Billed as a novel, this coming-of-age tale of a boy growing up in Siberia reads more like non-fiction, or autofiction, although is none the worse for that. It’s obvious that much of it is in fact based on the author’s own life, which gives it an authenticity that a straight novel might otherwise lack. I found it a completely riveting read, and for anyone wanting to understand more about contemporary Russian life, then it’s pretty much a must-read. The narrator Alexey tells of his childhood in Taiga, an industrialised region not far from Novosibirsk in Siberia. He remembers the happy summers he spent with his grandmother in a remote coal-mining village in the early 1990s, and the rather more difficult times spent with his parents in Taiga. Alexei isn’t at all athletic, much preferring artistic and literary pursuits and faces the rejection of his typically macho father, who can’t understand his son, as well as the usual bullying such a lad faces from conventional boys at school. After his parents’ separation and his mother’s move to the city, a new life begins when he meets Andrey, an intelligent and sensitive boy who opens his eyes to the limitations of Siberian life, and with whom he forges a deep relationship. The two manage a week’s holiday to Europe where their horizons are broadened even further, but have to return to oppressive and repressive Siberia, where life for gays becomes increasingly dangerous. The author left Russia in 2011 after severe anti-gay legislation was passed. Honest, insightful and perceptive, the book is an intelligent exploration of modern Russian life; the widespread corruption, the rise of gangsterism and the Mafia, the hostility to anyone stepping out of line, and how the country has succumbed to Putin’s tyrannical rule. Stylistically it can feel quite didactic at times, and there are some factual inaccuracies, but these pale into insignificance next to the importance of this eye-opening behind the scenes narrative of a country so much in the news right now.

Coming of age in late twentieth century/early twenty-first century Russia is the subject of expatriate journalist Mozgovoy’s début novel, which, based on the author’s fascinating bio, could be classified as a fictionalized memoir. Rich in details about the country’s turbulent and contradictory history over the past century, the book is timely for the American public while many of us struggle to understand the reasons for Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the very nature of the Russian state and its people. Mozgovoy offers an extraordinary first-person account of life for average Russian citizens as well as the specific plight of LGBTQ+ individuals, and what he has to say is bold, harrowing, and damning.

Like the author, the narrator of the story, Alexey, was born in a remote, industrialized town in Siberia in the mid 1980s. We meet Alexy as a young boy, just a few years prior to perestroika and the ensuing dissolution of the U.S.S.R.. His vibrant rendering of his hometown and the period sweeps you off your feet. For the American lay reader, Siberia evokes images, gleaned from popular culture and perhaps clichés, but to read Mozgovoy’s passages is to see and, against one’s hopeful inclinations, to believe. In Alexey’s subarctic town of Taiga, winter lasts for half the year. For much of the season, the sun rises at ten in the morning and sets before five o’clock in the afternoon. Alexey must hike each day through snow drifts, in the dark, in -40 Celsius temperatures, to make his way to school. It’s a mile-long journey in each direction. The climate alone is overwhelming, and then we’re introduced to the boy’s sadistic teachers and classmates.

One is quickly aware that this is going to be a story of hardship and struggle, yet I found myself unprepared for the dimensions of that motif. In the tradition of classic Russian authors, Mozgovoy writes with such evocative detail, locations are like characters in and of themselves, and they are bleak, hopeless and hardened, exploited by the cruelty of a centuries-long succession of authoritarian rule, just as the Russian people have been.

Taiga is by design unremarkable. Its concrete apartment houses were built to transplant workers to the town’s factories, and they are so plain and identical, young Alexey has trouble finding his way home. In any given month, those workers, including Alexey’s parents, may or may not get paid for their labor due to the dysfunctional government-run economy. As a result, organized crime and alcoholism are rampant (and supported by corrupt law enforcement), and no one truly believes in the possibility of self-improvement. Yet, with all the discontents of Alexey’s working-class peers and their families, they have it better than the ethnic natives who live in dirt huts in the marshy slums, abutting a barely disguised mass burial ground that was a prison camp during Stalin’s Great Purge of middle-class “enemies of the state.”

The fact that this is a story about real life people makes Mozgovoy’s novel more horrifying than any post-apocalyptic dystopia a science fiction writer could come up with.

There are slender rays of sunlight in Alexey’s world, most significantly when he spends the summer with his babushka in her farming village. Isolated from industrialization (at least for a time), his babushka gets all she needs from the land, and she’s generous and loving and eternally optimistic. Perhaps through a combination of shared nature and her abundant nurture, Alexey wants to believe the best of the world even as he’s harangued and shunned by peers and his own father due to his ‘effeminate’ looks and interests in ballet and poetry. Scalding disillusionment awaits him as he develops as a gay adolescent in a society where violence against LGBTQ+ people is a principal outlet for the emotional toll of systematic deprivation.

Mozgovoy writes that bringing attention to the terrors inflicted on queer people in Russia was his goal in publishing Spring in Siberia (and a forthcoming follow up novel about Alexey’s life after escaping to Western Europe). In that, he has achieved a much-needed spotlight on a human rights atrocity. The life choices for boys like him are suicide, heroin addiction, or risking illegal immigration, if one has the means.

I would argue that the author has accomplished even more than a portrait of queer struggle. Through Alexey’s story, he illuminates the complex histories of the Russian state, entwined as they are in the persecution of sexual minorities, yet vaster, seemingly impenetrable, a monster that eats its own young. What Mozgovoy presents is a repeated cycle of governance by deception and brutality from the Tzarist era to the false promises of socialist revolution to Stalin and his autocratic successors all the way to Putin, who Mozgovoy indicts as the enabler of the country’s vicious homophobic turn. To be honest, in spite of all the historical references, one feels that it is still incomprehensible, which is probably precisely what the author set out to accomplish.

A remarkable work that is both a poignant story of queer coming-of-age and a breathtaking history of modern Russia.

Reviewed for Out in Print.

I liked the book a bit, but got lost at times with some of the characters, and maybe it wasn't for ma at this time. Some will like it.

I could tell I was reading something special all the way through this book! It’s compelling and informative with beautiful language.

Growing up in a crumbling Soviet Union and the new formation of Russia, Alexey has to find his way in a country without tolerance for boys like him, who like poetry and other boys. Living in Siberia with its harsh conditions, Alexey and his family barely make ends meet and life is a continuous struggle to find work and conform to the changes of the nation.

I found myself greedily absorbing all the information about growing up in Siberia and Russia from a young citizen’s perspective in the 80s and into the 00s. This novel is a great history lesson presented in a fictional setting. The critique of all the leaders and corruption that permeates everything from top to bottom is scathing, with attention paid to how Putin has been able to get and keep so many ordinary Russians on his side.

The main character is continuously dismayed by the disjointed society around him, but Alexey’s mere existence and perseverance against the odds gives the story strength and heart, as does loving side-characters like his mother.

I very much recommend this novel if you like modern historical fiction with political commentary. Otherwise, the story might read a bit dry because of some of that focus but personally I loved it, especially with the gorgeous writing. It’s a rare occurrence that this kind of Own Voices story (growing up lgbt+ in Siberia) comes out, and with prose this good!

Spring in Siberia is out now. Thank you to Red Hen Press and NetGalley for providing me with an eARC for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

A crude reading but that makes it very clear what it is to be gay in a country that does not accept you, at a time when being different is reason to be attacked, in a context of repression that fosters hatred. And yet that message of hope is not lost. Even though people are telling Alexey to give up, that he is weird, that no one will love him, is not overwhelmed and faces a society that wants him dead.

A much-needed book that, in addition to dealing with being gay in Russia between the 1900s and 2000s, criticizes this society and its government. I think it’s such a special story because we see Alexey growing up from when he’s a kid to his early college years. How he sees things that no understands, how he discovers himself. How being around people like you can help you see that you’re not the problem, that maybe the problem is society.

This is the reality of many people today. Many young people, and not so young, from more conservative countries are having to flee because staying can mean death. That’s why this story feels so real, and that’s why it’s so necessary to give voice to those people.

I do not know if the book is for me, in some points it was slow and it was difficult to me to continue reading, but it is a reading that does not leave you indifferent and that I recommend.

I absolutely loved this book, it was so hard to put down that I put off reading physical books and instead picked up my kindle any chance that I got. I love stories that follow a character over a long period of time in general but the way the Mozgovoy described the different periods made it all feel like I was growing up with Alexey instead of just reading about it. I also loved the writing style, it felt as if each word was deliberately placed to evoke certain emotions or senses. Overall this book was unlike anything I’ve ever read before! We need more queer coming-of-age-ish books set in places other than the US & UK where everything isn’t all sunshine and rainbows at the end because for so much of the queer community around the world that is the reality, and it’s easy to forget that when you are privileged enough to live in a society where you don’t have to live in fear every day. I want to read this book over and over and tell everyone else I know to read it as well because it’s such an important story that needs to be told. Thank you so much to the publisher and to Artem Mozgovoy for letting me read this early! I’m looking forward to reading more from you in the future!!

If I had to describe this book in one word it would be: Powerful.

Luckily, I do not have to describe this book in one word, and can write to my heart's content about it. And that's one of the main topics that is presented in this book. This is a very real, very raw depiction of what it was like growing up in the USSR up to more modern times in Russia, and in all of the ways that it can break you down while dishing out promises of building you up, the empty promises, the whims of the government, which as you continue to read makes you feel more and more like a trapped bird in cage that can't even sing.
We follow our main character, Alexey, through all of his experiences growing up queer, and the times even before he realized this aspect of his identity, and all the subtle things about his upbringing that singled him out from others; being an outcast in a world that seemed to already want to break up the life he knew and the family he had.

Personally, I've never really had an interest in the Russian ways of life. All I knew from it was from sheltered teachers showing pictures of tourist attractions, traditional clothing, and national foods as a way of introducing us to Russian life, in this rose-tinted ideal of Russian life and historical buildings and a magical land of snow.
And when it came to the actual political aspects of the country, the only way that news is relayed to me is from my worried grandparents after watching their awful fear-mongering news channels. I don't think I really grasped how complicated the history of this country is, and in all the complex ways that the country has been transformed again and again, and at the same time staying completely stagnant in its ways.
And I think that this is something in particular that this book tackles very well. The narrative feels so seamless. We see this country, this way of life at the beginning through the eyes of a child that does not yet know the feeling of nostalgia. And as this child grows up, with descriptions on how the world around him began to change and how this affected his family, we begin to reflect on the earlier stages of his life and learn the ways in which his experiences were rose-tinted, hazy, not encapsulating the full picture of what was really happening to him and his family all along.

And as we progress further into the book, with our narrator becoming more aware of his surroundings, of himself, of his future (and his fears of possibly never seeing it), we as readers get to experience all of the pain, the fear, the glimmering hope, the soul crushing anxiety, through the lens of a teenager simply trying to survive.

This book is nothing short of a spiritual experience, and I would say that this is a worthwhile read to anybody looking to expand their worldview or even to better contextualize the things that they might have learned in their social studies classes.

(3.5 ⭐️) This book is a slow-paced, dark, and (seemingly) semi-biographical novel that follows Alexey, a boy from Siberia, as he grows up in the wake of the soviet union’s dissolution at the same time as he is discovering his sexuality.

“Spring in Siberia” called to me because i know woefully little about Russia —or Siberia— during any period in its history, and in that sense it was a very insightful read. As for the plot of the novel, I just wish it got to the point a little faster — the book is mostly exposition until around page 150.
Also, I found the tone inconsistent at times - the narration will suddenly become didactic, usually when talking about historical context, and it took me out of the story.

A beautiful, moving tale of love in one of the harshest places on earth. I would recommend this book to everyone I meet.

An absolute “must have”, “must read”! This book’s initial promise of beauty and strangeness is entirely fulfilled by a prose deceptively simple that takes you on a path to knowledge - of what it means to grow up in a place where you don't belong, of how it feels to be an outsider when everything you want is to be sheltered and allowed to blossom. Through the eyes of the main character we see the greyness of late Soviet times, masterfully balanced with portraits of people still kind and courageous (the grandmother). The rough, dangerous first steps into capitalism at the beginning of the ‘90 provide a background for teenage aspirations and ideals, while giving space to characters more complex (the mother, the gipsy lady) or somber (the KGB family, the teacher).
I love the way this book avoids the traps of both idealization and cynicism to ultimately deliver a message of hope. But might spring arrive in Siberia too? Pick up a copy and you shall find by yourself.

A beautiful book

Read this book! It’s a passionate coming-of-age story as well as a lens into the missed opportunities of Perestroika and post-Soviet Russia. Siberian Alexey is growing up looking for love, for artistic expression, and for simple freedom – the thing that we in luckier countries take for granted. He and his family struggle against a developing society of graft and thuggery – Alexey is beaten up daily after school by criminals newly released from the gulags because he looks ‘different’. His mother’s little shop is torched, probably by a self-styled ‘security’ gang.

Artem Mozgovoy writes beautifully with a purity of expression which perhaps comes from his writing in a second language, and also from being a poet. The imagery is striking and memorable: the claustrophobia of a tiny apartment in a grey block like every other grey block, being stranded in a snowy waste on a first attempt to see live theatre, the enchantment of his babushka’s cottage in the forest, a small boy lying down on the road because he thinks he has been abandoned, secret love on a balcony.

I would strongly recommend this poignant story of Alexey’s consuming longing for freedom fighting with the loves he will leave behind and the sadness of abandoning his troubled country