Snow Falls on Baikal

He was born in a drafty wooden house on the Siberian border. When he was one-year-old, he was critically ill with a high fever, and his father carried him on foot for thirty miles to seek medical treatment. At the age of five, he heard about the world outside Moscow for the first time from a broken radio, and understood for the first time: poverty is not destiny, but a cage left to the weak by the times.