Review: Imperium

Ryszard Kapuściński died in 2007, but fortunately left behind the sort of books that make you want to pack a bag, buy a questionable train ticket and disappear somewhere inconvenient.

He is perhaps better known for The Soccer War, his account of conflicts and political madness in Central America. It’s a very good book. But if the objective is to awaken that dangerous little voice suggesting that perhaps spending several days on a Russian train is a perfectly sensible holiday, Imperium is the one.

The journey begins with Kapuściński travelling through the Soviet Union in 1958. The Trans-Siberian Railway was certainly no luxury cruise back then. Barbed wire, angry dogs, suspicious officials and inspections conducted with all the warmth and hospitality of a prison intake procedure. It gave me a lot of perspective on my own Trans-Siberian journey.

From there, Imperium becomes a collection of eyewitness accounts from a country that no longer exists, at least officially.

There is the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, demolished on Stalin’s orders to make room for the proposed Palace of the Soviets. Then there is the Aral Sea, one of those spectacular achievements of Soviet planning where an enormous body of water was essentially destroyed in the name of progress. Some of these stories would be darkly funny if they weren’t so catastrophically real.

Kapuściński had a particular talent for going where sensible people wouldn’t. In one memorable episode, he jumps off a bus in the middle of nowhere and walks through darkness and murderous cold looking for a mining worker. In another, he attempts to board a plane at the wonderfully desolate airport in Syktyvkar, the sort of place where merely reaching your destination begins to feel like an unreasonable demand.

And that is much of the appeal of Imperium. This isn’t sightseeing. There are no carefully curated highlights, boutique hotels or cheerful recommendations for where to enjoy an artisanal cocktail afterward. Kapuściński goes looking for people living at the edges of an enormous, frequently absurd empire and lets them tell its story.

The final chapter, written in 1993, looks toward the future. The Soviet Union had collapsed and Kapuściński tries to imagine what might emerge from the wreckage. Reading it more than fifteen years later is fascinating and occasionally unsettling. Quite a few of his observations about Russia proved disturbingly perceptive.

Imperium should be required reading before traveling through Russia or the former Soviet Union. Not because it tells you where to go, but because it explains something far more useful: what happened there, what it did to people, and why so much of the landscape makes considerably more sense once you know the ghosts buried underneath it.