Month: October 2025

“The lesser of two evils is still evil.”
King Solomon

The major problem for me was not the voyage itself, but arranging my plans with my parents. I knew one thing for sure — not for love or money, or any other thing of value, would they have let me travel solo through the Siberian forests. One day, I decided to talk to my father about my journey. I started vaguely, telling him a story about a brave man, who had, all alone, crossed the arctic desert somewhere in Canada. When I finished, my father turned to me and said, “What a fool. I hope you’ll never do something like that son, will you?” He had a clever, keen mind, my father. I left his room wondering whom the word “fool” was referring to.

“You can’t wait for inspiration.
You have to go after it with a club.” 
Jack London

I was fed up. Not with the unbridled street crime and the lame Bolshevik economy, but with myself. I was finishing school and had to apply to university in the summer. I was also inevitably approaching my eighteenth birthday — the age of maturity as they say — and felt a bit nervous about that. You can be as nerdy as you want, but you have to respect your hormones. Up to that point, I would not have had much to show for myself if I had had to take part in a manhood initiation rite. You know, the usual Siberian stuff: drinking vodka by quarts, dogsled racing, wrestling with a street bear, and sleeping all night on the bare snow. Sorry guys, just kidding — none of that stuff at all.

“One cannot live in a society
and be free from society.”
Vladimir Lenin

In this story, I will tell you about my reckless solo hike through the Siberian wilderness that took place toward the end of the 1980s. Thankfully, I wasn’t seriously injured or killed during that adventure, but those three days spent in the wild significantly impacted my life and creed. It wasn’t a heroic voyage. Rather, it was a successful but awkward fight for survival, a battle against various natural obstacles and my own foolishness — and I have to say that the latter one probably was the toughest. However, before I begin, I would like to paint a general picture of what it was like to live in the Soviet Union in that period.

I wrote A Siberian Elegy as an answer to my American friend who once asked what life was like in the Soviet Union during the 1980s, when I was a teenager. While working on it, I tried to capture a comprehensive snapshot of those days rather than a chapter of my autobiography. So, it’s a fictional story with fictional characters — but much of it comes from my own memories and sentiments. I finished it in 2018. My friend read it and gave me two thumbs up.