Journeys to the heart of Russia

Imperium
Ryszard Kapuscinski,
Granta Books
1994
337 pages

Reading a newspaper feature one day last January, I first came across the author of Imperium. The FT journalist was referring to Ryszard Kapuscinksi as if he were a household name, but he was new to me. I had read works by Tolstoy, Dostovesky and Turgenev, or closer to our time, Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. All of these authors are Russian. It was a complete novelty to learn of a Polish Foreign Journalist who had written several well-known books translated into English. Kapuscinksi is not your classical facts-and-figures Western journalist who is wary of mixing objective reportage with opinion. Not that such journalists do not do opinion pieces, but too often their analyses fall short of capturing the mystery of a people or culture. The latter is arguably Kapuscinksi’s strength. To his critics, he is not a conventional journalist; in the eyes of his supporters, his work is literature. 

What of Imperium, one of Kapuscinski’s mature works? It concerns countries of the former Soviet Union and consists of three parts. He describes Part I, which covers a period from 1939 to 1967, as “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 in Belarus), about a journey across a snow-covered and desolate Siberia, about an expedition to Transcaucasia and to the republics of Central Asia”. Part II (1989-1991) documents Kapuscinski’s wanderings from Brest (the border between the former USSR and Poland) to Magadan on the Pacific, and from Vorkuta beyond the Arctic Circle to Termez (the border with Afghanistan), a total of about 60,000 kilometres. The third and final part, entitled “The Sequel Continues (1992-1993)”, is a collection of reflections and observations he compiled while travelling, reading and talking to people.

“All his life”, Margaret Atwood writes in a sympathetic Afterword, “Kapuscinski longed to travel … precisely to those places that the ordinary pleasure-seeking tourist would take pains to avoid…. Surely no other writer has had greater grounds for pessimism, considering all he saw, but this is not an emotion Kapuscinski expresses often. More frequent is the note of wonder: wonder that such things – both splendid and squalid – can exist on earth.”

Born in Pinsk in 1932, Kapuscinski refers to memories of his childhood in Imperium. The Foreign Press Correspondent recalls the introduction into his school in late 1939 of a book on Leninism (Voprosy Leninisma) by Stalin. “Best not ask who Lenin was. All our mothers have already instructed us not to ask about anything. But these warnings weren’t necessary anyway … there was something so frightening in the air…. We were afraid even to take a deep breath, lest we set off an explosion.” The NKVD arrived in sky-blue uniforms, bringing white shirts and red scarves for for the school-children to wear on important days. They also distributed stamps or badges bearing the portraits of nine different Soviet leaders: “They were called Andreyev, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Kaganovich, Kalinin, Mikoyan, Molotov, Krushchev. The ninth leader was Stalin. The stamp with his portrait was twice as large as the rest. But that was understandable. The gentleman who wrote a book as thick as Voprosy Leninizma (from which we were learning to read) should have a stamp larger than the others.” 

The narrative viewed from the perspective of a child provides some light relief, for example, when the kids traded stamps with each other – “Molotov could be traded for three others because grown-ups said that Molotov was important. The price was high also for Kalinin, because he resembled a Polish grandfather. He had a pale beard and – unique among the leaders – something resembling a smile.” But there was little to smile about when classes were interrupted by gunfire, when a tower of the large church in the middle of Pinsk town was bombarded by a cannon, when deportations began, or when the whole town was gripped by hunger.

In Chapter Two, Kapuscinski takes us on a journey along the Trans-Siberian Railway starting from the border with China – evocative of Michael Portillo’s “Great Railway Journeys”? A little perhaps, though in 1958 there’s no BBC camera crew to accompany the Polish foreign correspondent and generally no welcoming party when the train stops. On the contrary, like all the other passengers who reach the border, beneath bright red banners welcoming them to the Soviet Union, Kapuscinski is met by lookout posts, sentries, guard dogs, barbed wire and: “customs inspectors, men and women, without exception fierce looking, severe, almost as though they were bearing some sort of grudge.” While he’d “like to establish any kind of contact, exchange a courtesy, talk a little”, the travel writer is first asked what he’s grinning at (a lack of respect) and next has his luggage forensically sifted through. Still, the treatment is mild compared to that meted out to an ordinary citizen of the Soviet Union who has dared to leave it even temporarily to go to China. 

Nine years after this first journey East-West, Kapuscinski travels south, taking in Armenia (“the source of all [its] misfortunes was its disastrous geographical location”), oil-rich Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan (and its deserts and oases), Tajikistan, Kyrgystan and Uzbekistan.

The book takes a more critical and reflective turn in Part II, the largest section, covering the critical period 1989-1991. Kapuscinski admits that his knowledge of the Imperium has been wanting. Up to this time Africa and Latin America had absorbed most of his research and time as a journalist: “In the Spring of 1989, reading the news arriving from Moscow, I thought it would be worth going there. It was a time when everyone felt a sense of curiosity about and anticipation of something extraordinary.” Democracy was breaking out worldwide as dictatorships fell in Uganda, the Philippines and Chile. Surely the Soviet Union could not be immune to these seismic geopolitical transformations. 

Radical change was not unprecedented. The Czars ruled long before Stalin was born. Centuries of history had conjured up the image of Russians praying “at the sight of the holy city [Moscow] like pilgrims at the sight of Jerusalem. Yes, because Moscow was for them a holy city, the capital of the world – a Third Rome.” The Polish foreign correspondent quotes the monk Pilotheus’ letter to Prince Vasily III of Moscow: “Two Romes have already fallen (Peter’s and Byzantium)…. The Third Rome (Moscow) stands. There will not be a fourth.” Stalin changed all of that when he assumed power after the Lenin-inspired Bolshevik Revolution. 

In 1830, almost twenty years after the defeat of Napoleon (1812), Czar Nicholas I approved the idea of building a temple of gratitude in the name of the one who saved Russia, that is, in the name of Christ the Saviour. Work continued for decades until finally, Kapuscinski writes, “the consecration of the temple takes place in the presence of Czar Alexander III on the twenty-sixth of May 1883.” A new century begins. In 1931 Stalin arranged for it to be announced via a news item in Pravda that the authorities of the USSR had decided to construct a Palace of the Soviets in Moscow. The Temple of Christ the Saviour was detonated and plans made to replace it with an enormous palace. Why? The Czar was man and God; his authority was omnipotent since it was sanctioned by the heavens. Bolshevism was the latest in a long line of pretenders to being Czar: “but a pretender that goes a step further: it is not only the earthly reflection of God, it is God. To achieve this status, to transform oneself into the new God, one must demolish the Houses of the former God … and on their foundations raise new temples, new objects of admiration and worship.” The cult shifted from the Czar to Stalin.

Several purges (massacres) follow. Poland is annexed, along with Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. A Kremlin-induced famine in Ukraine kills ten million people. Kapuscinksi sardonically portrays Stalin’s attention to the construction of the new Palace of the Soviets as suffering on account of more immediately pressing duties: “he must oversee the deportation to Siberia and to Kazakhstan of entire conveyances of Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Ukrainians; he must organise new trials and massacres, and then by that time he is old, has a stroke and dies.” In the end Kruschev ordered that an outdoor swimming pool be built on the site of the Temple of Christ the Saviour.

Imperium features an eerie chapter entitled the “Russian Mystery Play”. The wave of nationalism that gave rise to the breakup of the Soviet Union didn’t stop there. Within the newly configured Russian Federation there was also nationalistic unrest, for example, the Baskirs and other non-Russian people (Buryats, Chechen and Ingush, Chuvash and Koryak, Tatars and Mordovians, Yakuts and Tuvinians) living within the Russian state. The extremely low Russian birth rate had resulted in “anxiety, uncertainty and frustration”. In Irkutsk, the Polish foreign correspondent goes to see a Russian play entitled “A Word about Russia”, which takes place in a church, formerly called the Museum of Atheism. The play features seven young men, one of whom is the Ideologue. The latter praises Russia as always great and holy, decries the October Revolution as an international conspiracy (with collusion by Latvians, Jews, Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, English and Spanish) to wipe Russia off the face of the earth! “Russia for Russians”, cries the Standard Bearer (and to the sound of a drum): “Do not dance to the music of the West! Do not hang bottles of Coca-Cola around your necks! … Our objective is: one state, one territory, one spirit, one Russia…. Russia, forgive us our sins…. Let your sun, Russia, shine over the world in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost!”  One sympathises with the call not to venerate bottles of carbonated drinks, but there is a clearly xenophobic ring to the script.

On his journey Kapuscinski meets so many characters. One of the most charming is a nine-year-old Siberian girl whom he meets as she jumps puddles in the city of Yakutsk, “a veritable Siberian Kuwait, the capital of an extremely rich republic reposing on gold and diamonds”. Most of it ends up in shops in New York, Paris and Amsterdam. Ironically, though it is mineral rich, Yakutsk contains slums like the favelas of Rio de Janeiro or the callapas in Santiago de Chile. Kapuscinksi asks the little girl for directions to Krupska Street where he has an appointment, and learns from their conversation that the great cold protects Siberia from many things such as everything turning to mud once the temperature rises to a balmy two degrees! In a later chapter the Pole goes on to give a comic description of his attempted visit to the Kremlin; everywhere he turned he was watched and his path impeded by two identical guards who suddenly blocked him from visiting anywhere other than his official intended destination.

He explains the Great Famine (he in fact calls it “the genocide”) in Ukraine and the northern Caucacus by invoking both Russian and Ukrainian historians. “Russian historians see it as an instrument of the destruction of traditional society and the construction, in its place, of a formless, docile, half-enslaved mass of Homo sovieticus. Ukrainian historians (among them Valentin Moroz) believe that Stalin’s goal was to save the Imperium: the Imperium cannot exist without the Ukraine.” In view of the recent outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine, this sounds like a familiar strategy almost a century later!

There is so much more to this book than one can satisfactorily cover in a review. Suffice it to say that Kapuscinski’s Imperium will challenge Cartesian-minded Western readers to look beyond merely rational analysis when assessing the prospects of Central and Eastern Europe, where faith in God coexists with a disturbing degree of violence. Perhaps this is epitomised by Mrs Kamielowska. Several of her ten children died in the Great Famine in Ukraine. Her husband was arrested and freed six times, then sent off to war while she was deported to Kazakstan where life was as bad and the climate worse. Mrs Kamielowska was a fortunate woman because “she maintains … she believed in God. God will never abandon man, she tells me with conviction. She herself is proof of this…. She was certain that her husband had been killed in Germany. And then, look! Here he is, back from the war! It was from that reunion that Fr Ludvik was born, who is sitting here with us and smiling.”