The Real Far East: Beyond Siberia

Tony Barrell's "real far east" is a vast, wild and rambling territory of forests, mountains, rivers, and lakes bordered by the Siberian taiga to the west, by the Arctic to the north, by Mongolia and China to the south. When you cross the Pacific coast your next landfall is Alaska, and east becomes west.

While strategically critical and rich in resources, these outer reaches of empire remained historically inaccessible and - apart from military personnel, exiles, migrants, and inmates of the gulags - thinly populated. With the decline in military spending and state industries following the demise of the USSR, economic hardship and corrupt local administrations combine to make Russia's "wild east" an extremely tough place to live.

'The Real Far East' is an extraordinary account of journeys through the most remote, difficult, and politically volatile regions of the former Soviet empire - a superb portrait of a region and its inhabitants.