Siberian Dawn: A Journey Across the New Russia

Tayler, who has now published a handful of books, started out with this one on Russia. Despite the dated looking cover, I enjoyed this book a lot - more than I expected.

Tayler explains his long term interest in Russia, followed by a long trip undertaken in 1993 from Magadan in Eastern Siberia on rarely travelled roads heading west, eventually to Ukraine and ending in Poland. Warned by almost all people he spoke to, not to go, and that he risked his life, Tayler kept travelling anyway.

Luck played its part in his safety, but also his drive in not giving up when events looked hopeless. His fluent Russian was also a major factor, and while not perfect native Russian, it allowed him to be conveniently mistaken as from the Baltics.

However, Tayler's book doesn't go out of its way to paint a rosy picture and the grimness of Siberia is plain for all to see. Long a place of exile, its harshness in winter matched by mud and mosquitoes in summer, and the road from Magadan to Yakutsk in particular is risky. While Tayler also details the social problems of Siberia (Russia in general) with alcohol, and the poisoning of various cities from industrial pollution with the terrible health effects, he makes his story personal with his interactions with people.

Travelling by a combination of hitch-hiking, arranged rides, train and the occasional bus, Tayler is exposed to a range of people (of various levels of sobriety), and experiences. While he occasionally includes random interactions which seem out of context, the reader gets the impression this is very much the context of his interactions - sometimes quite unusual and random.

Perhaps one of the more surprising aspects of his travel was how far people went out of their way to help him when he told them he was American. Several times he was told he was the first American to visit places, he was afforded special treatment by officials. Tayler had relatively few run-ins with bureaucracy - something that is really surprising, considering how Russia is now with the complexity for foreigners to travel. He even had a visa limited to Moscow, and was challenged on that fact only a couple of times, to which he just argued his way through.

Set out with a chapter per city, I found Siberian Dawn a well paced read. It perhaps lacked a crescendo at the end, the epilogue was ok, but not a conclusion as such. Still, a very good read, especially when put into context of the time of travel - the USSR having dissolved less than two years before, and Russian borders (especially Siberia) only recently opened, and certainly not used to visitors.

4.5 stars, rounded up.