Life in the Empire — Reading Impressions

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

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“Russia has seen a great deal in the thousand years of its history. The only thing it has never seen is freedom” — Vasily Grossman.

On the whole, nearly all of us know that our close neighbour to the east is Russia. We also know that this is a neighbour with whom we have rarely been bound by ties of friendship. We remember that tsarist Russia was the primary initiator and executor of all three partitions of Poland; that in 1939 it struck Poland in alliance with Hitler’s Germany, annexing part of Poland’s eastern territories; and that after the Second World War it stood guard over Poland’s membership in the socialist camp it controlled. There is also a common view that Russia the state is one thing and Russians as people are another: in direct contact we find in them a brotherly, Slavic soul — they are kind, hospitable, sincere. But Russians are only part of a multinational state. Unfortunately, we know far too little about Russia as a whole; we have no conception of what an unfathomable and varied organism it is. We do not understand clearly how this immense, Euro-Asian superpower functions.

Stanislaw on kapuscinski.info

Life in the Empire — Reading Impressions

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