Since Soviet times, Russians have called this part of Siberia the Russian Far East. To the east, about three thousand miles beyond the Urals, Siberia ends at the Pacific Ocean, in the form of the Sea of Japan, the Sea of Okhotsk, and the Bering Sea. Across the middle of Siberia, west to east for thousands of miles, runs the Russian taiga, the largest forest in the world.
#SYBERIA II REPAIRING THE HORSES PLUS#
The continental United States plus most of Europe could fit inside it. The United States from Maine to California stretches across four time zones in Siberia there are eight. Siberia takes up one-twelfth of all the land on earth. Three-fourths of Russia today is Siberia. Rather, they were established by custom and accepted by general agreement. Nobody has ever formally laid out the boundaries of the actual, physical Siberia. He turned to us and spread his arms wide, indicating the beams brightly filling the room. He reached up and screwed the new bulb into the socket. He climbed down, put globe and bulb on the counter, took a fresh bulb, and ascended again. Mounting it, he removed the glass globe from the overhead light and unscrewed the bulb. He fooled with the switch, then hurried off and came back with a stepladder. When we got to the kitchen, he flipped the switch but the light did not go on. The mineral-water bottler led us from room to room, throwing on all the lights and pointing out the amenities. The time was late evening darkness had fallen. 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. Apart from their actual, physical selves, both exist as constructs, expressions of the mind. In this respect (as in many others), Siberia and America are alike. When an author writes a book about a Park Avenue apartment building, and the book offends some of the residents, and a neighbor who happens to be a friend of the author offers to throw him a book party in her apartment, and the people in the Park Avenue building hear about this plan, the party giver is risking “social Siberia,” one of them warns. Newspaper gossip columns take the word even more metaphorically. 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. For most people, Siberia is not the place itself but a figure of speech. By contrast, the state of New Jersey, where I live, has nearly a quarter as many people on about. About thirty-eight million Russians and native peoples inhabit that northern third of Asia. Despite this invisibility, one can assume that Siberia’s traditional status as a threat did not improve.Ī tiny fraction of the world’s population lives in Siberia. During Soviet times, revised maps erased the name entirely, in order to discourage Siberian regionalism. In atlases, the word “Siberia” hovers across the northern third of Asia unconnected to any place in particular, as if designating a zone or a condition it seems to show through like a watermark on the page. No political or territorial entity has Siberia as its name. Officially, there is no such place as Siberia.
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