Imperium

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.

.... or is it the Impressionist as Historian? With Ryzsard Kapuscinski, the two modes are inseparably fused. One senses his painterly involvement in every factual account, but then one detects his historian's detachment in the pointillism of his elegant prose. In fact, Kapuscinski is not a historian in methodology. Not really a journalist, either. He's a "travel writer", and a great one, in the special generic tradition of great travelers, from Herodotus to V.S. Naipaul. His is the same method as theirs; he goes where he goes, not knowing what he'll learn there, and he somehow encounters ordinary people who turn out to have extraordinary things to tell him. The comparison to Naipaul is extremely close; the structures of their travel accounts are almost parallel, and both have the art of making grim depictions and painful implications highly readable.Most of Kapuscinski's travels have traversed the "southern" land masses, the tropics and deserts of Africa, South America, and "Asia Minor". Though born in Pinsk, now part of Belarus, and writing in Polish for a Polish readership for most of his journalistic career, Kapuscinski explains in his preface to "Imperium" that he had felt a disinterest to the USSR - a range of feelings actually, from aversion to apathy - and had stayed away from the Imperium (his term for the Czarist/Communist empire of the Russians) as long as he could. Even the three sections of this `report from the Imperium' focus almost entirely on the peripheries of empire, the `colonized' regions of the five "-stans", the Ukraine, and Siberia. The disparity and disconnectedness between Moscow and all the rest of the Empire are among his prinicipal themes of analysis. The imperial structure of both Czarist and Communist governance, in which all authority rested in the supreme leader perched so far above the people that that could both worship and despise Him, is one of the unchanging historical `givens' that have determined the course of all Russian history. That and the immensity of the Imperium ....... but Kapuscinski, as I said, is less a historian than an impressionist, and it is his impressions of Soviet-era realities at the ground level that make this book powerfully revealing. Yes, from the outside and from the elevations of international politics and economics, we all knew that Stalin was a beast, that Brezhnev was another, that the Five-Year Plans were a gigantic Potemkin hoax, that repression was fearsome and people were fearful. With the deftest words, however, and with absolute credibility, Kapuscinski shows us a USSR more backward, corrupt, degraded, and nonsensical than we ever imagined. The gulags, for instance: we thought we'd peered into their horrors in the novels of Solzhenitsyn, but Kapuscinski exposes the muck and mass graves upon which they were built. Without relying on fictional artistry, without projecting a hero or heroine with whom we could empathize, Kapuscinski nevertheless can make us weep for the little victims of history whom he largely leaves nameless.All colorful travelers' tales are more amusing in retrospect than the experiences were in real time. Kapuscinski records his share of travel disasters - discomforts, delays, and dangers - as `adventures' verging on comical. In fact, the man must have been incredibly intrepid and adept, but his tone is invariably modest. The bulk of this book narrates his visits to the Imperium in the final years of Communist rule and on into the transitional years of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, when the USSR declared itself the CIS in a stroke. "Imperium" concludes with events of roughly 1993, but the portrayal of common conditions on the ground, both economic and social, tells more about events that have followed that year than all the front page news coverage of elections and military strife. In a sense, Kapuscinski tells his story backwards, beginning with his personal recollections of boyhood flight from the war violence, exhibiting his random "postcards" of travel, intruding into places and circles where he suspects to find clues about the nature of things from the underside, and finally concluding with a quick summary of those `major' events that seemed from the top to be making history.Still, there are some cautionary lessons that get expounded in Kapscinski's travel accounts. Midway though his tourism, so to speak, he suddenly generalizes:"Three plagues, three contagions, threaten the world.The first is the plague of nationalism.The second is the plague of racism.The third is the plague of religious fundamentalism.All three share a common trait, a common denominator - an aggressive, all-powerful, total irrationality."Exactly! So it was in 1993, and so it still is today! Ryzard Kapuscinski did not make specific prophesies in this book. He did not predict the chaos in the Balkans, the Chechen rebellion, Al Queda or the Taliban, the catastrophe of 9/11. He did not foresee, at least explicitly, the willingness of the USA to succeed the USSR as the imperial bull goring itself to death in Afghanistan. But his perception of those three plagues was exactly on the mark. They are, everyone needs to realize, plagues in the USA today as much as in the former USSR. They are the markers of virulent right wing ideology, of the Tea Party extremists who denounce Barack Obama as a clandestine Muslim and a socialist while coyly hating him as a Man of Color. Anyone who reads this book without reflecting on America might as well read only thrillers and bodice-rippers.

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.

It was a positive experience, and I congratulate all the team involved.

Recommended to me by a colleague in my writing class. Kapuscinski's reportage is rich, sensuous, complex and moving. He knows how to write political pieces that not only give a sense of the awful forms of repression experienced by those in the Soviet Empire but to inflect the depictions of its reality with incredibly poetic acuity. One of my favourite books of all time.

Já li muita coisa do Kapuscinski, principalmente sobre as andanças dele pela África. É considerado um dos maiores jornalistas do século passado, pai do jornalismo literário, e por outro lado criticado por ser “literário demais”, sendo vários os exemplos de distorção dos fatos para tornar a narrativa mais rica. Este livro, não tão bom quanto outros do mesmo autor, me pareceu indo um pouco demais pro lado literário e menos pro jornalístico ou histórico. É um conjunto de relatos e opiniões de vários lugares visitados pelo autor na URSS em diferentes anos, alguns aparentemente isolados e aleatórios. Ele tornou-se um forte anticomunista e deixa transparecer isso facilmente no texto. Tudo é cinza, tudo é absurdo, tudo é anormal, nada é como deveria ser no mundo soviético. Terminei o livro com a sensação que não aprendi nada sobre a URSS do ponto de vista histórico, só me restaram relatos de imensos absurdos, que embora reais, foram dramatizados.

Knows the former Soviet Republic inside out. Fearless travel and intelligent writing.

When I finished reading it, I felt sad: I wanted more. I wish Kapuscinski was still alive, writing about contemporary Russia and other nations of the ex USSR, with his unique stile and insights.