text: Siberia's boundaries encompass about three-quarters of Russia's territory and a twelfth of all land on earth. The continental United States and most of Europe could fit inside.Photographs by Simon Roberts
  A tiny fraction of the world's population lives in Siberia. About thirty-eight million Russians and native peoples inhabit that northern third of Asia. By contrast, the state of New Jersey, where I live, has nearly a quarter as many people on about .0015 as much land. For most people, Siberia is not the place itself but a figure of speech. In fashionable restaurants in New York and Los Angeles, Siberia is the section of less desirable tables given to customers whom the maître d' does not especially like.
  In this respect (as in many others), Siberia and America are alike. Apart from their actual, physical selves, both exist as constructs, expressions of the mind. Once when I was in western Russia, a bottler of mineral water was showing my two Russian companions and me around his new dacha outside the city of Vologda. The time was late evening; darkness had fallen. The mineral-water bottler led us from room to room, throwing on all the lights and pointing out the amenities. When we got to the kitchen, he flipped the switch but the light did not go on. This seemed to upset him. He fooled with the switch, then hurried off and came back with a stepladder. Mounting it, he removed the glass globe from the overhead light and unscrewed the bulb. He climbed down, put globe and bulb on the counter, took a fresh bulb, and ascended again. He reached up and screwed the new bulb into the socket. After a few twists, the light came on. He turned to us and spread his arms wide, indicating the beams brightly filling the room. "Ahhh," he said, triumphantly. "Amerika!"
  Nobody has ever formally laid out the boundaries of the actual, physical Siberia. Rather, they were established by custom and accepted by general agreement. Siberia is, of course, huge. Three-fourths of Russia today is Siberia. Siberia takes up one-twelfth of all the land on earth. The United States from Maine to California stretches across four time zones; in Siberia there are eight. The continental United States plus most of Europe could fit inside it. Across the middle of Siberia, west to east for thousands of miles, runs the Russian taiga, the largest forest in the world.*
  The Arctic Ocean borders Siberia on the north. West to east, its seas are the Kara Sea, the Laptev Sea, and the East Siberian Sea. For most of the year (though less consistently than before), this line is obscured under ice. The land here for as much as two hundred and fifty miles in from the sea is tundra—a treeless, mossy bog for the months of summer, a white near-wasteland otherwise.
  Sakhalin Island, which almost touches the Russian coast north of Japan, is considered part of Siberia. The island was a prison colony during tsarist times. Six hundred miles east of Sakhalin, the peninsula of Kamchatka descends from the Siberian mainland, dividing the Sea of Okhotsk from the Bering Sea. Kamchatka lies within the Pacific Rim's "Ring of Fire" and has active volcanoes. Kamchatka's Klyuchevskaya volcano, at fifteen thousand five hundred and eighty feet, is the highest point in Siberia. Among Russians, Kamchatka has served as a shorthand term for remoteness. Boris Pasternak's memoir, "Safe Conduct," says that for Russian schoolchildren the far back of the class where the worst students sat was called Kamchatka. When the teacher had not yet heard the correct answer, he would cry to the back bench, as a last resort, "To the rescue, Kamchatka!"
  Coincidentally, Kamchatka was the first geographic fact that many people my age in America knew about Siberia. I am of the baby-boom generation, who grew up during the Cold War. In our childhood, a new board game came out called Risk, which was played on a map representing the world. The object of Risk was to multiply your own armies, move them from one global region to the next while eliminating the armies of your opponents, and eventually take over the world. This required luck, ruthlessness, and intercontinental strategizing, Cold War style. The armies were little plastic counters colored red, blue, yellow, brown, black, and green. Of the major global powers, you basically understood which color was supposed to stand for whom. The Kamchatka Peninsula controlled the only crossing of the game board's narrow sea between Asia and North America, so gaining Kamchatka was key.
  As a landmass, Siberia got some bad breaks geographically. The main rivers of Siberia are (west to east) the Ob, the Yenisei, the Lena, and the Amur. I have seen each of these, and though the Mississippi may be mighty, they can make it look small. The fact that the tributary systems of these rivers interlock allowed adventurers in the seventeenth century to go by river from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean with only five portages. Seeking furs, these men had crossed all of Siberia in a hundred years, and built fortresses and founded cities along the way. In western Siberia, there are cities more than four hundred years old. Siberia's rivers still serve as important north-south avenues for barge traffic and in the winter as ice highways for trucks.
  The problem with Siberia's big rivers is the direction they flow. Most of Siberia's rivers go north or join others that do, and their waters end up in the Arctic Ocean. Even the Amur, whose general inclination is to the northeast and whose destination is the Pacific, empties into the stormy Sea of Okhotsk. In the spring, north-flowing rivers thaw upstream while they're still frozen at their mouths. This causes them to back up. This creates swamps. Western Siberia has the largest swamps in the world. In much of Siberia, the land doesn't do much of anything besides gradually sag northward to the Arctic. The rivers of western Siberia flow so slowly that they hardly seem to move at all. There the rivers run muddy; in eastern Siberia, with its real mountains and sharper drop to the Pacific, many of the rivers run clear.
  Another bad geographical break is Siberia's continentality. The land simply stretches on and on; eventually you feel you're in the farthest, extra, out-of-sight section of the parking lot, where no one in the history of civilization has ever bothered to go. Only on the sea can you travel as far and still be in apparently the same place. The deeper into Siberia, and the farther from the mitigating effect of temperate oceans, the harsher the climate's extremes become. Summers in the interior of Siberia are hot, sometimes dry and dusty, sometimes hazy with smoke from taiga fires. In the winters, temperatures drop to the lowest on the planet outside Antarctica. In the city of Verkhoyansk, in northeast-central Siberia, the cold reaches minus 68 degrees centigrade (about minus 90 degrees Fahrenheit). When I mentioned this frequently noted Siberian fact to my friends and guides in St. Petersburg, they scoffed, as Russians tend to do. Then they said they knew of someplace in Siberia even colder.
  Because of the cold, a lot of central Siberia and most of the east lies under permafrost—ground permanently frozen, sometimes to more than a thousand metres down. Permafrost also covers all the tundra region. Agriculture on any large scale is impossible in the permafrost zone, though in more forgiving parts of it people have kitchen gardens, and greenhouse farming occasionally succeeds. Much of Siberia's taiga rests on permafrost, implying a shaky future for the forest if the permafrost melts, and a shakier one, scientists say, for the earth's atmospheric chemistry. Huge amounts of climate-changing methane would be released into the air.
  What, then, is good about Siberia? Its natural resources, though hard to get at, are amazing. Its coal reserves, centered in the Kuznetsk Basin mining region, in south-central Siberia, are some of the largest in the world. The Kuznetsk Basin is also rich in iron ore, a combination that made this region Russia's armory. Siberia has minerals like cobalt, zinc, copper, lead, tin, and mercury in great abundance; in Norilsk, the second-largest city in the world above the Arctic Circle, the Soviets dug the world's largest nickel mine. The diamond mines at Mirny, near the Vilyui River, are second only to South Africa's. Siberia has supplied the Russian treasury with silver and gold since tsarist times; during the nineteen-thirties, the Kolyma region of eastern Siberia produced, by means of the cruellest mines in history, about half the gold then being mined in the world. Russia has some of the world's largest reserves of petroleum and natural gas. A lot of those reserves are in Siberia.
  Along the route of the Trans-Siberian Railway, trains of oil tank cars extend across the landscape for miles. Each tank car, black and tarry-looking, with faded white markings, resembles the one that follows it; slowly rolling past a grade crossing of the Trans-Siberian Railway, a trainload of these cars defines monotony. The Trans-Siberian Railway covers nine thousand two hundred and eighty-eight kilometres between Moscow and the Pacific port of Vladivostok, or five thousand seven hundred and seventy-one miles. In other words, it's almost twice as long as Interstate 80 from New Jersey to California. Lying awake near the tracks in some remote spot, you hear trains going by all through the night with scarcely a pause. Sitting beside the tracks and observing the point in the distance where they and the cables above them merge—the Trans-Siberian Railway is all-electric, with overhead cables like a streetcar line—you find that the tracks are empty of traffic for only five or ten minutes at a time.
  Besides oil, the railway carries coal, machinery parts, giant tires, scrap iron, and endless containers saying HanJin or Sea-Land or Maersk on their sides, just like the containers stacked five stories high around the Port of Newark, New Jersey, and probably every other port in the world. Now and then, a passenger train goes by, and, if the time is summer and the weather, as usual, hot, many shirtless passengers are hanging from the open windows with the curtains flapping beside them. Not even the most luxurious car on the Trans-Siberian Railway offers air-conditioning. Then more freight comes along, sometimes timber by the trainload. Siberian timber can be three or four feet in diameter, a size only rarely seen on logging trucks in America today. Some of these trees are called korabel'nie sosni—literally, caravel pines, trees from which ships' masts were made.
  Geologists have always liked Siberia, especially its eastern part, where a lot is going on with the earth. Well into eastern Siberia—to a north-south range of mountains roughly paralleling the Lena River Valley—you are still in North America, tectonically speaking. The North American Plate, sliding westward, meets the Eurasian Plate there, while to the south the Amursky and the Okhotsky Plates complicate the collision by inserting themselves from that direction. All this plate motion causes seismic activity and an influx of seismologists. Eastern Siberia is among the most important places for seismic studies in the world.
  Paleontologists come to Siberia not for dinosaur fossils, which are not found nearly as often as in the Mongolian territory to the south, but for more recent fossils, of prehistoric bison, mammoths, rhinos, and other species that lived fifteen thousand to ten thousand years ago. The Siberian-mammoth finds alone have been a bonanza, some of them not fossils but the actual creatures themselves, still frozen and almost intact, or mummified in frozen sediments. In the nineteenth century, discoveries of mammoth remains were so common that for a while mammoth ivory became a major export of Siberia.
  Travellers who crossed Siberia in the eighteenth century noted the remarkable animals they saw—elk "of monstrous size," fierce aurochs, wild boars, wild horses and asses, flying squirrels in great numbers, foxes, hares, beavers, bears. Of the swans, cranes, pelicans, geese, ducks, bitterns, and other birds, one traveller wrote, "After sundown these manifold armies of winged creatures made such a terrific clamour that we could not even hear our own words." Philipp Johann von Strahlenberg, a Swede captured by Peter the Great's army at the Battle of Poltava, in 1709, and sent with other Swedish prisoners to Siberia, wrote that the region had six species of deer, including the great stag, the roe deer, the musk deer, the fallow deer, and the reindeer. He also mentioned a special kind of bird whose nests were so soft that they were used for socks. About two hundred and ninety years later in Siberia, I saw few or none of these marvels, except in museums, where some of the specimens are facing a second extinction from moths and general disintegration.
  The main four-legged animal I encountered in Siberia was the cow. Little herds appear all the time, especially in western Siberia, grazing along the road or moving at twilight from the woods or the swamp into a glade. Siberian cows are skinnier than the ones in America, and longer-legged, often with muddy shins, and ribs showing. Some wear bells. Herders, usually not on horseback, follow them unhurriedly. The boys have motorman's caps and sweaters with holes; the women, usually older, wear rubber boots, long trousers under their skirts, and scarves around their heads against the insects. Beef in Siberian stores is gristly, tough, and expensive. Siberian dairy products, however, are cheap and good. The butter and ice cream of Siberia are the best I've tasted anywhere.
  At times, Siberia has supplied a lot of western Russia's butter, and some of England's and Western Europe's, too. Just before the First World War, sixteen per cent of the world's exports of butter came from Siberia. N. S. Korzhanskii, a revolutionary who knew the father of the Russian Revolution, V. I. Lenin, when Lenin was living in England in 1903, recalled a meal in Lenin's London apartment: "I was amazed at the wonderful, beautiful-smelling creamy butter, and was just about to burst out with some remark about the wealth of the British, when Vladimir Ilyich said, 'Yes, that must be ours. From Siberia.' "
  Lenin went to Siberia on two separate occasions. He was sent into exile there following his arrest for revolutionary activities in St. Petersburg in December of 1895. Lenin was twenty-five then, and still using his original name, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. Sentenced to three years' exile, he was sent to Shushenskoye, a village on the Yenisei River, in south-central Siberia. Exile under the tsars could be a rather mild proposition, especially compared with what the Soviets later devised; during his exile Lenin received a government stipend of twelve rubles a month, which covered room and board along with extras like books. He was able to get a lot of reading done. All in all, Siberia seems to have agreed with Lenin splendidly, and seasoned him as a political thinker.
  The second time Lenin was sent to Siberia he had been dead for seventeen years. After leading the revolution and maneuvering the Bolshevik state through the power struggles that followed, he suffered a series of strokes; a convalescence did not restore his health, and he died, of another stroke, in January of 1924. Because of Lenin's importance to the revolution and the saintlike status the Communists gave him, the Soviet government decided to have his body preserved. Embalmers and other technicians did such a skillful job that when they were done he looked better than he had in the months before he died. To house him, the government built a temporary and then a permanent tomb on Red Square, in Moscow, where his body went on display for the crowds who filed reverently by.
  In 1941, with the Germans approaching, an icon as important as Lenin could not be left at risk of destruction or capture, so the body was packed into a railroad car and shipped to the western Siberian city of Tyumen for safekeeping. There, far from the front, it waited out the war. In 1945, after the Allied victory, Lenin again returned from Siberia, and went back to his Red Square tomb.
  The first part of the author's route from St. Petersburg across Siberia; the second part will be covered in a second installment.Map by Laszlo Kubinyi
  Like Lenin, many of the objects in museums and churches in western Russia have spent some time in Siberia. During the Second World War, state treasures and works of art and historic archives were put in crates and shipped east. A lot of western Russia's heavy industry also moved to temporary factories beyond the Urals. The instinct to withdraw, to disappear far into the interior, figures often in Russian history. During invasions from the West, Russia's strategic option of nearly unlimited retreat made it, in a sense, unkillable. After Napoleon began his invasion of Russia in 1812, an adviser told Tsar Alexander I, "I am not afraid of military reverses. . . . Your empire has two powerful defenders in its vastness and its climate. The emperor of Russia will always be formidable in Moscow, terrible in Kazan, and invincible in Tobolsk." Tobolsk, at the junction of the Irtysh and Tobol Rivers, was at the time the administrative capital and ecclesiastical seat of western Siberia.
  On the question of whether Russia's vast size has benefitted or hurt it over all, historians and others disagree. Those who take the negative side say that Russia has been too big and spread out ever to function properly, that it has been "crippled by its expanse," that much of its land is not worth the trouble, and that Siberia is a road leading nowhere. A few years ago, two public-policy experts at a Washington think tank wrote a book advising Russia to close down its remote and hard-to-supply Siberian cities and villages and concentrate the population in locations more practical for transportation and the global market. The far places should be left to a few skeleton-crew outposts, and the difficult environment allowed to revert to wilderness, the experts maintained.
  Those on the positive side of the argument (a larger number, in total, than the nays) say, basically, that Russia was not really Russia until it began to move into Asia. Before, it was a loose collection of principalities centered on trading cities like Novgorod and Vladimir and Moscow. The pro-Siberians say that other nations became empires by crossing oceans, while Russia did the same by expanding across the land it was already on. At weak moments in Russia's history, it could have been partitioned between hostile countries that were then more powerful—Lithuania, Poland, Sweden, the Ottoman Empire, Germany—had not the resources and hard-to-subdue vastness of Siberia kept it alive. Possessed of Siberia, Russia became a continental country, not only an ethnic entity on the map of Eastern Europe. Or, as Joseph Stalin once told a Japanese interviewer, "Russia is an Asiatic land, and I myself am an Asiatic." (Stalin, by the way, was exiled to Siberia an indeterminate number of times during his years as a young revolutionary, and claimed that he escaped from Siberia six times. He was, of course, alive during the Second World War, and so did not make a posthumous visit via cold storage.)
  The first Russian ruler to style himself officially as tsar, Ivan IV (Ivan Grozny, Ivan the Fear-Inspiring, the Terrible), was also the first to add "Lord of All the Siberian Land" to his titles. He was able to do this because he had conquered the Tatar city of Kazan, a Muslim stronghold on the Volga River which had long blocked Russian moves eastward. With Kazan out of the way, Russian adventurers could go beyond the frontiers to previously unexplored lands across the Urals. In 1581 and 1582, a band of Cossacks led by a Volga River pirate named Yermak Timofeyevich followed rivers into the country of the Khan of Sibir, fought several battles with the Khan's forces, defeated him, captured his leading general, and occupied his fortress, Isker, on the Tobol River. Yermak sent envoys to Ivan with news of his victory and a rich tribute of sable furs, black-fox furs, and noble captives. This impressed Ivan favorably with Siberia's possibilities, and the state then secured Yermak's foothold with contingents of troops.
  After Russia acquired Siberia, tsars of the seventeenth century sometimes were told by Westerners that their dominion exceeded the size of the surface of the full moon. This information pleased the tsars, who probably did not look too closely into the math of the statement. The surface area of the moon is about fourteen million six hundred and forty-six thousand square miles (although the tsars would have measured in desyatins, or square versts, or something else). When the moon is full, the part that's visible is, of course, half of the entire moon, or about seven million three hundred and twenty-three thousand square miles. Whether Russia in the seventeenth century could honestly claim to be larger than that is not certain. It had not yet taken over the Baltic territories, the Crimea, Ukraine, or the Caucasus, and most of its Siberian territory was unknown in size. Mapmakers then had little information about Siberia's eastern regions, and were not even sure whether it joined North America. Those details weren't important, however. To say that Russia was larger than the full moon sounded impressive, and had an echo of poetry, and poetry creates empires.
  Sergei Mikhailovich Lunev is a muscular and youthfully fit man in his mid-sixties. He looks like a gymnast, or a coach of gymnasts. He has a long, ectomorphic head whose most expressive feature is its brow, which furrows this way and that in thought, emphasizing his canny, mobile, and china-blue eyes. The neatly trimmed hair around his balding crown adds a professorial dignity, appropriately, because he is the head of the robotics lab at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical University. He used to work with the Soviet space program before it was reduced in size.
  I met Sergei in the summer of 2001, in St. Petersburg; he was to be my guide for an automobile trip across Russia. Guiding was something he was doing for extra money. After knowing him for a while, I wondered if the discontent and suppressed anger that sometimes showed on his face were the result of having to do an extra job, one unequal to his talents. He speaks some English, I speak some Russian. We got along better as my Russian improved and I understood how prestigious his real job was.
  One day in June, Sergei and I drove to a labyrinthine warren of single-vehicle garages in a far section of St. Petersburg. I had wanted to buy a Russian all-road vehicle like a four-wheel-drive Niva, but I was warned that that was a bad idea, because Russian vehicles constantly break down. (On our journey, after I'd seen the thousandth Niva by the side of the road with its hood up and the driver peering under it, I appreciated this truth.) Instead, with forty-five hundred dollars supplied by me, Sergei had bought a diesel-powered Renault step van. He promised me that this car was far more reliable.
  In the narrow, low-ceilinged garage where Sergei was keeping it, the Renault struck me as not Siberia-ready. It looked more suited to delivering sour cream and eggs, the job it had done until recently. Sergei backed it out and we went for a quick test drive. Its shocks weren't much and its stick shift was stiff. Sergei said he would have it running smoothly in time for the journey. He said he planned to put an extra seat in the back, and a place to store our stuff, and a table where we could eat when it rained. I noticed that there were no seat belts, and said that each seat must have one. Sergei conceded that seat belts could be added if I wanted them. He treated this as an eccentric special request. Many Russians do not use seat belts and consider them an American absurdity.
  Sergei described how he would arrange the back so we could sleep in there if necessary. I didn't see quite how this would work, especially when I learned there would be three of us—Vladimir Chumak, called Volodya or Vitya, who was a past associate of Sergei's, had been asked to come along as an assistant. Sergei and Volodya had been in Kamchatka together and had known each other since university. I was told that three men were better than two for safety. That sounded sensible to me. Sergei praised Volodya Chumak as a topnotch alpinist and a great guy. He lived in Sochi, a resort town on the Black Sea, where he employed his alpinist skills in his regular job as a building renovator, rappelling down the façades of buildings he was restoring. I would not meet him until just before the trip began.
  There are very few motels in Siberia. Most of the time, Sergei and Volodya and I would be camping out, or else staying in people's houses. Sergei would supply tents, a propane stove, camp chairs, and other gear. I was to bring my own sleeping bag, eating utensils, personal items, etc. I asked if I should buy a travel directory of Siberian campgrounds, and he laughed. Sergei said that I would understand better what Siberia was like once I got there.
  Early on the morning of the fifth of August, Sergei and Volodya brought the van to the back of Sergei's building. Volodya, who had arrived the day before, is a slim, broad-shouldered man who usually wears neat work shirts and pants in shades of gray. He was fifty at the time, with a full head of black, graying hair, blue eyes, and the thin nose and chiselled features of his Ukrainian ancestry. We did our final loading, Sergei said goodbye to his wife and grandson, and we climbed aboard. Setting out, I did not think about the enterprise before us or about our destination a third of the way around the globe. Instead I noticed that the rain, which had been sprinkling, had begun to pour, and that the windshield wiper on the passenger side worked only intermittently. The driver's-side wiper worked all right. The gray Neva River, beside us, reproduced the overcast drabness of the sky, and the speeding traffic threw up rooster tails of spray. By the time we reached the city limits, the oil-pressure warning light on the dashboard had come on. I pointed it out to Sergei and Volodya. They said it was nothing.
  The van had been built with the cargo area in the back lower than the front seats, which rested on a raised platform. In the seat Sergei had installed in the back, one therefore had to sit straight up and lean forward in order to see over the dash. For comfort this was not ideal, but I had no choice, because there were no back windows on the van's sides. About the time the oil-pressure light came on, I also smelled a strange burning odor, mixed with diesel exhaust. When I mentioned this to Sergei, he rolled his window partway down.
  "The gods want olive oil, but it has to be virgin olive oil."
  Past the city, we turned onto the Murmansk highway eastbound. Its four lanes soon became two. Trucks were speeding toward us in the downpour. I thought Sergei was driving too fast but I couldn't tell for sure, because the speedometer needle, which had been fluttering spasmodically, suddenly lay down on the left side of the dial and never moved again for the rest of the journey. After a couple of hours, we came to the highway leading southeast to Vologda, and we pulled over at the intersection. The rain had let up by then. The intersection appeared to be a popular place to stop, with broad aprons of gravel beside the pavement and trash strewn around. We got out to use the facilities, which were bushes and weeds that had seen such employment before. Near the intersection stood a ruined brick church with grass and small trees growing from its upper towers and from the broken-off parts where the onion domes had been.
  The Vologda road led through rural places with people selling potatoes along the narrow shoulder and irregularly shaped yellow meadows sometimes opening widely to the horizon. Then birch forest thronged close around, and Sergei said we were going into a huge swamp where many men had died in battles with the Nazis. People still go back in the swamp and find rusted grenades and skulls in helmets, he said. This conversation got Volodya talking about Ivan Susanin, the heroic Russian peasant who deliberately misled a Polish army deep into a swamp in order to save the life of the first Romanov tsar, in the Time of Troubles, during the seventeenth century. The Poles, discovering the trick too late, killed Ivan Susanin before perishing themselves. He is the main character of Glinka's opera "A Life for the Tsar," Volodya told me. (Later, in my more uncertain moods, I wondered if my guides might be Ivan Susanin, and the Polish army might be me.)
  The woods continued; now we came to a rotary completely enclosed by forest. On a pedestal in the middle of the rotary, pointing nose upward as if about to swoop into the sky, was a bright silver MIG fighter jet. I had never seen a MIG up close. We had passed no airbases or factories that I recalled, so I couldn't figure out what it was doing here. Sergei seemed not to know, either. The shiny MIG was a strange object encountered inexplicably in a dark forest, spaceship-like.
  The Vologda road had become a spill of pavement, untrimmed along its edges, with scalloping where the poured asphalt had flowed. Small villages followed, one after another, at regular intervals, roadside signs announcing their names. Often I looked up the names in my pocket Russian-English dictionary to see what they meant. According to my translations (verified by Sergei), that day we went through villages named Puddle, Jellies, Knee, New Knee, and Smokes.
  All along the road, sometimes to heights of ten or twelve feet, grew a plant that Volodya identified as morkovnik. This plant resembles a roadside weed in America called Queen Anne's lace—except that morkovnik is like our modest, waist-high plant drastically and Asiatically enlarged. Queen Anne's lace and morkovnik are in fact related, both belonging to the carrot family (morkov' means "carrot"). Along the route we travelled, morkovnik grows abundantly from one end of Russia to the other.
  In early afternoon, we stopped at an informal rest area like the one at the intersection of the Murmansk and Vologda roads. Here for the first time I encountered big-time Russian roadside trash. Very, very few trash receptacles exist along the roads of Russia. This rest area, and its ad-hoc picnic spots, with their benches of downed tree trunks, featured a ground layer of trash basically everywhere, except in a few places, where there was more. In the all-trash encirclement, trash items had piled themselves together here and there in heaps three and four feet tall, as if making common cause. With a quick kicking and scuffing of nearby fragments, Sergei rendered a place beside a log bench relatively trash free and then laid out our cold-chicken lunch on pieces of cellophane on the ground. I ate hungrily, though I did notice through the cellophane many little pieces of broken eggshell from some previous traveller's meal.
  Back on the Vologda road, we continued in the direction of Cherepovets. After not many kilometres, the warning light for the engine generator lit up on the dashboard, making a companion for the oil-pressure light, which had never gone off. I expected that soon every warning light on the dashboard would be glowing. I pointed out the generator light to Sergei, and to humor me he said that we would stop and have the generator looked at in Cherepovets.
  If that city consists of buildings, like a conventional city, you couldn't prove it by me, because all I saw of it was complicated highway ramps among a forest of power-line towers. The towers were everywhere, many stories high, sometimes clustering right up next to one another like groves of trees all striving for the daylight. Of daylight itself there was almost none; a tarpaulin of gray clouds overlay the entire scene. Somewhere Sergei spotted a garage in a roadside expanse of mud and gravel and pulled up in front of the garage-bay door. Just at that moment, the garageman came out, yanked a rope, and pulled the bay door down. He informed Sergei that the garage was now closed for the day. Then the garageman hurried to his car and sped away into the power-line forest. Sergei returned to the van, reseated himself behind the steering wheel, and turned the key. From the engine came no noise of any kind.
  With this particular non-starting of the van we entered an odd zone—a sort of horse latitudes of confusion and delay caused by the mysterious problems of our vehicle. At low moments, I thought I might bounce around in this zone and stay in western Russia forever. The episode comes back to me in flashes:
  Here are Sergei and Volodya and me pushing the van away from the garage-bay door, and then heaving and straining from behind to build up enough speed in order to start the engine by popping the clutch. Finally, at our breaking point, Volodya runs up to the open driver's-side door, leaps in, throws the gear shift into first, and the engine coughs alive.
  Here we are in the city of Vologda, a hundred and thirty-five kilometres down the road, where Vyacheslav, the brother of a friend of Sergei's wife, lives. Night has fallen. We are in a parking lot behind some buildings with our weakly idling van. Vyacheslav arrives. He is like a provincial nobleman from a nineteenth-century novel. He is tall and straight, with Tatar eyes, a round head, and Lenin-pattern baldness. He wears a well-tailored shirt of white, finely woven cotton, freshly pressed slacks, and polished brown loafers with silver buttons. His confident and peremptory manner shows not a particle of doubt. In the silvery aura of the headlights of his shiny new Volvo sedan, he says he knows an excellent mechanic who will repair the van tomorrow. For now, we will stay at his dacha, twenty-eight kilometres out of town. We will leave the van here in this parking lot overnight. Someone must stay with it to watch our things. This job falls to Volodya. He accepts it with a shrug.
  Here we are in Vyacheslav's large dacha, in a densely packed village of dachas. Vyacheslav's is set off from the others by a concrete wall with a steel gate. On the other side of the driveway, but inside the wall, is a smaller dacha that Vyacheslav has told me is the dacha of his security staff.
  Here we are rocketing back to Vologda in the early morning. The faithful Volodya, when we find him, is walking up and down unhappily in the parking lot. He looks a bit worn from his night in the van. Vyacheslav's mechanic has been summoned and is on his way. Now, Vyacheslav tells us, we will go to a tennis exhibition put on by his son, a rising tennis star. Then we will take a tour of Vyacheslav's factory. Meanwhile, Volodya will stay and deal with the mechanic and the van.
  Here we are in Vyacheslav's factory. He owns a company called Start-Plus; it bottles a mineral water called Serebrenaya Rosa, which means "silver dew." The factory is a Soviet-era concrete-and-brick pile reconfigured into a bottling plant, with many hallways, storerooms, catwalks. As we go through it, Vyacheslav tells me that he was trained originally as an engineer in metallurgy, but after meeting the founder of the first Russian bottled-water company, he got the idea of starting such a business himself. With friends, he formed a company, hired a team of geologists to search for springs, found the water of one particular spring to be good-tasting and extremely healthful, and began to bottle it. The company's success has been enormous. He attributes this to the company's collective method of working, and to the water itself, which he says is better and purer than bottled water in America, where what is sold as spring water is actually fake—distilled, or piped from a public water supply. His bottled water is alive, he says, while bottled water in America is "dead water." In office after office, he introduces me to his employees, who stand at their desks and smile and say they are pleased to meet me.
  Here I am taking a walking tour of the city of Vologda with Stanislaus, an executive of the Start-Plus company. The van, which we hoped would be done by now, has apparently presented some new difficulties. Stanislaus is in his seventies, with thinning blond hair combed back, faded blue eyes, and an easygoing style. He seems to have done this kind of duty before. He shows me a cathedral that Ivan the Terrible got built in record time by denying food to the workers when they progressed too slowly; soon after the cathedral was finished, it began to fall apart, and it wasn't consecrated for many years. Stanislaus also shows me the house of the first translator of Marx's "Das Kapital" into Russian, and the building where Lenin's sister lived while in exile, and a statue of Lenin that Stanislaus says is the only life-size statue of Lenin in the world. It looks painful—as if the powerful Bolshevik had simply stood on a pedestal and been bronzed alive.
  Now here I am with Stanislaus and Vyacheslav in a restaurant in Vologda having a late lunch.
  A woman selling vegetables in Bilibino, a town above the Arctic Circle, in the district of Chukotka, the part of farthest Siberia just across the Bering Strait from Alaska.
  Here we are in Vyacheslav's office. Sergei and Volodya have just arrived. The van is out of the shop and supposedly ready to go. A conference of the executives of the Start-Plus company has been assembled to determine what we travellers should do now. My own plan is simple: Let's go. Oh, but that is an overly hasty idea, I am told. The afternoon is almost gone. We should not leave now, but instead stay another night at Vyacheslav's dacha. Sergei and Volodya both strongly favor this idea. What can I do but agree?
  Here we are at Vyacheslav's dacha that evening. Dinner has ended long ago, but still we are sitting at the table, drinking our fifth or seventh cup of tea; and I am thinking that Russians can sit at a supper table while saying brilliant or ridiculous things longer than seems physically possible; further, this trait may explain Russia's famous susceptibility to unhealthy foreign ideas, with the post-mealtime tea-drinking providing the opportunity for contagion; and, further yet, I am wondering whether tea perhaps has been a more dangerous beverage to the Russian peace of mind, over all, than vodka. At about midnight, Vyacheslav brings down his semi-automatic rifle and begins to tell us his adventures hunting bears.
  Here we are saying goodbye to Vyacheslav and his wife on the steps of his dacha the next morning. Sergei walks over to the van. Against expectation, it starts. I am glad it has finally been repaired.
  Of course, the van's ills were not cured—not then, nor were they ever, really. As we continued our journey, and new problems arose, I sometimes raged inwardly at Sergei for attempting to cross the continent in such a lemon. In time, though, I quit worrying. I noticed that, whatever glitch there might be, Sergei and Volodya did always manage to get the thing running again somehow. When the ignition balked, Sergei found a method of helping it along by opening the hood and leaning in with a big screwdriver from our gear. Soon his pokings would produce a large, sparking pop, the engine would start, and Sergei would extricate himself from the machinery, eyebrows a bit singed.
  Once after Volodya had accomplished a similar maneuver, I asked if he could explain to me just what was the matter with this car. He thought for a while and then said that what was wrong with the car could not be said in words. I recalled the lines by Tyutchev:
  Arshinom obshchim ne izmerit':
  U nei osobennaya stat'—
  (Russia cannot be understood with the mind, / She cannot be measured by ordinary measure: / She has her own particular stance— /All you can do is believe in her.)
  For days we motored eastward toward the Urals. Though the road went on and on, it never settled down and became what I would consider a standard long-distance highway. You never knew what it would do next. Sometimes it was no-frills two-lane blacktop for hours. Then without any announcement it would change to gravel, degenerating into mud and enormous potholes, and I learned the word yama, meaning "hole." Arriving in a village, the road might lead straight into an Olympic-size mud puddle or lose itself among streets apparently based on cattle paths. Many stops to ask directions would be required before we could pick up its thread again.
  On long, desolate sections with no villages nearby, people sat along the road selling things, or not. You might see a very fat and not-young woman in a bright-yellow dress sitting on a folding chair and reading a newspaper, with nothing visible to sell; then, a kilometre later, a group of little boys with several buckets and a sign that said "Raki." I knew that rak meant "cancer," but Sergei said it was also the word for crayfish, which the boys catch in nearby creeks and swamps. Day after day, men and women waited beside cardboard boxes filled with newspaper cones of mushrooms, gooseberries, strawberries, fiddlehead ferns, and cedar nuts. The term for these forest products is podnozhnii korm, Sergei told me; it means, literally, "feed found underfoot." Regularly, we passed women standing all alone and giving each passing vehicle a sideways, hangdog stare. When they realized the driver wasn't stopping, they would turn away with their eyes cast down. They reminded me of fallen women from an old novel; I had never seen prostitutes acting ashamed before.
  Whenever we stopped to refuel, the stations were as minimal as could be. A couple of fuel pumps on a gravel apron and a sheet-metal kiosk with a glass or plastic pay window so thick and opaque you could hardly make out the attendant inside composed the total of their amenities. No advertising banners, vending machines, drinking fountains, or rest rooms cluttered up this just-the-facts approach. Of course, no bucket or squeegee was available should your window need to be cleaned. We had entered a buggy part of the journey, and our windshield was usually covered with splattered insects. No problem: Volodya took some water from our supply, gave the windshield a few splashes, crushed an unfiltered cigarette in his fingers, and using the tobacco as a solvent washed the bugs from the glass with big sweeps of his hand. Sergei, meanwhile, removed the wiper mount from the windshield-wiper arm and with the blade of the wiper squeegeed the windshield dry and clean.
  One day—a Saturday—we drove through five weddings in the course of the afternoon. I couldn't tell whether the bridal couples had actually been married on the highway or were just having their receptions there. In either case, a lot of participants and guests had showed up, their numbers perhaps swelled by curious passersby. The celebrants stood on the pavement and along the roadside, clutching champagne bottles by the neck, photographing one another, and shouting remarks. Late in the day, we came upon the biggest and most sociable wedding yet. The bride and groom themselves were square in the middle of the road with the wedding party milling around them and backing up traffic in both directions. A young woman in a fancy dress came to the passenger-side window of our van and, talking fast, said we must give money to the newlyweds. Volodya handed her a few kopeks, and she said with indignation that that was not nearly enough. He asked how much and she said, "Ten rubles, at least." He found a ten-ruble bill and gave it to her. She then handed in a tray of little plastic cups of vodka, which Volodya declined, saying we were drivers on our way to the Far East.
  Cities came and went—Kirov, some seven hundred miles from St. Petersburg, and then Perm. Both were big, gray, and industrial. For a while, the scenery had been getting hillier. Sometimes the road ran on ridge tops above pine forests, and beyond Perm the land reminded me of the Rocky Mountain foothills along Interstate 90 near Bozeman, Montana. Just when I was expecting the sight of the mighty Urals themselves rising above their hilly prologue, we were on flat ground again. The Ural Mountains had been crossed. If there had been a moment when we crested the continent-dividing range's summit, somehow it had slipped by me. Then almost immediately we were coming up on Yekaterinburg, considered the westernmost Siberian city; here the road did one of its quick-change acts to become a crowded and roaring multilane highway with furniture-store billboards alongside, and broken-down vehicles, and extra-large heaps of trash, and stooped figures poking through the heaps with old umbrella handles.
  Having read a lot about the end of Tsar Nicholas II and his family and servants, I wanted to see the place in Yekaterinburg where that event occurred. The gloomy quality of this quest depressed Sergei's spirits, but he drove all over Yekaterinburg searching for the site nonetheless. Whenever he stopped and asked a pedestrian how to get to the house where Nicholas II was murdered, the reaction was a wince. Several people simply walked away. But eventually, after a lot of asking, Sergei found the location. It was on a low ridge near the edge of town, above railroad tracks and the Iset River. The house, known as the Ipatiev House, was no longer standing, and the basement where the actual killings happened had been filled in. I found the blankness of the place sinister and dizzying. It reminded me of an erasure done so determinedly that it had worn a hole through the page.
  The street next to the site is called Karl Liebknecht Street. A building near where the house used to be had a large green advertisement that said, in English, "LG—Digitally Yours." On an adjoining lot, a small chapel kept the memory of the Tsar and his family; beneath a pedestal holding an Orthodox cross, peonies and pansies grew. The inscription on the pedestal read, "We go down on our knees, Russia, at the foot of the tsarist cross."
  Beyond Yekaterinburg, the road lay straight through grain fields like Nebraska's or Iowa's, and the sky unfolded itself majestically outward and higher. Vistas kept appearing until the eye hardly knew what to do with them—dark-green tree lines converging at a distant yellow corner of the fields, and the lower trunks of a birch grove black as a bar code against a sunny meadow behind them, and the luminous yellows and greens of vegetables in baskets along the road, and grimy trucks with only their license numbers wiped clean, their black diesel smoke unravelling behind them across the sky.
  And everywhere the absence of fences. I couldn't get over that. In America, almost all open country is fenced, and your eye automatically uses fence lines for reference the way a hand feels for a bannister. Here the only fenced places were the gardens in the villages and the little paddocks for animals. Also, here the road signs were fewer and had almost no bullet holes. This oddity stood out even more because the stop signs, for some reason, were exactly the same as stop signs in America: octagonal, red, and with the word "STOP" on them in big white English letters. Any stop sign in such a rural place in America (let alone a stop sign written in a foreign language) would likely have a few bullet holes.
  THE CONVICTS' ROAD
  "Walden Pond is fine as long as Thoreau isn't there."
  In 1885, George Kennan, the journalist who became one of the most famous Siberian travellers of that century, went to Siberia to see prisons and interview political exiles. "Siberia and the Exile System," the exposé he wrote afterward, appalled readers and contributed to the revolutionary spirit that brought down the Tsar. I got interested in Kennan because he grew up in Norwalk, Ohio, where some of my family came from. Admiration for him was one of the reasons I had wanted to travel in Siberia in the first place.
  Because I knew Kennan's route, I generally had it in the back of my mind. Though the human geography had changed in a hundred and sixteen years, I was confident that Kennan had travelled quite near where I was right now. Kennan and George Frost, his travel companion and sketch artist, arrived in Yekaterinburg on June 12, 1885, and left there soon afterward. During Frost and Kennan's first day on the Siberian road (also called the Sibirskii Trakt, or just the Trakt), they saw one thousand four hundred and forty-five freight wagons. The Trans-Siberian Railway had not yet been built, so the Trakt then served as Siberia's main artery. Traffic crowded it, especially tea caravans, which were among its chief nuisances—the great throngs of carts and wagons loaded with crates of tea from China, moving in herd formation all over the roadway at the will of their driverless horses, loosely controlled by a few caravan masters.
  Of course, much of the Trakt's eastbound traffic consisted of exiles. Shackled or not, sometimes accompanied by their families, always under guard, parties of exiles journeyed to their various Siberian destinations on foot for most of the way. In tsarist times, many thousands of exiles walked the Trakt every year. It officially crossed into Siberia a hundred and fifty miles east of Yekaterinburg, where the province of Perm, a western Russian province, met the Siberian province of Tobolsk. A square pillar of stuccoed or plastered brick marked the spot of this continental transition. One side of the pillar bore the coat of arms of Perm Province, and the other side that of Tobolsk.
  At this pillar, Kennan said, exiles were allowed to stop and make a last goodbye, to press their faces to the ground and pick up a little of the earth of western Russia to bring with them. Beyond this spot they were, in a sense, jumping off into the void.
  Naturally, I wanted to find this pillar and see what it looks like now. If I stood beside it, I would be in an exact place where the famous traveller had been. I explained about the pillar to Sergei and we kept our eyes open. Kennan had said that the pillar was about two days' travel from Yekaterinburg, between the villages of Markova and Tugulimskaya. I noted a large town named Tugulym on the map, but Markova was either too small to be included or didn't exist anymore. Then, about two hundred kilometres from Yekaterinburg, on the right-hand side of the road, there it was: Markova, barely a hamlet, just some houses and a sign. A short distance beyond it, tall markers announced the boundaries of two raioni, or regions. The marker facing westward said Tugulymskii Raion, and the eastward-facing marker said Tapitskii Raion. We got out at the wide place in the road there. Pistachio shells and a Fanta Orange can littered the oil-stained ground, the trucks blew by, the trees leaned overhead. But nothing like Kennan's fateful pillar could be seen.
  A woman in a roadside café nearby told Sergei that the road we were on was the new road, and the previous one, the original Trakt, used to run through the woods just to the north. She had never heard of any pillar such as Kennan had described. Following her directions, we went down a brushy lane until it ended at a collection of trash piles, and then Sergei and I continued on foot into deep forest with weeds and underbrush over our heads sometimes. Rain had fallen the night before and our clothes were soon soaked through, while grass seeds covered us all over. The woman had said that exiles who died along the road were buried beside the old Trakt, and you could still see the mounds. We did find mounds on either side of a declivity among the trees, and its barely visible path could once have been a roadway. But the mosquitoes were coming at us so madly that we had to wave our hands before us like windshield wipers on the fastest setting, and I soon decided that Kennan's pillar, if it did perhaps exist somewhere in these thickets, would not be found by me.
  Back on the road, we drove slowly and asked people along it if they'd ever heard of the pillar—none had—and if they could show us sections of the old Trakt. Everybody we talked to pointed out pieces of the Trakt right away. Sometimes it was on one side of the new road, sometimes the other. Where it crossed grassy fields you could still see the deep depression the road had made in the ground. A man selling carrots on the new road told us that the Trakt had been the main street of a tiny village nearby called Maltsevo. Leaving the pavement and rambling along mud paths, we came upon Maltsevo in its backwater, where the new road as well as the railroad had passed it by. Every one of the dozen or so houses in the village was made of wood, and every piece of wood was the same shade of weathered gray. The houses' logs, thin pieces of overlying lath, decorative scrollwork, and plank window shutters all seemed to be in a slow-motion race to see which would be the first to fall completely down.
  The single distraction that kept the village from epitomizing a dreary Russian peasant village for all time was the loud rock-and-roll anthem reverbing from speakers somewhere invisible but quite close by. I recognized the song as "It's My Life" (in English, the original), by Bon Jovi. As we stood on the town's one street, a small, unshaven, dark-haired man came walking along. He had on two sweaters, whose several large holes almost did not overlap. We asked him where the Trakt used to be, and he immediately said, "Right here!," gesturing backhand at the ruts at his feet. "Also, there," he said, and gestured far to the west. "And there!" This final gesture, to the east, was like an overhand throwing motion, and it pantomimed a hopelessness at even imagining how far the road went on.
  I turned to where he gestured—first, back to the west, where the old road came on snakily but straight, a pair of muddy ruts in a wide and worn bed. The ruts entered the village, barely deigning to notice the weak attempt at domestication alongside, and then headed straight out of town. Across another empty field they dwindled eastward to the horizon and forever. I had seen some lonesome roads, but this one outdid them. I stood looking at it with Sergei and Volodya and the man wearing two sweaters. For a moment, I got an intimation of the sadness Kennan had talked about—the deep and ancient sorrow of exile.
  In the ruts of the old Trakt, I tried to picture its former magnitude. This had been a continental highway, after all, a road of empire. I imagined parties of prisoners tramping along it, chains jingling; and sleighs slipping by in winter, and imperial couriers on horseback bound for Peking, and troops of soldiers, and runaway serfs, and English travellers, and families of Gypsies, and hordes of tea wagons in clouds of dust. If there were a museum of the great roads of the world, the Sibirskii Trakt would deserve its own exhibit, along with the Via Appia and the Silk Road and old U.S. Route 66.
  In America, we love roads. To be "on the road" is to be happy and alive and free. Whatever lonesomeness the road implies is also a blankness that soon will be filled with possibility. A road leading to the horizon almost always signifies a hopeful vista for Americans. "Riding off into the sunset" has always been our happy ending. But I could find no happy-ending vista here, only the opposite. This had also been called the Convicts' Road or the Exiles' Road. Not only was it long and lonesome but it ran permanently in the wrong direction, from the exiles' point of view. Longing and melancholy seemed to have worked themselves into the very soil; the old road and the land around it seemed downcast, as if they'd had their feelings hurt by how much the people passing by did not want to be here.
  Using a place as punishment may or may not be fair to the people who are punished there, but it always demeans and does a disservice to the place. ♦
  *Correction, November 11, 2009: The Russian taiga runs for thousands of miles. The original sentence said forty-six hundred miles.
  More:Board GamesCarsExilesGeorge KennanHighwaysJoseph StalinMoonNatural ResourcesRiskRoad TripsRoadsRussiaSiberiaVans