"Russia" by Jonathan Dimbleby

Date: 04 May 2010 20:01:51

This is a book which I'm embarrassed to say has taken me nearly 2 years to read! It accompanies the 5 part BBC series that was on TV in 2008, just after HD and I had started temporarily living with his parents - we watched it with them, and my mother-in-law suggested they buy the book for my birthday that year as I'm always hopeless at thinking of presents. I was quite happy with this, but it's been a book I've dipped in and out of, leaving for weeks or months at a time and then picking up where I left off. In many ways the book (and the series) was quite frustrating. Now I have to say that I have never been to Russia; however I have (as most of my readers know) lived in another former Soviet state for a while and done lots of work and research in eastern Europe more widely. I also have a lot of colleagues who have researched (and still do) in contemporary Russia and the former Soviet Union, and my university department is quite heavy on Russia specialists (including one of my PhD supervisors), so it's not entirely unfamiliar. I know a couple of my colleagues who were really cross with the series as they felt it was so superficial; I didn't necessarily agree with this and enjoyed it as an entertaining travelogue, but what I did find frustrating was that both the series and this book set themselves up as so much more than just a travelogue. In a country as vast and complicated as this, a project with the aim of "getting beneath the skin of modern Russia", seeking to explore how Russians view their history, present, attitudes towards democracy and place in the world is, in my view, going to struggle to get beyond the surface. Of course I've been lucky in that I've read lots of research on Russia and elsewhere in the region where aspects of these questions were explored in depth, but the best ones have tended to be quite localised studies, and it is in reading many of these localised in-depth studies from different places and with different groups that I think a bigger picture is best built. Dimbleby's trip took 18 weeks, started in Murmansk within the Arctic Circle near the border with Finland, and ended up several timezones later in Vladivostok on the Pacific Coast just short of North Korea. Even in what is undoubtedly a vast (not to mention heavy!) book, to cover such a huge area (he travelled 10,000 miles) in such a relatively short time meant that - in my view - many things were discussed more superficially rather than fewer things in more depth. As I said, if it had just been a simple travelogue that would have been fine, but having set itself up as something more (the subtitle to the book is "A Journey to the Heart of a Land and its People") I think to be honest it was always going to disappoint. What I did like was Dimbleby's interspersal of history and literature within his contemporary account. I think that did work well, and placed his account within a wider context. In fact it has made me want to discover the Russian classics (to my shame, I have never read any Tolstoy, Dostoevsky et al) - though maybe that's a project for the end of the PhD when I actually have some time! He also did manage to meet all sorts of really interesting people and highlighted a number of issues that are the subject of academic research - energy, corruption, democracy, envionment, poverty and inequality, minority policies, health care etc - so as an introduction to some of the issues it wasn't bad. He visited a wide range of places, from St Petersburg and Moscow to Beslan and Lake Baikal, and I did enjoy the book as an introduction to these places and as a prompt for thinking where I would like to visit (or not) if I ever make it to Russia. Towards the end I was starting to think the subtitle "A Journey to the Surface of a Land and its People" would be better, but I'm not sure that that's entirely fair. Dimbleby himself at the end says "I had seen so much and yet so little. I had discovered a great deal but I still had so very much still to learn". That did redeem the book somewhat for me, and in a way I wish he'd ended the book with those thoughts - I was in for further disappointment in the shape of the final sentence, which talked of him "vault[ing] up the steps of the plane without even a goodbye". Maybe it's because I know the region reasonably well and it's under my skin to an extent, but more than anything else that sentence was really alienating for me. Even when I've been (like Dimbleby) ready and even desperate to get home, I've been saying goodbye and wondering when I'll be back long after the plane has taken off. In all then - I did enjoy this book as a travel book, but as a book aiming to really get under the skin of the place I personally found it a bit disappointing and would prefer to read something in-depth about a smaller place within the country or about fewer issues in more depth. Obviously I'm coming from a regional academic researcher perspective and he's a journalist so why should he pander to me and my snobby prejudices; there is plenty of academic work out there I can read instead, and I must admit that for all its faults this book is much more readable and considerably less turgid than much of the academic literature!