Tadzykistan on kapuscinski.info

A Reader's Review of "Imperium"

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Life in the Empire — Reading Impressions

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

I

“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.

"Scenes from Life in the Empire" — a review of "Imperium"

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Author: Izabella Sariusz-Skapska. Source: Znak no. 3/1994. Published: 1994-03-01

The material for describing the Empire was supplied to Ryszard Kapuściński by notes from several journeys, begun at a time when even the greatest dreamers had not dared imagine they would live to hear the Soviet Union referred to in the past tense. Kapuściński describes his encounters with that world in three acts, so to speak. The First Encounter (1939–1967) begins with the entry of Soviet troops into the author’s hometown, Pinsk in Polesie. The Second Encounter contains the section A Bird’s-Eye View (1989–1991), set at the twilight of the communist colossus, when Kapuściński, like “an ubiquitous reporter,” traversed many republics — the counter on those expeditions clicking over “some 60,000 kilometres.” And finally — the third act: The Sequel Continues (1992–1993). In other words: is the succession after the Empire still up for grabs? Or is this ending simply a journalist’s trick — never closing a topic? A threatening memento…