In Siberia

After reading [b:The Lost Heart of Asia|386402|The Lost Heart of Asia|Colin Thubron|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1174355868l/386402.SX50.jpg|687924] by the same author, I was looking forward to some new insights into Siberia, the eastern part of the Russian Federation, which is bigger than any country in the world apart from Russia itself. Thubron travelled across it from west to east, mainly by the Trans-Siberian Railway, and its northern branch, the Baikal-Amur Railway (BAM), with side trips to various other places by plane, bus and river boat.

In his travels he met and conversed with many different people, most of whom he had met by chance, and it is his reports of conversations with these people that helps to give one a sense of the place and what it is like, and what the people are like. In some places he invited himself to stay with such people, as he made no travel arrangements in advance. so the people he met and the places he stayed at were unpredictable. He visited Ykaterinburg, where the last Tsar and his family were murdered by the Bolsheviks. The house where they were held immediately before their death, which he describes in some detail, had been demolished, lest it become a place of pilgrimage.

[a:Colin Thubron|83934|Colin Thubron|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1376407480p2/83934.jpg] wandered off the site into a nearby garden and down a track which led to a rubbish tip, where he shared supper and a sleeping place with a tramp who had camped there for the night. It is the comments and insights of such chance-met people that give the book its unique flavour. At another town not far away he searched for the home of Rasputin who had such an influence on the royal family. He met a man who looked like Rasputin and made the most of the resemblance. Was he related? Well, not certainly, but his great-grandmother was once a housemaid in the Rasputin household, and Rasputin was a notorious womaniser, so...

Thubron flies off to visit a remote mine inside the Arctic Circle, where most of the work was done by prisoners, political and criminal, and visits the ruins of the prison barracks where so many overworked and underfed prisoners died.

Further down the line he visited Novosibirsk, and the nearby town of Akademgorodok, which was built as the ultimate academic scientific research centre, with no expense spared, until the money ran out. It was literally fantastic. It was a bit like the home of the academics in [a:Herman Hesse|1113469|Hermann Hesse|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1499981916p2/1113469.jpg]'s [b:The Glass Bead Game|16634|The Glass Bead Game|Hermann Hesse|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386922806l/16634.SX50.jpg|2959456], But what it has become since the fall of Bolshevism is something that goes beyond the wildest fantasy dreamed up in [a:Jonathan Swift|1831|Jonathan Swift|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1183238507p2/1831.jpg]'s Laputa. Thubron interviews people who work there and somehow manages to keep a straight face as they tell him of their fanciful and crackpot theories.

Perhaps the most depressing part of the book is his description of a four-day boat trip down the polluted Yensei River. On the way back he persuades the captain of the boat to drop him off at a village where the only person in employment is the village doctor, and he, like many other civil servants, hasn't been paid for months. In the economic collapse after the fall of Bolshevism the only thing left for the villagers to do was get drunk on their pensions, if they arrived.

One thing that I didn't so much like about the book was the way that the author's bias against Orthodox Christianity hardened into prejudice as the book went on. One of my reasons for reading the book was to get an idea of how the Orthodox Church was recovering from Bolshevik persecution, but though Thubron is is sympathetic towards Buddhists, and pagans, and even to some extent towards Old Believers and neopagans, he rarely has a good word to say about the Orthodox. In the Buddhist monastery they sang and prostrated themselves, but in the Orthodox one the singers were "crazed-looking youths" and the nuns were sobbing as though "something must be expurgated for ever". I've added a few more thoughts on this aspect of the book on my blog here In Siberia | Khanya.

In many ways it is a depressing book. The economic collapse, the pollution, the hopelessness of many, and the relics of Stalin's Gulag and the mass murders that went with it don't make for happy reading.