Quotes from Piers Vitebsky

It was illegal in the Soviet Union to live anywhere except where you were registered, and it was difficult for anyone born in the Farm to change their registration and move to another place except by entering an urban profession or going to jail.

In the 1980s reindeer meat still made a substantial profit. Every other activity, even when the real cost of anything at all was masked by the Soviet tangle of cross-subsidies and phantom accounting, ran at a severe loss. Though this was to change beyond all recognition in the 1990s, reindeer herders in the 1980s were fairly well paid and well provisioned, and their exotic holidays were provided free.

In the 1980s one would see rows of silent commuters in the crowded undergrounds of Moscow and Leningrad, their heads buried in serious books covered in newspaper to protect the binding (and, in those open but still uncertain times, perhaps to hide the title: in 1988 I was roughly arrested on the Leningrad metro by young Communist vigilantes who noticed that I was reading a book on shamanism).

I was appalled when I realized how quickly they went through sugar, and understood their many missing teeth (Tolya calls it 'white death', the white man's revenge for the black death, which had come to Europe in the Middle Ages from Siberia).

Every empire has a contradictory attitude towards its frontier areas, seeing them variously as a source of raw materials, a security buffer, and a social responsibility.