Siberia, seen from the window of a train, seems to go on forever. Kilometre after thousands of kilometers of brown grass flattened by recently melted snow, pools of icy water in the depressions alongside the railway. The sparse, spindly trees of the taiga are interrupted at intervals by ragged villages of age-blackened timber houses.
The shattered remains of abandoned Soviet industrial plants mark the entry to some non-descript city, or appear in the middle of nowhere, grim oases of broken concrete and rusting iron the location of which must have made sense to the Soviet planning bureaucracy but which today seems bizarre. The presence of still-functioning factories or power station is announced far in the distance by towering chimneys belching grey smoke.
Siberian cities have many things in common. Row upon row of white brick or concrete apartment blocks are surrounded by scruffy open spaces; it looks difficult to grow anything, even grass, in these tough, cold places.
Lenin remains ubiquitous in Siberia, as in the rest of Russia. Every town seems to have its Lenin statue, its Lenin Square, its Lenin Prospekt. Some other remnant names are more surprising: Tomsk still has a Dzerzhinsky Street, named after the founder of the Cheka, Lenin's political police force that would eventually become the KGB, the primary agent of Soviet repression.
Many Siberian cities retain, contrary to preconceptions, quite attractive central areas and large numbers of 19th century timber buildings, colourfully painted and with intricate wooden ornamentation. The Soviet imprint on these old city centres is often benign, with wide boulevards, generous public spaces and — perhaps the greatest legacy of the period — excellent public transport.
But the ordered, tidy, attractive core seems much like a façade as soon as one strays beyond it. In the suburbs the poverty is palpable, although apartment buildings seem neglected rather than ramshackle. But it is the areas of old timber housing and rubbish that shock. In some districts the old houses appear to be literally sinking, haphazardly, into the ground. Rubbish, particularly the ubiquitous evil of the modern world — the plastic bag, seems to be strewn everywhere.
It seems that all sense of civic cooperation was abandoned with other, more oppressive, forms of collectivisation when Russian tired of the Soviet Union.
The bifurcation of Siberian cities reflects, in microcosm, the duality of contemporary Russia. As the train leaves Siberia, winding through the Ural to 'European Russia', the sense