The Other Side of Russia: A Slice of Life in Siberia and the Russian Far East (Eastern European Studies (College Station, Tex.), No. 21.) [ILLUSTRATED] (Hardcover)

by Sharon Hudgins (Author)
Key Phrases: ooo rubles, salmon caviar, Lake Baikal, Russian Far East, Russian Orthodox (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
". . . useful explanations about the history and development of these regions. . . . Readers will enjoy Hudgins's lively narrative style. . . ."---Library Journal -- Library Journal

"...an animated examination of grim, grimy, and unpredictably gracious ordinary life in the extraordinary place she calls 'Absurdistan.'" -- Alfred Friendly, Jr., co-author of Ecocide in the USSR and former Newsweek Moscow bureau chief

"For those seeking a window into the soul of Siberia, you need look no further." -- James A. Cramer, President & CEO, World Learning

"Hudgins has written a vivid and engrossing book about a part of the world that's both geographically and ethnically complex." -- Larry McMurtry

"It goes well beyond being a travelogue, and provides insight well beyond Siberia. A great read." -- Helen Hundley, Wichita State University

Product Description
Award-winning author Sharon Hudgins takes readers on a personal adventure through the Asian side of Russia-from the "high-rise villages" of Vladivostok and Irkutsk to Lake Baikal and the Trans-Siberian Railroad route. Join her as a guest confronted with exotic dishes at Christmas parties, New Year's banquets, Easter dinners, and Siberian festivals-and discover what daily life is really like on Russia's "other side."

"Sharon Hudgins has written a vivid and engrossing book about a part of the world that's both geographically and ethnically complex. She's done much to make the unfamiliar familiar."--Larry McMurtry

"Rare is the person who can step into the wonderland of Siberia and capture the culture and the spirit of its people. Sharon Hudgins has done that and more. . . . This is a warm, considered, and completely engaging work from start to finish. For those seeking a window into the soul of Siberia, you need look no further."--James A. Cramer, President & CEO, World Learning

". . . an animated examination of grim, grimy, and unpredictably gracious ordinary life in the extrordinary place she calls Absurdistan."-Alfred Friendly, Jr., coauthor, Ecocide in the USSR, and former Newsweek Moscow Bureau Chief

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 319 pages
• Publisher: Texas A&M University Press; illustrated edition edition (April 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585442372
• ISBN-13: 978-1585442379
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 5.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,623,928 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating view of life in Siberia, May 17, 2003

By	Joanna Daneman (Middletown, DE USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

Sharon Hudgins and her husband took teaching jobs in Irkutsk and Vladivostok, two major cities in Siberia. They had to adjust to life in post-Soviet Russia, a far cry from the way things were at the University of Maryland, where they held teaching positions.

Hudgins is a food and travel writer, so there is much detail about the food, cooking and grocery supplies in Russia. In fact, several chapters seemed pretty much one party after another with the hospitable Russians, who love a get-together with good food and drink, and party hard all night. It's a good way to ignore the intermittant electricity, lack of running water and other infrastructure problems that plague the crumbling post-Soviet urban landscape.

The most interesting part of the book was a stint in Ulan-Ude, capital of the Buryat Republic. The Buryat are a Mongolian people, cousins of the Mongol Horde of Genghis Khan. The only Tibetan lamasery (monastery) is in Ulan-Ude. The Buryat Republic borders Lake Baikal, the deepest, oldest lake in the world, home to unique species of flora and fauna and a fascinating place to read about.

This is a fascinating travel book, with a lot of fun anecdotes and stories about horrific train rides, scary food (a sheep's head with the wool still on it, and blood pudding in a sheep's stomach, no way to say "no thank you" to the amiable hosts who are putting on a real spread for their guests.) If you are interested in Russia, in a part of Russia most Westerners never visit, you should read "The Other Side of Russia."

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Welcome to "Absurdistan", September 2, 2003

By	Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

This extraordinary work is quite a bit more than "a slice of life." It's more like a seven-course meal replete with a different wine for each course topped with cognac, coffee, tea and cigars--not to mention a steady stream of songs, dances, toasts, speeches, gossip and other staples of Russian life east--far east--of the Urals. Relying on her experience as visiting professor at the Irkutsk State University in Irkutsk and the Far Eastern National University in Vladivostok during the years 1993-1995 when the fledgling Russian Federation was crashing headlong into the realities of the new market economy, Professor Hudgins has penned an amazingly detailed, colorful and often painfully vivid reminiscence of life in a place she and her husband Tom rightly dubbed "Absurdistan."

Much of the book chronicles their day-to-day life amid the dreary poverty, the revolting filth, the depressing pollution, the mind-altering inefficiency, the endemic corruption, the physical danger and the stubborn backwardness and Big Brother paranoia that still characterized the Russian reality. Living in a drab high-rise "village" often without electricity or running water, with elevators that seldom worked, in small rooms often without heat in below zero temperatures, where toilet paper typically consisted of pages cut from Soviet era books, subsisting on their wits and craftily purchased food and drink, Sharon and Tom made an adventure out of what most of us would rightly experience as a horror story.

Consider this from Chapter 7: "The water that ran through our taps...ranged in color from clear to amber to orange to purple to black, with accompanying aromas of petroleum, sewer gas, ham, rotten eggs, or fish." Consequently they pumped all their water for drinking, cooking, and tooth brushing through a portable filtration device they had brought with them. When the electricity was on they used the opportunity to boil water for future use, storing it in plastic bottles and an emergency 10-liter plastic container. They saved and used and reused plastic bags for many purposes, including carrying home fresh meat from the market that was cut from the animal and placed in their hands. They even reused the foil from Cadbury chocolate bars since there was no aluminum foil available.

Siberia is a cruel place, one must conclude from reading this book, yet a place where people survive in a hardtack economy buffeted with long cold winters and brief, sometimes sweltering summers, away from the dependable comforts of our world, a place pitifully short on glamour and indoor plumbing, a place I would rather read about than experience first hand.

That Hudgins did experience this first hand surprises me. I wonder why she did it. Part of the reason was her love of adventure no doubt, and part was to write a book about a country that she had been interested in since childhood, and part was to experience a culture in transition.

Central to that experience was her love of food and drink as exemplified by the way she describes in the most amazing detail the bizarre and sumptuous feasts she attended as well as exactly what she and her friends and neighbors ate on a daily basis. Additionally she recounts ritualistic ethnic meals featuring strange dishes and the frequent imbibing of even stranger drink. In one of them Tom is forced to eat raw salted liver still warm from the butchered sheep (while she was able to make herself otherwise busy away from the table!) The food in general was so heavy and the accompanying drink so relentlessly alcoholic that I was weighted down by the mere experience of reading about it! How Sharon and Tom could walk after some of the gluttonous meals forced on them by the dictates of the social graces, is beyond me. Sharon never once admits to regurgitating, even though some days the eating and drinking began full force in the morning and continued throughout the day and even into the wee hours of the next morning. One especially recalls tarasun, a liquor distilled from sour milk by the Buryat people that had the "unappetizing aroma of a baby's wet diaper." (p. 139)

So outrageous was the cuisine that at times I felt like I was reading about a drunken episode of the TV reality show "Fear Factor"!

Yet there is great beauty in this forlorn land of corrupt petty bureaucrats, dirt poor peasants, and mafiya cowboys in shark skin suits. There is the fabled Lake Baikal and environs, the land of the Buryats, historically a nomadic people akin to the Mongol hordes that once ruled half the world. There is the extraordinary white of the Siberian winter when all imperfections are covered in a pillowy down while in the snowy forests Siberian tigers (God save them) still roam.

But most of what Hudgins describes made me realize how far the Western world has come from the days when the serfs still tilled the land in Russia, and how little removed the present day people of Siberia are from that way of life. This sense is illustrated on the cover with the photo of the leather-skinned and shifty-eyed babushki in shawl selling radishes and onions from her dacha at market much as her ancestors did more than a hundred years ago.

Hudgins's book is attractively presented, well-edited, and written in a style that is at once thoroughly professional and as readable as a travel log. There are four maps, a couple of dozen or so black and white photos of buildings, people and scenery, an Index, and a splendid "Bibliographic Essay and Notes" on the literature of Siberia and the Russian Far East.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Realities of the joys and absurdities of living in Siberia, December 8, 2003

By	Linda Linguvic (New York City) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

From 1993 to 1995 Sharon Hudgins and her husband Tom lived and worked in post-Soviet Siberia, teaching at the university level through the University of Maryland's overseas programs. Originally from Texas, they had formerly worked in Germany, Spain, Greece, Japan, Korea under the same program in which he taught economics and she taught cross-cultural communication. Ms. Hudgins was particularly interested in Russia and her first master's degree was in Soviet-US relations. Both she and her husband had also learned the language, which made communication possible. This book is about the two years they spent in Siberia, specifically in Vladivostok and Irkutsk.

Ms. Hudgins' descriptions are rich with detail and the book is full of anecdotes that transported me immediately to the world she describes. I had always heard about the inefficiencies and breakdowns that were common in Russia. But after I read about their living conditions, the reality of it hit me immediately. In both cities they lived in high-rise apartment buildings, a commute of 1-1/2 hours each way to their jobs. These high rises were built with shoddy material and shoddy workmanship and were nowhere near food shopping or any other conveniences. The elevator never worked and they would have to walk up and down eight floors. But the worst thing of all was that heat, water and electricity were intermittent. They would suddenly be without heat in the middle of a Siberian winter. And even when the undrinkable and polluted water did come through their pipes, it could be cut off at a moment's notice. Same with electricity. As a result, they learned to be very creative, especially in their preparation of meals.

Speaking of food, in addition to all Ms. Hudgins' other accomplishments, she is also a trained food writer. And so her descriptions of food were some of the most memorable parts of the book. She and her husband are experienced gourmet cooks and befriended some Russian people who were also good cooks. There's a lot of interesting food descriptions and I was fascinated by the time and trouble they took to prepare even the simplest meal.

One incident in particular stays in my mind. They went out to countryside to buy fresh milk at a farmers' market. In this Siberian area the farmers milk their cows, fill a pail and leave it outside to freeze. However, they put a branch of a tree upright in the pail. Later, they lift the frozen milk out of the pail. It now looks like a huge popsicle. These "popsicles" are then loaded on a wagon and brought to market. The Hudgins purchased milk this way, carried it home on public transportation and it actually stayed frozen the whole time. Naturally they had to boil it before they used it. But they said it was delicious.

Another area which particularly interested me was the education system. Formerly, it was all about privilege and favoritism. People paid teachers for good grades. Bribes were considered a fact of life. And students themselves could never really understand the idea of plagiarism. But now that the Soviet era was over, this was gradually changing.

Yes, there were many challenges that the Hudgins had to meet. But they did it all with a spirit of good will and adventure. That's why this book was a pleasure to read. It's only 295 pages long, but so dense with insights and information, that I purposely took my time reading it.

I definitely identified with the Hudgins and know my understanding of Siberia has certainly been enriched. Highly recommended -- especially for armchair travelers such as myself.