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Siberia, Siberia

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Valentin Rasputin is one of Russia's greatest living writers and may well be remembered one day as the country's finest author of the twentieth century. Mikkelson and Winchell achieve the nearly impossible in translating the poetic power and beauty of Rasputin's style as well as his content.
Siberia, Siberia is an essential book for anyone with an interest in this fascinating region. A wonderous read.

Valentin Rasputin comes from a village that is now underwater, flooded by the massive Bratsk Dam in Siberia. He seeks to preserve what has survived the flood and fire of the Soviet era and to awaken his reader to a moral awareness of the need to preserve and protect Siberia.

He asks where most Russians stand, "on the side of paternal memory, on which the people's prosperity depends to a large extent, or on the side of a militant carelessness toward sacred things that we can't seem to outgrow? Whom will we be with and whom will we be against when the cleansing period of sobering up finally sets in?" (287) It's clear which side he's on, and he wants to bring his readers over to it.

He seeks to convince two groups -- political leaders and the intelligentsia -- of the need to preserve the past. The first is an obvious audience, since the Soviets destroyed so much, both by actual demolition and by extreme pollution. The second group is more implied but is still there. The intelligentsia of Moscow and St. Petersburg tend to have a dismissive attitude toward the provinces, which I have termed the "Gogolian paradigm." This involves an argument that the provinces are all the same in order to show one's identification with the intelligentsia of the two capitals. Rasputin doesn't agree with this and identifies himself with his native Siberia and shows how different its different parts are. After all, Siberia is larger than the United States and Europe combined, so it only makes sense that it's not all the same.

There is a useful introduction by the editors, which gives the larger historical context of the book, written during perestroika, and also a short synopsis of each chapter. The body of the book consists of a series of essays on different parts of Siberia. Each chapter shows the dangers that this part of Siberia faces. For example, the chapter on Tobolsk, once the capital of Siberia and the site of the most important Russian victory over the Khanate of Sibir', begins by explaining how important the town is to the Russian people and ends by shows how endangered it is. In particular, the Lower Town, below the Tobolsk kremlin, is sinking into the ground and many important churches and buildings are being lost.

The next chapter, on Baikal, is a model of persuasive writing. He begins by describing how beautiful and unique Lake Baikal is. His writing about nature is very lyrical, more so than his writing about towns. Readers who want to smile should look for video of the nerpa. They are a seal unique to Baikal and - well, you should just look. Only after fully involving the reader does he turn to a discussion of the pollution and willful defiling of the lake by an unnecessary placement of a cellulose factory at its shores. (By the way, this factory closed down for a while because it wasn't making money, but then has recently unfortunately reopened.)

Rasputin's writing on nature is more open and free than his writing on towns, even when those towns are important to Russian history. For example, the section on Irkutsk, where he has lived, isn't nearly as joyous as his chapter on the Gorno-Altai region, which he presents as a region of beauty and wonder. Also, in that chapter, he presents his ideal man, a Russian forest ranger named N.P. Smirnov. Smirnov lives entirely in harmony with nature. Smirnov's wife is an indigenous Siberian, and its clear that Rasputin sees this as another example of his authenticity.

The chapter that presents an entire community living in harmony with nature is that on Russkoe Ustye, a series of villages on the Indirka River in the far north. He argues that Russians fled from Ivan the Terrible and settled there, where extremely old versions of the Russian language have been preserved. By the way, he accepts Russian intermarriage with natives and is more concerned with the continuation of the Russian language than with a separate Russian ethnicity in the region. Perhaps this is because he sees the language as the true marker of Russianness. The whole way of life of this region is endangered, though, and Rasputin doesn't think it will survive.

Rasputin feels both the gloom and joy of ruins. The chapter on Kyakhta, the Russian border town with China that once held many rich and enlightened Russian merchants, is one of the best examples of this. Although little of Kyakhta's glory days remain, it hasn't been scarred by Soviet development. It is true that the Soviet version of modernism is the most aggressively ugly I've ever seen, and the thought that no tower blocks were built in Kyakhta seems something worthy of applause. Rasputin would rather contemplate falling down wooden houses than such tower blocks and I can't really blame him.

One of the themes of the book is a rehabilitation of pre-revolutionary Siberian bureaucrats and merchants. He argues that they did more good for the region than many others. Here, it's clear that he means Soviet bureaucrats.

The conclusion makes clear that Rasputin sees himself as the successor of the Siberian regionalists, who argued for Siberian autonomy in the late imperial period, as well as the Slavophiles. The title "Your Siberia and Mine" also shows how he wants to have the reader invest in Siberia emotionally and morally. At the end is a useful bibliography of English-language titles on Siberia and an index.

For those interested in Siberia and Russian history, this is a book worth reading.