Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier
Russia—and in particular, Asiatic Russia—hasn’t yet had, it seems to me, its Peter Hessler, while China has arguably had several. With Ian Frazier, whose work has likewise appeared in the New Yorker, Russia’s vast expanses have begun to catch up.
Travels in Siberia is just that, telling the story of Frazier’s several trips to Siberia over a period of a decade or more. These include a west-to-east drive across Siberia, finishing at the Pacific, sandwiched between a relatively short hop across the Bering Sea from Alaska to Chukotka and a wintertime expedition, over a period of a decade or more.
This is very much a travel book, so we hear a great deal about Frazier’s traveling companions, the various characters he meets along the way and the trials and tribulations of Russian bathrooms, bugs, roads and motor vehicles. There are long digressions on Russian and Siberian history and numerous asides about the Russian language and Russian literature.
If you like this sort of thing done well, and Frazier does indeed do it well, you will like Travels in Siberia. I do. And since I travelled several times between Vladivostok and Nakhodka in the 1990s, two places which are, by Siberian (or even Primorskii Krai) standards, right next to each other although they are about 200km apart, there is a great deal which is recognizable, from the intense friendships to the specifically Russian litter. (This is not to place to argue whether the Russian Far East is part of Siberia or not; my contacts in Primorskii Krai impressed upon me that it was not. But as Frazier writes: “Officially, there is no place as Siberia. No political or territorial entity has ‘Siberia’ as its name.”)
If countries were like functions and had inverses, the Siberia would be China’s. China is large, but China could fit into Siberia several times over. Siberia’s entire population of thirty-nine million is on the same scale as single (admittedly mega-) cities in China. More important, perhaps, Siberia has the raw materials—oil, gas, timber, minerals—that China needs. If one wants to understand why Sino-Russian trade and investment has not yet reached the levels that logic indicates it should, one could do worse than read Frazier’s accounts of the Siberian way of doing things.
And while travel books on China focus on change and, for better or worse, development, Frazier’s brings out Siberia’s stasis and, with few exceptions, decline. In spite—or perhaps because—of this, Frazier loves the place with a passion that while difficult to explain, is surely shared by many that have visited.