SIBERIA

Emil Lengyel was a Hungarian war prisoner in Siberia, during and following the first world war, so his interest in and knowledge of Siberia is, to that extent, first hand. I've read other books on Siberia (Hindus, Russia and Japan, and Davies! Soviet Asia are the best). But I learned a lot in this, not only in that he goes more thoroughly into the make-up and policy of Czarist Siberia, with its wide variety of enforced colonists and exiles, political, scientific, religious and so on; but that he throws considerable light on the confusion worse confounded of the interim period between the beginning of the Russian Revolution and the comparative stability of the establishment of successive republics as part of the U.S.S.R. The first third of the book bears some of the signs of being a scissors and paste job; is it, perhaps, made up of articles previously written, and brought together here? Perhaps some of the duplication and repetition will be edited out in the final form. The balance seems to have been written for this book, as it goes along an established plan of organization. The last section reveals -- to some extent -- the importance of the section as a bread basket and arnal of Russia in Europe -- and he prophesies the inevitability of the ""border incidents"" breaking out into war with Japan.