Customer Reviews

Murderers in Mausoleums: Riding the Back Roads of Empire Between Moscow and Beijing

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If one has been harboring a desire to travel through Mother Russia of long ago, as well as, experience the current Russia, after the break up of the Soviet Union in 1991, but has been afraid to do so becuase of language barriers, this is the guide. Armed with this book, a good map, a dictionary of all the languages and dalects of Russia, all is possible.

This is the largest land mass on our planet. All climates, all terrains, all levels of education, all levels of ignorance to what we know as civilization having not touched some of these people since the days of Genghis Khan.

Jeffrey Tayler starts his journey by train in Moscow. He covers all nations and peoples from that point to Beijing, China. The boundaries, histories and peoples of Chechna, the Tatars, the Yakuts, the Ingus. The lands of history of the Kazaks are discussed at great length. The Greeks brought Christianity to the people of Ossetia and Georgians. Facts such as: the Ural River being the waterway that to according to Russian tradition divides Europe from Asia. Descriptions of Suleyman Mountain and Kyrgyzstan's cpital Osh.

Mention of many writers on the classic list of Russian's elite, such as Turgenev, Pushkin, Lermontov and most interesting the ballet dancer Boris Gudonov having been born a Tatar. Aside from these little tidbits of history and geography " Murderers in MMausoleums " holds a wealth of informtion useful to the amateur or the serious scholar of Russia, students of its former satellites and current crop of countries which have seceaded from Soviet Union.

The book also has a chapter on Karaganda, the architectually ugly site built by the Soviets, made even more ugly in terms of human decadence of the soul. A place that was used as a Gulag during the Soviet Regime. Many interesting interviews and conversations hetween Jeffrey Talyer and young people he meets in his travels and throughout it all the marvelous feeling that one is not reading a dry travelog but a novel with sensual characters and history celebrating the spirit and traditions of a great people. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in Russian and history from the time of Ghenkhis Khan to the present.

The book was written with sincerity and love for detail that characterizes Mr Tayler's previous travelogue titled River Of No Reprieve. What it lacks in comparison is the sense of discovery. Instead, there is a sense of guilt and shame for America. The author sits down with all kinds of deluded individuals to hear how America deserved 9-11. Perhaps his contempt for president Bush justified eating their food and drinking to their toasts. Most of what we learn from his round-table experience is commonplace today and of little investigative value.

I don't pretend to be an expert, but history references must be accurate to support the presentation. On page 8 or 9 Tsar Ivan III "carts away Moscow's veche bell", the last symbol of democracy. Moscow never had one. The veche (people's assembly) existed in the Republic of Novgorod until it was defeated by Muscovy, and its bell was duly confiscated.

On a visit to Russia, hanging out with the locals may be a lot of fun. You can sample traditional hospitality, get plenty of attention, and stay above the fray. The author is a long-time expatriate based in Moscow. I think that may have affected his judgement and fogged up his crystal ball. Or this could be a case of overreachiitis - a common affliction among professional journalists with no academic creds.

I could not finish this book. Perhaps you will, just be forwarned.

Disappointed--that's how I felt after finishing Tayler's saga of his trip from Moscow to Beijing. His premise is very interesting, to find out the attitudes of peoples in the vast areas of the Caucasus and Central Asia, and he visits cities off the usual Silk Road, such as Makhachkala, Atyrau, and Astana. However, Tayler seems to converse mainly with disgruntled minorities, Cossacks, Kabardin, Uygurs, and mainly in bars. By the end I was fed up with reading repetitively about how much he drank and wondered why he didn't spend more time talking to the occasional food shopper, small businessman or local politician. His abrupt "summary/conclulsion" on the last two pages was the last straw. "Murderers in Mausoleiums"--a great title for a mediocre book.

Like ALL of Jeffery Tayler's books....he takes you where you will never ever go yourself and brings you the world.........None of us have the guts to do what he has done......We would be crying like babies.......This books helps you understand why we can NEVER EVER win the war in Afganistan

I hope that someday a great writer will chronicle the fascinating life of Jeffrey Tayler- a brilliant expatriate American writer that travels to some of the world's most difficult and dangerous places and manages to convey the essence of these places that most of us will never visit. Tayler speaks Russian, Arabic, Turkish, French, and spends his "vacations" in places like Chad, Dagestan, the Congo and Siberia, rather than Provence and Tuscany. In this new book, which may be his finest to date, Tayler takes us to obscure, little visited muslim republics in Russia like Dagestan, and then cuts across Central Asia and into western China.

Unlike other journalists that breeze into a hotspot on an expense account and get a few cliche'd quotes from their cab driver and someone at their hotel, Tayler gets down and dirty with the locals in their language. He's not afraid to tell us about nights of drunken debauchery, where desperate people bare their souls to him to the sounds of "I like to move it, move it!"

This is a great read, but sadly, Tayler is too good for this gengre- why people would rather read Eat, Love and Pray over Tayler's adventures is beyond me. An exhilirating read- highly recommended.

This is a facinating and revealing description of places and people that the author describes. This is quite interesting but I feel it is really not about what the title suggests. The author has a wonderful way of taking you with him to some seedy joints along the way and meeting some tough characters. It is particulary enlightening as to the history of peoples that strongly retain a high degree of hatered toward Russians, as well as getting to know a bit more about Muslims. The writer makes impressive use of perfectly good words which are little known outside of his wrtiting. Something, I would say, akin to words used in Melville's Moby Dick. Well worth reading.

That Eurasia has had more than its fair share of tyrants more or less in the Ungern-Sternberg mold is the impetus for Jeffrey Tayler's new book Murderers in Mausoleums. Setting out on a journey from Moscow to Beijing that is bookended by the eponymous mausoleum residents (Lenin and Mao), Tayler wants to look at how life is being lived in the villages and towns of the Eurasian space today, unfiltered by analysts or media, to see how people are getting by, to understand how Eurasians can so value liberty yet so idealize dictators.

It would be impossible to summarize what he finds, but if you have read Tayler's River of No Reprieve: Descending Siberia's Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny, about his trip down the Lena River, you know that half the fun is in the journey. (As reviewed in Russian Life)

What a boring book! I read it through to the end of chapter 5, a quarter of the book (80 pages) and gave up - I tossed it into my mausoleum trash-bin. Just nothing informative nor interesting about his travels. For any `background' information regarding the regions he traveled, it seems like that the author got his historical data from whatever travel guidebook he happened to stumble upon. His conversations with taxi drivers and bar-flies were - well - shallow. The most interesting portion of the author's book was its title, downhill from there.