Escape from Siberia

A captivating tale - and extremely well written ' -Le Figaro litteraire 'A staggering testimony ' -Livres Hebdo Nerve-wrecking ' -Le Monde 'A spectacular story ' -L'Obs'An utterly chilling tale ' -France Inter'The scene unfolds not far from Lake Baikal, where I live and love and am lucky enough to be loved, in Irkutsk, the capital of eastern Siberia. It's morning, men in balaclavas appear out of nowhere. My daughter screams. She's five years old. I'm arrested right in front of her, then beaten - expertly - and interrogated. Worst of all I'm branded with that ignominious word I struggle to commit to paper: paedophile. These men hidden behind balaclavas and shadows want my skin. They have set in motion an implacable and brutish process of destruction that has a name, a name I know, invented by the KGB: Kompromat. Inside Siberia's prisons, I try to understand. In the psychiatric hospital where I'm later interned, I try to understand. I'm guaranteed fifteen years of a gruelling camp. The story of my escapes can begin. I haven't invented anything. It's a film, but it isn't. It's a novel, but it isn't. It's all true...

Born in 1978, Yoann Barbereau worked in Russia for over ten years, including running the Alliance fran aise (a government-funded agency that promotes French language and culture abroad) in Irkutsk, Siberia.He was imprisoned on charges of a crime he had not committed in a plot involving Russian intelligence services and French international business interests. To escape his captors, he used every modern method available, outmanoeuvring the signals from his electronic tag and travelling hundreds of kilometres across Siberia using a carpool app and then on foot.

A captivating tale - and extremely well written' - Le Figaro litteraire 'A staggering testimony' - Livres Hebdo Nerve-wrecking' - Le Monde 'A spectacular story' - L'Obs 'An utterly chilling tale' - France Inter Yoann Barbereau was a promising official at the head of the Alliance Fran aise in Irkutsk, in Siberia, when he was imprisoned on charges of a crime he had not committed. The FSB, heir to the KGB, created a set of false evidence to incriminate him and confine him to 15 years in a Siberian prison camp. After months of abuse and deception by the authorities, he decided to end the injustice on his own account: he would escape from Russia. Escape from Siberia is the gripping tale of a flight from the depths of an icy continent, telling the epic story of how an innocent man escaped from the clutches of injustice. In a cinematic and action-packed account, Barbereau recounts his mind-boggling trek across a forest border guarded by ferocious dogs and gunmen to cross the border and reach Europe. This is an enthralling - and terrifying - account of a rogue state in action and how one man escaped the nightmare.

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