The novel Flood Zone tells of the inhabitants of old Siberian villages who find themselves in a zone where the Boguchanskaya hydroelectric power plant is due to be built. Its construction was completed at the beginning of this decade. Senchin depicts the way of life of these people: how they earn their living, their small solid houses “built to last”, which are soon to be obliterated when the place they know as home disappears under water.

Among the local people there are Siberian old-timers and others who were forcibly sent to Siberia from the Baltic Republics as children or from the German communities in the Volga region. These people are now going to be uprooted yet again…

The well-known critic, Lev Danilkin, has given us a very apt description of Roman Senchin’s novel: “Flood Zone is a disaster novel, but not in the Hollywood sense… Senchin conveys to us how an old way of life can be destroyed at the whim of bureaucrats and oligarchs who revive – for their own political advantage – the idea of ‘development’ once so prominent in the era of the USSR. Whole families disappear and are cut off from places that have been their homes for the last 300 years. An “Atlantis of the People’s Life” disappears under water…”