Open Lands : Travels Through Russia's Once Forbidden Places [Paperback]

Mark Taplin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1998

"An extraordinary and beautifully written chronicle that combines the best of different genres: travel writing, journalism, and history . . . A modern classic tale of a foreigner’s travels through Russia."--Kirkus Reviews

VAST FORBIDDEN AREAS, once marked in red on official maps of the Soviet Union, were suddenly thrown open for travel in 1992 when the United States and Russia signed the "Open Lands" agreement which allowed free travel throughout both countries. For nearly 75 years whole cities and regions, roads, rail lines, and rivers, had been colored crimson on the maps, hidden from the prying eyes of foreigners by the secretive Soviet government.
Taplin interpreted the Open Lands agreement as an invitation to hit the road, visiting seven cities and regions – from the Arctic to the Caucasus, from Gorky in the west to Kamchatka in the far east – which had been barred to foreigners for decades. Taplin’s report of what he found, Open Lands, is an exhilarating, rugged journey into the world of ordinary Russians.
"While Open Lands does not pretend to be a scholarly work," wrote the Moscow Times, "there is enough research here to satisfy the historian. It is a thoroughly enjoyable read . . . a heartfelt evocation of lands and peoples struggling to come to grips with their past and their future."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Mark Taplin went to Russia in 1984, a junior-level diplomat sent deep into Cold War land. He tells of the map he studied, colored green for the few cities where foreigners were allowed, and omnipresent red for "Stay Away." In 1992 Taplin returned. Russia and the U.S. had signed an "Open Lands" agreement allowing free travel, and Taplin wanted to explore the lands that taunted and haunted him from the map eight years before. The result is a book you can't put down, an informed look at a complex country. Russia requires more than a casual eye and pen to sort through the contradictions, and Taplin excels in both. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

An extraordinary and beautifully written chronicle that combines the best of different genres: travel writing, journalism, and history. His first book reveals Taplin, a former public-information officer in the American Embassy in Moscow, to be a keen observer of Russian life and a gifted writer. Fortuitously, he was living in Moscow in 1992 when Russia and the US signed the ``Open Lands'' agreement permitting free travel throughout both countries. Taplin immediately took action. ``Instinctively,'' he writes, ``I knew I had to go beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg, sly old deceivers of travelers past. Was there a truer expression of Russia's past and its future in those forbidden places of the Soviet era?'' He searches for answers in seven locales: Velikiy Ustyug, Vorkuta, Arkhangelsk & Solovki, Kabardino-Balkaria, Tuva, Kamchatka, and Vladivostok. His journeys are full of surprises, revealing a curious mixture of the old and the new, the Soviet-driven and the local. Contrary to general opinion, Vladivostok is not alien or exotic; ``it was a veritable bastion of Russianness.'' It is also, Taplin finds, the very embodiment of the new Russia, its future ``framed, at least for now, by commerce, crime and chaos.'' In Vorkuta, an inhospitable, snow-covered land that is home to isolated villages and the ruins of innumerable Gulag camps, Taplin discovers ghosts of Russia's past. With his malleable prose, he is able to convey the sentiments, personalities, and worlds of both the head organizer of monuments honoring the Gulag's victims and of a woman who defends and honors those who headed the forced-labor brigades that built the region's roads and railroads. Above all, it is Taplin's exquisite literary sensibility that animates this narrative. A description of Vladivostok's airport, applicable universally to former Soviet or East European transport vehicles illustrates his precision and wit: ``The airport terminal . . . was another of Russia's countless dysfunctional edifices, a glass-fronted incubator of grime and body odor.'' A modern classic tale of a foreigner's travels through Russia. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 376 pages
• Publisher: Steerforth; 1st Pbk. Ed edition (September 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1883642876
• ISBN-13: 978-1883642877
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,752,823 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Worth a read - SLANTED, but worth a read, August 23, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Open Lands : Travels Through Russia's Once Forbidden Places (Paperback)

A good effort, and most of it is interesting and entertaining. His description of the mood and conditions are quite accurate and illuminating.

Which is the rub - his bias gives the book a feel of one written at the height of the Reagan era, and not by a typical American travelling Russia in the 90s. An 'Information Officer' in the U.S. embassy, son of a spook... 'nuff ced. His description of Russian trains clearly show he's NEVER ridden on Amtrak, and his condemnation of 'soulless monumental Stalinist architecture' makes me wonder WHERE in Washington D.C. he was living.

The main annoyance with the book is his constant references to some mysterious pre-revolutionary golden age in Russia. Basically, he seems to feel that everything SINCE the Revolution was bad, and everything BEFORE automatically good (perhaps coming up with spin for the State Dept. has made it easy for him to ignore the pre-revolutionary 90% illiteracy, NO health care, serfdom, etc. - he doesn't seem to recall that the schoolkids he talks to wouldn't have BEEN schoolkids under old Nicky II).

As I said, a good read, but it has a definite Reagan-era feel to it. A good companion to Jeffrey Tayler's OUTSTANDING 'Siberian Dawn', or Colin Thubron's "Lost Heart of Asia', and 'In Siberia'.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Open Lands, Closed Mind?, January 11, 2004

By 

R. V. Prooyen "qx" (South Melbourne, Victoria Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Open Lands : Travels Through Russia's Once Forbidden Places (Paperback)

This is basically a time-warp report which punishes Russia about past tragedies, human suffering, and sly politics; written with a sort of morose satisfaction. It's not about the Russian spirit successfully striving to leapfrog from the 19th century Russian culture into the 21st century global culture. Readers will either rub their hands with glee at the sullen, false representation of Russia's lost century as still extant, or they will admire the spirit, creativity and willpower of a people strong enough to bounce from a 3rd world country to a fledgling 1st world country...in just ten years!

For the savvy reader, the book does provide a remarkable opportunity to read between the lines and compare new news with old history. The trap for the unwary reader is to take the author's second-hand descriptions of old Russian tragedies and past injustices as a blanket picture of present day. He lovingly describes the infrastructure conditions left over from an oppressive era; cracked buildings, ex gulag-prisoners' memories, hidden mass graves, cold trains, sheep's-head dinners, 1940-truck repairs, out-dated clothing, smuggling, mud, vodka, no bitumen, and so on.
All seems hopeless and the read can be a bit of a downer unless one slaps himself awake to realize that Russia is not starting from the bottom. It's not an apathetic, fly-blown, poverty stricken bog that can't feed itself. In reality, there is no-one starving, the trains are clean and do run on time. They have industry, science, medicine, atomic energy, universities, space travel, literature, art, agriculture, creative spirit, smiles and hope.
Otto von Bismark, the Prussian chancellor, once commented, "The Russians may take a long time to saddle their horses, but when they ride, they ride!"

I give the book three stars for reporting, with seeming relish, only the unsavory.There's an opportunity for the author to redeem his objectivity and do the trip again in present time for Volume Two. It would make a very interesting read. Except next time, interview the people who are remaking the country; shave, bathe and leave the back-pack at home.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Exploring the sticks of the "new" Russia., May 6, 2000

By 

Joseph Haschka (Glendale, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Open Lands : Travels Through Russia's Once Forbidden Places (Paperback)

In 1992, The United States and Russia signed an accord allowing the citizens of each country the right to travel freely throughout the territory of the other, thus reversing years of Cold War policy that had closed off access to cities and immense tracts of land to the respective peregrinations of both "commie comrades" and "imperialist warmongers". In this book, Mark Taplin, an employee of unexplained duties who represents Washington's Foggy Bottom in Mother Russia, records his observations as he visits newly "Open Lands" at the far margins of his host country.

Taplin is one of those intelligent, observant individuals who can write a travel monologue that is appealing to intelligent, curious readers that want more out of life than driving to Disney World in the family SUV. His honest, yet sympathetic, portrayal of post-Soviet Russia and the condition of its people in such places as Vorkuta (the former center of Uncle Joe's Gulag), Tannu Tuva (on the edge of Mongolia), and Vladivostok ("Lord of the East"), reveals much of what is wrong, and right, in today's Russian Federation. What is more, he provides histories of the regions in which he wanders, salt to the literary meal devoured by those of us who, though we may travel extensively, will likely never visit these corners of the earth. Finally, Taplin writes with a sense of humor, an indispensable character trait that served him especially well as he semi-surreptitiously makes his way to the interior of the Kamchatka Peninsula and an almost comic encounter with the Russian secret police.

My only complaint, but one that prevents me from awarding 5 stars to this entertaining and informative volume, is the failure of the author to include the photos he says he took along the way. Instead, at the head of each chapter, we are offered a fuzzy, unenlightening, boring image created by some freelance photographer hack that adds virtually nothing to the text that follows. A significant, disappointing oversight!