THE mere prospect of a wintertime visit to Siberia, where some of the world's lowest temperatures have been recorded, is enough to give anyone cold feet. TIME's Moscow bureau chief John Shaw, however, eagerly anticipated such a trip to report this week's story on Siberia. Since arriving in Moscow a year ago, Shaw had been planning an excursion to the vast region between the Urals and the Pacific, but not until last November did he find the time--and get the permission of Russian authorities--for the trip. Shaw spent two weeks touring Siberia at that time, then returned for a second look in February with Photographer Howard Sochurek.

For Sochurek, whose color photographs accompany the article, February's visit was his 15th to the Soviet Union since 1958. This time both he and Shaw were treated to a view of Russia's interior that few foreign journalists have ever seen. They traveled to the western Siberian oilfields of Samotlor and Surgut, and emerged with the first color photographs of the area ever taken by an American photographer. At Aldan, Sochurek talked Aeroflot officials into renting him a helicopter to photograph the gold fields and track down the reindeer herds that graze in the area. In the eastern Siberian republic of Buryat, he visited and became the first American to photograph the isolated Buryat Buddhist monastery.

Cold feet, in fact, became a very real problem for both Shaw and Sochurek, but the -74DEG temperatures that they encountered proved especially difficult for the photographer. The moving parts of his camera froze, the film turned brittle, and the metal adhered to his skin whenever he tried to focus the lens.

To save time in covering the vast distances, Shaw and Sochurek did most of their traveling by air, including one memorable morning when they waited 20 minutes in -25DEG weather before the Aeroflot crew arrived and unlocked the plane. "It had been sitting on the freezing runway all night," Shaw recalls. "The temperature inside was about 20 below, and there were thick icicles inside the door. Finally a crewman hauled aboard a hose from the engine-warmup truck and began blasting hot air straight into the cabin. It was rough, but it worked--a bit like Siberia itself." Our story was written by Contributing Editor Marguerite Johnson, who in 1970 saw the region from a somewhat different perspective: a coach window on a Trans-Siberian railroad train during a week-long trip across Siberia.

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