“Imperium” by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Completed on 5th of February 2017

Review:

A set of three impressions of Russia, with the first one when the author was seven years old and Poland was invaded by Russia in 1939 and NKVD were looking for his officer soldier father. Luckily, his mother managed to escape to German occupied Poland and they survived the war there. The second part covers Kapuscinski’s impressions of Soviet Union in the late fifties when he travelled on the trans-Siberian train, and in the sixties when he visited the south of the country and was surprised by the multiculturism of the native populations.

The third part covers the late eighties and the early nineties when Soviet Union was collapsing. During that time, he visited some of the most notorious gulag sites, including Vorkuta and Magadan and checked what was left of the them. He also travelled to remains of Arial See and visited Nagorno-Karabakh area, where the isolated Armenian population was attempting to live among the hostile Muslim population of Azerbaijan.

The book is full of intelligent observations of life in the Soviet empire and the colossal damage inflicted by the previous tsarist regime and further compounded by their communist successors.

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