cover image Siberian Odyssey

Siberian Odyssey

Frederick Kempe. Putnam Publishing Group, $24.95 (317pp) ISBN 978-0-399-13755-6

Wall Street Journal correspondent Kempe ( Divorcing the Dictator: America's Bungled Affair with Manuel Noriega ) has seen things no American heretofore has, but that's only part of the hold of this superb journal of a five-week summer trip through Siberia just before the abortive Moscow coup. Kempe is a seasoned journalist and precise writer, and the book is brisk, evocative and telling. In company with three Western journalists, two Greenpeace scientists, local interpreters and assorted Russians--one a troublesome member of the Supreme Soviet--Kempe traveled via helicopter and riverboat. Since the expedition was organized to be journalistic and ecological, and carried a letter of safe passage from the KGB--and because the author is obviously tenacious--Kempe was allowed to visit Tomsk 7, a self-contained city where nuclear weapons material is produced, although he was refused access to the reactors. He also stopped at vast industrial areas where the pollution is so severe that half of all newborns have chronic illnesses; and he spent time with Gulag veterans and aboriginal Siberians, including nomads who herd reindeer 100 miles above the Arctic Circle. With no pretense to finding the ``Russian soul,'' Kemp makes vivid the populace's self-defeating acceptance of sudba , or fate, and its repressed anger at the Communist lie, as well as his compassion for ``a people who had been so anaesthetized by suffering and exhausted by hardships that they had lost much of the spirit they needed for the free market and democracy.'' Photos not seen by PW . (July)