Alexander Grigorenko’s previous book Mebet, set among the Nenets people of the Siberian taiga, was such an unique literary experience that one could be forgiven for opening Ilget, the next book in the trilogy (a rather loose trilogy, it would appear), with some trepidation, anxious that it repeat or at least not surprise in same…
It’s perhaps one of history’s funny accidents that relations between the U.S. and Russia were changed not by one, but two, George Kennans. Decades before George F. Kennan wrote his famous Long Telegram that set the tone for the Cold War, his predecessor was exploring Russia’s Far East on a quest to investigate the then-Russian…
It can be hard to imagine now, but there was a time, about 150 years ago, when Americans had a favorable and amicable view of Russia, “a ‘distant friend’” of the United States, a colorful but mysterious land filled with tragically romantic characters,” as Gregory Wallance writes in Into Siberia, his engrossing account of, as…
At the end of the Second World War, about 600,000 Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner after the Soviet Union swept through Manchuria in the very final days of the war. Instead of returning them to Japan, the Soviet Union held them in prison camps in the Russian Far East for over a decade. The last…
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.
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…
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…
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…
The Blakiston’s fish owl is the world’s largest living species of owl, with larger females of the species weighing as much as ten pounds. It lives in the Russian Far East and Northern Japan. It is also endangered: global populations are estimated to be around 1500 owls in total.
Works of literature that feature the nomadic peoples of the Eurasian taiga are extremely rare; the only ones that immediately come to mind are The Last Quarter of the Moon by Chi Zijian, about Evenki along the Heilongjiang-Russian border, and the (true) story of Dersu Uzala, a Nanai introduced to the world in Vladimir K…
In Russia’s far east, meeting a person alone in the wilderness is usually a bad thing. Some recluses in this remote region might be criminals of one kind or another: those hiding from law enforcement or those hiding from other criminals. But when conservationist Jonathan C Slaght ran into a man with “a crazy look…
The Sino-Russian relationship is often seen by the West (for which, read the USA) as a sort of counterpoint to Sino-American relations with Russia ready to step in when the US takes a step back. Sören Ubansky’s recent book is one of the periodic but salutary reminders that China and Russia’s mutual dealings are not…
Writers have, over the years, given many excuses for a trip to Siberia—tigers, stories, trains, shamanism, Jews, rivers, solitude, cycling—but the most unexpected must surely be “pianos”.
If you’ve never met Arkady Renko, erstwhile Soviet and now Russian cop, his most recent set of cases, this time in Asia—well, Siberia, to be exact—is as good an opportunity as any to finally become acquainted.