River of No Reprieve: Descending Siberia's Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny [Hardcover]

Jeffrey Tayler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 11, 2006

One of today's most intrepid writers chronicles a deadly trek through the legendary region that gave birth to the gulag and gave Siberia its outsize reputation for perilous isolation.

In a custom-built boat, Jeffrey Tayler travels some 2,400 miles down the Lena River from near Lake Baikal to high above the Arctic Circle, recreating a journey first made by Cossack forces more than three hundred years ago. He is searching for primeval beauty and a respite from the corruption, violence, and self-destructive urges that typify modern Russian culture, but instead he finds the roots of that culture—in Cossack villages unchanged for centuries, in Soviet outposts full of listless drunks, in stark ruins of the gulag, and in grand forests hundreds of miles from the nearest hamlet.

That’s how far Tayler is from help when he realizes that his guide, Vadim, a burly Soviet army veteran embittered by his experiences in Afghanistan, detests all humanity, including Tayler. Yet he needs Vadim’s superb skills if he is to survive a voyage that quickly turns hellish. They must navigate roiling whitewater in howling storms, but they eschew life jackets because, as Vadim explains, the frigid water would kill them before they could swim to shore. Though Tayler has trekked by camel through the Sahara and canoed down the Congo during the revolt against Mobutu, he has never felt so threatened as he does now.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

[Signature]Reviewed by Tom BissellIn his fifth book, Tayler returns to the Siberian hinterlands of Russia, the country where he has lived for the past 11 years and of which he wrote in Siberian Dawn. This time, however, he struggles 2,400 miles up the Lena River in an inflatable raft with his guide (and bane) Vadim, an ill-tempered veteran of the Soviet-Afghan war. Tayler follows the likely route that the Cossacks"who embody "the best and worst" of the Russian spirit"took in the 16th century, when they annexed much of Siberia for Ivan the Terrible. It was a hard trip then; it is a hard trip now. Tayler, a freakish polyglot who speaks eight languages, is unique among contemporary travel writers. Despite his fondness for death-prowled lands, he rarely complains and never falls prey to self-aggrandizement. The Lena River, however, very nearly undoes him. After a pleasant spell, the temperature drops, bad weather rolls in and soon Tayler is gagging on clouds of mosquitoes and shooing wasplike horseflies"all of which is grippingly described. "In more than two decades of travel," he writes, "I had never... hit this nadir of gloom." Along the way, he and Vadim come ashore to find devastated villages, teenagers dancing away in surreal Arctic discotheques, Soviet irredentists flying the hammer and sickle, drunken Russians and aboriginal people, Baptist missionaries, Yakut shamans (one of whom has his own Web site) and, in what is perhaps the book's most moving interlude, some of the last of Siberia's Volga Germans. The many incidental pleasures of this harrowing if sometimes repetitive book are chiefly literary and sociological. Tayler is good at describing the summer Siberian sky ("a glowing canopy of lavender"), and his thoughts on Russian president Vladimir Putin, who is adored by the very people for whom he provides the least, offers the American reader some borscht for thought about the appeal of their own benighted leader. About halfway through, the book catches fire when Tayler's patience ruptures beneath Vadim's shower of abuse. Movingly, Tayler and Vadim neither become friends nor grow to "understand" each other.This is a book about survival, and Tayler's observations are as bracing, and sometimes shocking, as a lungful of Arctic air: "Had any other people on earth," he writes of the Russians, "done so much to destroy itself?" Tayler's Siberia is unremittingly depressing, and the book concludes with little hope for its people or its culture. As a sympathetic but clear-eyed portrait of an unhappy but beautiful land, River of No Reprieve will be a difficult book to surpass. (July 11)Tom Bissell is the author of Chasing the Sea and God Lives in St. Petersburg. His new book, The Father of All Things, will be published early next year.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

During the summer of 2004, Tayler traveled in a custom-built raft 2,400 miles down the Lena River in eastern Siberia from near Lake Baikal to Tiksi on the Arctic Ocean. The voyage took almost two months and was what Tayler called a partial re-creation of the Cossack journeys that delineated Russia's eastern borders and annexed Siberia to European Russia in the seventeenth century. The boat was constructed to carry enough fuel to get them to the city of Yakutsk, about halfway along the route. They were armed to protect themselves from "potentially desperate villagers and Siberian bears." At one point the temperature soared to 114 and gales battered their tents, marooning them on an island. Tayler, the author of five other books, has spent the last 13 years in Russia and is married to a Russian, and he is the Moscow correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly. Thanks to Tayler's keen powers of observation, readers will relish this trip of high adventure. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (July 11, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618539093
• ISBN-13: 978-0618539093
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #454,134 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Summer rafting in an extreme place with an uncertain future, September 21, 2006

By 

Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: River of No Reprieve: Descending Siberia's Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny (Hardcover)

Burdened with a brutal history of Cossack conquest, labor camps, gulags, displaced people and rapacious resource plundering, and all but abandoned by the state that exploited it, Siberia is the perfect choice for a certain sort of travel writer to go and reflect on the state of the world.

Jeffrey Tayler ("Siberian Dawn," "Angry Wind"), a linguist who speaks Russian, Arabic, French, Greek and several other languages, writes about remote and difficult places - the Sahara, the Congo, Siberia. His previous trip to Siberia was in winter, when he traveled on the frozen Lena River by truck.

This time he goes in summer by inflatable raft down the same river, retracing some 2,400 miles of Cossack exploration, from Lake Baikal to Tiksi on the Arctic Ocean, 450 miles above the Arctic Circle. Tiksi is the sort of place where the deluxe hotel suite does not come with hot water in the "warm" months, the months of "rain and snow, not just snow."

The trip grew out of a desire to clear his head of city clamor and explore the lives of real Russians - the impoverished rural masses. Having lived in Russia for 11 years, made a life and married, Tayler, an American, finds himself despairing of the place. The collapse of communism seems only to have opened the doors to corruption and chaos. "I was seized by a desire to find out what had gone wrong? Had I really devoted my life to a doomed land?"

His guide is the misanthropic Vadim, a Muscovite and Afghan War veteran who drives a truck and spends every summer in the North. He would prefer his beloved Siberia without people and his disdain for Tayler's insistence on stopping at each down-at-heels village to talk with the inhabitants only grows with time. His enthusiasm for the land is vocal and passionate and Tayler's restraint baffles him. Their personalities chafe, but Tayler grows to appreciate his expertise - from his boat handling skills to his precision in setting up the daily camp.

The trip itself is as grim as it is adventurous. The indigenous Yakuts and Evenks, forced by the Soviets to abandon nomadic lives for villages, factories and government subsidies, now find themselves abandoned, the old ways forgotten. The Russians include descendants of prisoners - criminals, dissidents and intellectuals - as well as exiled Baptists and Germans. Others came for the high pay and benefits offered by the Soviet government to harvest the land's rich resources. And now the factories are closed and the benefits long gone.

People, even descendants of those banished by Stalin, yearn for the security and order of a strong central authority. Tayler despairs at their nostalgia for Soviet rule and their support for Putin's strong-arm tactics. Alcohol is a ubiquitous plague.

Even the weather seems to signal collapse. As the raft heads north storm follows storm, lashing the travelers with frigid rain and gale-force winds, when the season calls for balmy temperatures and alpine tundra blooms. Climate change, the inhabitants comment, has deprived them of summer.

Tayler writes with an eye for detail and a certain reserve. Though open to everyone he meets, he is also wary and not easily bamboozled. While Vadim exults over the view at every bend in the river, Tayler's enthusiasm is tempered by the (literally) choking clouds of bugs and a certain impatience with Vadim's insular chauvinism. This is a thoughtful, sympathetic, often melancholy portrait of an extreme place with an extreme history and an uncertain future.

-- Portsmouth Herald

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A mentally satisfying challenge - not just the physical difficulties, August 16, 2008

By 

Mary McGreevey "frwhiskey" (SAn Francisco) - See all my reviews

This review is from: River of No Reprieve: Descending Siberia's Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny (Paperback)

Many of us have been interested in Russia from the Cold WAr days, and I certainly have tried my best to learn the language, and I visited three times in a backpack/student-ish way in the 1980's. When I spotted this book in the library, the outdoorsman-feel of the cover turned me off, then I browsed through the pages and realized that Taylor was a great writer about people. It's a great book for anyone to read, who would like to know how the "real Russians" are, out in the countryside - and we're talking very far out, in Siberia, on collapsing former-collective farms, living on dribs and bits and puny pensions, hunting, fishing, small gardens, minimal electricity, police or medical service, paved roads, or telephone systems.

Taylor has a sharp eye also for the various ethnic types who've made their way up there: exiled Polish gentry from two centuries back, for example, have led to beautiful young women with "aristocratic" faces. Volga Germans, exiled by cattle car in 1941, still run their farms with an admirable efficiency and cleanliness, with animals penned in and no litter, as opposed to the semi-abandoned Russian farms on the opposite side of the Lena river. Yakuts and other natives, once nomads, now settled into small towns, are mixed with the locals. All seem to have a love of cigarettes and alcohol regardless of racial origin, which destroys the young people's health, teeth, skin and handsome features quickly; people tell him that at 22, they're "old"; teens are "the young". Professionals from the poor parts of former Soviet regime, e.g. Bishkek in Kurgistan, see opportunities, and move to Siberia for better wages, sending all possible saving home for their children's educations.

Taylor's own Western mentality comes into a clash with his river guide Vadim's perversities and pride. Vadim is a rebel against modern society, used to be a well-paid manual worker under the Soviets (a Siberian truckdriver!), and loves the open forests and freedom from people that one finds in the North. Taylor also loves Siberia's nature - why else take such a ride or pay Vadim, anyway? - but he argues back against Vadim's Russophile Grizzly-Adams egotism. Things get rough between them, while Taylor is absolutely dependent on Vadim's expertise with the boat, the camping equipment, the endless flies and midges and mosquitoes, so he is not angry at him; rather, Vadim seems angry at him. This growing tension is an excellent device to hook any reader, as one wishes to know if something truly awful, some horrible river crisis, can lead even to blows or deathly injuries.

It's definitely written by a man, as one sees in his descriptions of the women working in cafes, hotels or shops. One wonders sometimes if his wife read the manuscript, or whether he cares. In describing the various men, he is not so generous in his praise; a very telltale male style.

Taylor had been living in Moscow since 1990, and was married to a Russian, speaks the language, and has travelled widely. He writes with a great incisiveness about the people, which kept me going straight through. My own memories of hitchhiking in Finnish Lapland, hooking up with hunters, and meeting people in isolated communities, came through strongly. Russians' longing for a strong central government is not unique to Russia, as one could learn from world travel or wide reading, but it is especially poignant to read such statements from people whose own parents or grandparents had been exiled or deported to Siberia. They live without regrets that they are there, instead of in their homelands.

The atrocities of Russia come alive in Taylor's words, as Siberia was filled with the Soviet and Tsarist victims.

Enjoy a suspenseful read!

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Other Russia, January 9, 2007

By 

Walter H. Brooke (St. Petersburg, FL, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: River of No Reprieve: Descending Siberia's Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny (Hardcover)

Most of us who have visited or lived in Russia since 1990 have spent out time in the major cities or around them. Jeffrey Tayler takes us to places in Russia that we will probably never have an opportunity to see. He does more than look and see. He experiences. If you are familiar with Russia or parts of it, the story makes sense and we can relate. Certainly what he experiences is far more extreme than what most of us know. And yet, it is still familiar. From his travel companion's contempt for all people who aren't "real" Russians, to the wish for and fear of contact with nonRussians that others exhibit, this is a story of Russian people. I learned, I was depressed, I laughed, and this book made me want to go back to Russia and experience it again and again.
Walter Brooke