Ian Frazier’s Guide to Siberia: 6 must-see places

The first time, Ian Frazier came to be in Russia by accident, after he met the Russian artists Komar and Melamid. Having arrived in Moscow, he received an unexpected invitation to go further into Siberia, which captured his heart for many years.

In his introduction to the book, he writes that in America, and around the world, Siberia seems like a strange, cold, faraway place, where one can be "exiled." However, at the same time, this place is romantic and mysterious, which you can even hear ringing in its name "Si-ber-ia" – a place still seemingly unknown.

In his travelogue Ian Frazier refers to the history of Siberia, and the history of travel to Siberia – for example, Kennen George’s books, which explored the area in the 19th century, and compares them with the reality he encounters. Much attention is also paid to the people who helped him during his travel. As Frazier said at a meeting in Krasnoyarsk, Siberians surrounded him exclusively with care, attention and curiosity.

We asked Ian Frazier to advise us about which main places, in his opinion, are definitely worth visiting in Siberia and picked appropriate citations from his book.

In Chukotka, the nature and the fauna are lovely, bright and diverse: birds, giant whales. It is very impressive. The wind had died completely, and lozenge-shaped spaces were swapping back and forth on the surface in the flat calm. The sea flashed colors of azure and green and turquoise with a swimming pool allure, if you could forget how cold it was. Here and there curled white feathers dropped from the passing seabirds sat undisturbed like wood shavings on a shiny floor. Five minutes or more went by. Then a mile away, a whale spout rose against the dark land beyond it. The spout shot white and unmistakable in the sky, then dropped back, leaving a veil of mist that hung in the air and drifted to one side.

Large cities have everything that the tourist is accustomed to - restaurants, cafes, fast food shops, and boutiques of famous brands. Anton Chekhov called Krasnoyarsk the most beautiful Siberian city, and I myself became convinced of this. There are also many beautiful women as if they are the only inhabitants of the city, like in a science fiction movie.

The name—from krasnyi, “red,” and yar, “cliff ”—refers to the red cliffs nearby the city that give the landscape with its broad valley a slightly out-of-context look, as if this place might be in eastern Wyoming or South Africa. The city occupies a prominence above the Yenisei River just upstream from where a series of mountainous, tree-covered cliffs along both sides of the river suddenly descend to level ground. Many buildings in the city center were from the later nineteenth century and in a style of brickwork done decoratively, almost whimsically. Recent renovations had emphasized a color scheme perhaps based on the earth-toned reds of the Yenisei cliffs, and with white or light blue trim for intensity.

The Tobolsk Kremlin is very beautiful and very ancient; its antiquity is so real that you can sense it. The Chuvashia Cape is another beautiful place near Tobolsk; where Khan Kuchum Ermak defeated the army, is also worth visiting.

The Kremlin – the walled city – of old Tobolsk. It's the oldest stone Kremlin in Siberia, built at the beginning of1587, and on its promontory two hundred feet or more above the floodplain of the Tobol and Irtysh rivers, it rises skyward like the fabled crossroads of Asiatic caravan traffic that it used to be.

What I want in a city is partly a mirage like quality, an elusive shimmering you can see and dream about from afar. The old part of Tobolsk provides that, with the Kremlin visible at a distance and the humdrum structures of the city not prominent at all. The walls of the Kremlin are white, fifty feet high, with conically shaped towers at each corner. St. Sophia Cathedral, inside the wall, has a large central tower and three subsidiary ones, and their main domes are a light blue with gilded dots on them and gold filigree at the top and bottom, and above are smaller gold domes supporting tall Orthodox crosses.

Many do not even realize how pleasant and lovely the Siberian cities are, and not only because of the historic centers, but also because of the Soviet buildings and their interaction with the natural landscape.

Novosibirsk became the city’s name in 1925. Most of its growth has been since the Second World War. Novosibirsk’s tall steel-and-glass buildings, including a strange blue one with sort of knobs at the top that give it the look of a two-pronged electrical plug, form an impressive skyline above the Ob’s eastern shore and its complicated crosshatching of cargo cranes. Boosters of Novosibirsk point to its domed opera house in the classical style, it’s up-to-date underground metro system, and it’s population of almost a million and a half. Here in the not-quite-middle of Siberia it is the third-largest city in Russia.

Everyone should visit the Baikal – it is awfully beautiful, and not just once, but at different times of the year. For example, in winter, you can get a thrill from riding a car on a frozen lake. It's just great.

When a wave rolls in on Baikal, and it curls to break, you can see stones on the bottom refracted in the vertical face of the wave. This glimpse, offered for just a moment in the wave’s motion, is like seeing into the window of an apartment as you go by it on an elevated train. The moon happened to be full that night, and after it rose, the stones on the bottom of the lake lay spookily illuminated in the moonlight. The glitter of the moon on the surface of the lake—the “moon road,” Sergei called it—fluctuated constantly in its individual points of sparkling, with a much higher definition than any murky water could achieve. Light glitters differently on water this clear. I understood that I had never really seen the moon reflected on water before.

Cities like Tynda are staggering. It is a city on the Amur River, founded for gold mining; it is all buried in the taiga hills - BAM’s extreme point.

The large town of Tynda is considered to be the capital of BAM, and the Tynda train station is another modernist fandango, its many bold architectural statements cramming themselves into one structure with an energy and incoherence difficult to summarize. Much clearer in my mind is the station’s interior, which was a sort of mall of empty shops along hallways to nowhere radiating from the station’s busy and relatively crowded central area. The interior’s focal point was an improbable and elaborate fountain.

Quotes from Ian Frazier’s book Travels in Siberia