Ryszard Kapuściński is without doubt Poland’s greatest reporter. Although his figure has stirred controversy in recent years, I value his craft enormously, setting aside any judgement of him as a person — that is none of my business. I love (!) reading his books and the pleasure they bring is immense every time. This time I revisited Imperium, his study of the Soviet Union.

Imperium is divided into three parts. The first covers 1939–1967 and describes travels through the Soviet Union mainly in the 1950s and ’60s, including Kapuściński’s first encounter with the Empire — the entry of the Red Army into Pinsk, the city where he was born and grew up. The second part observes the disintegrating communist organism through expeditions to the outermost points of the USSR in 1989–1991. The third part offers the journalist’s impressions of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and its consequences.

Being there and witnessing events from the front line is one thing. Describing them in a way that is comprehensible to the reader, casting them in a literary form, is another. Kapuściński is unquestionably a master of the word. The way he builds his prose — the escalating tension, the emotional charge — is a pleasure to read. His erudition and wide reading impress: countless references not only to Russian classics such as Dostoyevsky but also to texts about the regions he travels through and contemporary studies of the subjects he explores, enriching and rounding out his narrative. Kapuściński always paid close attention to the cultural context of a place, which is indispensable to a proper understanding of it. Moreover, he drew his knowledge of a country from the bottom up — from ordinary inhabitants, people who, outwardly, no one noticed.

I was struck by a strong similarity to Tiziano Terzani’s book Goodnight, Mr. Lenin. Both Kapuściński and Terzani travelled through the Soviet Union at the same time, visited many of the same places at almost the same moment, and described them in remarkably similar ways. This may reflect a similar cast of mind: whether we like it or not, we are culturally far closer to Western Europe than to the East. Naturally, Kapuściński looks at socialism through different eyes — but a comparison of the two accounts is well worth the effort, and I warmly recommend it.

Imperium cannot be summarised here; one can only list its themes. Kapuściński visited Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenia, Tajikistan, and Kirghizia — the very “un-Russian” republics. He tried to capture the Soviet spirit in them, to understand how a soulless system had subjugated peoples whose history stretches back to antiquity. The USSR had been turned into a country of atheists: churches were renamed warehouses or, paradoxically, museums of atheism designed to demonstrate the harm of spiritual life. It is estimated that between the October Revolution of 1917 and the early 1990s some twenty to thirty million icons were destroyed on Soviet territory — used as targets on shooting ranges, floorboards in flooded mine galleries, crates for potatoes at market stalls, or chopping boards for vegetables and meat.

The Soviet person did not protest — he existed always in silence and without questions. In the Russian spirit Kapuściński detects an eternal striving for suffering. The subjugation of such a mass of people would have been impossible without the centuries-old inculcated respect for authority. The tsar was God’s anointed; his icons hung in churches in the place reserved for saints. Later, despite the arrival of the secular system of socialism, Russians continued to treat those in power as superhuman. In this country no revolution has ever come from the people — reform has always been imposed from above. The tsar himself, in the mid-nineteenth century, issued a decree revoking the requirement to display icons with his likeness. The quasi-sacred nature of power is a cornerstone of Russian political culture.

Kapuściński also writes at length about Kolyma. It is worth comparing his account with Jacek Hugo-Bader’s Kolyma Diaries. Magadan, a city on the Sea of Okhotsk, is the world’s largest cemetery. From the 1920s onwards, a network of over 160 Arctic death camps was built in that territory. The prisoner population changed, but at any given time roughly 500,000 were held there in exile, and almost half of those who arrived died en route. The Gulag — forced-labour camp — was designed so that a person would endure the greatest humiliations, suffering, and torment before death. The enemies of a prisoner were cold, hunger (rations consisted of a piece of bread and water), backbreaking labour, sleeplessness, filth, vermin, NKWD sadism, and the terror of criminals who constituted the lowest rung of the camp’s power structure. The majority of those exiled were political prisoners — people of different views or simply of a different nationality. Sentences reached twenty-five years. Demographers estimate that between 1915 and 1958 between 54 and 110.7 million (!!!) Soviet citizens perished — on the fronts of both wars, in prisons, and in the camps.

Imperium belongs to those books that stay with you long afterwards. Is it worth reading? Absolutely — not only for those interested in Russia or the former USSR, but for anyone who wants to encounter the consummate journalistic craft of Ryszard Kapuściński. Highly recommended.

Source: http://bazgradelko.blogspot.com/2012/01/imperium-ryszard-kapuscinski.html

source: kapuscinski.info