In Siberia by Colin Thubron

“Everything achieved under slavery was being destroyed by freedom.” Upon this crucial sentence hangs Colin Thubron's In Siberia. Soviet institutions, the fabric of Soviet infrastructure and the people shaped by Soviet communism were all degrading before Thubron's eyes as he traversed Siberia in 1997, six years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

This is how rabbit holes go; I started with Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar (London to Tokyo and back by train, the return leg taking him across the USSR on the Trans-Siberian Express. Fascinated by that particular railway journey, I then reached for a book devoted to it, Eric Newby's The Big Red Train Ride. That left me fascinated by Siberia itself, so on to Thubron.

Colin Thubron, born in 1939, so of the same generation as Theroux, had already written about travelling through the Soviet Union in Among the Russians, published after a journey made in 1982, in the dying days of the Brezhnev era. By the time Thubron returned, 15 years later, the USSR had fragmented and Russia itself was in chaos. This time he concentrated solely on Siberia. He witnessed the fallout: the hopelessness of people left behind among the shards of Soviet megaprojects intended to conquer and develop the tundra and taiga through science, industry and Marxism.

Newby spends several days watching endless forest, taiga and tundra pass his train window. Thubron spends months disappearing into their depths, travelling by train, bus, truck and river boat, hitching lifts and taking dodgy flights into places far beyond the railhead. Newby is travelling through the Soviet Union. Thubron is travelling through what it had left behind.

Akademgorodok, the 'Academic Town' south of central Novosibirsk, gets a chapter. Founded in the late 1950s as one of the great centres of Soviet science, by Thubron's visit it had been hit badly by the collapse of state funding. Scientists had emigrated to the West, institutes were impoverished and serious research projects had been curtailed. Into the vacuum seeped some distinctly unscientific ideas. Thubron encounters underpaid academics pursuing variations on old Russian cosmism, involving mysterious energies, altered states of consciousness and devices supposedly capable of opening normally inaccessible psychophysical realms. 

Komsomolsk-on-Amur provides another telling example. The city was founded in 1932 as a great Soviet industrial project. Official mythology celebrated the heroic young Komsomol volunteers who had gone east to build socialism in the wilderness. They did indeed exist, but the labour they supplied was nowhere near sufficient. The state increasingly turned to forced labour, and around 90,000 prisoners worked in Komsomolsk during the main years of construction. The bulk the city and its industrial infrastructure was in the end built by slaves.

Here, Thubron's remark about slavery and freedom takes on its full meaning. The Soviet state could decide that a city should exist in an impossibly remote place, send tens of thousands of people there, compel them to work and continue supplying the settlement regardless of whether what it produced made economic sense. Once that coercive machinery disappeared, the enterprises that it spawned began falling apart, naturally. It was not that freedom was destroying what slavery had built; rather, it was the lack of Moscow's coercion that ultimately showed how dependent those achievements had been upon that very coercion. Building railways over permafrost is not just an engineering challenge.

As with The Big Red Train Ride, I followed the author's journey along maps, online and printed, and dipped into the many places on Google Maps that have street view imagery (albeit from before the start of Russian aggression in Ukraine). These continue to fascinate.

Reading In Siberia, in places I had a distinct feeling of déjà lu – passages of Siberian history were tales I'd just encountered in The Big Red Train Ride: the aristocratic wives who voluntarily followed their Decembrist husbands into Siberian exile, grotesque punishments inflicted by the Tsarist authorities such as tearing out the septums from the noses of snuff users, and the strange survival of strange communities expelled to the  east over the centuries. Newby and Thubron had clearly drawn on some of the same source material while researching their journeys.

Both write extensively about the Old Believers, driven into exile in remote settlements after refusing to accept the 17th-century reforms of the Russian Orthodox Church. Under communism religion was suppressed but not extinguished. After its collapse, belief flooded back into the space vacated by Marxism-Leninism, though often in peculiar forms.

The dull certainties of communism had disappeared, suggesting the ideology's shallow roots, bereft of tradition. In the place of Marxism-Leninism came Orthodox Christianity, Old Belief, Buddhism, shamanism, mysticism and freelance spiritual entrepreneurs. Thubron has little time for the newly confident Orthodox establishment, whose clerics he portrays as arrogant, pompous, entitled and worldly, prospering amid the poverty of people with a genuine hunger for spiritual direction.

Thubron's Siberia is populated by sects and millenarian religious groups awaiting the End of Days. He also writes about the revival of shamanism after decades of active Soviet persecution. But how do you revive a religion whose traditions were mostly oral, when the people who carried those traditions have been killed, dispersed or silenced?  You improvise; you make stuff up, filling the gaps with what you imagine it to have been like. Thubron meets ersatz shamans, some inventing traditions as they go along, complete with plastic antlers and paying clients waiting for consultations in the corridors of shabby apartment blocks.

The most striking difference between Newby's USSR of 1977 and Thubron's Russia of 1997 was the lack of a system. In Newby's Soviet Union, there's always some official somewhere, a permit needed, a guide watching him, regulations, timetables, a place one may or may not visit. Thubron's people have been abandoned by the system. People ignore regulations and scoff at uniformed officials who try to enforce them. The institutions remain, the uniform blocks of flats, the mines, the railway lines, laboratories and factories remain, but the ideology which once explained why they were there has vanished.

The final chapter takes Thubron into Kolyma, the darkest heart of the Gulag. At Butugychag he visits the remains of a forced-labour mining complex where prisoners extracted and processed uranium ore without adequate protection. Accounts from the camp describe men surviving only months in some of the most hazardous jobs. The ruined machinery and abandoned buildings are the logical end-point of his journey: Soviet industrial achievement stripped of all propaganda and reduced to its human cost.

The inhumanity of the system is stark – shocking to those who have not confronted it in their family history. The collapse of the Soviet system was something to be welcomed. Thubron had arrived in Siberia at a bleak point in its history; Soviet tyranny was not replaced in the 1990s by a liberal order that would ultimately lead to peace and prosperity as it did across most of Central Europe, but institutional breakdown, corruption, mafias, unpaid wages, collapsing industries and the sudden disappearance of certainties by which people had organised their lives.

When Thubron writes that “everything achieved under slavery was being destroyed by freedom”, he is not claiming that freedom had failed; he was underlining the extent to which Soviet achievement had been grounded on compulsion.

Reading the book nearly 30 years after Thubron's travels through Siberia, we can now see that this was a Russia in transition, after the Soviet state had lost the power to imprison society but before another authoritarian state had assembled itself to take its place. The direction Russia eventually took out of that chaos was not towards ever greater freedom.

Ultimately, I doubt if Moscow will be able to cling on to Siberia – at least the far eastern, trans-Baikal part of it, until the end of this century. Much of this was Outer Manchuria, once ruled by Chinese dynasties – and China wants it back.

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