Stephen Kotkin: evaluation

Transcript context

…Now, Colin Thubron, in his famous travel book on Siberia, called the place, and I quote, “dull and poor.” Agree or disagree? I think he’s right about the poor part. I wouldn’t say it’s dull. Quite the contrary. If you’ve ever seen real taiga, which is dense forest — not tundra, which is not forested — but if you’ve seen taiga, which is thick ancient trees, forest, and all of the ecosystem of that, meaning not just the forest canopies up top, which you can barely see from the ground, but the entire ground and everything that’s living there and growing there and happening there — it’s a wonder. From a purely ecological point of view, I think dull would be almost a criminal appellation for Siberia. We don’t want to put anybody in jail over what they say. We’ve been practicing that at universities now for a little while, and it hasn’t worked. But you get my point. Just ecologically, it’s not dull, and then one could go on — the people, of course, et cetera. Is Siberian butter very good?…

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