I told my Russian friends I was going to Siberia and was met with shock and incomprehension. "It's boring and poor!" "It's dangerous and criminal!" What struck me as I stuffed a suitcase with clothes woefully unsuited to -40°C temperatures, was just how remote Russia beyond the Urals or deep in the hinterlands seems to the people I hang out with in Moscow. As I left my newsroom for the last time, a Russian colleague gave me a look as if I had told him I planned to paddle the Congo River. "Just follow the local tradition and look at yourself in the mirror first," were his parting words.

I think all children do this — take a pen and race across a map, thinking, "One day I'll go there." My childhood Biro always went east, past Stettin on the Baltic, along the Volga and over the Urals, into Siberia. I would stare at those strange names: "Krasnoyarsk, Khabarovsk, Kamchatka." Just to read them aloud was a frightening chant.

I thought of that little boy as I pushed through the crowds of hunched Chinese peddlers, squatting Uzbek migrants and hurrying Slavic travellers into Yaroslavl Station, eerily reminiscent of the great transcontinental stations Albert Speer had planned for Berlin. On the platform, a group of teenage conscripts were slipping on the blackened ice. Orange lights shone over trains. The stench of the engines rose like gunpowder.

It was these rails that zeks, as Gulag inmates were known, had ridden eastwards to camps. Those destined for Kolyma were boarded up in cattle-trucks to Vladivostok, a week from Moscow, with scarce rations or none at all. Peasants who had never travelled, never seen the sea, were shipped to Magadan in the far north to be slaves. Some thought they were being taken to a different planet. I sat in the restaurant carriage staring at the scenery. Carpets of snow. Boundless miles of birch-tree forests.

Russians feel great pride that theirs is the largest country in the world, radiating in all directions across 11 time zones. As Solzhenitsyn said, it was these lands beyond the Urals that would forge Russia's destiny — they were "awaiting our love". For centuries, the dream of colonising these expanses has driven the beat of Russian history. It was Siberia that made "Socialism in One Country" a possibility. The temptation to exploit it inspired planners to draw up diagrams of the Gulag. It is often said that Russia is always "becoming", because Siberia is forever yet to yield — the etymology of the word stems from ancient Turkic for "the sleeping land".

A day later I arrived in Yekaterinburg. I was looking for the borders in people's heads. Situated in the foothills of the Urals, Russia's first city in Asia is where the Cossacks set out to bring Siberia under the writ of the Tsars. Here I met Ivan. Fifty and fat, he was to drive me to Ganina Yama, a monastery deep in the forest which marks the shallow grave where Nicholas II and his family were secretly buried by the Bolsheviks. "My city is where the ruptures are," Ivan said as we drove out of town. He crossed himself ostentatiously, almost slamming into a mini-van, as we passed the Church on the Blood, where the "House of Special Purposes", scene of the murders, once stood. "That's where they shot the Tsar and his beautiful children. And Yeltsin came from here — the apparatchik who brought the whole thing down."