At the end of September 1939, when war was everywhere in Europe, Ryszard Kapuscinski had his first encounter with the Imperium (the Russian empire, then called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or the USSR). He was seven years old. Villages were burning; people were fleeing, dead horses lay on the road. His mother held his sister and little Kapuscinski’s hands and walked for days to reach the bridge to Pinsk in Poland, a region later swallowed up by the Soviet Union to fall in Belarus.
They were surrounded by sailors (who had come all the way from the Black Sea) with long rifles and sharp bayonets, shouting “Don’t move”. They were angry and there was something incomprehensible about their fury. Later at school in Pinsk, as they were taught the Russian alphabet, Kapuscinski learnt that it was best not to ask questions. Soon boys started to disappear from class, and one day the teacher, Pawel, disappeared too. As Kapuscinski walked home, he saw freight cars along the railway, packed with people about to be deported, and his teacher waving to him.
Intrepid journalist
The vivid storyteller became an intrepid journalist travelling to far-flung places in South America and Africa, sending despatches to Polish newspapers (his biographer would point out his flaws as a writer, but more on that later). In Imperium, Kapuscinski narrates his experiences of Soviet Russia, his memories of troops entering his hometown, a journey across Siberia and to Ukraine, sojourns to Central Asia, and what happened after the USSR disintegrated.
It is divided into three parts with ‘First Encounters’ dealing with the period between 1939 and 1967; ‘From a Bird’s Eye View (1989-1991)’ is an account of the years of the USSR’s decline and dissolution into smaller republics; Part 3, ‘The Sequel Continues (1992-1993)’, gathers his observations and notes “in the margins” of his travels, conversations and readings. The polyphonically written book, like Svetlana Alexievich’s works, is neither a history of Russia nor a handy compendium of knowledge about the Imperium, Kapuscinski clarifies in the preface. It’s a personal report based on journeys.
In 1958, he boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway from Peking to Moscow because he wanted to discover a region with rivers called Argun, Unda, Chaychar; mountains called Chingan, Ilchuri, Dzagdy; and cities called Kilkok, Tungir and Bukachacha. “From these names alone one could compose sonorous, exotic poems,” he writes. People spoke in monosyllables, indicating that they had already understood the essentials: “Well, that’s life!” he was told often. After glasnost, “when the dam burst”, Russians would open up to Kapuscinski as he criss-crossed the country, going east, west, north and south for two years from 1989.
Window to another world
As he travelled from Kishinev to Kiev — the capital of Ukraine, which is under attack from Russia as you read this — he waited for the train to pull into Vinnytsia, where thousands of Ukrainians were killed in 1937-38 and buried in mass graves. “When the executions were finished, bandstands for dancing were erected over several of the graves, and, on one of them a Ministry of Laughter.” He roamed around the streets of Kiev, “warm, quiet, bathed in sun”.
“The architecture of Kiev is a subject for a separate story. One can see all epochs and styles here — from miraculously preserved medieval cloisters and Orthodox churches to dreadful examples of Stalinist social realism,” he writes. He bought a map of Old Kiev which documents the 254 structures that were destroyed by the Bolsheviks to erase traces of its culture. Kapuscinski met people who still remembered the Great Famine in the Stalin era, when entire families and villages perished, despite Ukraine being the grain capital.
Were his narratives careless with facts, as Artur Domoslawski claims in his biography, Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life? Whatever the case may be, Kapuscinski’s writing is of profound importance to many because his is the only window to another world. Salman Rushdie writes in Imaginary Homelands that through Kapuscinski’s “astonishing blend of reportage and artistry,” we get as close as possible to incommunicable images of life and struggle.
The writer looks back at one classic every month.
