Auto/Biography 0967-5507 14 3 200609 Sage Publications Sage UK: London, England Book Review: Dining With Siberians The other side of Russia: a slice of life in Siberia and the Russian Far East. Sharon Hudgins, 2003. Texas: A & M University Press; ISBN 1585442372. £25.95, cloth BrigidAllen 274 276

274 Book ReviewDining With SiberiansThe other side of Russia: a slice of life in Siberia and the Russian Far East. Sharon Hudgins, 2003. Texas: A & M University Press; ISBN 1585442372. £25.95, cloth SAGE Publications, Inc.2006DOI: 10.1177/09675507060140030503 Brigid Allen Tom and Sharon Hudgins are a Texan academic couple who have taught and administered the overseas programmes of the University of Maryland University College in Spain, Germany, Greece, Korea, Japan, Siberia and the newly opened southern littoral of the Russian Far East (Primorskiy Kray). Resourceful, adaptable, eager, relaxed and friendly, they cheerfully survived the discomfort and squalor of life in Vladivostok and Irkutsk in 1993 and 1994. Take Christmas, for example. Presented with a naked evergreen tree (in Russia, as elsewhere, a legacy of nineteenth-century German influence), they faced the fact that `Russia was not the kind of country where you could just drive down to the local Wal-Mart and buy a tree stand.' Foraging in the wasteland of mud and filth outside their 275 Vladivostok apartment building, Tom finds a discarded, nickel-plated electric samovar which he cunningly converts with his tool kit, wedging the tree into place with crushed beer cans before helping to cover it with home-made decorations. On Boxing Day, their tiny apartment fills with guests bearing contributions to lunch, who eat, drink and socialize so suc- cessfully that the party lasts until 10 at night. Sharon Hudgins's book is full of such achievements. When, as so often, the electricity fails in their newly built apartment, they dine on cold food and Hungarian wine by candlelight. They fashion lavatory seats out of waste paper, and cooking foil out of the wrappers of imported chocolate bars. Inventive and accomplished entertainers, they try out all manner of exotic dishes on their guests (admitting defeat only with Tex-Mex chilli and tortillas), and introduce culturally impoverished Russians to their own Easter paskha and kulich. The quantities of vodka cocktails and cham- pagne that they consumed in Vladivostok may have helped to counteract the allnight thumping, yelling and rap music in the apartment overhead. They learn to process their own salmon caviar, and explore the city's food markets with the help of a friendly, expert shopper and cook. Things become tougher when, based in Irkutsk, they visit a family of Buryats and are given sour-milk spirits, newly slaughtered raw sheep's liver and an undercooked sheep's stomach overflowing with blood and milk. Yet politeness wins over squeamishness, and they are soon off to another gag- inducing peasant feast. Although full of fascinating domestic detail (including lists of the Chinese, American and South-East Asian goods that were becoming avail- able in the free markets of the formerly closed capital of the Russian Far East), this book may disappoint serious students hoping for a textbook account of the post-perestroika economic and social scene. Reports of conversations with educated Russians suggest a certain defensive reserve or paradoxical mixture of viewpoints – as in the couple from Irkutsk who defended Stalin as a strong, efficient leader, but thought that all land in Russia should belong to a benignly disinterested version of the pre- Revolutionary aristocracy. Too much analysis, however, would detract from the vivid impressio- nism of this book. We become aware of the pervasive presence of the Vladivostok Mafiya; of university students who cheat as a matter of course; of old people marginalized by society; of the feral children who dance round the apartment blocks at night, making bonfires of scattered rubbish. The chapter which describes the `high-rise village' of new apart- ment blocks, with the instant squalor of their public areas and cramped cosiness of their apartments behind locked steel doors, is more enthralling by far than the earlier sections of the book which dwell on the discomforts of public transport. Like the Siberian landscape, this account has 276 longueurs but extraordinary beauties, and repays an intelligent and persis- tent read. It will also leave the reader impressed by the understated effi- ciency, self-control and mutual support with which the Hudginses present themselves to us, and the world at large, at all times.