When Jeffrey Tayler decides to make his way across the entire Russian continent (over 8,000 miles from Siberia to Poland), everyone he discusses it with discounts the idea as dangerous and/or impossible. In fact, in Magadan, the former gulag capital in eastern Siberia where he chooses to start his journey, he is told again and again that there is no overland way out - that the only way in or out is to fly. Nonetheless, he finds a ride with a trucker - not on a road, but over frozen marshland.

Traveling with a Moscow-only visa, Tayler finds new adventures and hurdles almost hourly in this country still reeling from totalitarianism and ill-prepared for travelers needing food and lodging. As a stranger with a camera, he is often mistaken for a KGB or CIA agent.

Threats range from the general lawlessness of highway robbery to the disorder created by widespread alcohol abuse and poverty, from bureaucratic apathy that can arbitrarily bring anything to a standstill to the inescapable history of toxic waste. As the first American to visit many of the places he goes, his reports on a country in transition are timely and unforgettable. It is also the account of one man's love for a fragile, desperately troubled country.