XANDER BLAKELY
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Siberia Bound is Alexander Blakely's first book. It was published in July 2002. Learn more about the book REVIEWS "This sprightly book has an almost Mark Twain quality of making us learn about a far-off place while making us laugh. It's a tour de force (pardon the pun)". More readers' and editorial reviews of the book are available at Reviews/Media FROM SIBERIA BOUND'S INTRODUCTION Five months after the Soviet Union collapsed, I graduated from college with a degree in economics and a surplus of idealism. We had won the Cold War, and with the Soviet Union emerging from 70 years of economic retardation, it was time to win the peace. Freedom and prosperity were surely the greatest weapons we had against a resurgence of communism, and I could imagine nothing more thrilling and meaningful than helping our former enemies rebuild their country on the solid foundation of democracy and market economics. As with Germany and Japan after World War II, we could secure their stability and allegiance for decades to come. I assessed my options: 1) travel to exotic, far away lands; live in a continent-sized economics laboratory; affect events that would affect the world for decades to come, or 2) go work for a bank in St. Paul. I moved to Novosibirsk, Siberia on the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's first voyage to the New World. With the hubris of a twenty-two-year-old, I thought this chronological coincidence entirely appropriate. I knew that I wasn’t setting out to discover a New World. But neither was Columbus. He was looking for a quicker route to the spices of India. I was looking for the express lane to a spicier life. RUSSIA'S ROLE IN CURRENT EVENTS - AUTHOR'S COMMENTARY Based on what the US did, or rather, didn’t do, in Russia after the fall of the genocidal Soviet regime, there is good reason to doubt whether the US will help rebuild Iraq after Saddam is gone. Nation building is just too boring, and, though it saves lives, even American lives, it doesn't garner American votes. (We get the government we deserve.) To Continue reading go to Author's Blog
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