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Book
ReviewDining
With SiberiansThe other side of Russia: a slice of life in Siberia and the Russian
Far East. Sharon Hudgins, 2003. Texas: A & M University Press; ISBN
1585442372. £25.95, cloth
SAGE Publications, Inc.2006DOI: 10.1177/09675507060140030503
Brigid Allen
Tom
and Sharon Hudgins are a Texan academic couple who have taught and administered
the overseas programmes of the University of Maryland University College in
Spain, Germany, Greece, Korea, Japan, Siberia and the newly opened southern
littoral of the Russian Far East (Primorskiy Kray). Resourceful, adaptable,
eager, relaxed and friendly, they cheerfully survived the discomfort and squalor
of life in Vladivostok and Irkutsk in 1993 and 1994. Take Christmas, for example.
Presented with a naked evergreen tree (in Russia, as elsewhere, a legacy of
nineteenth-century German influence), they faced the fact that `Russia was
not the kind of country where you could just drive down to the local Wal-Mart
and buy a tree stand.' Foraging in the wasteland of mud and filth outside
their
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Vladivostok
apartment building, Tom finds a discarded, nickel-plated electric samovar
which he cunningly converts with his tool kit, wedging the tree into place
with crushed beer cans before helping to cover it with home-made decorations.
On Boxing Day, their tiny apartment fills with guests bearing contributions
to lunch, who eat, drink and socialize so suc- cessfully that the party lasts
until 10 at night. Sharon Hudgins's book is full of such achievements. When,
as so often, the electricity fails in their newly built apartment, they dine
on cold food and Hungarian wine by candlelight. They fashion lavatory seats
out of waste paper, and cooking foil out of the wrappers of imported chocolate
bars. Inventive and accomplished entertainers, they try out all manner of
exotic dishes on their guests (admitting defeat only with Tex-Mex chilli and
tortillas), and introduce culturally impoverished Russians to their own Easter
paskha and kulich. The quantities of vodka cocktails and cham- pagne that
they consumed in Vladivostok may have helped to counteract the allnight thumping,
yelling and rap music in the apartment overhead. They learn to process their
own salmon caviar, and explore the city's food markets with the help of a
friendly, expert shopper and cook. Things become tougher when, based in Irkutsk,
they visit a family of Buryats and are given sour-milk spirits, newly slaughtered
raw sheep's liver and an undercooked sheep's stomach overflowing with blood
and milk. Yet politeness wins over squeamishness, and they are soon off to
another gag- inducing peasant feast. Although full of fascinating domestic
detail (including lists of the Chinese, American and South-East Asian goods
that were becoming avail- able in the free markets of the formerly closed
capital of the Russian Far East), this book may disappoint serious students
hoping for a textbook account of the post-perestroika economic and social
scene. Reports of conversations with educated Russians suggest a certain defensive
reserve or paradoxical mixture of viewpoints – as in the couple from
Irkutsk who defended Stalin as a strong, efficient leader, but thought that
all land in Russia should belong to a benignly disinterested version of the
pre- Revolutionary aristocracy. Too much analysis, however, would detract
from the vivid impressio- nism of this book. We become aware of the pervasive
presence of the Vladivostok Mafiya; of university students who cheat as a
matter of course; of old people marginalized by society; of the feral children
who dance round the apartment blocks at night, making bonfires of scattered
rubbish. The chapter which describes the `high-rise village' of new apart-
ment blocks, with the instant squalor of their public areas and cramped cosiness
of their apartments behind locked steel doors, is more enthralling by far
than the earlier sections of the book which dwell on the discomforts of public
transport. Like the Siberian landscape, this account has
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longueurs
but extraordinary beauties, and repays an intelligent and persis- tent read.
It will also leave the reader impressed by the understated effi- ciency, self-control
and mutual support with which the Hudginses present themselves to us, and
the world at large, at all times.