In Siberia

by Colin Thubron

Release Date: 26 December, 2000

Edition: Paperback

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A Dark Journey through Russia's Wild East

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.

A Long Read

This was an interesting book! Siberia strikes me as a much more friendly and beautiful place to visit than I formerly believed. The author's side trips by boat and bus and train are very descriptive and entertaining but he seems to meet quite a few depressing people! I found the book to be a "slow" read, the kind of book you can put down and don't rush back to continue, though you do want to know how it ends.
Also, the end wasn't satisfying to my taste. The author could have written a summary of his feelings about the trip and the people and thrown out a bit of hope for this economically ravaged land!
I recommend this book for the fascinating travel narratives but add an asterisk to prepare for the emotional rollercoaster one experiences from the interactions with the inhabitants of that region!!