A Siberian Curse in America?
View from Amtrak's California Zephyr train. America's Siberia? Fiona Hill became an unlikely celebrity during the course of the Trump impeachment hearings. The expert on Russia rose to national prominence mostly because of her slaying testimony regarding President Trump's actions with the government of Ukraine but also because of the resonance of her biography, the child of a poor family rising through education and hard work to a position of respected authority. That she came to the United States to escape the enduring class and regional biases of her native United Kingdom was another source of her appeal. Fiona Hill testifying before Congress One of her books is The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold , about the enduring difficulties of Russia that date back to the state planning era of the USSR during which the nation essentially colonized Siberia. First populated with the forced labor of the Gulag and then with subsidies ...