This article opens with an account of a hike in a remote region and a story about how local bears bore extreme deprivation during a harsh winter. It then opens out to reveal the location, a nature reserve on the shore of Lake Baikal in Eastern Siberia, and contrasts the story from this remote region with conventional accounts of “Russian environmental history” that emphasize destruction and disasters in the Soviet period, which are sadly all too true, but give insufficient attention to other aspects of the environmental history of the vast territory that once comprised the Soviet Union.
