them.

One of the greatest ironies of contemporary Siberia is depicted in a
conversation Thubron has with the captain of an oil tanker who picks up
Thubron in one of Siberia's most desolate and suffering regions, Dudinka. His
hopes of a better life in the post-Soviet era have been dashed by the Former
Soviet Union's bleak economic situation. "(The captain) wanted to retire to a dacha, he said -- but his pensions was
too small. 'What pension? Bread and water!' Once he slurred he had operated
on secret service with the Soviet navy in Algeria and Syria: he couldn't have
spoken of it before because of the KGB. He couldn't speak of it now because
of the vodka," Thubron writes. In this small exchange, Thubron precisely exacts how many Russians and
Siberians are still horribly oppressed. But still, among a different
oppression than under communism, Thubron finds a jarring honesty and faith
within Siberia that he shares with his readers brilliantly.

Thubron concludes that this faith has inspired a notion that somehow, some
way, Siberia will survive, as it always has. "The mystique of a chaste,
self-reliant Siberia rises again. Siberia is more Russian than Russia is,
people say, as if it were a quintessential Russia, or the imagined country
which Russia would like to be," Thubron writes.

Thubron's eloquent, insightful observations of this distant and troubled land
are a bittersweet pleasure to read. In Siberia is a remarkable book to curl up with as the winter here draws near. The way in which Thubron deftly
navigates the paradoxes of a land that bears a heavy history and of a people
trying to find their way among the ruins of a bygone political system makes
In Siberia a unique and astonishing work that casts a much discussed but rarely understood place in an intriguing light.

—Emily Burg is a freelancer living in New York.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, Russia, History, Memoir, Adventure, Travelogue

8 pages, Audio Cassette

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Colin Thubron, CBE FRSL is a Man Booker nominated British travel writer and novelist.

In 2008, The Times ranked him 45th on their list of the 50 greatest postwar British writers. He is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Times, The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Times. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Thubron was appointed a CBE in the 2007 New Year Honours. He is a Fellow and, as of 2010, President of the Royal Society of Literature.

Reviews

[Shovelmonkey1 · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Siberia was not only a trip across the vast frozen land mass in the company of Colin Thubron, for me it was an evocative text conjuring memories of my childhood.

When I was young (in the 1980s... I know I am so old and it was so long ago) my Dad worked in Siberia. Between 1987 and 1996 he would disappear for months at a time into the unimaginable vastness of Siberia. In those days there was limited mobile phone technology and no email. GPS was a military thing, not something for civilians. So where was he? Normally we didn't get to find out until he returned to Moscow where he would pay up to $50 for a five minute phone call - usually calling from the Novotel - to let us know he was ok. When he returned he usually brought people with him. Russians and Siberians who worked in the medical profession and so dinner times were peppered with Russian dialogue and strange food. Inky black beluga caviare, sunset orange balls of Salmon caviare which popped like eyeballs when you bit into them, pickles, salted goods and vodka. The most memorable bottle was shaped like a war head with glassy body and blood red nose-cone. Appropriately it was called "bomb vodka".

Thubron's books brought back all the names of my Father's travels. Omsk, Magadan, the Sea of Okhosk, Lake Baikal, Novosibirsk, Novokuznetsk were place names that formed a common part of my child hood vocabulary. I read this book with interest as I have already experienced this world through one man's eyes and his descriptions and now Thubron provided me with yet another view. Both accounts agree on one key issue - the vastness. How can you describe one sixth of the worlds landmass? When you are in it you cannot see the borders or the ends of it and so it seems no larger than any other outdoor space you can experience in the UK or America. Yet you can sense it because the people are defined by their isolation and the rawness of the landscape. In a landscape where millions were sent as punishment with thoughts that they would never return, the people who live there by choice represent dignity and resilience in the face of political, financial and geographical adversity.

Thubron's fluency in Russian and his ability to blend in provide him with the advantage of a shared language which means that people opened up to him. He carefully relays their opinions, describes cultures and social groups (not always impartially but what travel writer can be impartial when they are so immersed in their subject matter?). From politics to the border control, poverty to archaeology and communism to shamanism, Thubron has a good long look at the Siberia shaped, or sometimes carved and butchered by the rise and fall of Communism.

The closest I got to experiencing this country first hand was the smell of wood smoke and shashlik on my Dads impressive Russian fur hat and holding the Whale bone earrings from a trader at the Sea of Okhosk and the piece of Woolly Mammoth tusk retrieved during a mining operation in Magadan. Nesting dolls and lacquer boxes smelling of pine are the closest I've got to the Taiga but thanks to Thubron's book I feel like I've gotten another glimpse of a world which I never visited but which shaped my childhood. I still hope to go to Magadan one day to see a city made beautiful by death.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Colin writes well, but he’s a bit of a cold fish. He doesn’t ever seem to do anything fun (only once does he take a young woman out for dinner). And so Siberia seems really boring. Perhaps it is? Colin gets involved in religions, goes to underfunded museums and archeological sites, and visits prison camps and mines where thousands died. That’s Colin on his holidays. But it’s not like there isn’t fun stuff happening around him … he passes several Opera Houses. Couldn’t he have caught a show? Someone mentions a festival; that Jewish-town-that's-no-longer-Jewish was having a concert. I also thought he could have talked to a few of the Chinese people. They may not be Siberian, but they are there. But perhaps they were having too much of a good time for Colin?

[Max Berendsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful portrait of one of the most mysterious regions of our planet. Thubron really succeeded in capturing the essence of Siberia and the great diversity of people inhabiting it. After having read "Shadow of the Silk Road" I was already enamoured by Colin Thubron's travel writing. "In Siberia" really sealed the deal for me, Colin Thubron is the greatest travel writer ther is. I read this book's 300-ish pages in 3 days, but it truly felt like a three month journey through the vastness of Siberia.

I'll probably order some more of Thubron's travel books these coming days to have a nice start for my 2022 reading challenge :).

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

the book was every bit as good as I’d hoped. To you Russophiles out there: this is a book you definitely must read. To those of you out there with any interest in Russia at all, or with an interest in traveling to remote lands, I recommend this book to you as well. Thubron’s prose is incredible, and throughout the book I found passages describing with incredible accuracy and beauty, things which I had seen during my brief foray into Siberia. His descriptions of the vast, desolate beauty of the Siberian countryside far outdid anything I produced. Here’s an example:

At the head of the pass, and at springs along the way, the pine trees were dripping with rags in honor of the spirits. Spirits infected the waters and peaks of all this country. Neither Christianity nor Communism had dislodged them. They were too pervasive, and too old. The rags shivered in the pines – requests, tributes – and the river-beds glistened with coins. Here and there hundred-ruble notes caught among the stones, pulled free again, floated away. (p. 82)

I must admit, however, that I was disappointed by the fact that Thubron neglected to stop at Olkhon Island, one of my favorite places on the planet. He mentioned the island briefly, in regards to his trip past it by boat as he crossed Lake Baikal:

By noon the far shore has misted away, and as the hydrofoil enters the channel between the western bank and the long, volcanic island of Olkhon, you are sailing over silk. It is the last voyage of the year, and the boat seems almost empty. The island is bitter and rainless: an ancient stronghold of shamanism. The Evenk knew that the sea god Dianda lived there, and the Buryats peopled it with an evil spirit, the voice of its seismic groaning. The shores are unloosened even here, without rock or weed, and leak out only a salt or mineral trickle. Olkhon is in fact a mile high underwater mountain, and you are sailing over the lake’s abyss. (p. 159)

That was it for Olkhon. To me, Olkhon was definitely worthy of more exploration, both physically and with the written word. However, given the sheer vastness of Siberia, I can forgive Thubron for not stopping at every possible destination.

I also found myself wondering about the ease with which Thubron traveled throughout Siberia. For those of you who have never been to Russia, let me just say that it is *not* an easy place for tourists to navigate. At every stop one encounters bureaucratic hoops through which one must jump in order to do just about anything (i.e., buy train tickets, stay in a hotel). It also helps exponentially to be able to speak Russian. While South Koreans are generally very helpful to non-Korean-speaking foreigners, Russians (especially those who work in places – such as ticket-selling offices – who frequently come into contact with tourists) tend to range from brusque to unhelpful... especially to those who lack the ability to communicate in Russian. Thubron obviously speaks Russian well (or, despite the fact that he claimed to be traveling alone, he had an interpreter – one or the other), and I wish he had mentioned how he had learned Russian, and why. The further I delved into his work, the more I began to wonder about him. Unfortunately, the book didn’t resolve this mystery, nor did an internet search. Thubron wandered into many cities, towns and villages across Siberia – often (seemingly) at the spur of the moment – without any reservations, plans, or ideas as to where he might stay the night. My friends and I only went to one city in Russia (Tula) without definite plans as to where we would stay the night, and between a lack of rooms in the city, and the initial unwillingness of the staff at the one hotel in Tula with a vacancy to accommodate foreigners, we almost didn’t get a place to stay. Either Thubron had incredible luck, or his accommodations weren’t arranged as spontaneously as it seemed in his book. (Granted, these little nit-picky details do not in any way detract from the beauty of this work... I simply worry that someone wishing to travel in Siberia after reading Thubron’s work might be a little misled with regards to the ease (or lack thereof) of travel inside the Russian Federation.)

[Gina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I now have an established pattern with Thubron. I get really jazzed to read his book, mostly based on the locations he visits. Then I start the book and think, "This man is a genius, but I would never want to actually travel with him. He's constantly miserable." As I edge toward the end of the book, I very nearly hate him. I finish the book and give it three stars, not four, because he casts a pall of pessimism so heavy that it affects my mood when I'm not even reading. Then, a few months later, after I've lived with and settled into my memories of the book and realize how much I learned and how evocative his writing is, I go back and switch it to four stars. I expect the same will happen here.

[Antonomasia]

[3.5] Sometimes ageing seems most stark through objects. I was already an adult when I got this copy new; now the pages are so tanned that it looks like it was printed when I was too young to read anything more complex than Topsy & Tim - the instinctive perception having been formed around the same time I acquired the book. (Likewise books that, in my mind's eye, were nearly new actually look scruffy from moves and storage.) This serves to remind, though, that it's about a Siberia which will have changed by now, and gives a context for some of the author's more old-fashioned moments.

In the first half I often wished that I'd read it years ago when some of those wouldn't have been quite so noticeable; in the second, Thubron has become so immersed in the place, that he judges less, and more often lets things and people be as they are. I've little doubt that by the standards of men who went to Eton in the 1950s, he is sensitive and open-minded. (Review quotes praise the sensitivity, yet there are remarks which look anything but now. Mentally I often crossed out these short sentences or clauses, which left a great deal of very interesting material I was glad to read.) Though even the less tactful descriptions communicated well; they produced a response of "I know exactly what you mean, just wouldn't have used that word". A description of a shaman's costume includes the word 'barbarian' .... I'd have said 'atavistic'. One of the more glaring ones in the midst of some otherwise lovely writing, a woman of a Siberian tribe with dyed ginger hair (the result, I suspect, of an ineffective home bleach job, which Thubron maybe wouldn't know about) "a traitor to her race" ... I understand the feeling, that comes through time and again, that he half wishes he were of such a people with animistic traditions close in time, so he could be really purist from the inside - but even without complicated Russian and Soviet colonial history behind you, you're not always most attached to the culture/s you descend from; otherwise he'd just be an English Francophile. He is subtly condescending about Christian denominations who were having a resurgence post-USSR - again less so in the second half - but at least he isn't dismissive to a New Atheist extent, and still gives space for the people themselves to shine through. The complication of communicating the material in words often left me wishing this were a film made up of mostly pictures and talking heads of local people.

There are upsides to his old-school gentlemanly style of travel writing. He is tough and competent and can handle the conditions better than most, without any laddish hardman boasting. Once, a more informal style of moaning about the state of the toilets and how difficult everything was, was fresh and removed the distance from the audience, but it's almost all there is now. Thubron, whilst he rightly gives brief mentions to awful accommodation so readers aren't misled about what it would be like to visit Siberia, can concentrate on the stuff he's gone there to see, not held back by an inability to sleep in bad beds.

There is perhaps a shortage of expression of overt pleasure - in a good meal, rest after a hard day - but it's clear he finds most of what he sees fascinating. (I'd much rather meet these people and places that than stop off to go to an opera, as one reviewer suggests he should have for a break.) And the style of writing rather overloads on the epic and sonorous (I frequently heard it as a documentary narrated by Andrew Graham-Dixon) - it often feels like it should be an introduction to something more humorous or mundane which rarely appears, especially in the first half. The lack of humour throughout makes one miss Michael Palin's travelogues.

It's when Thubron is more or less knowingly stuck for three weeks in an impoverished, decaying Northern Siberian village of alcoholics that something changes and he stops always wanting people to feel a certain way about their situations (people are too religious [Christian], or not into their folk traditions enough, or not angry enough, being the most frequent implications). It also seems that spending time with individual professionals, such as the village doctor or a museum curator or a family of engineers, who see things from something closer to his viewpoint, then allows him to accept other differences more. (Knowing some people who agree and understand helps one feel less besieged and indignant, I find.)

There is so much in here that it's harder to summarise the subjects than simply write a list. The overwhelming sense, however, is of decay and a succession of destructions - of the indigenous peoples by the Russian invasions (they were more accepted by the earlier Khanates - for some reason one doesn't hear Russia spoken of as a colonial power), of traditional Russian culture, and further of the local tribes, by Communism, then most recently of the machinery of Communism (which did at least keep many people fed and paid). And that's apart from the ordeal and genocide of millions of prisoners sent to Siberia by the Tsars and the Communists. It was a place of both transportation and emigration, punishment and fresh, lawless opportunity, like America and Australia to imperial Britain.

-------------

- The unexpected beauty of Siberian cities (many of them built by exiles)
- Rasputin’s illegitimate descendent
- Canonising and praying to and for the Romanovs
- Babushkas addicted to soaps, Mexican or Santa Barbara
- Resurgence of Orthodox church. Beautiful vestments and walking into a lake wearing them. New church buildings and monasteries everywhere.
- Religion survived thanks to old women. Hiding icons in the home.
- Brothers’ grave
- Old ladies who survived the gulags. At once tough as old boots, and traumatised. A famous one (not met) was Yevgenia Ginzburg
- At the start thinking author ought to go on a basic counselling course to better understand how to talk with these people. Then by the end he was usually rather good at it.
- Novosibirsk & Akademgorodok. Once the white heat of technology, now gone cold and rusty. Hopeless out of touch questions (based on his visit 20 years ago) to an academic crippled by lack of funds. Fringe researchers on mystical cosmic energies – haven’t emigrated like many others because it wouldn’t be supported elsewhere.
- Ice Princess of the Altai and other preserved graves. Arguments over where & how to store. --Arguments over whether the peoples were Caucasian or mongol – differentiating the peoples a Russian obsession that spills over into the narrative. (Also a generational thing… having parents of Thubron’s generation, I remember what I heard as a kid when watching sports, comments re. national / regional characteristics and abilities.)
- Many Pazyryk remains & artefacts moved to St Petersburg (where he visited them earlier – how typically organised of him only to mention this during the chapters where he visits their native area.) Landscapes covered with kurgans, many not opened. Makes me want to read Herodotus again for accounts of the Scythians. Indo Europeans displaced by Mongol peoples, later graves show lower classes & women more IE, men & rulers Mongol. (What is current research? Sacrifice of servants & horses. Headdresses, gold. Tattoos – would love to see drawings.
- Lenin’s exile in Shushenskoe. Museum struggling, trying to adapt to the times.
- Russians whose idea of England is Sherlock Holmes, Dickens, pea-soupers (how do you see in all that fog?)
- Shamanism. In more than one instance there are neopagan revivals by younger people who don’t seem to know all the old stuff but set up foundations, and older people who practise or treat more or less alone.
- Projects for a Russian Alaska. (And later a Russian-Pacific Zion.) Evokes The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.
- Two unrelated women named Stalina… if you don’t like your name, they make you think it’s perhaps not so bad after all.
- Potentially fatal ticks! Has the right amount of genuine fear to be able to deal with them *immediately* on finding them (he normally seems so unflappable) – and surrounding people on train help by stamping on them – and he calms down right away afterwards.
- The village of drunks, Potalovo, is acknowledged even by its doctor to be extreme.
- Acid rain destroying reindeer habitat and possibility of a subsistence life up there. (Why do we never hear about acid rain now?)
- The decaying arctic fox farm. “They had barely room to turn round. It crossed my mind to release them – all 200 or so – but what would they do? They had known only a few square feet of wire, and impoverished humans needed them.” If there, it would have seemed an impossible dilemma, though I’d have done the same (nothing). Seeing it written out like this, I felt this response, and this articulation of it, was the right one.
This scene is spot on; there are honestly more things he responds well to than not – it’s just the bad bits that stick out.
- Baikal and its unique animals.
- The particular beauty of Irkutsk.
- Decemberists & exiles who made the place cultured. Death penalty abolished as early as 1753 but transportation to Siberia for many now trivial offences including fortune telling, prize-fighting. Similar to C18th Britain, but without the hanging. Interesting that wife beating was considered an offence that early.
- Buddhism. Old Believers (another interlock with Crime & Punishment, where Mikolai was one.) He is noticeably less judgemental of religious people by now.
- Magadan & places built by dying convicts. Seeing the camps. “You lose your eyes here, and start to imagine through those of the dead. You have no right to this country. It belongs to them. Is it sometimes beautiful? You cannot say. You see only signposts to atrocious places.”
- Mammoths & mammoth ivory. Fascinating ancient ideas about mammoths: that they still lived under the ground. A French saint’s relic found to be a mammoth bone.
- Yakuts, “the hardmen of Siberia”. Other tribes that have been mentioned include Tuva, Erkut, Evenk, Entsy(in Potalovo), Buryat. Nothing about Chuchki - I have two books by Yuri Rytkheu; have also heard they are Russia’s buffoon /hick people about whom jokes were made. Would have been nice to see another POV.
- Lonely archaeologist who was in favour of a multi-region human evolution hypothesis in Siberia – now disproven BUT remains were found to be far more ancient than anything previously discovered in the area (c. 300 000 BC)
- His managing never to register anywhere and travel further than his visa stated. Partly the chaos of the times, also shows great skill at managing in this place. Helps that he speaks Russian almost like a native (on a previous journey he’d once previously been mistaken for an Estonian).
- Chinese traders. Fears of Russians about a takeover – this is something I’ve heard recently about contemporary Siberia too.
- Throat singing (and circus couple – a marketable version of their culture that’s a way of preserving bits of it, brings to mind Consuming Race) – he hasn’t heard it before but since it has become well known over here, Bjork album & even before.
- I wonder if he changed these people’s names… some of the accounts are rather unflattering, Louis Theroux stuff.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

From BBC radio 4 Extra:
4 Extra Debut. The soul of Siberia described through its buildings, people and amazing quirks of nature. Read by John Rowe. From January 2000.

Episode 2 of 10
North of the Arctic Circle, the author visits the mines, graveyards, camps and an 87-year-old survivor.

Episode 3 of 10
Omsk, where Fyodor Dostoevsky languished in a wooden prison for four years condemned to hard labour.

Episode 4 of 10
Novosibirsk, the largest city in Siberia, and a visit to Akademgorodok, once the brain of Russia.

Episode 5 of 10
The author travels to the stunning Lake Baikal, the oldest and deepest lake in the world.

Episode 6 of 10
'Weeks of visual deprivation turned Irkutsk glamorous.' The home of the Princess of Siberia.

Episode 7 of 10
On route to Albazin, the author reaches the Amur, the tenth longest river in the world.

Episode 8 of 10
The author travels by train to Komsomolsk on Amur, Stalin's city of dawn founded by young Communist pioneers.

Episode 9 of 10
The author flies 1000 miles to the Sakha Republic and lands in a town of ice and twilight.

Episode 10 of 10
The author's bus arrives at Magadan - the Capital of Sorrows.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007jlkv

[Stephen Hayes · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading The Lost Heart of Asia by the same author, I was looking forward to some new insights into Siberia, the eastern part of the Russian Federation, which is bigger than any country in the world apart from Russia itself. Thubron travelled across it from west to east, mainly by the Trans-Siberian Railway, and its northern branch, the Baikal-Amur Railway (BAM), with side trips to various other places by plane, bus and river boat.

In his travels he met and conversed with many different people, most of whom he had met by chance, and it is his reports of conversations with these people that helps to give one a sense of the place and what it is like, and what the people are like. In some places he invited himself to stay with such people, as he made no travel arrangements in advance. so the people he met and the places he stayed at were unpredictable. He visited Ykaterinburg, where the last Tsar and his family were murdered by the Bolsheviks. The house where they were held immediately before their death, which he describes in some detail, had been demolished, lest it become a place of pilgrimage.

Colin Thubron wandered off the site into a nearby garden and down a track which led to a rubbish tip, where he shared supper and a sleeping place with a tramp who had camped there for the night. It is the comments and insights of such chance-met people that give the book its unique flavour. At another town not far away he searched for the home of Rasputin who had such an influence on the royal family. He met a man who looked like Rasputin and made the most of the resemblance. Was he related? Well, not certainly, but his great-grandmother was once a housemaid in the Rasputin household, and Rasputin was a notorious womaniser, so...

Thubron flies off to visit a remote mine inside the Arctic Circle, where most of the work was done by prisoners, political and criminal, and visits the ruins of the prison barracks where so many overworked and underfed prisoners died.

Further down the line he visited Novosibirsk, and the nearby town of Akademgorodok, which was built as the ultimate academic scientific research centre, with no expense spared, until the money ran out. It was literally fantastic. It was a bit like the home of the academics in Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, But what it has become since the fall of Bolshevism is something that goes beyond the wildest fantasy dreamed up in Jonathan Swift's Laputa. Thubron interviews people who work there and somehow manages to keep a straight face as they tell him of their fanciful and crackpot theories.

Perhaps the most depressing part of the book is his description of a four-day boat trip down the polluted Yensei River. On the way back he persuades the captain of the boat to drop him off at a village where the only person in employment is the village doctor, and he, like many other civil servants, hasn't been paid for months. In the economic collapse after the fall of Bolshevism the only thing left for the villagers to do was get drunk on their pensions, if they arrived.

One thing that I didn't so much like about the book was the way that the author's bias against Orthodox Christianity hardened into prejudice as the book went on. One of my reasons for reading the book was to get an idea of how the Orthodox Church was recovering from Bolshevik persecution, but though Thubron is is sympathetic towards Buddhists, and pagans, and even to some extent towards Old Believers and neopagans, he rarely has a good word to say about the Orthodox. In the Buddhist monastery they sang and prostrated themselves, but in the Orthodox one the singers were "crazed-looking youths" and the nuns were sobbing as though "something must be expurgated for ever". I've added a few more thoughts on this aspect of the book on my blog here In Siberia | Khanya.

In many ways it is a depressing book. The economic collapse, the pollution, the hopelessness of many, and the relics of Stalin's Gulag and the mass murders that went with it don't make for happy reading.

[Richard Newton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost unremittingly sad, with just the odd page here and there with even the faintest trace of optimism. Thubron is a brave traveller, and given other stories of the fate of individual travellers in the wild east of Siberia, lucky. This was a wild and dangerous trip, but he survives without too much trouble. In this book he recounts his travels through some of the most desolate places, with the grimmest histories from the darkest periods in soviet history. The book shows cultures and environments ruined. You get a sense of the bleak vastness of the place, of its long history and a lost potential. It is well written with the easy flow of an excellent writer.

Thubron observes much, but you find out little about him. He is almost anonymous. An occasionally irritating personality. We see what he observes and only a little of what he thinks. We never know why he is making the journey he makes, which is not for the feint hearted.

The book is worth reading, but it feels oddly old. I doubt much has changed in the roughly twenty years since this was published. Even so, it feels as if his journey was longer ago.

[Fiona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, intelligent writing as always from Thubron who, for me, approaches his journeys on a much more cerebral level than most travel writers.

[Nick Davies · Rating 4 out of 5]

This I found very interesting and readable. The right level of description in a poetic sense, nice language and the author's thoughts, balanced against the right level IMHO of reportage and writing about the people he met. I was left slightly wondering how verbatim all of the conversations were (I'm not saying they weren't real, just that considering the nature of translation and second langauges, and presumiably the author having to later recall or transcribe what was said.. it made me wonder) and the second half of the book had a little less impact than the first because many of the themes had already been discussed, but here there is an insightful and thought-provoking travelogue detailing post-dissolution USSR and the huge cultural, political, economic, religious and geographical challenges of the vast regions away from the traditional centres of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

[Lord Beardsley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could not recommend this book highly enough. I truly believe everyone should read this. Never once have I really thought about visiting Siberia. Recently, I read Angela Carter's 'Nights at the Circus' in which a large chunk takes place in Siberia and this led to me picking up this book. This book has everything. It is a detailed examination of a land where people have had everything pulled out from underneath them and a land mass that has been totally raped. This book is bleak, yet human and at times even extremely humorous (one portion features a hobo who claims to be the last living heir of Rasputin). Thubron never once slides into the patronizing tone of pity for the people whom he meets, he treats them with respect and above all as human beings. This book is fascinating and I could not recommend it enough. It is part of a trilogy of the author's travels in the Russian land mass and I now plan to hunt out the other two volumes.

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This non-fiction account of travelling in siberia is evocative, humourous, and assured on the sentence level as well as on the overall structural level. There are many set pieces as Colin Thubron interacts with shamans, priests, poor people, fishers and hunters, former KGB officers, museum staff, scientists with outré hypotheses, mothers, daughters, sons and fathers. He gets along with everyone, and avoids cliche writing.

Going from west to east, sometimes by the trans-siberian railway, at other times by vessel or truck, Thubron sees former towns in ruins, abandoned gulag camps and mines, and communities (municipal and cultural) that are barely hanging on. The writing is precise and not sentimental. The drama is left to the russians and first nation peoples he encounters. Highly recommended.

[Weronika · Rating 4 out of 5]

„Po Syberii“ to taki reportaż jakiego jeszcze nie czytałam. To obraz Rosji kilka lat po upadku Związku Radzieckiego i na przełomie wieków. Syberia pochłaniania przez alkohol i bezrobocie, bez perspektyw i szans na przyszłość. Ale jest to też reportaż o przeszłości. O łagrach, zsyłce, walce i śmierci. Gorąco polecam

[Anny · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I started reading this book, I thought I would be reading about the beauty and harshness of nature in Siberia. I thought it couldn't be more depressing than Among the Russians. I was wrong on both count.

This book was about the people who lived in Siberia, and it was even more depressing. Where else would you find a mother who worked for thirty-five years, saving all her pension (around 6000 rubles), only to find that now it amounted to mere two loaves of bread?!

But other Russians would consider her lucky, to have a job at all, to be paid at all (others still go to work even if they haven't been paid for six or ten months or more). Others were even less lucky, with no job and no faith left, they started to drink (and when there's no money left, they started to beg) and wasted themselves until there were nothing left.

Still, even those drunk beggars could count themselves among the lucky. Lucky indeed! For they were not among those sent to the gulags, to places like Kolyma. Places like in The Orphan Master's Son, places even worse than that. Since, even if the end had come (and Stalin had died), there were no hope, no future, nor salvation left for them.

P.S. Now I should go and read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The ice-fields are crossed for ever by a man in chains.

On page 4 - 'If Siberia were detached from Russia, it would remain by far the largest country on earth. At almost five million square miles, it is bigger than the United States, including Alaska, and western Europe combined. As the sun is rising over the Urals, it is setting on the Bering Sea.'

As much as I was disappointed in Journey into Cyprus I thought I would give Thurbron another go and am Loving this very much. Okay, so he's not wee willie dalrymple but this particular travelogue is not to be missed.... and I say this after only 100 pages.

[Zuberino · Rating 5 out of 5]

It would take a thousand-word essay for me to fully capture my feelings towards Thubron's opus. Suffice to say that the nearer I got to the last page, the Iess I wanted to finish the book, and the pace of my reading slowed down significantly in the last 50 pages. I wanted to relish every word, savour every turn of phrase, linger over every poignant description and captured mood.

Sadly, the book is now done but the impression that it made on me will last a long, long time. If there is such a thing as "spirit of place", then Thubron comes closer to tapping into that tragic spirit - of Siberia, and more broadly of Russia - than any other work I have read recently. It's not an easy task, simply because the staggering scale of Russia's twentieth-century suffering nearly defies belief, let alone description. Was it 20 million people that died in the gulag? Or was it 60 million? How do millions of human beings become mere rounding errors?

To penetrate into the very heart of that desolation - into snowfields of death with names like Kolyma and Vorkuta - and to describe it adequately - not just adequately, but in prose of great beauty and power, for Thubron is a master stylist - is an achievement that was previously given only to the Russian greats themselves - Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, Mandelstam, Ginzburg. Not many outsiders have visited the physical and psychic extremities that Thubron does in this book, and very few ever will.

*

It all starts in a juddering train climbing painfully over the Ural mountains that separate Europe from Asia. This is the legendary Trans-Siberian Railway that threads through the southern half of Siberia like a fragile, stubborn thread, all of seven and a half thousand kilometres in length. In the very first chapter, Thubron sets the tone, of undaunted journeying into Russia's remotest, darkest heart. After making pitstops in Yekaterinburg, where the last Czar and his family met their end, and Tyumen, he hitchhikes to the distant village of Pokrovskoye where the monk Rasputin was born. Again and again, he invents such solutions when forced by necessity. He cadges rides on the road in a variety of vehicles, bunks with hospitable strangers in ramshackle apartments or fairy-tale cottages - and once, for a long stretch, in a tiny hospital in a dying native village on the Yenisei river near the Arctic Circle.

Chapter 2, Heart Attack, is a flight to the far north, to Vorkuta - a name synonymous even today with harsh labour and frozen death. He will go to the gulag again at the end. Chapter 3 is a trip to Novosibirsk, largest of Siberia's cities, and to an extraordinary place just to its south: Akademgorodok, the science city that Khrushchev built, which at the time of Thubron's telling - the shiftless years at the end of the 90s between Yeltsin and Putin - was bleeding funds and scientists in equal measure. (I've read since that Akademgorodok is coming up again in the world, funded in part by Western R&D money).

Chapter 4 is a journey to the beautiful mystical borderlands of the Altai mountains, heartland of the ancient Scythians and meeting-place of four national boundaries - Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia, China. In this remote steppe, he tracks down a Tuvan shaman, one of the last of his kind. A sign of how acutely Thubron is attuned to the country and its people is the amount of attention he devotes to faith in Russia, or its absence. Whether it's the nascent Orthodox revival in 90s Russia, the extreme isolation of the Old Believer sects, pagan animism among the native tribes, or the soulless atheism sponsored by the Soviet state, he finds time for all of them, finds current day adherents and talks to them, explores their outer and inner lives.

Once he visits Shushenskoye, the village of Lenin's exile in Czarist times. The bitterness of broken belief among the village's elderly custodians is a theme that will come back again and again throughout the book - how the end of communism left several generations stranded and bereft in an ideological vessel that capsized without leaving so much as a replacement lifeboat in sight.

In Chapter 5, I found the physical and emotional centre of this book: a ferry journey down the mighty Yenisei, 2000 km from Krasnoyarsk to distant Dudinka beyond the Arctic Circle, where all the houses stand on stilts sunk into the permafrost. This leisurely ride, from human civilization to the outer reaches of polar emptiness, put me in mind of a similar epic journey that I read about just a few weeks ago - Negley Farson's trip down the great Volga in the 1920s that took him all the way from Soviet Moscow to the wild mountains of the Caucasus.

It is on the return journey up the Yenisei that Thubron comes unstuck, becomes marooned in the native Entsy village of Potalovo for weeks on end, living in a settlement full of drunks, holed up for the most part in its hospital. At times, he even loses patience with the fatalistic, and fatal, way of native life. But never for too long. He is the most humane of observers, and has all the time in the world for the follies and failures of his fellow man. Chapter 6 is a journey to Lake Baikal, largest, oldest and deepest of all the world's lakes. Even here, he hunts down a crumbling remnant of the gulag, a mica mine shut down in the 1930s when artificial substitutes to the insulating material were invented.

The Buddhism of Buryatia province and the classical grace of the city of Irkutsk follow. The latter became the home of the exiled nobles who led the failed Decembrist uprising of 1825.

*

And then the encounters with the Old Believers. Thubron tracks them down with characteristic determination, these folks who split from the reforming Orthodox Church back in the 1600s over the weighty question of whether to use TWO fingers or THREE when making the Sign of the Cross. And then suffered the most grievous hardships, willingly, as a result of their adherence to the old beliefs and customs. This is an extraordinary passage - in a book that is fucking BRISTLING with extraordinary passages - and as luck would have it, the very morning after the night I read this chapter, I came across the unbelievable story of the Old Believer Karp Lykov who retreated with his family from civilization in 1936 into the remote reaches of the Abakan river, and lived in the forest utterly innocent of all contact with human beings for 42 years, until their clearing was discovered by chance from a helicopter overhead carrying a team of geologists in the summer of 1978. They never even knew that something called the Second World War had come and gone. It was the most amazing story, and came hot on the heels of my first learning about them in Thubron's book. YouTube is still packed full of videos about the Lykov family, and especially about Agafia Lykova, the youngest daughter of the family and the sole survivor who still lives the life of a hermit in the forest where her reclusive family raised her.

What is the one thing that Thubron missed out on? To my mind, it is the Tunguska event, the meteor that crashed into the Siberian taiga a hundred years ago, and gave rise among other things to an episode of the X-Files! He covers the A to Z of Siberia, but I do wish he had found time for this too. No one could have explored that mystery better, gotten closer to its source than Thubron. He also gives rather short shrift to the Civil War, just a single page on the death of Kolchak. A few more pages about the Czech legions, for example, might have been interesting.

The rest of the book is a slow drift down the Amur railway to the Pacific far east, to Khabarovsk, to Yakutia - mammoths! - and finally to Magadan itself. Varlam Shalamov wrote his gulag classic "Kolyma Tales" about life, and more often death, in the labour camps of Magadan, and Thubron in his mood of dogged daring goes to places that no Westerner saw before: the frozen fields of mass death, the radioactive uranium mines that even today kill reindeer, the white mountains in the distance that look flat and one-dimensional, "like the veins of giant leaves swept against the sky."

The book that starts with the startling line - "The ice-fields are crossed for ever by a man in chains" - ends then in those self-same ice-fields, but on a note of hope, in the company of a man whose grandfather was sentenced to five years in the gulag for telling an off-hand joke about Stalin. "I wish my grandfather had lived on. He loved a good joke, and people can joke about anything now. We've still got that. Jokes." And standing on a snowy mountain stained with numberless deaths, the man starts laughing. Thubron leaves us stranded there.

If Conrad or Graham Greene had lived to see the end of communism, this is the kind of book they would have been proud to have written. This is Thubron's answer to Heart of Darkness, replacing the close, humid forests of the Congo with the vast, white emptiness of Siberia. These five stars are the easiest I'll ever give out. This review's crossed 1500 words. Read the book.

[Chandy John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine a country where after a day and a night's train ride you feel you haven't moved at all- it's the same desolate hills, endless forest and snowdrifts. That's the immensity of Siberia for you- a fifth of the Earth's landmass.

Siberia was a dumping ground for criminals and political undesirables right from the start. Under Stalin the gulag system hit its apogee, claiming countless millions of innocents. The ghosts of those who died such tragic meaningless deaths pervades this book.

Stalin's legacy can still be seen in the hundreds of empty villages and mines and the haunted look of the people. This volume, published in 1999, could serve as a good companion to Applebaum's Gulag: A History. Doubtless, two decades on, the setting has changed. It was after all written during a time of great economic despair. Russia was at its worst in recent times.

Thubron's prose is as always neat and poetic. He is rarely boring and has the knack of encountering the right sort of people mostly- though they are often drunk, malnourished and prematurely aged.

Siberia is a great book for geography fiends and throws in a lot of information on the region. With Thubron as a guide, you would feel you know the place quite intimately.

[Keenan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Siberia is a perfect storm of sadness. All the doom and despair of Secondhand Time, the ruthless barbarism of The Gulag Archipelago, and the aimless alcoholism of Under the Volcano, all told through the eyes of a curmudgeonly (read: old and British) writer who seems keen on seeking out the extremes of people's personalities. The old woman with bony fingers who remains steadfast in her belief that the work in those camps meant something; the optimistic doctor posted to the vodka-bottle-laden permafrost wasteland; the cheerful shaman and the boom-boom of his tambour drum. Whether the entertaining, engrossing, and enthralling life stories he writes about constitute a fair picture of the average person's life in Siberia feels like a moot point in a Thubron novel: come into this to read about hopes and dreams and lives at the edges.

In contrast to Behind the Wall, there is a stronger focus on the natural in this book, and Thubron seems most at home writing about the raging power of the Yenisei, the dense growth of larch trees on the edge of the Arctic Circle, the entrancing blue of Lake Baikal. Those passages kept me going between the long stretches of sorrow and I hope they'll do the same for you.

[Miles Row · Rating 3 out of 5]

It had a lot of history but felt a bit like when news show street interviews which always feel edited to fit the story rather than getting a true representation.

[Kriegslok · Rating 4 out of 5]

Colin Thubron's journey through Siberia should probably be read as a snapshot of the time he was traveling - that is the 1990s as Russia struggled with political and economic collapse and became the playground of the mafia and oligarchs. It is an excellent overview of a landmass whose sheer size and inhospitability make visiting all but a small part of it impossible. Still Thubron manages to travel to most of the most historically interesting and important places of the 'rural waste into which were cast the bacilli infecting the state body'. Siberia has been both a place of exile and escape both from invaders and from the political and cultural center. For some the hostile landscape and conditions were the 'Belovodye' or Promised Land. A place away from the 'rot in the bones of Europe' and a ' pole of purity and authentic Russianess'. The list of crimes that could land someone on the road to Siberia, 300 years before the mass deportations of Stalin, is enlightening 'prize fighting, wife beating, begging with false distress, illicit tree felling, vagrancy, fortune telling'.

Ownership of the wastelands remains contested, Thubron meets the Altai female warrior discovered preserved in the permafrost and subject to fierce debate about whether she is of Europe or Asia. He goes seriously off the beaten track to find the burial mounds of the woman in Pazyryk, a journey whose description gives a real feeling of being on the edge of civilisation. The effect of the collapse of the center is clear everywhere as is the clear need for those living in such conditions to know how to stock up to survive.

While the labour and punishment camps of Stalins time may lie in ruins their legacy lives on. It lives on in the cities, towns and settlements they left behind and the industries they built. Today many of these places are in decay, factories have closed, people who can leave have left. Many of the more remote areas are still home to indigenous populations the mythical shamanistic practices of whom Thubron goes in search of but finds little left of cultures subject to repression over decades and more recently victim to economic collapse and the scourge of alcoholism. 'Everything achieved under slavery, it seemed, was being destroyed by freedom'. Even in the community of Old Believers he finds a state of decline and resignation although overall the Orthodox Church has seen a rebirth and renewal since the collapse of the USSR as well and incoming protestant sects.sects.

Despite its size Siberia has suffered the onslaught of human activity. Industry has spilled toxic waste onto the pristine land. Those who live off it and know it best have watched it die, especially the reindeer herding nomadic peoples and those fishing the great rivers. Even Lake Bikal, the worlds largest reserve of fresh water, and an unique ecosystem, has suffered years of pollution.

Finishing his journey in the permafrost bound northern republic of Sakha, where buildings have to be built on pillars sunk into the permafrost, a true sense of the remoteness and inhospitably of the place to humans is and the toughness of those who survive there. This areas cities were built by deportees who died in their tens of thousands in conditions of unimaginable hostility. Thurbron walks the frozen collapsing silent remains and ponders on the dead who lie in unmarked graves.

Thurbons book is made by his meetings with both the ordinary and the extraordinary people of Siberia. That people live and even thrive in such conditions is impressive. So to is the rich cultural and environmental tapestry of this little visited and misunderstood region. This book lifts the curtain of Siberia and its people at another particularly difficult time in its existence. Strangely the impression left is that the collapse of the USSR and its economy is perhaps having an even greater and more destructive impact than anything that has gone before. A wide ranging and engaging introduction to Siberia at a time of significant turmoil. Well worth a read.

[Jan · Rating 5 out of 5]

To start with the conclusion - this is great Travel writing. I can hardly imagine that you will be disappointed provided that you have the slightest suspicion that Siberia might interest you.

An important grip in Thumbron's book is to tell his story about Siberia though his meetings with locals and their stories. I belive this grip is one of the secrets behind the sucsess. First Thumbron has made a very good choice of characters to tell their stories. Second he is very good at turning the stories of these persons into great litterature. Third the focus on these characters in my view is both a good and honest way to describe what makes Siberia into Siberia. The people together with the nature is the by far most important features of Siberia.

-One can argue that many destinations in Siberia and the Urals is a bit like modern art - the subtitle is often more important than the actual part of work. Yekaterinburg where the Tsar family was shot, Pokrovskoe where Rasputin was born, Irkutsk where Kolchak were shot etc are arguably more about that you know that these historical incidents took place there than the act. Thumbron both extends the subtitle and bring the local characters, with very different concers than the last Tsar, Rasputin og Kolchak, to life.

-Thombrun's coverage of the native Siberians is limited. He has included a chapter about Tuva, and the Buryats are included as a part of his visit to the the Ulan Ude region and the Yakuts as part of his visit to Yakutsk. I miss some more in depth coverage though as well as several peoples are not covered. For this subject you could have a look at Anna Reid's The Shaman's coat.

-As his book was published in 1999, it is important to be aware that he describes Siberia in the 90s and no matter how interesting that is by its own terms, it is not representative for what the places that he describes are like now. Combined with the fact that some of the places is described a bit more interesting than they actually are, this means that you need other sources as well if your aim is to plan a journey to Siberia...

-Chapter one about Yekaterinburg, Tobolsk and Pokrovskoe and chapter 3 about Omsk and Novosibisrsk are arguably the weekest in his book. Partly because eastern Siberia is more interesting than Western Siberia, partly because he has put more work into other chapters than these. Chapter 4 about Tuva. Chapter 2, 6 and 7 about the consentration camps in Vorkuta, the Baikal region and Ulan Ude region are just great.

[EAL · Rating 3 out of 5]

At times I really liked this book, and at other times I really disliked it. The writing was occasionally beautiful: "In between hamlets the grasslands are broken by knolls, where cairns are stuck with the rag-hung poles of an old worship, and herds of black and chestnut horses graze against infinity" (98). The first third of the book was, as the reviews said, "cinematically evocative" and deeply moving. As Thubron moved farther east, though, I began to be repulsed. I sensed pity, condescension, from him for the subjects of the writing. A writer who cannot view the people about whom he writes as just as human as he is breaks the trust he has with his reader. I disliked the perspective that came across in his writing. There was, in particular, a passage about Chinese people that made my lip curl. Perhaps he was simply transmitting the views of others. It didn't seem that way. A talented, distasteful writer: what can you do with that?

[Anna Aresi · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book is informative, but somehow it seems to be just repeating the same thing over and over again - boring, I guess (although there are a few nice descriptions, such as that of lake Baikal). The narrator comes across as unsympathetic and slightly arrogant - being accustomed to excellent travel writers such as T. Terzani and R. Kapuscinski, it's hard to like Thubron's style/persona.

[Gaye · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a travelogue type of book of a writer/tourist in Siberia. Makes me realize that Siberia is a place I need never consider as a travel destination.

[Gopakumar · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the desolateness of Siberia, Colin Thubron's masterpiece brings to life a world that very few outsiders ever get to know, not to speak of appreciating. The desolation that wayward industrialisation of the erstwhile USSR wrecked on the fragile landscape of Siberia lies in stark contrast against the awe-inspiring natural wonder that the continent sized Siberian landscape is. It's a patient read, but as you reach the end you'd definitely wish there was more of Siberia that Thubron could trek to.

[Thomas O'Leary · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Siberia by Colin Thubron is a fascinating book that takes you through an unimaginably large tract of land during the mid 1990s, a time of change and turmoil. While the book was tough to get through in spots, the countless people Colin interacts with during his journey keeps you reading. The book gives you a glimpse into this far-away land. If you have a curiosity about Siberia, I would highly recommend a read.

[Prayash Giria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Apart from offering glimpses of a largely unknown land, this book also helps understand the contemporary Russian psyche. Also helps that Thubron writes well - he’s sharp and witty as the best English travel writers typically are. Enjoyed reading this book a lot, and it made me add Siberia to my bucket list, despite its air of bleakness.

[Agnieszka Herda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Zaczyna się obiecująco i ciekawie, ale po przeczytaniu całości: to tylko zbiór luźnych, oceniających przemyśleń podróżniczych i przynudnawych anegdot, które wkrótce ulecą z głowy, mimo barwnego języka. Temat tak interesujący, miejsca tak rzadko opisywane, że liczyłam na solidny reportaż, a ten, niestety, wymęczyłam.

[Agnieszka · Rating 4 out of 5]

To była dobra książka przeplatana bardzo słabymi i nudnymi fragmentami. Czegoś mi w niej brakowało a jednocześnie czasami nie mogłam się oderwać! Paradoks