For us, people who feel an animal love for Siberia’s expanse of taiga, it is hard to think of the city, of urban culture, of the clang of factories. But let it be so, let the human being in us knock down the animal, drag it by the mane. Let Siberia’s flabby green breast be clad in the cement armor of cities, be armed with the stone craters of factory chimneys, be bound by iron railroads. Let the taiga be scorched and cut, let the steppes be trampled.
(Words of Russian novelist Vladimir Zazubrin in1926 describing his struggle to accept the new Soviet approach to the taiga, as cited in The Larch and the Oak: A Forest History of Russia and its Empires, by Sophie Pinkham )
Altaic Storytelling 