IIn late February 2022, Charlie Walker set out on a hiking holiday in Northern Siberia. In temperatures as low as -50C, they intended to sail a thousand miles north along the frozen surface of the Lena River, then across the solid Laptev Sea to the port city of Tiksi, before eventually flying to London. “The plan,” he writes, “was simple in concept.” A sub-zero camping trip in a country populated by wolves and bears and scarred by centuries of historical trauma that was about to be invaded by one of its neighbors: what could possibly go wrong?
On Thin Ice is Walker’s third travelogue. Previous excursions include a 43,000-mile bicycle trip across three continents, a 1,000-mile solo hike through the Gobi Desert, and a river trip down the Congo in a leaky canoe. According to his website, when he’s not pulling off incredible feats of forward motion, he speaks to business leaders on topics such as “risk-taking” and “the line between courage and recklessness.” Reading his latest, it’s clear he’s familiar with the terrain on both sides of that line.
Landing in the Siberian city of Yakutsk with his skis, sled, tent and a “comically huge sleeping bag”, Walker is busy making provisions in case a full-scale invasion of Ukraine begins. With the Foreign Office advising against traveling to Russia, he briefly considers abandoning his plans. But, arguing that “Yakutsk is comfortably closer to the city of Anchorage, Alaska, than to Kiev”, he adds.
“Now the trip would be different,” he writes. “As one of the last Western tourists in Russia, I was afforded a unique opportunity to record the thoughts and feelings of ordinary Russian people, neither soldiers nor politicians. Far from the front lines, their diverse opinions would provide insight into the silent majority of 144 million citizens. It seemed worth the risk of living inside a police state where already limited freedom of expression could vanish overnight.”
Armed with a flare gun, a can of pepper spray, and a dagger for protection from wolves and bears, Walker spends several weeks on icy roads – zimniki – Shivering in your tent by day, at night, and sometimes experiencing the extremes of Siberian hospitality. he meets lorry drivers zimniki Stop by for photos, coffee sharing and conversation. One scolded him for setting up his tent on the road: many truck drivers fuel themselves with vodka, while some watch television while driving. He is served local delicacies: grilled horse ribs, reindeer shin pie, sausages made from old horse blood (“The puck of boiled blood escaped from its horse’s intestine housing and spread across the roof of my mouth, setting fast like some ungodly grouting”). Indigenous Sakha women place an amulet of the wolf’s penis around her neck and offer pancakes to Bayani, the “spirit lord of the taiga”, to protect her passage.
Many of the people he met were eager to talk about Ukraine. “Ukraine is a corrupt country run by Nazis,” says a young Sakha man. “Ukraine belongs to For Russia,” says another. Even in areas where barren trees struggle to grow, Kremlin propaganda is deeply rooted. “I heard that President Putin is saving the Ukrainian people and I’m glad to know they’re being helped,” a lonely Evenni herder tells Walker over a meal of roasted reindeer spines. Almost everyone believes some version of the same story: that Putin Saved Russia from the chaos of the 90s, and everything he does is for the best. One wonders – a million Russian casualties later – what happened to that story.
More than votive panache, more than daggers and flares, it soon becomes clear that the survival tool Walker should have actually packed was the business card of a competent local attorney. It is not the bears who chase him across the snow, but the FSB, who take an increasingly hostile interest in this unimaginative Englishman, especially when his intended destination, Tiksi, turns out to be a military base. He is accused of “doing journalism”; of being a spy; People he encounters are harassed, others rush to report him. When anti-war journalists face 15 years in prison, he takes a crazy risk by recording his own “anti-Putin statements” on a Dictaphone – and signing a confession without translating first. He ends up in a detention center, where he spends a harrowing month awaiting deportation. Reflecting on his choice, he remembers an old Russian proverb: “You saw what you were buying, so eat, even if you choke.”
At the beginning of his journey, Walker hoped to see a brighter side of Siberia. There are moments of beauty – the aurora borealis, rare bursts of warmth from the locals – but there is horror and corruption almost everywhere. Growing potholes, decaying cities, streets filled with skeletons of prisoners Those who died from the wildfires created a “black wasteland” the size of Belgium. Walker highlights all this with a masterful touch. After reading this book, no one will be in a hurry to book a ticket to Siberia, least of all its author, who is now banned in the country.
