SOURCE: Thomson, Ian. “A Thaw in the Gulag: Where Has the KGB Gone?” Guardian (9 October 1999): 10.

In the following review, Thomson offers a positive assessment of In Siberia, calling it Thubron's “finest achievement to date.”

Colin Thubron brings back few souvenirs of his solitary wanderings, but his notebooks are crammed with life stories. From these he fashions a meticulous reportage tinged with poetry. His two wonderful accounts of communist Russia and China—Among the Russians and Behind the Wall—narrated the lives of ordinary people trapped beneath the crust of dictatorship. Classics of the genre, they were written with an unerring eye for human desolation. Thubron's eighth travel book, In Siberia, contemplates Stalin's slave-labour camps and the frozen immensity of Tartar territory. This is some undertaking. Weeds now sprout from the isolation cells and the Gulag watch-towers have grown over with moss. Yet the abandoned sites still overwhelm with...