In from the cold

With passionate insight and quirky humor, Ian Frazier gamely gets inside the vast heart of Asiatic Russia, home of Stalin’s gulags and bone-chilling temperatures

October 17, 2010|James Zug, Globe Correspondent

Siberia is the Pacific Ocean of land: an enormous place that consumes not only much of the planet but the imaginations of many, including writer Ian Frazier.

Siberia makes up one-twelfth of the world’s land mass. It has eight time zones. Huge, but hardly inhabited, Siberia hosts about 39 million people; the continental United States could be easily plopped inside of it, with room left over for a gaggle of European nations.

All but a half-dozen cities along the Trans-Siberian Railway were closed off to foreigners until the demise of the USSR, so it spent most of the last century in hibernation. But it was a deadly sleep. Siberia was the home of the gulags, one of history’s worst killing fields where millions of political prisoners were exiled, tortured, and worked to death during the Stalin terrors. It was where the last czar and his family were slaughtered in a basement.

It is cold. Visitors try — and usually, like Frazier, fail — to make it to Oimyakon, the obscure Siberian village where in 1933 the coldest temperature (96.2 degrees below zero Fahrenheit) of any permanently inhabited place on Earth was recorded. Schoolchildren in Oimyakon, it is said, get the day off if it gets colder than 61 degrees below.

Siberia provides Frazier the perfect canvas to paint what may be his masterpiece. Frazier told the story of the Great Plains (his eponymous 1989 bestseller) and Native American life (“On the Rez,’’ 2000) by mixing history, reportage, and memoir, but what makes him special is his brilliant, if quirky sense of humor. Having worked on the Harvard Lampoon while in college, he first burst guts around the country in 1986 with “Dating Your Mom’’ — the title piece is a classic. When confronted with a place as serious as Siberia, it helps to have Frazier’s comic leavening.

Off the coast of Siberia, he saw a whale surface and dive. “Motors idling, we sat and waited for the whale to reappear,” he writes. “From whale-watching trips I’d been on, I knew that it is possible to time a whale and predict the duration of a dive, so I asked a Russian guy in my boat how long the whale would stay under. ‘Until he comes up again,’ he replied.”