Black Dragon River: A Journey Down the Amur River At The Borderlands Of Empires, Ziegler - B

                                                For reasons uncertain, I am fascinated by histories focused on geography, and in particular, ones about rivers. So the story of the world's 9th longest river, the only one in Siberia that drains to the Pacific and most importantly, forms the border between Russia and China, caught my attention. The Onon, in northeast Mongolia, is the tributary that is generally considered the head of the river. It is the land that eight hundred years ago gave the world Genghis Khan. The river flows north into Russia, where it is home to six of the world's fifteen species of crane.  About 300 miles east of Lake Baikal is Chita, home to the Buryats and the only Buddhist community in Russia. The next major town down the Onon is Nerchinsk, where Nicholas I banished the Decembrists after their pathetic attempt at revolt in 1825, and also where in 1689, Russia and China, as equals, negotiated their shared border. As the river extends east, the author explores the many and different tales of those who came to colonize a wilderness beyond our comprehension. Along the river, the Trans-Siberian Railway was built in the 1890's. Blogoveshchensk is where the last of the tributaries join and form the Amur.  There is also now in Siberia, from Lake Baikal to Vladivostok, dedicated by Vladimir Putin upon its completion in 2005, a paved road, a bona-fide macadam two lane highway. At Kabarovsk, further east, in 1969, the border clashes between the two communist behemoths took place.  Hundreds of miles north, after the last turn, the river finishes with a whimper, a shallow estuary, blessed only by the vast kaluga that spawn there. It also is the site of some heavy fighting between the Japanese and the locals during the allied interventions at the end of  WWI.
                                                    By definition, a book like this is sort of an indirect history. The stories it tells are limited to what transpired along its banks. Throughout Siberia, the story is pretty much the same. The Russians came seeking fur, and like we Americans, they overwhelmed the indigenous peoples. They struggled mightily with an extraordinarily difficult land, frozen, thick with flies and endless stretches of steppe and water lands.  It is hard to process that Siberia is itself larger than all of Europe, including Russian Europe. It is 4,000 miles from one end to the other. There were conflicts with the Chinese and later, the Japanese. Siberia was populated with prisons and filled with the Gulag of the mid-twentieth century. The author also spends a considerable time on the uniqueness of Russian history, culture and traditions. Russia is different from the west because it is not of the west, having undergone an extensive occupation by the Mongols, who featured an autocracy that, the author suggests seems to suit the Russians well.  He closes with no particular insight or conclusion. Just the observation, that other than to plunder Siberia's resources, Russia today looks west and not both ways, as the two-headed eagle standard of the Empire implied.