Cédric Gras can’t explain it, but the fact is that he is drawn to hostile lands with harsh climates – 20 feet of snow, cows frozen in the wind – that seem to do their best to repel travelers rather than to attract them. That’s just how it is, but it means his singular geographer’s gaze is like no other. In this, his second book of travel writing, he ranges thousands of miles, from the Republic of Karelia to the Amur River, from the Crimea to the sea of Japan, from the vast Mongolian steppes to Amazonian Siberia looking for the human archipelagos lost in a sea of land that Soviet power developed by increasing salaries there. These are the Northern and Assimilated Territories, which often correspond to the Gulag Archipelago.  Unlikely towns and villages in the middle of nowhere –the steppes, the taiga or the mountains – where life is harsh and alcohol defines the lifestyle, where the thousand ethnic groups that compose the Empire commingle.  Unnamed rivers; towns that are emptied out and turned into targets for MiG bombing practice; endless stretches of ice and snow where, in winter, nomads have to cling to ropes to find their way from one yurt to the next. Even more surprising is the realization that the famous Russian North is actually to the east, and that in order to truly understand the country, you need to pivot the map. Geographical north is not what people, or even the administration, mean when they talk about the North. There’s Moscow, and the rest. The North is all the cold, hostile or out-of-the-way places that still need to be populated even when there’s nothing but some wooden huts and a few hold-outs who have nearly fallen off the edge of civilization. This book is a real eye-opened for the curious Westerner who thinks he knows something about the former USSR.

Cédric Gras is attracted to harsh, unwelcoming regions. He has wandered the isolated human archipelagos of the Russian Federation, where the central government has increased salaries in order to try to keep the areas populated. This little-known North is actually mostly east, geographically speaking. The sense of abandonment that reigns there is an unusual but realistic vision of an empire that stretches from the Karelia to Amazonian Siberia on the coast of the Sea of Japan.