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A strange book, published in 1970 in which the author, in the course of moving house by approximately a mile, departs on a long loop to carry out that journey. A travel guide and author, he is well familiar with Leningrad (St Petersburg) and Moscow, but has not travelled further east, and completes the Trans-Siberian railway to Nakhodka (he was not permitted to visit Vladivostok), then returns to Irkutsk to visit Ulan Bator, flying to Uzbekistan then making side journeys or flights to Georgia, Ukraine and Turkey before returning to London.
Constantly engaging with people (speaking Russian fairly fluently) he recounts all of these encounters, whether interesting or not. Some are interesting, many are not. He mixed an overview of history for context and takes in some of the out of the ordinary. As expected in the USSR at this time, his constant companion is a Intourist guide. Many of these were excellent, less were obstructive and limiting, but one must wonder to what degree the author goes to protecting his future access to the USSR by not writing negatively about his experiences.
Having read back the above paragraph, I am unsure why this book was less enjoyable than it sounds - it sounds right in my reading ‘wheelhouse', but it is strangely unsatisfying. Perhaps Elvin has a short attention span, programmed to move things on by his guiding job; perhaps he was limited in the page count by his publisher, and couldn't resist leaving things out, so trimmed everything up? It felt constricted and could have been edited to increase the interesting parts and omit the dull.
Once he leaves Russia and starts into Mongolia and Central Asia it really picked up for me. It still had the faults identified above, but once freed of the train he seemed to have more freedom (not from the Intourist guides though!) He makes some nice descriptions of things in these places, and doesn't waste so much time describing places where there is nothing of interest.
Unfortunately the dull outweighs the interesting to garner more than 3 stars.
