In Siberia

Thubron's descriptions of these people and their lives reveal his tendency toward the depressing, which is the main feature of his writing style. His morose ways are also evident in his descriptions of Siberia's vast natural beauty. Thubron describes this bounty not as a visually impressed lover of nature, but with a strange anti-claustrophobia. He contemplates the thousands of miles of taiga and hundreds of miles of tundra with a vague sense of creeping dread, as if he were an insignificant speck being crushed from all directions by a fathomless void. But don't assume that's so strange, because that feeling is apparently how the Siberians themselves see things. Another curse on the minds of Siberians is the vast network of death camps operated there during the Stalin years, where many millions of innocent people were worked to death simply because they got on the regime's bad side. Thubron also proves that Siberia is afflicted with the sense of aimlessness that is also a problem almost everywhere else in the former USSR. The people are now adrift with "independence" but they have nothing to fall back on in the post-Soviet political void, as the Communists erased their ancient cultures and traditions. Thubron's journey ends abruptly at the toxic site of a former death camp/uranium mine. In fact, he writes the book without describing how he got to Siberia or how he got back, as if the journey had no real beginning or end - kind of like Siberia itself.


Depressing..yet fascinating   April 20, 2002
 7 out of 7 found this review helpful

Colin Thurbron takes us through a journey into a new and old world. The journey through Siberia provides a snapshot into an area of the world that until recently was off limits to westerners. A world steeped in history with the clashes of cultures, the stench of conflict and specter of death. Siberia was the land where people were sent to die - exile, the gulags, religious schisms. A land where the government got what it paid for: free slave labor produced construction, such as railroad lines, that failed to last in the harsh thaw/freeze cycles of the region. In most people's minds it's a land of frozen cold.

In this cold harshness, there is the new harshness of life after the breakup of the Soviet Union. While in the west we have hailed the new freedoms, the collapse of communism, the rebirth of capitalism as a warm new light on Russia, in Siberia this light is in cold eclipse. Collapse means a loss of ideals, poverty, unemployment and inflation. And it is in here that the book becomes a depressing read. Everywhere that Thubron went, eh found decay and disillusionment; a land steeped in history, yet where history had been built and erased as if a chalkboard by the ideologies in power. Stories of inhabitants carry less promise for the future than a resignation to decline and continued muddling through.

The landscape runs the gamut from beautiful to bleak, and this is reflected in the people that Thubron writes about. He does a decent job of describing where he is and the histories involved in sites he visits. The book reflects his research, and his knowledge of the subject - how he can bring alive the last days of the Romanovs in the Russian Revolution, and the people who still visit the site of their death where the renewal of freedom does not necessarily mean a renewal of hope for the monarchy. Or the church. Yet the church(s) cling to life even after the long night of communist rule.

One of my biggest problems with the book is that as the author moves westward, winter approaches, the landscape bleaker, the areas less populated. And the stories of the people parallel this - becoming bleaker and full of more despair. Settlements being slowly abandoned. Old ways dying. The book falls further into melancholy as it goes along. The redeeming bright spot for it is the author's continual ability to find the average person who, in the midst of poverty and despair, still find the need and ability to help him - to bring him into their lives, to share food and shelter without even knowing who he is. It is reading between the lines of the story that you can see the hope of a people that, hardened by their lives, and their land, still survive.