Fragments of a Shattered Empire

Ryszard Kapuscinski's first encounter with the power and rapacious expansionism of the Soviet Union took place in September 1939. The fighting had just stopped, and Ryszard, 5, was being taken home by his mother. Home was Pinsk, previously a town in eastern Poland, but now engulfed within the borders of Belarus.


Everyone else in the town was trying to get out -- for there, guarding the bridge like the monsters in a fairy tale, were the sailors of the Soviet Navy, with the NKVD right behind them. Next week at school the nervous teacher began to instruct her Polish pupils in Russian. The first letter they learned was "s." "S" in those days was for "Stalin."


How Kapuscinski developed from that frightened little boy into arguably his generation's greatest war correspondent we are never told. But the experiences of his childhood filled him with a loathing for all things Soviet and snow-bound, and it made him turn to the exotic odors and chaotic brutality of the sun-filled tropics. He became an expert in decolonization, covering the bloody births of, and counter-revolutions in, a staggering 27 third-world states, and writing some profoundly memorable books on the way.


But in 1989 Kapuscinski, infected by the spirit of change which was invigorating the world, decided to explore the Soviet Union, retracing the route of a 1960s trip through Central Asia and seeing more besides. He set out on a two-year journey, covering more than 60,000 kilometers. He traveled from most westerly Brest to Magadan in the east, from Vorkuta, in the Arctic circle, to Termez, on the Afghan border. He would, of course, stop in Moscow on the way, but his real interest lay in the peripheries. He wanted to explore those regions where distance and native culture had undermined the deadening effect of Sovietization, and where the destructive legacy of the colonial relationship was most visible.


"Imperium" is the result of this journey, a highly impressionistic and fragmentary account of Kapuscinski's encounters with, and memories of, people and places, books and buildings. It includes some dangerous adventures without which no Kapuscinski book would be complete. Posing as an Armenian pilot, he lands in Nagorno-Karabakh to find that his argumentative Armenian hosts have no way of getting him out. He gets lost in a blizzard on an endless Arctic night in a suburb of Vorkuta. But in spite of the dramas, the book's aim is modest; it simply seeks to capture something of the atmosphere of the Third Roman Empire as it breaks into bits.


Kapuscinski has always been a writer who eschews journalistic impartiality in favor of a more personal, even prejudiced, approach. And never more so than in "Imperium." His overriding hatred of the Soviet Union colors everything. At times the reader could believe that Stalin died only days ago. You can still feel the hunger in the Ukraine as Kapuscinski talks to old people who remember the terrible collectivization famine of the 1930s -- the days when a man might beat his neighbor's child to death for stealing a clove of garlic and when stray children were liable to be preyed on by cannibals.


Placing flowers in the Siberian snow, Kapuscinski finds every corner haunted by memories of the millions who perished in the labor camps. The mood of human misery and desperation has scarcely changed. A group of friends gather round a broken television set to watch a game that is a tear-inducing blur to Kapuscinski. Striking miners in Vorkuta cannot organize a thought, let alone effective action, and so allow themselves to be hoodwinked by the man from Moscow.


Everywhere that Kapuscinski goes he finds that communism's legacy is utterly brutal and mind-numbing.


The orgy of border-redrawing which took place within the empire can only lead to war and strife, as the fate of the Southern republics has already shown. The author writes: "After 70 years of bolshevism, people do not know what freedom of thought is, so in its place they practice freedom of action. And here in [the Caucasus] freedom of action means freedom to kill. And there's perestroika for you, the new thinking."


The legacy of the ecological rape by the old empire of its colonial resources is visible everywhere. But how much more insoluble are the psychological problems of a people raised in fear and ignorance. Of conspiracy theorists who find others to blame for everything, or see the hand of the mafia everywhere. Of the apathetic thousands who believe that Russia is simply too big to run efficiently, but still hunger for empire.


Kapuscinski's vision is profoundly pessimistic. He wisely makes no predictions for the future, but many might be tempted to pack up and leave after reading this book. However, reading "Imperium" is a worthwhile journey. Kapuscinski's great erudition and novelist's eye will help the reader to understand, if not to love, the little things that make Russia a country like no other.


"Imperium" by Ryszard Kapuscinski, Granta Books, 331 pages, ?14.99.