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A gathering of essays and impressions over the years (starting with a flashback to his early childhood in Polish speaking, Nazi-invaded Belorussia) and featuring Kapuscinski's two years of wanderings around the imploding republics in the early 90s. Perhaps the most fascinating insights are derived from his conversations about the peak Stalin years, and the innumerable blind gaffes (and knowingly perpetrated acts of icy bureaucratic inhumanity) which buffeted every region from the Baltic States to the Caucasus to Baikal to deep Siberia. At times it reads like a nightmare, at times like a surreal document from the 15th century, at times like letters home from the front. Indispensable to an understanding of modern Russia.

Reading Ryszard Kapuscinski is like sitting at the knee of a master storyteller! The tales he tells are amazing, horrific, informative, fabulous--all the things a great storyteller weaves into a tale. The only thing is that Kapuscinski does not make up his stories. He boarded (he is deceased) trains and planes for far-flung places--all in the name of news gathering. However, what Kapuscinski delivers then is not just news, but his dry-eyed observations of humans in all their glory, all their disgusting or disquieting ways, their cruelties, their passions, even their incredible, often feeble attempts just to survive, and amazingly, in this context, their jubilations, their small victories, and their powerful will to live. Kapusciski is a master all right: of human nature, of writing, of that rare ability to inform, entertain, and evaluate. He is a newsman extraordinaire.

In "Imperium" Kapuscinski turns that extraordinary talent to---call it what you will---the U.S.S.R.---the Soviet Union---Russia and her satellites. He visits, in many cases, multiple times, every country that made/makes up the U.S.S.R. (He divides his book into three parts, each denoting his travels and findings. They are "First Encounters 1939-1967," detailing his own experiences as a Pole with Soviet power and rules. Then Part 2 concerns his observations from his extensive travels across the USSR from 1989-1991. Part 3 (1992-1993)is comprised of his astute commentaries, fascinating reading!) Back to the USSR: I was simply amazed at the extent of differences of each country, of the almost phenomenal ability of the Soviet ruling elite to hold such a disparate world together. But at what unconscionable cost?

That's the horror of the story--the horror of mass exterminations that went far, far beyond whatever goals Hitler and his Nazis conceived and carried out. Six millions? A mere pittance in comparison! Kapuscinski's figures in support of the vulgar, despicable number of deaths carried out by Stalin and later Soviet powers are more than shocking! Here's just one figure concerning one circumstance out of dozens: "Stalin starved to death around ten million people" (285). His chapter about the Great Famine will make you absolutely weep that such a distorted and vile creature as Stalin was allowed to live. The reader truly learns the meaning of the words "totalitarian" and "tyrant."

But there's also a creative passion. After the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, Kapuscinski tells the reader about a wondrous story in the making. In Belarussia, there are the ruins of a church, felled by German artillery fire during WWII, where someone discovered bits of colored fresco. Prof. Grekov made it his life's work--and his students--to put that shattered fresco back together. Imagine! (Is this tear from Mary at the loss of her son or from the Mary who discovered the resurrection? Is this bit of fire from the burning bush or the fire of hell?) And it is Grekov's imagination that Kapuscinski celebrates. This long quote will show that imagination, that spirit and tenacity of the people, and, most of all, Kapuscinski's magnificent ability to weave facts and observation into gossamer, but gossamer with tensile strength:

"And thus observing how from thousands of particles, bits, and crumbs, from dust, molecules, and pebbles, the professor and his students have been for years piecing together portraits of saints, sinners, and legends, I feel as though I were a witness, in this cold and dusty underground, to the birth of the sky and of the earth, of all the colors and shapes, angels and kings, light and darkness, good and evil" (302).

So it is with the reader in discovering Kapuscinski's own talents. My personal pick of his most profound talent is that of observation of human nature, which then provides the reader with astute commentary. His explanation of the Russian mafias is illuminating. When Russian mafia figures began showing up in news and then films, I was perplexed. Mafias in Russia? How was this possible in a world of the KGB and totalitarian government? The answer? Bezprizorny! Homeless children! Beginning with the deaths caused by World War I, then October 1917, then civil war and mass starvation resulting from weather and by tyrant--a new class of social strata was born, or hatched, or exploded like Athena from Zeus's head: A new class--the bezprizorny by the thousands. Their goals: find food, find shelter. With no adults to guide them (if there were adults, living conditions still would not be conducive to developing healthy children either physically or emotionally) these pitiful children lived however they could, becoming more and more dangerous as their numbers doubled, tripled.

Eventually, they formed their own mafias and lived by mafia rules: stealing and squaring accounts. Today's Russian mafias are the grandchildren of this class. Each successive event in Russia--the second world war, postwar purges, accelerating corruption of government, disintegration of the USSR---all contributed to the huge numbers of homeless children who produced children and grandchildren, who make up today's powerful and horrifyingly violent mafias. In fact, there are three distinct mafias: the Russian Mafia (from Russia proper--a whole other story in his book), the Caucasian Mafia (all other ex-Soviet countries), and the Asiatic Mafia (those from Islam regions, a huge population in the former USSR).

I could tell story after story from Kapuscinski's book-- (For example, the story of Turkmenistan, the country of the desert, a place of riches and freedom, but not by America's standard of riches and freedom! This story alone--its explanation of the power of the desert--is worth the price of the book) --so packed it is with horror and passion, but each time I relate a story, I know it is taken out of context. Kapuscinski's account is causally and historically driven. There is an order, a precise arrangement in relating the stories about the USSR and its dissolved union. The only real way to learn this information, this series of inspired scrutinies of days past and days future is to read the book. Whatever I write will never do this book justice. You will also discover that one reading is not enough to absorb the expanse of space and time that that fills Kapuscinski's book.

"Imperium" is not a book to miss, if you want to learn what the USSR really was. You must order it today! Two other books by this writer that I also highly recommend are "The Other" and "Travels with Herodotus."

Thanks to GB who introduced me to Kapuscinski, currently my favorite writer.

Note: I see in previewing what I wrote before I hit the publish button that I was totally correct. I did not do this book justice. It is so much more-much, much more-- than the few words I wrote.

I read his book on Herodotus (actually, his reading of Herodotus while on his many travels) and liked it a lot. So I bought this book and am not disappointed.

I've learned a lot about Russia and the former Soviet Union--for instance, how much of a Turkic empire the former central asian republics are. Most of those former "republics" are occupied by Turkic people who speak a common language and can readily understand one another.

We are all now aware of the Stalinist brutality that existed. But this book really brings it home and just how hard and grueling life has been in the imperium and how much it continues to be so, especially in the outlying areas.

The author notes that Russian demographers have estimated that between 1918 and 1953, between WWI and the Stalinist terror, between 55 and 110 million Russians died of unnatural causes. The full horror of the prison camps--in Siberia, for example, over one-third of those who entered died in prison--the forced starvation and murder of over 10 million Ukrainians, and the appalling harshness of life and environmental depradations that Bolshevism brought are revealed into full view in his writing.

The author, who writes this book in the early 1990's and died a few years later, is hardly optimistic in his assessment of what lies in store for Russia and the former republics.

The book is a real eye-opener about what is going on in Russia today.