It’s a great pleasure to welcome Colin Thubron to the Asian Review of Books podcast. Travel writer and novelist, Colin has written countless books that bring faraway sights and peoples to English-speaking readers—many of which covered regions in China, Russia, Central Asia and elsewhere on the Asian continent.
Russia
Sergei Tretyakov is on something of a roll. The Soviet writer has featured in several recent books, including a new translation of (among other plays) Roar, China!, a new biography and a study of the Soviet-led drive for a “Leftist Literary Commons”. He also is a main character, arguably the protagonist, in Edward Tyerman’s Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture. China loomed large, both politically and culturally, in early Soviet thinking; this renewed attention coincides with today’s ever-closer Sino-Russian relations.
The border between Russia and China is one of the world’s longest, spanning thousands of miles. It’s one of the few extended land borders between two great powers, subject to years of history, conflict and cooperation. Yet for such an important division, there are surprisingly few crossings, with not one passenger bridge in operation.
On 9 August 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki and three Soviet armies invaded imperial Japan’s puppet state of Manchukuo. Six days later, Emperor Hirohito’s recorded broadcast to the Japanese people told them that the end of the war had arrived. Most Japanese troops in Manchukuo surrendered or withdrew by August 19. The fate of 2.7 million Japanese soldiers and citizens in the former Manchurian colony would be determined by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
With COP26 and high fossil fuel prices, energy is back in the headlines. And Russia, as one of the world’s largest producers of hydrocarbons, is part of the conversation—most recently, in Putin’s refusal to expand oil production to ease global prices.
Back in the early 1990s, when I was trying to pitch the idea of including Vladivostok-listed stocks in Asian emerging markets funds, I was told by one Hong Kong fund manager that “Asia stops at the Amur River.” Three decades or so on, that aphorism might still serve to summarize the findings contained in Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey’s On the Edge: Life along the Russia-China Border.
There are, in a very general sense, two kinds of travel memoir. In the first, writers take you on a journey somewhere they know very well. They share with you their deep understanding of the place—its people, its history and its geography. The authors’ physical journey is for the most part a literary scaffold upon which they hang their knowledge and expertise. In the second kind of travel memoir, the author is a direct proxy for the reader: as clueless and naïve as you—though perhaps a little braver—embarking together on the journey from the same starting point. You see new experiences and sights through the author’s eyes, and slowly develop the ability to interpret and understand these new surroundings.
One doubts COP26 made much of an impression on Georgetown University’s Thane Gustafson; his recent book Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change doesn’t even entertain the possibility that climate change can be stopped, to say nothing of being reversed.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the courageous Soviet dissident and Nobel Prize-winning author of the Gulag Archipelago who died in 2008, considered The Red Wheel his most important work. Its ten volumes cover Russia from pre-World War I days to the fall of the Romanov dynasty and the early months of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The Red Wheel was the author’s monumental effort to identify the crucial turning point in 20th century Russian history, and Solzhenitsyn’s admirers consider it and Gulag his “two great literary cathedrals”.
Writers did a lot of shouting during the establishment of the Soviet Union. The literary salons being empty, they had to harangue the people, be heard over the crowd, and, as Katerina Clark wryly points out in Eurasia Without Borders, they had to shout because their public could not always understand the language they spoke.
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