This is the account of Thubron's 15, 000-mile journey through an astonishing country
- one twelfth of the land surface of the whole earth. He journeyed by train, river & truck among the people most damaged by the breakup of the Soviet Union, traveling among Buddhists & animists, radical Christian sects, reactionary Communists & the remnants of a so-call Jewish state; from the site of the last Czar's murder & Rasputin's village, to the ice-bound graves of ancient Sythians, to Baikal, deepest & oldest of the world's lakes. This is the story of a people moving through the ruins of Communism into more private, diverse & often stranger worlds.