Midnight in Siberia
A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia
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- £7.49
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- £7.49
Publisher Description
In this picaresque story of adventure, David Green captures an overlooked, idiosyncratic Russia in the age of Putin.
A journalist for National Public Radio in the US, David Greene decides to travel thousands of kilometres from Moscow to Vladivostok on the iconic Trans-Siberian line. On the train and in the many Siberian outposts he stops as he meets a wide range of ordinary Russian people – from a group of Beatles-singing babushkas to soldiers and struggling entrepreneurs – with situations arising that are at times comical, awkward or poignant. Travelling in third class, he learns to adhere to the train’s unwritten social codes and to navigate the unfamiliar environment of Siberia, occasionally shadowed by security agents.
Conjuring up other famous travellers to the regions such as Anton Chekhov, David Greene manages, through the events he describes and his reflections and conversations on the journey, to construct a complex, compassionate and astute portrait of Putin’s Russia, far away from the glamour and prestige of Moscow.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 2013, after several years serving as NPR's Moscow bureau chief, Greene traveled 6,000 miles of the Trans-Siberian Railway in a quixotic attempt to understand the Russian soul. As Green journeyed across the Siberian landscape, he made frequent stops to interview ordinary Russians in a variety of situations to capture the everyday realities of post-Soviet Russia. The result is chronicled in this travelogue that reads like a series of episodic radio pieces in the NPR style, a collage of Green's interviews and insights from scholars about Russian history that attempts to answer a few difficult questions: what do the Russians want? Why do they tolerate a corrupt and restrictive government? And, as the Arab Spring erupts in the Middle East, how close is Russia to (another) revolution? What Greene finds is complex and frequently contradictory but all the more thought-provoking: a small business owner who believes Russia must be patient and slowly "develop" towards democracy, a taxi driver who wishes for socialism, an anti-Putin activist who believes Russia needs an autocrat like Stalin (but more benign). Despite the poverty and repression he frequently encounters, Greene remains optimistic throughout his travels, and he reproduces the source of this conviction in this collection of vignettes.
