In October 2021, when I saw an announcement on the website of the Pskov Library about the 90th anniversary of a solo cycling tour around the Soviet Union, I couldn’t believe it. How was it possible that I had never heard of a feat that matched those of early Arctic explorers like Roald Amundsen? How could popular memory have forgotten a journey that went from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to Lake Baikal, Tajikistan, the Caucasus, and Crimea, through Moscow and St. Petersburg to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, then through Novaya Zemlya and Dikson Island to the Chukchi Peninsula and back to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky? And how could anyone have accomplished such a feat 92 years ago, without today’s bicycles, tents, backpacks, bike trails, camp stoves or other outdoorsy accoutrements? And what’s more, how was such a trip possible without electronic maps, cell phones, cycling gear or freeze-dried food? And going through the Arctic? Can’t be! This whole story must be fiction.
Turns out, truth can be stranger than fiction. All by himself, between October 1928 and October 1931, Gleb Leontyevich Travin pedaled the periphery of the Soviet Union – down the coastline of Primorye and the Far East, along the southern border of Siberia and the Central Asian republics, and, most amazingly, along the coast of the Arctic Ocean. In winter! By bicycle! This incredible journey lasted a bit over three years, involved plenty of deprivation and hunger, and cost Travin his toes to a bout of frostbite. It also went down in history as the remarkable achievement of a man who pushed the limits of physical and mental endurance.
It turns out that this “unknown” Gleb Travin is famous among cyclists all over the world. To this day, controversy rages on cycling forums as to whether Travin’s tour actually happened, how many miles he traveled, how he repaired his bicycle, who helped him, whether he was a member of the secret police, and the possibility that it could all just be an urban legend and that the whole trip was made up. But let’s put the conspiracy theories aside and focus on the facts.
Several books and articles have been written about Travin. First, there was Alexander Kharitanovsky’s The Man with a Metal Reindeer: The Story of a Forgotten Feat (Человек с железным оленем: повесть о забытом подвиге), published in 1965 in a series with the self-explanatory title Travel. Adventures. Fantastic Fiction. Second, the Novosibirsk writer and journalist Vivian Itin, who was personally acquainted with Travin, wrote an article about him entitled “The Earth Became His Own” (Земля стала своей). Itin had met Travin by chance in the summer of 1931 at a trading post on Cape Dezhnev. Third, in 2001, Yves Gauthier’s book about Travin, The Centaur of the Arctic, was published in France.
These seem to be the only print resources that exist about Travin’s amazing journey, but his name lives on in other ways. Cycling groups in the Soviet Union and East Germany were named after him, and some of the people who met Gleb Travin and spoke with him left reminiscences of those encounters. There is also a recording of a radio interview with Travin and a documentary film made in 1981 after his death (in 1979). His travel logbook, bearing stamps from all the places through which he passed (numbering 255 to 270, depending on the source), is on display at the Pskov Regional History Museum. This logbook was Travin’s greatest treasure and the most substantial piece of evidence that his trip did indeed occur. Travin’s bicycle, documents, compass, rifle, bag, commemorative lapel pins, and gifts are also on display at the museum. Even after reading the books and seeing the physical evidence of his journey, it is still hard to understand how he accomplished such an undertaking.
“My three favorite literary characters are Faust, Odysseus, and Don Quixote. Faust captivated me with his insatiable thirst for knowledge. Odysseus wonderfully withstood the blows of fate. Don Quixote had the lofty idea of selfless service to beauty and justice. All three serve as a perfect example of how to challenge conventional norms and perceptions. All three gave me strength in difficult situations, because when I set off for the Arctic by bicycle, I was also challenging conventional wisdom.”
– Gleb Travin in The Man with a Metal Reindeer
At 38,966 miles, the Soviet Union had the longest border in the world. As we see on Travin’s travel map, his route loosely followed its contours. According to various estimates, Travin’s trip was between 15,534 and 21,747 miles. Portions of it were covered by ship, dog sled, on skis, and sometimes on foot.
Gleb Leontyevich Travin was born on April 28, 1902, in the village of Kasyevo, not far from Pskov. By his own account, he was the son of a poor peasant forester, but he may not have been telling the truth, given that in the early Soviet era, prosperous peasants were considered enemies of the people. Travin’s children later recalled that, according to stories their father told, his family was wealthy and large, with three sons and two daughters. After his father, Leonty Travin, moved from a village to Pskov, he quickly prospered. He was a talented cabinet maker and crafted furniture for an elite Pskov school. Gleb Travin’s father passed along his love of nature and a taste for traveling to his son and taught him to hunt, find food and a place to sleep in forests and fields, and eat raw meat. Gleb’s sisters recalled that their brother was very ambitious and always accomplished everything he set out to do. A smart, able-bodied, and resilient person, Gleb graduated from school and became addicted to long-distance cycling trips through the Pskov forests. Although a bicycle was an expensive rarity in Russia 100 years ago, Gleb had a folding Leitner bike of the sort used by the Russian Army during World War I. Gleb himself joked that there were “three sons in his family – two were smart and the third was a cyclist.” After school, Gleb studied to be an electrician and a teacher and led a club for wild-game trackers.
In 1923, the Dutch cyclist Adolf de Groot, who had traveled all over Europe, arrived in Pskov. Gleb was inspired by him and began to dream of traversing the entire planet by bicycle. He put a few thousand miles on his bike going around the Pskov region, excellent training for his journey. In 1925, Gleb Travin was drafted into the Red Army and stationed close to Pskov in the headquarters of the Leningrad Military District. There he took up everything that could be of use to him in his travels: geography, surveying, zoology and botany, photography, and metalworking (in order to repair his bicycle). In addition, he was very involved in sports such as swimming, lifting weights, and bicycle and boat racing. Gleb rose to become a platoon leader.
After completing their service, veterans were entitled to a free ticket to their official place of residence. In Pskov, Gleb was registered at an address on Petropavlovsk Street. In a rather audacious act of fraud, he made a few minor alterations in his paperwork, and Petropavlovsk Street became Petropavlovsk, a city on the Kamchatka Peninsula, at the opposite end of the vast Soviet Union. To 26-year-old Travin, the Far East looked like the most logical starting point for his journey.
Several high-profile cycling tours around the globe had already gone down in history. During 1884-86, Thomas Stevens made the first trip around the world by bicycle. Onisim Pankratov, a cyclist from Russia, had gained fame by cycling around the world in two years and eighteen days during 1911-12. Travin certainly had plenty of inspiration.
In Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Travin worked as an electrician and took part in building a power plant. In the spring of 1928, he received a bonus for his excellent work and used the money to buy a Japanese bicycle, as people living on the Kamchatka Peninsula could buy goods from Japan and the United States during the years of the New Economic Policy.
Travin immediately began practicing riding on icy winter tracks on Avacha Bay that had been worn down by dog sleds, and in summer he rode from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to Ust-Kamchatsk, covering slightly over 600 miles through rivers, taiga forests, and over hills and high-mountain tundra.
That was when Travin started preparing for his trip around the world and getting the documents he needed. Although he did not receive permission to leave the Soviet Union, the government did approve a proposal for him to trace the borders of the USSR as part of a campaign to promote cycling, sponsored by the Kamchatka branch of the Dynamo Sports Club. Travin was issued the documents needed for his trip, including one certifying him as a “bicycle tourist.” The club also ordered him the best bicycle in the world available at that time, from the United States. Travin promised the members of the Dynamo Sports Club that he would wear the trademark green Dynamo armband throughout his trip around the USSR: through the Far East, Siberia, Central Asia, the South Caucasus, Ukraine, the central and northwest areas of Russia, and the Arctic, from the Kola Peninsula to Cape Dezhnev in the Chukchi Peninsula.
In the fall of 1928, Travin received a bright-red two-wheeled Princeton bicycle from the United States with white enamel arrows on the handlebars and frame. To it, he attached two leather waterproof pannier bags with spare parts and the equipment he needed. He strapped a bag with a leather jacket, a Leica camera, and an emergency supply of two pounds of chocolate and three of hardtack to the rear of the bicycle, which brought its total weight to 176 pounds. Travin was planning on riding for at least eight hours every day, regardless of the weather, season, or terrain. His assumption that he would get enough to eat in the forest unnerved the amateur athletes at the Dynamo Sports Club, but Travin assured them that he could manage. Gleb did not have a tent or a sleeping bag, because he was going to sleep in his jacket on the ground. He let his hair grow for a whole year in 1928, so that in the cold weather he would not need a hat. Two local cyclists from Dynamo were supposed to ride with Travin, but they changed their minds once they heard just how austere the trip would be. Gleb planned to eat twice a day – at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. – and ride like the wind day in and day out without stopping, all the while checking his compass.
On October 10, 1928, Gleb and his bicycle began to travel south on a ship set to sail from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to Vladivostok. On October 23, Travin left Vladivostok by bicycle for Khabarovsk with a green armband on his sleeve that read, “World bicycle tourist Gleb Leontyevich Travin.” He had business cards with the same fearless phrase on them and handed them out to the people he met. Additionally, he was going to get the traveler’s logbook the Dynamo Sports Club had given him stamped in all the villages, towns, and posting stations he passed through.
Twelve days after leaving Vladivostok, Travin reached Khabarovsk by riding his bicycle alongside the train tracks of the Trans-Siberian Railway. He then traveled westward, following the Amur River. Travin recounted how, in the Ussuri Taiga, he was stalked by a tiger that hid in the bushes and growled at him but did not dare to attack. Gleb thought that animals were frightened by his bicycle, which was unlike anything they had seen before with its bright red color, shiny spokes, kerosene lantern, and a small flag.
On the border of Amur Oblast and Zabaikalsky Krai, Travin met another unusual traveler: Yevdokim Kolyakov, a wayfaring peasant who had been a guerrilla on the Soviet side during the Civil War. In early 1928, Kolyakov had walked all the way from Primorye to Moscow to deliver peasants’ complaints to the Kremlin. As Travin recounted it, they immediately had words with one another, because Kolyakov told Travin that his bicycle would not make it to Moscow. Travin took offense at that and, before riding away, called Kolyakov a miserable pedestrian. A lighthouse keeper on Lake Baikal told Travin that sticking to the ice in Siberia makes for the easiest ride. Travin rode his bike across frozen Lake Baikal and generally used the icy riverbeds while traversing the taiga.
After leaving Lake Baikal, Travin traversed Siberia along the route Chita, Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Barnaul, and Semipalatinsk. Through Central Asia, his itinerary was Alma-Ata, Frunze (modern-day Bishkek), Tashkent, Bukhara, and Ashgabat. The trip along the southern border of the Soviet Union – from Vladivostok to the Caspian Sea – took him 276 days or nine months. In May 1929, when Travin arrived in Dushanbe, capital of what was then the Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, he decided to translate his Dynamo armband into Tajik. The word for “bicycle” was translated as using the Tajik words Shaitan Arba, “the devil’s cart,” because Tajiks had never before seen anything like it.
Travin crossed the Caspian Sea on a steamship, and, after leaving Baku, traveled to Rostov-on-Don via Tbilisi, then south through Crimea before setting off from Sevastopol for Moscow, a trip that totaled 26 days (for an average of about 50 miles per day). Once in Moscow, Travin paid a visit to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee’s Supreme Council of Physical Education, which, at that time, was the main administrative board of tourism. There his traveler’s logbook was stamped, and he got new tires from the Cyclists’ Union. He then set off for the North, traveling via Tver to his hometown of Pskov. On October 13, 1929 (a year after he left Petropavlovsk), the newspaper The Pskov Signal wrote: “Gleb Travin, the tourist and Pskov native, stopped in our city yesterday on his way north. Within the past two years, Travin has racked up about 50,000 miles after having traveled all over the entire East and South of the Soviet Union, mostly by bicycle.”
That is how the infamous “50,000 miles” came to appear next to Travin’s name in some reports, raising eyebrows. It’s difficult to say whether the truth was embellished by Travin or journalists, but this figure is five times higher than Travin’s actual mileage.
Before setting off for the north from Pskov, Travin got himself a hunting rifle and fishing rod. Traveling via Leningrad, his next destination was Murmansk.
Travin’s trip from Vladivostok to Murmansk – October 23, 1928 to November 21, 1929 – lasted a total of 394 days (covering an estimated 15,000 km, or just under 10,000 miles, thus averaging about 25 miles per day). It was in Murmansk that the most astonishing part of Travin’s journey began. It seemed that no one – not even Travin himself – believed that it was possible to cross the Arctic by bicycle. Travin’s own doubts are evident in the fact that he acquired a belt with his name spelled out in copper letters around that time, so that in case he died his body could be identified.
Based on information found in Travin’s travel log, which is now in the Pskov Regional History Museum, the following legs of his trip were by boat:
Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky – Vladivostok, 1,616 miles Krasnovodsk – Baku, 174 miles Rostov-on-Don – Yalta, 360 miles Vaygach Island – Dikson Island, 528 miles Saint Lawrence Bay – Ust-Kamchatsk, 1,180 miles
This adds up to a total of 3,858 miles. There is an additional leg via water, probably from Murmansk to Arkhangelsk, but the details of that trip cannot be confirmed. What we do know is that Travin arrived in Arkhangelsk via steamship, and on December 5, 1929, he began his journey eastward and up into the Arctic Circle. From there, the most direct route to the Chukchi Peninsula was 3,106 miles.
After leaving Arkhangelsk, Travin, whose bicycle amazed the Pomors living in old Russian villages on the coast of the White Sea, began to make his way over the ice along the shore of the Arctic Ocean from Pechora in the Komi Republic and on through the Yugorsky Strait to the Kara Sea. At first, with the help of his compass, he rode up to 50 miles a day in heavy snowfall. He pushed ahead, sometimes by bicycle, other times on foot or skis – no hat, no tent, but he did have a rifle. He tried affixing a ski to his front wheel so as to better glide over the snow, but this proved to be of little help. Travin slept in the snow and caught fish (which he ate raw) in polynyas (a geographic term borrowed from Russian that means patches of unfrozen sea water) and cracks in the ice. On Dikson Island, he was given fur coveralls. Travin recalled how once, when he was sleeping, his clothing became stuck to the ice. He had to extricate his clothes and boots in pieces and wound up riding almost barefoot up to the reindeer-hide tents of an encampment of indigenous Nenets, scaring everyone with his appearance. The Nenets described Travin as “riding on an iron reindeer and holding on to iron horns” and gave him the moniker “cannibal devil.”
Travin poured glycerin into the inner tubes of his bicycle tires so that they would hold up better in the cold. And when Travin would get wet from riding through polynyas, he would dry his clothes using the “freeze-dry method,” which is an awful but effective procedure. It requires that wet clothes be removed in the cold, wrung out, and after a few petrifying minutes, beaten against rocks to remove the ice particles from the fur and fabric.
There were days and weeks when Travin stayed at polar research stations and camps of reindeer herders waiting out snowstorms and fixing his bicycle. In some instances, Yakuts, Nenets, and Chukchi transported him to his next destination by reindeer and dog sled. After killing a female bear and eating it, Travin arrived in the town of Pevek with its cub, which he had brought along as a food supply and ultimately ate. During his trip, Travin was attacked by Arctic foxes and bears.
On November 28, 1930, Travin cycled into Olenyoksky District on the western border of Yakutia, and two months later he arrived in the village of Russkoye Ustye, on the lower reaches of the Indigirka River (where it flows into the Arctic Ocean). It took him another seven and a half months to get from the eastern part of Yakutia to Providence Bay on the Chukchi Peninsula.
Along the way, Travin slept inside of reindeer and bears that he had killed. Managers at radio stations in the Arctic were shocked when he would walk into their building from the freezing cold, his bicycle in tow. While in the Arctic, a Yakut repaired his handlebars, making him new ones from a Norwegian rifle. (Those handlebars are still on Travin’s bicycle, which is on display at the Pskov Regional History Museum.) Somewhere east of the Kolyma River, the Chukchi made him a new armband to replace the worn-out one he had been given by the Dynamo Sports Club. Now the words “World bicycle tourist Gleb Leontyevich Travin” were written in bead embroidery.
After he reached the Chukchi Peninsula, in the village of Uelen (just south of the Arctic Circle and brushing up against the International Date Line), Travin amputated his blackened and swollen toes himself to prevent gangrene. He took a knife, cut off his toes, and applied glycerin to the wound. Around that same time, he finished off his strategic stockpile of chocolate and hardtack.
In the fall of 1931, journalist Vivian Itin met a man on the Bering Strait coast of the Chukchi Peninsula about whom he wrote: “With hair past his shoulders, a beard, scars from frostbite on his face, fingers he could not unbend, and feet he could barely move, the frostbitten toes of which he had amputated himself, I thought that Amundsen was alive and well.” (At that time, Roald Amundsen, who had flown on a rescue mission in search of Umberto Nobile and his crew, was missing. Polar explorers, however, believed that Amundsen was alive and thought he could appear at any time. Travin was sometimes mistaken for Amundsen.)
On July 16, 1931, Gleb Travin reached Cape Dezhnev, the easternmost point of the Soviet Union, and on October 3, 1931, after traveling 667 days from Murmansk to the Chukchi Peninsula, Travin arrived in Providence Bay, the final point on his itinerary. He then set sail on the steamship Arika for Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky where, on October 24, 1931, his travel log was stamped for the last time. In total, he had traveled for three years and two weeks – a total of 1,109 days – either by bicycle or with it.
Travin left quite an impression on those who encountered him during his travels through the Arctic: locals, hunters, and crews of the Lenin, Volodarsky, and Malygin, as well as Yakuts, Nenets, Pomors, and Chukchi. He tried to be useful along the way, building a stove in Khabarov, a town near the Yugorsky Strait, teaching geography classes in Russkoye Ustye, a Pomor settlement near the Indigirka River, and fixing a radio tower in Uelen.
On November 3, 1931, the newspaper Kamchatskaya Pravda wrote: “Gleb Leontyevich Travin, a tourist who has been traveling around the world since 1928, recently arrived in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. While on his trip, Comrade Travin first visited the largest industrial and agricultural centers of the USSR and then the farthest reaches of the Soviet Union’s North, where he spent some time on the Kamchatka Peninsula. He traveled around by bicycle, dog sled, and water transport. After leaving Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Travin is going to Japan, the United States, Australia, China, Africa, and Europe before returning to the Soviet Union.” Travin truly did plan to go to Alaska by bicycle, but the Soviet authorities did not permit him to leave the Soviet Union. His subsequent life was quite ordinary: he worked as an electrician and taught physical education classes at local schools and vocational colleges.
In the early 1930s, the tone of subsequent newspaper accounts turned hostile toward Travin and his expedition. In 1932, journalist Viktorin Popov wrote a booklet about Travin’s trip called A Good-for-Nothing Hero (Никчёмный герой). In it, he compared hardworking polar explorers to the “slacker” Travin. In 1932, the magazine Around the World (Вокруг света) published an article entitled “Across the Arctic Ocean by Bicycle” (На велосипеде через полярное море), which described Travin’s arrival at a polar research station. One sentence in the article read: “What a meager understanding of travel and tourism a person would have to have to embark on a trip like that!” The only person who praised Travin’s feat was Vivian Itin. The two corresponded and became friends. Later Itin was arrested and killed during the Stalinist Terror, and when Travin’s family asked him to destroy all his travel diaries and pictures from his trip, he complied. When World War II broke out, several stories about Travin and his Arctic adventure appeared in German newspapers published for occupied areas of the Soviet Union. They claimed that the Soviets had accused Travin of spying and sent him to a Kolyma labor camp. In reality, Gleb Travin, a former Red Army commander and physical education teacher, spent the war serving in a coastal defense regiment on the Kamchatka Peninsula. He was not eligible for Red Army service because of his amputated toes.
Twenty-five years later, journalist Alexander Kharitanovsky was working as a correspondent at a leading newspaper on the Chukchi Peninsula. Locals told him about a traveler who had biked to the Chukchi Peninsula a quarter century earlier, and although Kharitanovsky did not believe them, he began looking into the story. He searched the archives, wrote to eyewitnesses, and unearthed information about Travin’s extraordinary and forgotten trip. In the 1950s, rugged outdoor adventurism was enjoying a heyday in the Soviet Union, and everyone became interested in Gleb Travin’s feat. Kharitanovsky tracked down Travin in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, where he was working as a physical education teacher, and, after looking at the travel log that Gleb had kept, Kharitanovsky wondered why Travin had embarked on his journey. Gleb explained that he wanted to test himself and the limits of human endurance. Their interactions resulted in The Man with a Metal Reindeer, which was reprinted several times, and translated into a several languages. Gleb Travin’s name immediately became legendary among cyclists, and cycling clubs in the Soviet Union were named after him. Following the release of The Man with a Metal Reindeer in German, several cycling clubs in East Berlin were named in honor of Travin.
Gleb Travin and his wife and children eventually moved to Pskov. After his first wife died, Travin remarried. He died in 1979 following a serious illness. He was 77.
Both Travin and his trip have become legendary. In 1988, Pavel Konyukhov, a native of Nakhodka and brother of the famous explorer Fyodor Konyukhov, decided to repeat the most unprecedented and frigid leg of Travin’s trip by bicycle with his two friends, Fyodor Abdulin and Sergey Vilkov, but with a car following close behind them.
Since then, other solo cyclists have been making similar attempts to replicate Travin’s feat. Some of them were driven by the idea of paying tribute to Travin; others aimed to prove just how real his accomplishments were, while still others simply wanted to explore the world. Some of these trips are unique. In 2020 and 2021, Moscow cyclist Tatyana Nikulnikova, inspired by Travin’s journey, repeated segments of it by first traveling from Moscow to Murmansk and then, the following summer, biking from Pitkyaranta to Vorkuta. Nikulnikova says that she never doubted that Travin’s tour had taken place, and calls it “a remarkable human achievement that is one step away from an act of heroism.”
The first woman inspired to replicate Travin’s solo journey, Nikulnikova did not aspire to copy every detail of his route. She runs the website The Blues of New Roads: Notes of a Bicycle Traveler Put to Good Music (Блюзы новых дорог: записки велопутешественницы под хорошую музыку), on which she shares photos and information about her trips. Fortunately, her job as a financial analyst allowed her to take off six months at a time to pursue her dreams. She is, after all, one of only a handful of Russian women to have completed long and arduous solo cycling trips in places all over the world.
Nikulnikova has been to the Namib Desert in Africa, traveled through Patagonia and Alaska, Europe, and Asia, and ridden across islands and mountains, volcanoes, and deserts. She loves the North, and being forced to isolate during the coronavirus pandemic provided her with an opportunity to discover Russia. When the country went into lockdown, Nikulnikova packed up and cycled toward Murmansk, traveling about 2,400 miles through Tver, Leningrad, and Murmansk oblasts. She lived in a tent, cooked on a gas stove, encountered wild animals, and kept on traveling north while her husband and cat awaited her return home.
Nikulnikova travels alone. She describes herself as petite and not strongly built. She is not an athlete trying to set records, rather an average person who wants to better understand the world with the help of a bicycle. She began going on bicycle tours after her mother died, because they kept her from wallowing in her grief. First, she cycled around Moscow Oblast and then decided to go on long-distance rides. As she put it, riding solo puts her in a happy place, even though these trips have their share of challenges and can be scary. She repairs her bicycle and tent herself.
Out of her five bicycles, Nikulnikova chose to ride her fatbike around northern Russia, because it has wide tires and is essentially an all-terrain vehicle that can handle not only bad roads but also bogs, marshland, and mud. This summer, she had to cross the Northern Urals, Arkhangelsk Oblast, and the Komi Republic, including historic routes along the Kozhim and Pechora rivers. She was forced to deal with more than her fair share of difficulties – gnats, bad weather, poor roads, and having to cross rivers. She took a small, inflatable boat with collapsible oars on which she and her bicycle crossed lakes, rivers, the taiga, and the tundra, taking on the vastness that is Russia.
Incidentally, even with all her gear, Nikulnikova’s bicycle weighed about 88 pounds, approximately half that of Travin’s loaded bicycle. Although she had even fewer things along to help her than Travin did, she still became the first woman to travel from Karelia to the Polar Urals by bicycle and on foot. As one can imagine, traveling by bicycle or on foot is drastically different from taking a train, car or airplane, as outdoor adventurists find themselves alone with the land and witness the beauty of natural regions and landscapes for themselves. It is truly a very special experience for people to see the Lovozero Massif, the White Sea, Pomor villages, and the Barents Sea.
To this day, many have tried to repeat Travin’s feat, but none has yet been able to complete the entire route uninterrupted.
Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.
Russian Life 73 Main Street, Suite 402 Montpelier VT 05602
802-223-4955
[email protected]
