In Siberia

At 58, Thubron had already lived 10 years longer than the average Siberian when he made his 15,000 mile trip and was as much a novelty to locals as they were to him. Until 1991, foreigners were only allowed along the Trans-Siberian railway. Now all is open, as Thubron writes: "The exhilaration of freedom never quite left me." In In Siberia he searches for the "core of Siberia"--a difficult quest in a land mass larger than the USA and Europe combined.

Siberia is Russia's wild east--pillaged by the Cossacks for furs, later populated by exiles and prisoners, who diluted the native culture of hunters and Mongol-Turkish nomadic tribes. Thubron travels from unknown town to unknown town, hunting at sunset for shelter. Some of it is as bad as you would fear--endless, uninhabitable, treeless tundra, frozen solid eight months a year. There are ghostly gulag towns like Vorkuta with its smoke stacks, "black detritus", and death camps where prisoners worked 12 hours a day, living in minus 40 until death (usually two weeks).He finds grim broken-down people living only for vodka, freedom having escaped them again. "Scarce jobs and high prices were the new slave masters."

At other times In Siberia is more surprising--the rebirth of Christianity and eager building of monasteries; Mongol shamans; the 2,500,000- year-old mummified remains of a princess; sweaty 85 degree temperatures; Akademogorodok, an abandoned science city where a lone professor experiments with cosmic consciousness.

Like many of the people he meets, Thubron's book is weighed down by history, but it does succeed in quenching the curiosity about that great blank in the Atlas. --Sarah Champion

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Riddle of the Snows - Rated
What on earth drives Colin Thubron? Why, traversing a subcontinent whose name has become synonymous with suffering, would he face tedium, banality and appalling weather to seek out agonizing communities, explore Artic death camps, plumb the worldview of demoralized individuals and contemplate remote sites where dramatic events unfolded years, if not millennia, ago? Certainly there is an unrelenting fascination with the mysterious heart of Eurasia, crisscrossed at least three times by the Russian and Chinese-speaking author, but there seems to be more. The intensity of the effort to bear witness to mankind's resistance to inexorable forces sometimes seems like part of a manic attempt to hold back the passage of time itself. Whatever the motivation the result is particularly appropriate when dealing with a place where not only maps, but also human memory and history itself have already been partially "blanked out" by a truly evil empire. This splendid book not only enlightens us about a part of the world and its peoples of which most people are ignorant but makes us regard with awe the commitment of its author.

In Siberia - Rated
I found this book to much about history religion and old tombs and not a lot about travel i found it extremely boring and hard work to finish johnfulden@hotmail.com

Bleak, fascinating, somewhat misleading - Rated
One has the impression that Thubron wanted to find the bleakest, saddest visions of Siberia. And find them he does, painting a portrait of Siberia as even more harsh and cruel than the region's already severe public perception. While admirably described and very true to reality - his encounter with 'Rasputin' in Pokrovskoe proved almost exactly what happened to me too when I turned up in that village. However, the problem lies in the choices of which bits of Siberia to cover. These choices mean that the reader is not shown the 'other' Siberia - places like Krasnoyarsk or Omsk whose new vibrancy and optimism are the very opposite of the unrelentingly bleak picture that a reader will be given here.
Siberia isn't THAT bad! Indeed to many Russians its pioneer spirit, independent-minded citizens and glorious out-door wildernesses make Siberia more paradise than hell-hole. That doesn't make the book a bad one by any means, but when reading it do bear in mind that you're getting a sellable bundle of selective negativity rather than a real overall picture.

Extraordinary - Rated
Previous to Thubron's In Siberia, I'd never read a travel book about Russia before. I lived there and in other parts of the former Soviet Union from 1994 - 2000 and didn't really see the need. Pretty narrow-minded of me, I admit, especially when I've never been to Siberia, by far the biggest part of Russia. When circumstances conspired so that I needed more information about Siberia, one of the things I did was to order Thubron's book.

At first I remember thinking, Well, this isn't so much different from the rest of the FSU. And it's true that at first as Thubron alights in Yekaterinburg just beyond the Urals the sights he describes were disappointingly familiar. In fact they seemed more typical of Russia west of the Urals. I remember thinking, I hope it's not all going to be like this. Fortunately it's not. Yekaterinburg seems in a way to be a departure gate from European Russia.

Thubron follows an itinerary which is outlined on a map at the beginning of the book: by train (Trans-Siberian, BAM (the Baikal-Amur) - I've never figured out if BAM is part of the Trans-Siberian or if they are separate), plane, boat and bus. He visits Yekaterinburg, Tobolsk, Vorkuta - formerly a hub in the gulag network, Omsk, Novosibirsk and its Akademgorodok, Gorno Altaisk and Pazyryk where the borders of Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China all come together, Shushenskoe, Kyzyl, Krasnoyarsk, to the top of Lake Baikal at Severobaikalsk, then ten hours and four hundred miles by hydrofoil to the south end of Baikal and Irkutsk - formerly known as 'the Paris of Siberia', and on to Ulan Ude, capital of Buratye, and a southward jaunt to find Old Believers in Targabatai, to Novoselenginsk right on the border of Mongolia. Upward and eastward to Skovorodino and by car to Albazin, site of much bloodshed as control of the land passed back and forth between China and Russia, to Birobidzhan, the Soviet 'homeland' for the Jews and Komsomolk na Amur, a utopian project built by the pioneers and convict labour in the 1930s, now a derelict monument. To Khabarovsk and the maritime province of Primoriye, then by plane up to Yakutsk and finally to the Magadan, frozen gold-mining hell of prison labourers.

One of the questions that interests Thubron as he travels Siberia is that of faith. With the former faiths of Siberians undermined by the ideology communism, and communism now broken, what had taken its place, if anything? Thubron seeks out shamans, Buddhist monasteries, Jewish temples, Old Believers, scientists.

Another question is of national identity. European or Asiatic? Russian or Mongolian? The Ice Princess of the Altai, recovered from a kurgan, fantastically preserved by the ice, sparks off a furious debate: is she European or Asiatic? In far-flung villages such as Potalovo on the nothern banks of the Yenisei, the native inhabitants have lost their language, their livelihood from hunting reindeer: all they have is vodka. (Never think vodka is a cliche in Russia; it is the bitter truth.)

Finally, Thubron's trip struck me as a pilgrimage in recognition of those millions upon millions who were lost and who died in the Soviet death camps. He visits these camps over and over again. At Yagodnoe north of the Magadan in the remains of a labour camp to be destroyed soon afterward, he is a witness to the conditions in which incomprehensible numbers of people toiled, suffered and died, which he is able to record in this book.

In Siberia is beautifully written - Thubron could be a poet (perhaps he is?), very rich in content. He has brought Siberia to life. A deeply rewarding read, and an important book.

An impressive but cheerless book - Rated
This isn't travel writing as entertainment. I found it impressively written but almost relentlessly bleak. I have not been to Siberia nor read Thubron before so it is hard to say for sure whether he habitually concentrates on the dismal or whether Siberia is as dreary as he portrays it. The book charts the area's harsh and often brutal past and how this has led to its current situation and it does so powerfully. However I would have preferred to see some hints as to how things could eventually be turned around. Thubron does include moving accounts of individual humanity but the overall impression is of a westerner's self-indulgent absorption with someone else's mess.

One niggle - on page 20 he states that Steller's sea-eagle has only twice been sighted since the naturalist, Steller discovered it - this simply isn't true and unfortunately even a small error like this makes one wary of the accuracy of the rest.