Rudolph, Dasher, Blitzen, and the rest don’t come around Potalovo much anymore. The village, located north of the Arctic Circle, was bullied into restyling itself as a reindeer collective in Krushchev’s day, but since then the animals’ pastures have been killed off by acid rain.

Near Vladivostok, a woman complains that, of the salary owed her husband the previous year, one-half of it went ignored altogether and the other was paid in glass: “Some customers,” she explains, “had paid the firm in sheet glass, so it was just passed on to the employees.”

The above are but two of the dispatches and vignettes, so grotesque as to be half-comical, with which Colin Thubron peppers his new travelogue, the latest—and presumably the last—in a series that began in 1983 with Among the Russians (published here as Where Nights Are Longest) and continued in 1994 with The Lost Heart of Asia. Thubron journeyed through Siberia in order, as he puts it, “for a moment to witness its passage through the wreckage of Communism,” and a pretty sight it wasn’t. The poisoned rivers, the jerrybuilt apartment blocks sagging into ruin, the people dazed and rudderless and drunk: all the familiar fixtures of post-Soviet life are to be found here, sharply if depressingly rendered. As Thubron formulates it, the bitter irony about Siberia is that “Everything achieved under slavery … was being destroyed by freedom.”

Any voyage through Siberia necessarily consists, in large part, of a ghoulish and supremely melancholy Grand Tour of horror spots, places where the Russian genius for cruelty, both czarist and Communist, flared up with special brilliance. Of these, Thubron’s itinerary features two of the most notorious: the coal mines of Vorkuta, “an evil jewel in the Gulag crown,” and the gold mines of Kolyma, where men were reduced to licking wheelbarrow grease for nourishment and an estimated two million perished. Other lowlights include Omsk, where Dostoevsky was imprisoned for four years and where Solzhenitsyn, on his way to a camp in Kazakhstan, was briefly stuffed in a dungeon; Yekaterinburg, where Nicholas II and his family were butchered; and the exile-sites of both Lenin (Shushenskoe) and Stalin (Turukhansk). In Siberia, it seems, not even objects are immune to persecution: the territory’s very first exile, Thubron writes, was

not a man, but a seven-hundred-pound bell from Uglich, which rang an insurrectionary alarm on the murder of the imperial heir in 1581. The usurper Boris Gudunov had the bell publicly flogged and its tongue ripped out, and ordered the citizens of Uglich to drag it over the Urals to Tobolsk, where it was forbidden to ring.

More particular to Thubron’s account is his obsession—rather perplexing in an agnostic Englishman—with Russian religious faith. Spirituality in Siberia blossomed, he found, under an almost American efflorescence of guises, from the Orthodox church and that of the Old Believers (a dissenting and long-persecuted sect); to shamanism in Tuva; to Buddhism among the Buryats (a Mongol people); and even, perhaps most exotic of all in this context, to Baptism.

In Siberia is distinguished as well by its author’s nearly masochistic travel habits. Thubron would, on a whim, peel off into the middle of nowhere and sometimes get seriously stuck there—he was marooned in Potalovo for weeks—but his misery is our gain. His bulletins from these hyperborean hamlets strike just the right tonal balance between disgust at the old system and solicitude for those who groan beneath its rubble. And his prose is a precision instrument, able to conjure up, with a few brisk yet nuanced strokes, the whole atmosphere and sadness of a place:

Space is the sterile luxury of Novosibirsk. In summer it hangs in vacant stillness over the flattened boulevards. In winter it starts to move, and howls between the islanded buildings and across the squares. The city is a claustrophobe’s dream. Its roads sweep empty between miles of apartment-blocks and Stalinist hulks moaning with prefabricated pilasters and cornices. As for the people, there are one and a half million of them, but they seem lost in space. They trickle along the pavements to work. You become one of them, reduced. The traffic, too, seems sparse and far away, meandering over a delta of stone and tarmac.

Unassailably well written though it is, In Siberia seems to me a step down from the superb Among the Russians. (The Lost Heart of Asia I’ve not read.) Thubron’s style, whether chastened by age or by the bleakness of his subject, has become terser and less lyrical, with the result that there are fewer striking passages here. Another problem—this one beyond Thubron’s control— is that In Siberia, undertaken as it was well after the fall of Communism, lacks the tension and menace that made Among the Russians so tautly immediate. In 1980, when he ventured by car through western Russia, Thubron was dogged by the KGB and had foisted upon him a series of amusingly preposterous official guides. His wrangles with these bossy, unshakeable chaperones made for compulsive reading, and so did his encounters, often quite moving, with ordinary citizens who, their hospitality prevailing over their state-inculcated xenophobia, took Thubron into their homes and tried their level best to pickle him (the man must have a Teflon liver still to be alive). In the late 1990s, by contrast, Thubron met with little resistance to his snoopings, and In Siberia is correspondingly slacker in feel. Thubron seems almost excited when, in Yakutsk, the hotel concierge barks at him to register with the local police, whose office he finds littered with rat turds.

Apropos of vermin, HarperCollins has, I can’t resist pointing out, once again managed disgracefully to soil a book. Having long since established its mastery of the garden-variety typo, this Keystone press has now hit on a fascinating new way to annoy readers and mortify authors: the misplaced diacritical. Every single mark here is set far too high, so that, for example, the circumflex in “Lancôme” pierces the underbelly of a hapless letter “a” in the line above—a cosmetic flaw, but one reflective of HarperCollins’s utter disdain for care and quality. If only there existed a special island in the Gulag archipelago for incompetent publishers.