Apparently, the Communists who ruled Russia for decades squandered the national treasure on weapons and spent little on infrastructure.
“Travels in Siberia,” by Ian “Sandy” Frazier (529 pages; © 2010; Farrar Straus Giroux) is an entertaining, enlightening and rambling travelogue about Russia in general and Siberia in particular. He reviews their villages and cities, their history, their people and their comparatively primitive existence.
Frazier, an Ohio native, is a book writer and a columnist for The New Yorker magazine who took several trips to Siberia and western Russia between 1993 and 2009. The trips featured, among other things, broken-down vehicles and abandoned slave labor camps.
He points out that Siberia constitutes three-fourths of Russia and comprises one-twelfth of all land on Earth. Siberia spans eight time zones (versus four in the continental U.S.) and stretches 3,000 miles, he writes: from the Ural Mountains, which separate Europe from Asia, to the Pacific Ocean.
Siberia is perhaps best known as the place where Russians banished their scofflaws and malcontents, including authors Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov). Exile to Siberia was the punishment for “imaginary and real misdeeds of all kinds,” Frazier writes.
In the 17th century, a person could be exiled for fortune-telling, prizefighting, vagrancy, taking snuff, usury, indebtedness, drunkenness, trespassing, salt gathering, wife beating, and begging when not in distress. A Russian nobleman could deport a serf to Siberia “because he didn’t like his attitude.”
Anarchists and revolutionaries were consigned to Siberia. For the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, including Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, time spent in Siberia was a “highlight of their resumés, a proof of authenticity,” Frazier contends.
Siberia’s population “has never been large…” Among its natives was the “ghoulish and wicked” Rasputin; Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first elected president; Raisa Gorbachev, wife of Mikhail, the last head of state of the USSR before its dissolution in 1991; and the late actor Yul Brynner (The Magnificent Seven, Westworld, The King and I).
The primary four-legged animal Frazier saw in Siberia was the cow. Beef in Siberian stores is “gristly, tough, and expensive.” Siberian dairy products, however, are “cheap and good,” and butter and ice cream made in Siberia are “the best I’ve tasted anywhere.”
Transportation across Russia and Siberia involves nothing like the interconnected, paved highway system throughout the United States. Although the road east toward the Urals “went on and on, it never … became what I would consider a standard long-distance highway,” Frazier recalls. “Sometimes it was no-frills two-lane blacktop for hours. Then without any announcement it would change to gravel degenerating into mud and enormous potholes…” Upon reaching a village, the road “might lead straight into an Olympic-sized mud-puddle…”
Frazier and his two Russian guides drove through five weddings in Siberia one Saturday afternoon. “I couldn’t tell whether the bridal couples had actually been married on the highway or were just having their receptions there.”
On one train he rode, “Every station I observed was dark, cracked, in the process of being colonized by weeds, and with the lights of its platform broken.”
Trash is strewn throughout Siberia. Russian trash differs from American roadside debris in that it has less paper, Frazier says. “The basic and most common item” of Russian litter is the handmade plastic drinking cup, “which is improvised on the spot by cutting off the bottom quarter or third of a plastic bottle that formerly contained water, soda or beer.”
Siberia has vast quantities of natural resources, including coal, timber and oil, and has Lake Baikal. The largest body of fresh water on the planet, Baikal is the deepest, and among the clearest, of all lakes in the world. Conversely, Siberia is famous for large-scale environmental damage, Frazier notes.
During a seven-week overland trek across Siberia the author and his companions often camped out to save money and because Siberia is not exactly choked with Holiday Inns or Motel 6s. One campsite resembled a “town dump.” Ironically, though, the author saw a line of storefronts in Siberia bearing the logos of Wrangler, Reebok and Nike.
While in Russia Frazier was besieged by insects; Siberian mosquitoes “laugh at organic-based repellents,” he quips. Bugs are “just part of the Siberian situation, as inescapable as distance and monotony.”
In Oklahoma, alongside roads and highways and even some urban streets, you can find small white crosses, often draped with flowers, denoting where someone died in a traffic wreck. At one Siberian intersection Frazier encountered “the crumpled remains of a car … on top of an iron pillar about 12 feet tall...” At the base of the pillar, two steel markers provided “the unelaborated facts” about two men killed in a car wreck that occurred in March 1996.
In a related matter, Frazier witnessed one Russian car towing another via two seat belts buckled to each other. “That was the only time I ever saw a Russian use a seat belt for any purpose at all,” he wrote.
In some areas of Siberia, central-heating steam pipes lay aboveground because it’s so cold they can’t be buried in the frozen soil.
In Irkutsk, one of the largest cities in Siberia, growth was unplanned and haphazard. “When civic improvement tried to bring some order to the confusion, the crews sent out for that purpose sometimes sawed houses in half to make crooked streets straight,” Frazier discovered.
“Life anywhere in Russia is more interesting than in the West,” a Siberian mathematician told Frazier, “because here it is more unpredictable…”