Colin Thubron
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By: Harper Perennial
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Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Former Soviet Republics & Siberia
Subjects -> History -> Russia
Subjects -> History -> World -> General
Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 32
Average rating: 4.5 of 5
Travel writing at its best 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.
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!
Editorial Review:
As mysterious as its beautiful, as forbidding as it is populated with warm-hearted people, Syberia is a land few Westerners know, and even fewer will ever visit. Traveling alone, by train , boat, car, and on foot, colin Thubron traversed this vast territory, talking to everyone he encountered about the state of the beauty, whose natural resources have been savagely exploited for decades; a terrain tainted by nuclear waste but filled with citizens who both welcomed him and fed him--despite their own tragic poverty. From Mongoloia to the Artic Circle, from Rasputin's village in the west through tundra, taiga, mountains, lakes, rivers, and finally to a derelict Jewish community in the country's far eastern reaches, Colin Thubron penetrates a little-understood part of the world in a way that no writer ever has.
