Customer Reviews

In Siberia

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Russia metamorphosed in the 20th century assuming and shedding identities as often as it did heads of state. Finding an examination of the history of these events that maintains some semblance of neutrality and pure observation seemed unlikely - until now. IN SIBERIA is a rare combination study of geography, economics, political science, sociology, and history in a format of conversations with the people who live there. Author Thubron is a modern day Richard Halliburton (remember him?), a man brave enough to singly explore the vastness of Siberia in search of the identity of its people. What he gives us is a lushly detailed panorama of physical grandeur and a near clinical insight into the psyches of the people he meets along his journey. His characters are so well reported that they seem to inhabit a fine fiction/history novel. But the sweep of his conversations with these time worn people is so honestly presented that the reader feels privy to shrouded secrets of the past and intimations of the future of a much maligned and misunderstood country.

Thubron seems intent on finding the sustaining spirit of his acquaintances; we encounter myriad variations of Russian Orthodox /Buddhist/atheist religion. We hear personal accounts of the labor camps of Stalin and Kruschchev that surpass even Solzhenisyn's descriptions. But more important we are introduced to the ordinary people of this vast country and Thubron shares these characters with insight and intelligent reportage that makes us feel as though we journeyed with him.

And this is supposed to be a Travel Book? I think not. This is a volume of first-hand information that leaves the reader enriched and empathetic.......an enormously fine read!

An ex-political prisoner, an elderly shaman, a vodka-sodden drunk, a KGB agent turned Baptist preacher, a Rasputin lookalike, a lonely babushka - they are all part of the landscape of Siberia brought to life in Colin Thubron's latest masterpiece of travel writing. Siberia's not an easy assignment: covering one- third of the northern hemisphere, it has a haunted past and a harsh present, inevitable, Thubron implies, given Siberia's history as "a rural waste into which were cast the bacilli infecting the state body: the criminal, the sectarian, the politically dissident."

Speaking accented Russian in areas where Westerners were forbidden until only a few years ago, Thubron sometimes passes for a down-at-the-heels Estonian as he crosses Siberia, making forays north to desolate Arctic towns founded as Stalinist labor camps.

The people he meets stick in the memory, captured with the eye and ear of a novelist. (No surprise there: when not traveling, Thubron writes edgy, dark fiction.) In Rasputin's hometown of Pokrovskoe, Thubron meets Viktor, "a ghastly distillation" of the dark magician, a disturbing man shunned by other villagers. In the Arctic town of Vorkuta, where hundreds of thousands perished in labor camps during Stalin's reign, he finds an old woman watching dubbed Mexican soap operas. She is a faithful Communist, arrested in 1938 on a whispered denunciation and sent to the coal mines for a dozen years. Despite herself, and to Thubron's dismay, she still can't condemn the system that wasted her life. And then there are the babushkas in Omsk, celebrating the blessing of a pool of water near a new Orthodox monastery by plunging in with joyous abandon once the archbishop has moved on.

While new-found freedom and hope pop up in odd places, often linked with dormant religions slowly budding to life, darkness prevails in Thubron's account. Looking for traces of the Entsy people, once nomads in northern Siberia, he strands himself with them in the remote village of Potalovo. What he finds is alcoholism, poverty, and despair. Other native peoples, stripped of their cultures under the Soviets and left with the hollow shell of Communism, are equally adrift. And everywhere are reminders of the Gulag, signposts of man's extraordinary capacity for evil.

Though the darkness may be palpable, in the hands of a writer as skilled as Thubron, it's not depressing. He's the best travel writer working in English: a traveler, not a tourist, taking risks, uninterested in his own hardships. In Siberia is his best book yet.

This is one of the few books that I've wanted to read again the moment I finished it. It's like a cross between Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Kosinski's The Painted Bird with one crucial distinction - it's not fiction.

The surreal and tragic effect of this book builds relentlessly as it goes along. By the end, I felt like I had a sense of a place that went well beyond a familiarity with appearance, to a much more important (and difficult for an author to convey) sense of what it feels like. The unspeakable tragedy of this land - centered around the hideous legacy of the Stalinist years - is conveyed in a thorough, convincing and compelling way. You cannot read this book and remain untouched by it - it is powerful stuff.

A unique feature is the author's language and style, which is often very poetic. The juxtaposition of the fine writing with the often macabre and disturbing subject matter makes for a strong effect.

I haven't read any other books by this author, but I will before long. This is an excellent, and highly memorable piece of work. Highly recommended.

'In Siberia' is about the author's trek from the Ural Mountains to Magadan in northeastern Siberia, using train, bus, truck, boat, and air. Colin Thubron is not the most engaging of travel writers. He isn't witty, he reveals little of himself, and he isn't good at building his travel narratives around a theme or 'hook.' Thubron's approach is more like that of a journalist - to document what happens to him, what he sees, and the people he encounters.

The low spots of the book are due to Thubron's habit of getting bogged down in pointless, over-long interviews. In one instance he spends too much space on a crank-physicist who claims that 'magnetic waves' can cure any disease, and later, on a fringe-archeologist who claims the first humans evolved in Siberia. A couple of pages on these eccentrics might be amusing, but Thubron doesn't know when to move on. Still, the book is of value because it documents an intriguing region at a turning point in history. He describes communities far away from roads and rail lines and, thanks to his fluent Russian, he interviews people there and describes how they see the world. Perhaps most important are his descriptions of the abandoned prison camps, some of which have never been viewed by westerners, and which are scheduled to be bulldozed. His accounts of what the Soviet government did in these camps will stick with the reader long after the book is finished.

This is a tremendous book, one that I would recommend to anybody that has either spent some time in Siberia or that is simply interested in the region. Indeed, one of the few criticisms that I have is that the book is too short. Thubron glosses over a lot of interesting places. He is undoubtedly more interested in peripheral, off the beaten track places than he is in major cities. He barely describes places such as Novosibirsk, the largest city in Siberia and the third largest in Russia. He similarly doesn't spend much time describing cities like Omsk, Ekaterinburg, and Krasnoyarsk, and he doesn't even make it to Vladivostok. Thubron's forte is describing life in places forgotten by Moscow and unknown to the outside world. I've long been fascinated by Siberia and have spent many hours poring over maps, identifying population points in the far north and wondering how on earth anybody could live there. Well, Thubron visits such places and portrays the difficult conditions of life there. He spends nearly a month in a small town near the Arctic Circle. Since there are obviously no hotels there, he finds a bed in the hospital. He describes how every night the drunks knock on the doors and windows trying to get inside so to find a warm bed for the night. The local doctor is a highly educated man who could have had a successful career in any of Russia's larger cities, and it is fascinating to read his story of how he ended up in this godforsaken place. Thubron also describes how Soviet planning destroyed many of the traditions and ways of life of the native peoples of Russia's far north. The author has a fine ear for detecting racism in his discussions with ordinary Russians, whether it is directed against the ethnic minority groups whose traditions were altered under the Soviets or the Chinese who have immigrated in large numbers to Russia's Far East. Among the more interesting parts of the book is Thubron's stay in Birobidzhan, the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast' in the Far East. This region was originally established to serve as a homeland for Russia's Jews, and many Jews from abroad immigrated there in the early Soviet period. Thubron describes how most of the Jews have emigrated to Israel and those still living there are planning to do so as soon as they find the means. Whatever semblance of a Jewish community that existed there in the past has pretty much evaporated. Thubron also visits a community of Orthodox Old Believers in the Republic of Buryatia and describes how they are trying to hold on to their traditions amid the social upheavals that have engulfed post-Soviet Russia. The book ends with Thubron's visit to Kolyma, the infamous prison camp during Soviet times. He provides a chilling account of the atrocities that occurred there and it is simply eerie reading his description of the buildings that still stand. Overall, Thubron does not provide a great deal of direct political analysis. Rather, his tactic is to understand how the tumultuous events of Russia's history, both recent and distant, have shaped the lives of ordinary people. Thubron is at his best when he lets these ordinary people speak for themselves and relate their experiences. This is truly a great book for anybody interested in Russia, past and present. I only wish that Thubron would write a sequel to this work!

Colin Thurbron takes us through a journey into a new and old world. The journey through Siberia provides a snapshot into an area of the world that until recently was off limits to westerners. A world steeped in history with the clashes of cultures, the stench of conflict and specter of death. Siberia was the land where people were sent to die - exile, the gulags, religious schisms. A land where the government got what it paid for: free slave labor produced construction, such as railroad lines, that failed to last in the harsh thaw/freeze cycles of the region. In most people's minds it's a land of frozen cold.

In this cold harshness, there is the new harshness of life after the breakup of the Soviet Union. While in the west we have hailed the new freedoms, the collapse of communism, the rebirth of capitalism as a warm new light on Russia, in Siberia this light is in cold eclipse. Collapse means a loss of ideals, poverty, unemployment and inflation. And it is in here that the book becomes a depressing read. Everywhere that Thubron went, eh found decay and disillusionment; a land steeped in history, yet where history had been built and erased as if a chalkboard by the ideologies in power. Stories of inhabitants carry less promise for the future than a resignation to decline and continued muddling through.

The landscape runs the gamut from beautiful to bleak, and this is reflected in the people that Thubron writes about. He does a decent job of describing where he is and the histories involved in sites he visits. The book reflects his research, and his knowledge of the subject - how he can bring alive the last days of the Romanovs in the Russian Revolution, and the people who still visit the site of their death where the renewal of freedom does not necessarily mean a renewal of hope for the monarchy. Or the church. Yet the church(s) cling to life even after the long night of communist rule.

One of my biggest problems with the book is that as the author moves westward, winter approaches, the landscape bleaker, the areas less populated. And the stories of the people parallel this - becoming bleaker and full of more despair. Settlements being slowly abandoned. Old ways dying. The book falls further into melancholy as it goes along. The redeeming bright spot for it is the author's continual ability to find the average person who, in the midst of poverty and despair, still find the need and ability to help him - to bring him into their lives, to share food and shelter without even knowing who he is. It is reading between the lines of the story that you can see the hope of a people that, hardened by their lives, and their land, still survive.

Thubron brings Siberia to life, he gives you the chill of the barren landscape while holding in the warmth of the people. He evokes Siberia in an almost Tolkien-like way, the barreness recalls the vast streches of Tolkiens middle earth. If you even have a passing intrest in Russia or Siberia get this book, it is worth every minute you get lost between the pages. If this book has a failing, that is a big if, it is that it is too short, I wanted to be lost in Thubron's Siberia much longer.

As a two-year resident of Siberia and author of ROAMING RUSSIA: An Adventurer's Guide to Off-the Beaten Track Russia and Siberia, I found this book to be an eloquent account of Thubron's 1998 six-month journey across Siberia. Full of history, life, and hope, this is the best available introduction to modern Siberia.

I'm not a great fan of Colin Thobrun. His style is dark and often involves too much conversation with people he meets along the way. But this time, though, CT is in a part of the world that is almost lost in time - a place that's perfect for his dark moody style. Some pictures would have made it really memorable. But that's just a minor quibble. This is travel writing from the centre of the wilderness. CT will conjure images that you'll find hard to forget.

The trip begins on a shuddering train journey east to Ekaterinburg, the scene of the Romanov massacre in 1917. After a brief stop, and some musings on their fate, Thubron sets off east on a tour of Siberia and the lands taken over during the great push eastwards and Stalin's purges. Off we go, up and down the great raging rivers, to once-important communities long forgotten by Moscow. How desperate are the lives of people who once took everything for granted and who now have next to nothing. Thubron's dark style is perfect for the characters and mind-sets of post-Soviet Siberia.

We visit Lake Baikal - the world's deepest lake - and Irkutsk, the scene of Russia's gold rush in the 19th century. What a mad place that must have been. There were dancing troupes from around the world, carpet baggers and all manner of adventurers. I bet few, if any readers, know anything about this place and its highly colourful past. We meet mad scientists, mystics and religious nutters (often the same people) and hear the tales of Russian insensitivity towards local ethnic groups. Half the place seems close to destitution. The fate of missionaries who spent twenty years in the wild and frozen east without a single conversion left me morbid, but absolutely riveted.

Finally, Thubron takes us over the edge into a very dark place. The death camps of Northeast Siberia. CT doesn't hold back. Through local guides and interpreters he describes the absolutely awful, tragic death camp butchery at Magadan and Kolyma where temperatures regularly reach 50 below and prisoners often had little more than a hole in the ground for shelter.

I'm sure he'll never forget what he saw and was told as he walked around ghost-ridden huts that once housed screams and tortured innocents.

I'll never forget In Siberia. Brilliant.

This is a serious book, not a page turner, perhaps not a book for the young and optimistic who might prefer to look forward and meet hopeful young Siberians than to slowly unfold the memories of some of its older citizens. Nor is it a book for the lexically impoverished. I first encountered it as a full text audio book on about a dozen cassettes. I greatly recommend this slower-paced way of getting to know the book. Later consideration of the written text only confirmed my delight; this is an impressive writer who reconsiders his sentences and uses a wider range of the resources of our English language than many of us may be used to. As a result, he manages to give a precise and individual tone to each description, whether of the land or of its people, despite the similarities that will recur. Don't expect a travel guide or an engaging host: the book gives little or no practical information and reveals little too about the author, except his obvious talent for drawing out personal stories and his pluck in venturing into remote and dangerous contexts. No, this is a serious book and, all in all, a terrific achievement, as its readers will begin to understand a most significant and oversized piece of the jigsaw of human history. Every serious minded person should know about this book and try to find time to read it.