Siberia! Although this is not the frozen Siberia of the gulag horrors. Although locals tell me that they generally get one (maybe two, some would argue) month of summer a year.
This is southern Siberia, in the "Golden Valley," so-called because of the golden color taken on by the aspen trees in the fall -- like Colorado without the mountains.
Novosibirsk was built a hundred years ago where the tracks of the Trans Siberian Railroad cross the Ob river. Now having a population of 2 million people, it is strategically located 4 hours from Moscow and 4 from Beijing.
I'm writing this from the quaint hotel room in the suburb town of Akademgorodok, purpose-built by the Soviets 50 years ago as a university and research center. After the fall of communism, many students and faculty broke away with their own businesses, such as David Levin of LEDAS, the guy who put this whole remarkable trip together. (In the figure above, Mr Levin takes a cell phone call on the shore of Ob Sea.)
Being government funded, Akademgorodok has suffered from the reduction in post-Soviet funding. So you walk through a town that looks just like it did 50 years ago, but 50 years older. The beauty comes from the forest being conserved inside the town, and from the nearby Ob Sea and its sandy beaches.
Mr Levin tells me that Akademgorodok benefited from a form of democracy during the otherwise communist times. The government was eager to accelerate science during the Cold War, and so provided free housing along with a relative freedom of rights. There was even a class structure, where the very best scholars received their own house, while lessor learneds had to do with increasingly smaller apartments according to their scholastic stature.
This is indeed a fascinating place.
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Posted by: Brian Sather | Sep 22, 2009 at 07:33 PM