In a custom-built boat, Jeffrey Tayler traveled some 2,400 miles down the Lena River, from near Lake Baikal to high above the Arctic Circle, re-creating a journey first made by Cossack forces more than three hundred years ago. He was searching for primeval beauty and a respite from the corruption, violence, and self-destructive urges that typify modern Russian culture. His only companion on this hellish journey detests all humanity, including Tayler. Vadim, Tayler's guide, is a burly Soviet army veteran whose superb skills ...
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In a custom-built boat, Jeffrey Tayler traveled some 2,400 miles down the Lena River, from near Lake Baikal to high above the Arctic Circle, re-creating a journey first made by Cossack forces more than three hundred years ago. He was searching for primeval beauty and a respite from the corruption, violence, and self-destructive urges that typify modern Russian culture. His only companion on this hellish journey detests all humanity, including Tayler. Vadim, Tayler's guide, is a burly Soviet army veteran whose superb skills Tayler needs to survive. As the two navigate roiling white water in howling storms, they eschew lifejackets because the frigid water would kill them before they could swim to shore. Though Tayler has trekked by camel through the Sahara and canoed down the Congo during the revolt against Mobutu, he has never felt as threatened as he does on this trip.
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I have a moderate obsession with Siberia. I've never been there, but read quite a bit about it, both fiction and non-fiction. Jeffrey Tayler gives a usually-fascinating account of his difficult boat trip with a Russian adventure guide, down the entire length of the Lena River from Lake Baikal to the Laptev Sea in the north. The guide is a bitter, ranting veteran of Afghanistan, who might be an infuriating boor even in ideal travel conditions. This is the Central Siberian Plateau, where the summer growing season is about eight weeks and the weather cannot be counted upon to be consistent for more than a few hours at a time. Conditions are dire in the settlements along the river among tribal peoples and Russians alike, but Tayler finds pleasure - or, at least some relief from his guide - by exploring the poverty, depression, squalor and drunkenness that plague them. It seems a hopeless land, abandoned by much-derided Moscow, and the majority of the people Tayler comes across yearn for the certainties of the old USSR. The prisons and labor camps of the Tsars, later the Gulags of Stalin, haunt the place still. There is much denial about the horrors of Stalin, and about the intentions of Putin, who are both seen as having the best interests of the Russian people at heart. They seem to prefer harsh leadership, perhaps because at least it eliminates the fear of choice.
Jeffrey Tayler is a decades-long resident of Moscow and is married to a Russian woman, so he is no Western ignoramus regarding Russia and her history. That is why it's so interesting to witness his despair over the attitudes of the isolated village people along his journey. He loves Russia, but he has no illusions about the lives lead by most Russians. It is a region frozen not only by virtue of its climate, but in thought, development and time.
