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A few years it became possible, for this first time, for a foreigner to travel Siberia almost at will. This is the account of Thubron's 15, 000-mile journey through this astonishing country - one twelfth of the land surface of the whole earth. He journeyed by train, river and truck among the people most damaged by the breakup of the Soviet Union, traveling among Buddhists and animists, radical Christian sects, reactionary Communists and the remnants of a so-call Jewish state; from the site of the last Czar's murder and Rasputin's village, to the ice-bound graves of ancient Sythians, to Baikal, deepest and oldest of the world's lakes. This is the story of a people moving through the ruins of Communism into more private, diverse and often stranger worlds.
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In parts, one can sense a fond yearning for the days of the Soviet Republic - when the collective farms functioned properly, with working tractors, to produce food for all. Now the mechanics of such planned economies have disintegrated, prices have spiralled upwards, the savings of the old have been rendered worthless and the young have little enthusiasm, other than to leave. Despite this, some do still find space to find hope, perhaps in the renaissance of forgotten religions, or perhaps simply in some strained, optimistic view of the future.
Throughout the book the shadow of the Gulag, the Soviet labour camp, lingers. Throughout Stalin's reign, criminals, political opponents, or simply those that were deemed to be a threat, were sent to the bleak wastes of Siberia for imprisonment. In the mines, inland of Magadan, on the Pacific coast, nobody lasted long; Thubron seems to touch upon suffering of the millions who died with a sense of quiet bleakness, rather like the snowy, barely living landscape in which they died.
This is not a book to read to cheer oneself up. True, the old Shaman, Kunga-Boo, playing wildly on his tambour, and enthusiastically requesting the author to return with a walrus, provides an endearing caesura within the enfolding sense of gloom. But the lingering picture that Thubron lyrically creates is of a people with a broken spirit, and a vast wilderness of slow, cold decay.
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