The Polish journalist whose The Soccer War and The Emperor are counted as classics of contemporary reportage now bears witness in Imperium to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. This magisterial book combines childhood memory with unblinking journalism, a radar for the truth with a keen appreciation of the absurd.Imperium begins with Ryszard Kapuscinski's account of the Soviet occupation of his town in eastern Poland in 1939. It culminates fifty years later, with a forty-thousand-mile journey that takes him from the haunted corridors of the Kremlin to the abandoned gulag of Kolyma, from a miners' strike in the arctic circle to a panic-stricken bus ride through the war-torn Caucasus.Out of passivity and paranoia, ethnic hatred and religious fanaticism that have riven two generations of Eastern Europeans, Kapuscinski has composed a symphony for a collapsing empire—a work that translates history into the hopes and sufferings of the human beings condemned to live it.

FIRST ENCOUNTERS (1939–1967)PinskThe Trans-SiberianThe SouthFROM A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW (1989–1991)The Third RomeThe Temple and the PalaceWe Look, We CryThe Man on the Asphalt MountainFleeing from OneselfVorkuta—to Freeze in FireTomorrow, the Revolt of the BashkirsRussian Mystery PlayJumping over PuddlesKolyma, Fog and More FogThe Kremlin: The Magic MountainThe TrapCentral Asia—the Destruction of the SeaPomona of the Little Town of DrohobychReturn to My HometownTHE SEQUEL CONTINUES (1992–1993)The Sequel Continues