Reviews for The Other Side of Russia: A Slice of Life in Siberia and the Russian Far East

The average rating for The Other Side of Russia: A Slice of Life in Siberia and the Russian Far East based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-08-10 00:00:00 Armaan Sheby Welcome to "Absurdistan" This extraordinary work is quite a bit more than "a slice of life." It's more like a seven-course meal replete with a different wine for each course topped with cognac, coffee, tea and cigars--not to mention a steady stream of songs, dances, toasts, speeches, gossip and other staples of Russian life east--far east--of the Urals. Relying on her experience as visiting professor at the Irkutsk State University in Irkutsk and the Far Eastern National University in Vladivostok during the years 1993-1995 when the fledgling Russian Federation was crashing headlong into the realities of the new market economy, Professor Hudgins has penned an amazingly detailed, colorful and often painfully vivid reminiscence of life in a place she and her husband Tom rightly dubbed "Absurdistan." Much of the book chronicles their day-to-day life amid the dreary poverty, the revolting filth, the depressing pollution, the mind-altering inefficiency, the endemic corruption, the physical danger and the stubborn backwardness and Big Brother paranoia that still characterized the Russian reality. Living in a drab high-rise "village" often without electricity or running water, with elevators that seldom worked, in small rooms often without heat in below zero temperatures, where toilet paper typically consisted of pages cut from Soviet era books, subsisting on their wits and craftily purchased food and drink, Sharon and Tom made an adventure out of what most of us would rightly experience as a horror story. Consider this from Chapter 7: "The water that ran through our taps...ranged in color from clear to amber to orange to purple to black, with accompanying aromas of petroleum, sewer gas, ham, rotten eggs, or fish." Consequently they pumped all their water for drinking, cooking, and tooth brushing through a portable filtration device they had brought with them. When the electricity was on they used the opportunity to boil water for future use, storing it in plastic bottles and an emergency 10-liter plastic container. They saved and used and reused plastic bags for many purposes, including carrying home fresh meat from the market that was cut from the animal and placed in their hands. They even reused the foil from Cadbury chocolate bars since there was no aluminum foil available. Siberia is a cruel place, one must conclude from reading this book, yet a place where people survive in a hardtack economy buffeted with long cold winters and brief, sometimes sweltering summers, away from the dependable comforts of our world, a place pitifully short on glamour and indoor plumbing, a place I would rather read about than experience first hand. That Hudgins did experience this first hand surprises me. I wonder why she did it. Part of the reason was her love of adventure no doubt, and part was to write a book about a country that she had been interested in since childhood, and part was to experience a culture in transition. Central to that experience was her love of food and drink as exemplified by the way she describes in the most amazing detail the bizarre and sumptuous feasts she attended as well as exactly what she and her friends and neighbors ate on a daily basis. Additionally she recounts ritualistic ethnic meals featuring strange dishes and the frequent imbibing of even stranger drink. In one of them Tom is forced to eat raw salted liver still warm from the butchered sheep (while she was able to make herself otherwise busy away from the table!) The food in general was so heavy and the accompanying drink so relentlessly alcoholic that I was weighted down by the mere experience of reading about it! How Sharon and Tom could walk after some of the gluttonous meals forced on them by the dictates of the social graces, is beyond me. Sharon never once admits to regurgitating, even though some days the eating and drinking began full force in the morning and continued throughout the day and even into the wee hours of the next morning. One especially recalls tarasun, a liquor distilled from sour milk by the Buryat people that had the "unappetizing aroma of a baby's wet diaper." (p. 139) So outrageous was the cuisine that at times I felt like I was reading about a drunken episode of the TV reality show "Fear Factor"! Yet there is great beauty in this forlorn land of corrupt petty bureaucrats, dirt poor peasants, and mafiya cowboys in shark skin suits. There is the fabled Lake Baikal and environs, the land of the Buryats, historically a nomadic people akin to the Mongol hordes that once ruled half the world. There is the extraordinary white of the Siberian winter when all imperfections are covered in a pillowy down while in the snowy forests Siberian tigers (God save them) still roam. But most of what Hudgins describes made me realize how far the Western world has come from the days when the serfs still tilled the land in Russia, and how little removed the present day people of Siberia are from that way of life. This sense is illustrated on the cover with the photo of the leather-skinned and shifty-eyed babushki in shawl selling radishes and onions from her dacha at market much as her ancestors did more than a hundred years ago. Hudgins's book is attractively presented, well-edited, and written in a style that is at once thoroughly professional and as readable as a travel log. There are four maps, a couple of dozen or so black and white photos of buildings, people and scenery, an Index, and a splendid "Bibliographic Essay and Notes" on the literature of Siberia and the Russian Far East. --Dennis Littrell, author of "The World Is Not as We Think It Is"

Review # 2 was written on 2013-06-07 00:00:00 Russell Clark I enjoyed it quite a bit. I almost never opt for a non-fiction when I have a fiction book on hand, but I really enjoyed S. Hudgins tone and flow. It didn't hurt that the author and I are both passionate about food and ethnography, or that I was pretty curious about Siberia and the Russian Far East. That said, I would like to formally ban S. Hudgins from the use of listed alliteration for the rest of her writing career. Also, this book could have been much better organized, with many of my questions only answered at the end, and quite a bit of information repeated unnecessarily. In fact, the middle of chapter 10 actually felt more like the beginning of the book. After 9 1/2 chapters revolving around the same ideas and topics, I felt that was a gross oversight by the editor. Lastly, I really loved the pictures, but would have liked more of them, and to have them more logically placed (for example, next to the text describing it, not several pages later.)