Ryszard Kapuściński - Imperium

Kapuciski is the conjuror extraordinary of modern reportage.

JOHN LE CARR

Here is perhaps the most essential of the centurys figuresthe wandering dissident, who is always on the side of emancipation but who has to find a way of getting his point not only past the censors but into the indifferent skulls of the readers as well.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS , Newsday

Kapuciski captures as few others can the human side of the story: He conveys how it really feels to be there, in some godforsaken place in Siberia, the Far East or Central Asia. An acute observer and sharp analyst.

Washington Post Book World

A disquieting look at the terrible legacy of the Soviet system as grand as the times and places it encompasses. Compelling and convincing rarely has such a collection of horror stories been assembled and presented with such narrative power. Kapuciski is a master. His fascinating narrative rolls on like a train.

Boston Globe

Masterfully blends travel stories, history and personal observations. Kapuciski brilliantly evokes mood, feelings, place his observations [convey] the essence of Soviet life.

Newsweek

RYSZARD KAPUCISKI
I MPERIUM

Ryszard Kapuciski was born in 1932. During four decades reporting on Asia, Latin America, and Africa, he befriended Che Guevara, Salvador Allende, and Patrice Lumumba. He witnessed twenty-seven coups and revolutions and was sentenced to death four times. His books have been translated into nineteen languages. He died in 2007.

BOOKS BY RYSZARD KAPUCISKI

The Emperor
Shah of Shahs
The Soccer War
Imperium
Another Day of Life
The Shadow of the Sun

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, AUGUST 1995

Copyright 1994 by Klara Glowczewska

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Poland by Czytelnik, Warsaw, in 1993. Copyright 1993 by Ryszard Kapuciski. First published in the United States in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1994.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: Excerpt from The Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes; copyright 1990 by Richard Pipes. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

University of California Press: Excerpt from Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France, from Complete Poems by Blaise Cendrars, translated and edited by Ron Padgett; copyright 1947 by Editions Denol, copyright 1992 by Ron Padgett. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press.

Viking Penguin: Excerpt from Anton Chekhov letter, 1890, from Letters of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov, translated by Avrahm Yarmolinsky; copyright 1973 by Avrahm Yarmolinsky, copyright 1947, 1968 by The Viking Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows: Kapuciski, Ryszard
[Imperium. English]
Imperium/Ryszard Kapuciski; translated by Klara Glowczewska.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Soviet UnionDescription and travel. 2. Kapuciski, RyszardJourneysSoviet Union. I. Title.
DK29.K313 1994
914.704854dc20 93-37048
eISBN: 978-0-8041-5071-2

Author photographCzeslaw Czaplinski

v3.1

in other words, that these are wonders; and all of this constitutes a picture.

ANDREI BIELY , Imperium

Russia has seen many things during the one thousand years of its history. There is only one thing that Russia has not seen in one thousand yearsfreedom.

VASILY GROSSMAN

The present is something that binds us. We create the future in our imagination. Only the past is a pure reality.

SIMONE WEIL

In Russia, an artists entire energy should be directed at showing two forces: man and nature. On the one hand, physical weakness, nervousness, early sexual maturity, a passionate desire for life and truth, a dreaming of a range of activity as wide as the steppe, analysis full of anxiety, a lack of knowledge together with high conceptual flights, and on the other handa boundless plain, a severe climate; a severe, gray nation with its heavy, grim history, its Tatar period, officialdom, ignorance, poverty, the humid climate of the capitals, Slavic apathy, etc. Russian life so threshes the Russian that he cannot collect himself, it threshes him like a thousand-pood stick.

ANTON CHEKHOV

Our dominant impression of things Russian is an impression of a vast irreparable breakdown. The great monarchy that was here in 1914 and the administrative, social, financial, and commercial systems connected with it have, under the strains of six years of incessant war, fallen down and smashed utterly. Never in all history has there been so great a dbcle before.

H. G. WELLS , 1920

The adventure that is the Soviet Union is the greatest experiment and the most important problem of mankind.

EDGAR MORIN

Russia vomited out the abomination that they were feeding it.

FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

The system that governs us is a combination of the old nomenclatura, the sharks of finance, false democrats, and the KGB. I cannot call this democracyit is a repugnant, historically unprecedented hybrid, and we do not know in which direction it will develop [but] if this alliance will prevail, they will be exploiting us not for seventy, but for one-hundred and seventy years.

ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN , 1992

Something has been clarified there, but something still remains obscure.

VLADIMIR VOINOVICH

THIS BOOK consists of three parts.

is called First Encounters (19391967) and is a report on my long-ago sojourns in the Imperium. In it I tell about the entrance of Soviet troops into my hometown in the Polesie region of Poland (today this is Belorussia), about a journey across a snow-covered and desolate Siberia, about an expedition to Transcaucasia and to the republics of Central Asiain other words, to the territories of the former USSR that are filled with exoticism, conflicts, and a singular atmosphere replete with emotion and sentiments.

Circle to Termez (the border with Afghanistan). A total of about sixty thousand kilometers.

is called The Sequel Continues (19921993) and is a collection of reflections, observations, and notes that arose in the margins of my travels, conversations, and readings.

This book is written polyphonically, meaning that the characters, places, and themes that thread their way through its pages might reappear several times, in different years and contexts. However, in contrast to the principles of polyphony, the whole does not end with a higher and definitive synthesis, but, on the contrary, it disintegrates and falls apart, and the reason for this is that in the course of my writing the book, its main subject and theme fell apartnamely, the great Soviet superpower. In its place new states arose, among them Russiaan enormous country, inhabited by a people who for centuries were animated and unified by the imperial ambition.