Rudolph, Dasher, Blitzen, and the rest don’t come around Potalovo much anymore. The village, located north of the Arctic Circle, was bullied into restyling itself as a reindeer collective in Krushchev’s day, but since then the animals’ pastures have been killed off by acid rain.
Near Vladivostok, a woman complains that, of the salary owed her husband the previous year, one-half of it went ignored altogether and the other was paid in glass: “Some customers,” she explains, “had paid the firm in sheet glass, so it was just passed on to the employees.”
The above are but two of the dispatches and vignettes, so grotesque as to be half-comical, with which Colin Thubron peppers his new travelogue, the latest—and presumably the last—in a series that began in 1983 with Among the Russians (published here as Where Nights Are Longest) and continued in 1994 with The Lost Heart of Asia. Thubron journeyed through Siberia in order, as he puts it, “for a moment to witness its passage through the wreckage of Communism,” and a pretty sight it wasn’t. The poisoned rivers, the jerrybuilt apartment blocks sagging into ruin, the people dazed and rudderless and drunk: all the familiar fixtures of post-Soviet life are to be found here, sharply if depressingly rendered. As Thubron formulates it, the bitter irony about Siberia is that “Everything achieved under slavery … was being destroyed by freedom.”
Any voyage through Siberia necessarily consists, in large part, of a ghoulish and