According to Colin Thubron, the name Siberia is "a mystical conflation" that derives from the Mongolian "Siber", meaning beautiful and pure, and the Tartar "Sibir", meaning sleeping land. Yet such Arcadian interpretations only underline the shudder the word evokes in us now - nothing to do with imagined cold, simply a Pavlovian response to what Siberia represents, a sump for the contagious "a wasteland, into which were cast the bacilli infecting the state politic, the criminal, the sectarian, the politically dissident." Thubron is here writing about the time of the Czars. With the arrival of communism, the thousands became millions.
In Siberia completes a quartet of travel books documenting Colin Thubron's travels through "the vast communist hinterlands" that have been the dark shadow to Western democracy for most of this century. The first was Among the Russians, an account of Thubron's journey through the Western Soviet Union during the Brezhnev era, followed by Behind the Wall (China) and, most recently, The Lost Heart of Asia (post-Soviet Uzbekistan and Kazakstan). During these journeys, Thubron says, Siberia had always made its presence felt, like a great question mark. Not to go there, once unsupervised travel was possible, seemed to him "almost perverse."
So it was that in the summer of 1997 Thubron took the train to Yekaterinburg where, in 1918, Nicholas II and his family were brutally murdered. From Yekaterinburg to the Pacific coast is 6,000 miles, but Thubron travelled 15,000: here are no cross-country short cuts, just north/south gashes, culs-de-sac sometimes thousands of miles long that extend through the permafrost into nothingness from the main artery of the Transiberian railway where trains rarely exceed 40 mph and whose wheels, he writes, "putter pathetically, like old men running out of breath."
What sets Colin Thubron apart from other contemporary travel writers is his detachment, his desire to "eliminate the self" from his writing. Thubron's prose style reflects the man - spare yet elegant and saturated in scholarship. We meet in his London flat crammed with books: Greek myths next to post-modern novels, mainly European; ditto 19th century classics; fat books on painters and middle-eastern archaeology next to slim journals of learned societies. The son of a British diplomat, Thubron, now 60, is still very much the Etonian, notwithstanding that in Siberia he was usually taken as an Estonian, "tall, gaunt and with bad Russian", he says with a self-effacing laugh.
"With some travel writers", he explains, "you know all about what they're reading, dreaming, thinking. In my case that's not so. My books are very much about those societies that have come to interest me". He is not, as he puts it, "particularly foregrounded". The personal stuff is dealt with in his novels, which - unlike the work of such other novelist/travel writers as Theroux, Chatwin or Raban whose fiction is steeped in place and often indistinguishable from their non-fiction journeyings - are utterly different. "They explore the psyche", he says, "and take place in mental hospitals, in prisons, instead of being Out There."
Thubron concedes that his travel writing is a reaction against the personal intensity of the novels. "It's a negation of self up to a point, getting out of myself, leaving myself behind. Also one doesn't want in some evangelical way to overload the society you're in with your opinions, your ideas. It's more a question of just listening, trying to see."
And there were real questions he wanted answered in Siberia. What had replaced the Communist faith? How had the devotees of the Orthodox church survived? And then there were the gulags. "Sometimes", he writes, "I wondered if the past had been laid too easily to sleep". Since their abandonment, Siberia had receded into rumour, he felt, an abstract of fantasy and "fear that the terrors of the gulag secretly continue, and the rocket silos are rebuilding . . ."
He discovered that in some sense the terrors of the gulag do indeed remain. The camps Thubron found "still lying about" have not lost their propensity to shock, even with their mantle of purifying snow. "My response to the gulags still being there was complex. It sort of shocked me and amused me. With the denazification of Germany, say, camps were just wiped out or tuned into penitential museums. In the case of the Russians, they were just left to rot."
In the notorious Kolyma gulag in the far north-east, where prisoners piled the bodies of fellow prisoners up against the hut walls as insulation against the freezing weather, Colin Thubron found his way into Serpintinka, built as a torture and execution centre. "In 1938", he starkly tells us, "26,000 prisoners died there. Tractors would rev up their engines to drown out the noise. You gaze with their dead eyes, and see no hope. Nobody escaped." The dead included Osip Mandelstam. Thubron was taken into the punishment block in a walled-up transit camp, the dungeons knee-deep in water, walls sheathed in ice, a date discernible: 1952.
THUBRON found no sign of remorse among ordinary people, just a slight sense of recoil and disappointment. "It's as if the Russians have a different attitude to it", he explains. "This was done for the future of glorious Communism, above all for the Russian Nation, for the Soviet Union, and that's what the whole society around them endorsed. The Russians were never conquered as the Germans were. And that makes a huge difference, I think - penitence wasn't imposed on them by an alternative morality. With the Germans, the slate was wiped clean. Also the culture divide between Jew and Nazi was very great, but in Russia the persecutor and persecuted were very similar and often were interchangeable - the KGB who were interrogating you one year would themselves be marched off to the gulag the next."
Those who remain, he found, would happily exchange today for yesterday, when the Soviet Union was great and they had food on the table - because with the ending of Communism came the ending of special economic treatment for the region.
"I think I'd gone in the hope that there might be places that had sort of survived, with maybe some kind of enhanced sense of self-respect and self-reliance because of cutting loose from the centre, the corrupt centre. And I thought perhaps they might be feeling `We're going to make a go of it ourselves,' and there would be communities in obscure parts of Siberia who would feel almost a relief at being freed. On the contrary, they seemed to have fallen on ghastly times in a material sense. It is all dark territory."
Colin Thubron's In Siberia is published by Chatto & Windus at £17.99 in the UK
