Along the Trans-Siberian Pipeline: A Social Geography by Camera

This paper follows the Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhhorod Pipeline, also known as the West Siberian and the Trans-Siberian Pipeline, as it conveys natural gas from source fields in western Siberia to Uzhhorod, Ukraine’s border city with Slovakia, where the conduit branches to reach consumers in the heart of Europe. The journey crosses diverse cultures and varying standards of living, as well as different periods of time, ranging from places with outmoded technologies and unchanging traditions to areas of modern urban life with the latest international fashions and knowhow. Along the way, we see the interconnections that characterize today’s globalized world and underlie geopolitical relations between the gas-exporting Russian Federation and importing countries in central and western Europe. We also gain a better understanding of how access to a critical resource such as natural gas relates to the global geography of haves and have-nots. In describing the route of the pipeline, this paper is simultaneously a review of the 2013 documentary film Truba (“Pipeline”) by film director Vitaly Mansky, whose remarkable footage of life along the pipeline’s route is a main inspiration for this essay.