Note: this was originally posted on cohost as a response to a chain of posts about the manga A Bride’s Story. The post was slightly edited here so it wouldn’t depend on context for comprehension.
The Eurasian steppe is incredibly fascinating to me, for geographic reasons, and it’s absolutely saddening that it’s still part of Russia – because, you know, colonization and Russification kinda erased a lot there, or limited cultural expression as the government got back to being centralized in recent years like it was with the USSR.
There was a podcast I listened to, many years ago, that compared the Eurasian steppe at the times of Genghis Khan to an unexplored ocean, and the Mongols, being horseriders, could quickly navigate the plains that provided no natural protections against invaders. For a long time, this part of the world was like the “final land frontier” of “civilization” (using this word from a Western perspective, doesn’t mean that there wasn’t civilization there), and it’s crazy to imagine this vast and open field with nothing except sparsely populated places that could barely keep in touch with each other. It really was like a giant blank space in a map that had both ends already defined, with only a few routes going through it. And if you ever settled down and built houses there, you would surely be invaded – sooner rather than later. The arrival of the Russian Empire and its colonization effort kinda proved the point, while paradoxically also putting a stop to that.
To this day, it’s mindboggling how far away things get from each other as the deeper you go into Siberia. Going from Western Europe, where there’s a village or town every 15~30 km, to a place where you traverse hundreds of kilometers without seeing another soul, is crazy. I can only imagine how much more difficult travel would’ve been in the past.
I lived in Russia for a while (to study at a university), right at the border with Ukraine (many, many years before the current conflict there), and traveling around already gave me a somewhat “good” feeling of solitude. If you ever played STALKER: SoC, the ambiance was perfectly captured by that game. My dream, at the time, was to take the Trans-Siberian route to see the sights and meet the people. But even in the city where I lived, among Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, and other people, the openness of the environment was incredible. I’m Brazilian, so I’m used to large swaths of land with nothing but crops or vegetation, but everything being flat? That was a first, and it’s hard to put into words. I guess it was like seeing the ocean for the first time, but you know, it was land instead of water. Or being at the foot of an incredibly tall mountain range and just taking it all in.
So, anyway, I wanted to entrench myself a bit more towards Siberia but never had the chance, and I think I won’t be for a time now, for obvious reasons. But I hope, one day, to at least be able to see the Sakha Republic up close, which is my favorite Republic in Russia. I mean, it has an area of ~3 million km² (now compare it to the European Union, which has ~4 million km²) with just ~1 million people living there, and making great effort to preserve their culture. If there’s a way to have a “safe adventure” in real life, getting to Yakutsk while seeing the sights is one of them.
One could say the Eurasian steppe is my Roman Empire, because I do frequently think about it. And well, having first-hand experience living in Russia, I’m well aware of all the issues that plague most of the non-European part of the country. At the same time, I can’t help but cultivate a romanticized version of it, while being fully aware that it only exists in my mind.