The story of Nikolai Maslov begins in 2000 when he, then a night watchman, opens the door of Emmanuel Durand, a French book salesman in Moscow and the publisher of Asterix in Russian, and shows the Frenchman three pages from a graphic novel, asking him to finance the rest. Stunned by the intensity of the work and life in those panels, Durand allows Maslov to quit his job to concentrate for three years on his work. The result is one of the most disturbing and astonishing visual renderings of the Russian spirit.
Awash in alcohol from the first pages to the last, SIBERIA (originally entitled "Une jeunesse soviétique," or "A Soviet Youth") describes the path of a young ordinary Russian across the desolation of the Siberian countryside, and through the labyrinths of the Soviet system—from construction site, to his military service in Mongolia, all the way to the psychiatric hospital where he was admitted after the death of his brother.
Drawn entirely in pencil on paper, SIBERIA bears witness to the life of the Russian people. It draws on images of faces deformed by alcohol, the fat, laughing mouths of officers, the bullying, the violence, the cynicsim of Soviet Russia...yet a world also from time to time illuminated by a ray of light, through a birch forest or on the river Ob, captured by a man who loves the natural world of Siberia.
Maslov depicts a schizophrenic society, “trapped between official discourse and the reality of life,” that, over the course of the years, plunges toward depression. On the one hand there are the fleeting glimpses of the West, seen on broadcasts of the ORTV, France’s former public TV station, making the adolescent Maslov dream of the “colors preferred by Parisian women this season.” On the other hand, there was school, where they harped on the idea that, “Year by year, the well-being of the Soviet people increases.” He sketches out the humiliations inflicted during his military service in Mongolia, the lessons in politics coming from “a land of ardent patriots, from savants and proletarians, talented inventors.” His lessons in life coming from drinking sessions with NCOs “drinking brandy that was brewed up by some expert from that corner,” drinking “to the inventive proletariats, like they say in the speeches.” In the army, the artistic gifts of the hero of this graphic novel were used to create propagandistic tableaux, notably to represent the national upward-trending graph of the production of sausage.
Drawn solely in pencil, the greytones are both unremittingly yet delicately nuanced, evoking the austere Siberian lanscape but also the deranged, violent, cruel, moody people, the dull icy grayness, the bad vodka, the daily brawls, military service of unbelievable brutality (his brother lost his life). But at the same time: lessons of love, learning about painting, the beauty of forests under the snow, the discovery of Moscow.
Amidst the pain of the present, there are also glimpses of the past, in pcrticular of his greandfather, an illiterate countryman, who had been arrested by the GPU (Soviet secret police) during the last great purge in the 1930’s. “Up to the end,” the trial transcripts attest, “he said the same thing—‘I’m not at all against the revolution, but before it, we had bread, and now we no longer have any. So, where’s our bread?’ He was executed by gunshot that evening.”
A truly Dostoyevskian graphic novel.

Nikolai Maslov (Moscow, Russia), born in Siberia in 1954, acquired a taste for drawing while in school. But he had to take his first steps alone, only accompanied by a work on Impressionism through which he had discovered Cezanne and Monet. He work on construction sites in Siberia, did military service with the Red Army in Mongolia, and a series of odd jobs in Moscow until he was paid a modest advance by a Moscow-based French graphic novel publisher to complete this book.