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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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