This is a great book, all of Kapuscinski`s books are great. It takes you for a journey you don`t expect. Great style and I always regret it`s over, after I finish to read his book.

I purchased this book after reading about the author in the Wall Street Journal. He died earlier this year. The author, a journalist, kept two notebooks while on assignments throughout the world, one for his assignment and one for himself. In this book he combined his observations from several trips he took within Russia and its states over a span of many decades. At times his writing style can be quite poetic, and the book is not unlike a travel book, although Soviet Russia was not a friendly place at the times of his visits. I intend to read his other books, and highly recommend this one.

As stated in most of the reviews of this book, Kapuscinski is a great writer. If you have not read him allready, read this book and understand why. If you allready have read him, you are going to read this book based on what you allready have learned to know.

Having given Kapuscinski the credit he obviously deserves for his writing, I believe there is some points that should be done.

-First Kapuscinski stands on the shoulders of giants. His writing is to a great extent the result of the local people that he meets on his journeys and agrees to open their region and their lifes to him.

-Kapuscinski is a very gifted writer endeed, that have read a lot about the places and peoples that he visits. On one hand this is what always makes his writing so alive, something to go back to and read agian, so informative. On the other hand he gets away with having little or nothing to really write about when his plan fails or when he does not get what he intended out of a trip. Striking examples of this is his journey at the Trans-siberian railway where he only observes the Soviet Union through the train window or to Nagarno Karabakh where he is stuck inside an airport, a car and a flat. That his stories is as intriguing, even when he hardly experience "what the war looks like on the ground" is a clear sign that his capabilities as dramaturg and writer can make up for a rather thin story. Even when he gets the chance to write the story he intended from a place he visits, the timeframe and the difficulties he worked under limits his insights compared to the writers that have covered the area afer him.

-Some paragraphs in the book makes me a bit uncertain about how good the translation is (my review is based upon the Norwegian translation). In the first chapter - Pinsk '39 the comment of a NKVD officer visiting their house "Muzh kuda?" is traslated "where is your husband" instead of the correct "Where have your husband gone", meaning that the NKVD officer allready knows that he has recently been in the house, meaning someone has infomed the NKVD that Kapuscinski's father (a hunted partisan) has recently been in the house. Things like this is not a big deal, but it makes you start thinking about the quality of the translation in general and if it can be the case that the author underplays the role of ordinary people as informers in the terror.

-In his story about the war in Pinsk 1939, his memory of the events as a child probably is an important expalianation behind the qualities of the stories. In the memory of a child events that would probably be described as horrorful and sad by a grown up, in the eyes of a smal shild gets exciting, intriguing, colorful and down to earth.

All in all, Kapuscinski is good reading and Imperium is a great intruduciton to the former Soviet Republics. To get true insight in the contemporary former Soviet Republics, you will need further reading though.

As stated in most of the reviews of this book, Kapuscinski is a great writer. If you have not read him allready, read this book and understand why. If you allready have read him, you are going to read this book based on what you allready have learned to know.

Having given Kapuscinski the credit he obviously deserves for his writing, I believe there is some points that should be done.

-First Kapuscinski stands on the shoulders of giants. His writing is to a great extent the result of the local people that he meets on his journeys and agrees to open their region and their lifes to him.

-Kapuscinski is a very gifted writer endeed, that have read a lot about the places and peoples that he visits. On one hand this is what always makes his writing so alive, something to go back to and read agian, so informative. On the other hand gret litterature sometimes can serve as a way of getting away with having little or nothing to really report from the battleground when his plan fails or when he does not get what he intended out of a trip. Striking examples of this is his journey at the Trans-siberian railway where he only observes the Soviet Union through the train window or to Nagarno Karabakh where he is stuck inside an airport, a car and a flat. That his stories is as intriguing, even when he hardly experience "what the war looks like on the ground" is a clear sign that his capabilities as dramaturg and writer can make up for a rather thin story. Even when he gets the chance to write the story he intended from a place he visits, the timeframe and the difficulties he worked under limits his insights compared to the writers that have covered the area afer him.

-Some paragraphs in the book makes me a bit uncertain about how good the translation is (my review is based upon the Norwegian translation). In the first chapter - Pinsk '39 the comment of a NKVD officer visiting their house "Muzh kuda?" is traslated "where is your husband" instead of the correct "Where have your husband gone", meaning that the NKVD officer allready knows that he has recently been in the house, meaning someone has infomed the NKVD that Kapuscinski's father (a hunted partisan) has recently been in the house. Things like this is not a big deal, but it makes you start thinking about the quality of the translation in general and if it can be the case that the author underplays the role of ordinary people as informers in the terror.

-In his story about the war in Pinsk 1939, his memory of the events as a child probably is an important expalianation behind the qualities of the stories. In the memory of a child events that would probably be described as horrorful and sad by a grown up, in the eyes of a smal shild gets exciting, intriguing, colorful and down to earth.

All in all, Kapuscinski is good reading and Imperium is a great intruduciton to the former Soviet Republics. To get true insight in the contemporary former Soviet Republics, you will need further reading though.

Perhaps history will never be told better than through the eye of this travelling writer (or is it a writing traveller?). Read and be awed by the staggering proportions of recent history in the vast empire that is no more, the Sovjet Union. And be chilled to the bones by the unimaginable amounts of suffering inflicted by the sovjet leaders on their own people. And be astonished that in the midst of the most utter despair, poverty, and enslavement, Kapuscinski can find optimism, humor, and love of life.

A lyrical masterpiece by this superlative writer! Nowhere have I found as dissection of the Evil Empire done with such fluid verse. He goes from the periphery into the heart of beast and everywhere he discovers that appearances deceive and what seems to signal change is really a re-hash of old. Kapuczinski's sharp analysis and trenchant comments will be sorely missed!

A lyrical masterpiece by this superlative writer! Nowhere have I found a dissection of the Evil Empire done with such fluid verse. He goes from the periphery into the heart of the beast and everywhere he discovers that appearances deceive and what seems to signal change is really a re-hash of old. Kapuczinski's sharp analysis and trenchant comments will be sorely missed!

"Imperium" is more than a mere travelogue of the states comprising the former USSR, although if the book were only visit to far-off spots (like Kolyma, Zabaykal'sk and Nagorno-Karabakh) that very few get to see, it would be worth your time. Ryszard Kapuscinski's masterful work not only describes places within "the Imperium" and the history behind them, it plumbs the very soul of Russia.

The book starts in Pinsk, in 1939, when the author was a boy. Stalin ruled the USSR and the Soviet Army's invasion of Kapuscinski's home city gave the author his first glimpse of the terror of the Soviet regime -- made even more terrible by the utterly arbitrary use of power. The remainder of the first section of the book describes Kapuscinski's travels on the Trans-Siberian railway in 1958 and in the southern portions of the USSR in 1967. Here we learn about the beauty and tragedy of Armenia and are given a feel for life in the "stans."

The second, and longest, section of the book describes the vast areas of the USSR visited by Kapuscinski between 1989 and 1991. Kapusczinski describes Moscow as it was, before Napolean's invasion, Moscow before the Bolsheviks took over, and their transformation of Moscow into a dreary, vaguely industrial-looking city. The symbol of the replacement of worship of God with the mastery of the State is the nearly overnight destruction of the magnificent Temple of Christ the Savior, which was built over sixty years, and its replacement with the Palace of the Soviets. Kapuscinski travels to Georgia, Armenia, and icy Vorkuta. In a chapter on Central Asia, Kapuscinski describes the destruction of the Aral Sea -- another man-made ecological disaster, caused by Brezhnev's order to turn Uzbekistan into a land of nothing but cotton. But the most heartbreaking chapter is on Kolyma, part of the gulag where millions were sent to their frozen, hungry deaths. This is difficult to read, but important.

Whither Russia? When this book was written, more than a dozen years ago, it seemed that Russia was starting to unfreeze -- at least politically and economically. Kapuscinski's outlook at the time was bleaker than most. He recognized the enormous problems facing Russia -- the legacy of terror and repression, the poverty, the demoralization of significant portions of the society and the ecological depredations. He also predicted a confrontation between Christianity and Islam in the border regions.

I wish that the author had been able to return to the Imperium and provide his unique insights into Putin-ruled Russia today. Unfortunately, Ryszard Kapuscinski died this year. This book is part of his important legacy.

Russia for all its' history has only worked well when it had a philosopher- king as its' ruler. Peter and Catherine did more to pull the country into a modernized version than all of their predicesors. Ivan III (not the terrible but the venerated) and Stalin had many of the same megalomaniac ideas of how to govern. I.e. Banish or exterminate anyone who doesn't agree with you (both had a son murdered on their orders) and rule by fear.

The one thing that you would have expected the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) to have accomplished in seventy years, was the construction of a massive infrastructure to allow them to better control the population. But the biggest problem in Russia today, is the work that was done during the communist period. Pre-revolutionary buildings (built before 1914) have held up better than those built under Stalin and especially those built after WW2. Russia has never been able to feed its' own people during the twentieth century because of the poor distribution system that exists to this day. It is estimated that half the harvest is lost each year due to a lack of infrastructure to move food from the farms to the cities.

Kapuscinski gives us a background on the ways in which the CPSU controlled the country but never learned to govern it. He begins with his visits in the pre-WW2 era, gives us extended tours during the middle century and an interesting view at the time of the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In his ending section (His Sequel) he is prescient in discussing how he sees the beginning of the failure of 'democrats' to rule Russia and the beginning of the growth of monopolies and dictatorship. Only a strong hand will help Russia survive while it tries to set its' house in order. He saw Putin coming before anyone knew his name.

Ryszard Kapuscinski is a guru to many people in Poland, and his books were always received with unending awe - because he traveled, when hardly anybody else could o anywhere apart from other countries of the Communist bloc, and moreover - he could write about what he saw... I still marvel how he managed to write so many things, which were in principle against the system, and still get published, but it is another question (Polish censorship was maybe not that tight or not that clever, or - most likely - clever enough to allow the chosen one his writing in the name of relative peace???).

"Imperium" is one of my favorites among Kapuscinski's books (NB. I have read the original, so have no idea about the translation, but after reading some earlier reviews I think it must be good too). I have been driven to the mystery of Russia and its acquisitions as well as to the phenomenon of Soviet Union for a long time, and here Kapuscinski gives a lot on these subjects in a concise form.

The book is divided into several parts, starting with the author's earliest memories of Soviet Union, when he was a schoolboy of what is now Belarus, and with his surprisingly acute observations (reminding me of my own, never put into words, forty years later, when everything was already much more relieved, but still the school was mysteriously insane). Then we go through Siberia on the Transsiberian train (still a cult trip for many students in Poland, albeit it must be very different now), and proceed to the other republics of the Soviet Union.

Kapuscinski traveled as a journalist, but always he managed to get something private out of each visit, which had to have an official program and probably nothing more was permitted. He talked to people in the forgotten corners of the Imperium and in the representative places, watched them, saw the ancient rituals and old habits under (and clashing with) the overwhelming, transplanted Russian culture, and wrote about it, preserving the memories and triggering in several generations the urge to see it with their own eyes, managing to capture the atmosphere of each place he got to... He evokes the image of "Homo Sovieticus", at the same time wondering about Russian soul.

The book is full of literary allusions and connections and contains a rich bibliography at the end, which is also recommended. "Imperium", as Kapuscinski warns at the beginning, is a collection of observations and his thoughts, as deep as they can be in this form, but because the subject is vast, everything is treated personally and rather as an encouragement to inflame greater interest, and then more monographic works come in handy (e. g. reading in "Imperium" about the North led me to excellent books by Mariusz Wilk, a longtime resident of Solovki).

I heartily recommend this book - it cannot disappoint!

Ryszard Kapuscinski is a guru to many people in Poland, and his books were always received with unending awe - because he traveled, when hardly anybody else could o anywhere apart from other countries of the Communist bloc, and moreover - he could write about what he saw... I still marvel how he managed to write so many things, which were in principle against the system, and still get published, but it is another question (Polish censorship was maybe not that tight or not that clever, or - most likely - clever enough to allow the chosen one his writing in the name of relative peace???).

"Imperium" is one of my favorites among Kapuscinski's books (NB. I have read the original, so have no idea about the translation, but after reading some earlier reviews I think it must be good too). I have been driven to the mystery of Russia and its acquisitions as well as to the phenomenon of Soviet Union for a long time, and here Kapuscinski gives a lot on these subjects in a concise form.

The book is divided into several parts, starting with the author's earliest memories of Soviet Union, when he was a schoolboy of what is now Belarus, and with his surprisingly acute observations (reminding me of my own, never put into words, forty years later, when everything was already much more relieved, but still the school was mysteriously insane). Then we go through Siberia on the Transsiberian train (still a cult trip for many students in Poland, albeit it must be very different now), and proceed to the other republics of the Soviet Union.

Kapuscinski traveled as a journalist, but always he managed to get something private out of each visit, which had to have an official program and probably nothing more was permitted. He talked to people in the forgotten corners of the Imperium and in the representative places, watched them, saw the ancient rituals and old habits under (and clashing with) the overwhelming, transplanted Russian culture, and wrote about it, preserving the memories and triggering in several generations the urge to see it with their own eyes, managing to capture the atmosphere of each place he got to... He evokes the image of "Homo Sovieticus", at the same time wondering about Russian soul.

The book is full of literary allusions and connections and contains a rich bibliography at the end, which is also recommended. "Imperium", as Kapuscinski warns at the beginning, is a collection of observations and his thoughts, as deep as they can be in this form, but because the subject is vast, everything is treated personally and rather as an encouragement to inflame greater interest, and then more monographic works come in handy (e. g. reading in "Imperium" about the North led me to excellent books by Mariusz Wilk, a longtime resident of Solovki).

I heartily recommend this book - it cannot disappoint!

Think of Dante's ability to create entire worlds. Think of Dante's skill at capturing the largest of themes and extracting their essences. Kapuscinski's Imperium is indescribably more than memoir, travel stories, or USSR history. If you relish writing of the highest caliber, read this book. You will be rewarded on every page. Along the way you will also come to know the world that existed behind an Iron Curtain for most of the last century. This is the work of an accomplished master who has distilled 54 years of observations and 36,0000 miles of travels into wisdom, insight, and poetry. I certainly wish that more than 5 stars could be awarded.

Think of Dante's ability to create entire worlds. Think of Dante's skill at capturing the largest of themes and extracting their essences. Kapuscinski's Imperium is indescribably more than memoir, travel stories, or USSR history. If you relish writing of the highest caliber, read this book. You will be rewarded on every page. Along the way you will also come to know the world that existed behind an Iron Curtain for most of the last century. This is the work of an accomplished master who has distilled 54 years of observations and 36,0000 miles of travels into wisdom, insight, and poetry. I certainly wish that more than 5 stars could be awarded.

My grandparents left the territory of what would become the Soviet Union long before the 1917 Revolution. They came to America and I thank God they did. Whenever I read about the USSR, I always realize that only a couple of small decisions saved me from being born there, or more probably, saved me from being wiped out there, since I was born during World War II. Fate has a way of creating circles, though, and I've wound up teaching English to people from my grandparents' homeland. It's curious. Many of them are ethnically exactly the same as I am, but it is always obvious that there is a huge cultural gap. OK, they didn't grow up in America. I have never set foot in any part of the former USSR. I have spent the last 14 years peering into their pasts, constantly wondering why they are predisposed to think this way, act that way. I have thought long and hard about the issue, discussed it with many of my students, read their stories, listened to many more. A book like IMPERIUM goes a long way towards helping me understand that difference between me, "the one that got away" and them, "the ones that didn't".

Back in 1988, in a single week, I read three of Kapuscinski's books in a mad dash of fascination. I'd already spent over six years living in various Third World countries and his writing on Iran, Ethiopia and Angola captured something that no one else came close to, especially because he never sneered, he never condescended. No racist platitudes, no grandstanding for a Western audience for Kapuscinski. IMPERIUM, the description of his travels around the Soviet Union in 1958, 1967, 1989-90 and in 1992-93, continues in his own tradition of inserting himself into the most desperate of situations, visiting places where the most extreme sorts of human behavior have taken or are taking place. I feel that at times he does exaggerate certain events, certain facts may be forgotten or left out. (Plus, if you can't read Polish transcriptions, the names will all look strange to you.) No matter. He arrives at a picture that rings with authenticity; he is able to persuade you that you understand what is happening. (Or that nobody can understand what is happening.) This author can somehow portray the stupidity, the bestiality, bravery, and unconquerable human spirit that suffuses every event in our unhappy human history. He does it with a sense of immediacy, crossing every cultural and racial boundary as if it didn't exist. (Do they really exist ? Much less than most people think, I would say.) He visits the frozen horrors of the gulag archipelago, now fallen silent, crumbling into the permafrost. He describes the petty nationalist hatreds that increasingly suffused Soviet life to the end, the economic disaster, the environmental destruction, the brutality of a government that deliberately let ten million people starve to death, the lack of organizational knowhow, a dispirited despair. It is all a dark picture of a country that devoured so many of its own, shot itself in the foot so many times. He did come up with numerous insights that helped me to understand my own past or, as it were, my own non-past. No delving into party history, statistics, or laws and decrees; he cuts straight to the heart of the matter. If you need a single book that will describe the atmosphere in the former USSR, that will help you understand what happened to people there, choose this one.

My grandparents left the territory of what would become the Soviet Union long before the 1917 Revolution. They came to America and I thank God they did. Whenever I read about the USSR, I always realize that only a couple of small decisions saved me from being born there, or more probably, saved me from being wiped out there, since I was born during World War II. Fate has a way of creating circles, though, and I've wound up teaching English to people from my grandparents' homeland. It's curious. Many of them are ethnically exactly the same as I am, but it is always obvious that there is a huge cultural gap. OK, they didn't grow up in America. I have never set foot in any part of the former USSR. I have spent the last 14 years peering into their pasts, constantly wondering why they are predisposed to think this way, act that way. I have thought long and hard about the issue, discussed it with many of my students, read their stories, listened to many more. A book like IMPERIUM goes a long way towards helping me understand that difference between me, "the one that got away" and them, "the ones that didn't".

Back in 1988, in a single week, I read three of Kapuscinski's books in a mad dash of fascination. I'd already spent over six years living in various Third World countries and his writing on Iran, Ethiopia and Angola captured something that no one else came close to, especially because he never sneered, he never condescended. No racist platitudes, no grandstanding for a Western audience for Kapuscinski. IMPERIUM, the description of his travels around the Soviet Union in 1958, 1967, 1989-90 and in 1992-93, continues in his own tradition of inserting himself into the most desperate of situations, visiting places where the most extreme sorts of human behavior have taken or are taking place. I feel that at times he does exaggerate certain events, certain facts may be forgotten or left out. (Plus, if you can't read Polish transcriptions, the names will all look strange to you.) No matter. He arrives at a picture that rings with authenticity; he is able to persuade you that you understand what is happening. (Or that nobody can understand what is happening.) This author can somehow portray the stupidity, the bestiality, bravery, and unconquerable human spirit that suffuses every event in our unhappy human history. He does it with a sense of immediacy, crossing every cultural and racial boundary as if it didn't exist. (Do they really exist ? Much less than most people think, I would say.) He visits the frozen horrors of the gulag archipelago, now fallen silent, crumbling into the permafrost. He describes the petty nationalist hatreds that increasingly suffused Soviet life to the end, the economic disaster, the environmental destruction, the brutality of a government that deliberately let ten million people starve to death, the lack of organizational knowhow, a dispirited despair. It is all a dark picture of a country that devoured so many of its own, shot itself in the foot so many times. He did come up with numerous insights that helped me to understand my own past or, as it were, my own non-past. No delving into party history, statistics, or laws and decrees; he cuts straight to the heart of the matter. If you need a single book that will describe the atmosphere in the former USSR, that will help you understand what happened to people there, choose this one.

Writing as a correspondent for various Polish journals and press agencies over several decades, Ryszard Kapuscinski travelled extensively through Africa, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union, documenting brutal conflicts and ravaged countries. Ryszard has a poetic ability to delve underneath the surface of geopolitics and reveal stories at a human level.

In Imperium, Kapuscinski covers the human experience in the territories of the former Soviet Union, starting with his remembrances as a young boy in Poland in 1939, hungry and wondering in quiet fear as his friends got deported, presumably to Siberia. In the 50s and 60s, and then again after Perestroika, Ryszard travels to the far flung outposts of former Soviet territories, reflecting upon the after affects of Stalin and later the dramatic changes from the disintegration of the Soviet empire.

The University of Michigan's Journal of the International Institute interviewed Kapuscinski after the publication of the English translation of Imperium.

Wolfe: At the end of the Copernicus Lecture, you said that you wrote Imperium because it was important to bring a Polish way of seeing things to your topic. How did you come to a sense that there was a Polish way of seeing things? Did it emerge from your experiences in Africa, or in relationship to Russia?
Kapuscinski: It developed in relation to Russia in particular. Our history, the history of Polish-Russian relations, is very tragic, very harrowing. There has been a lot of suffering on our side, because Stalin killed all our intelligentsia. It wasn't just that he killed 100,000 people, it was that he purposely killed the 100,000 who were our only intelligentsia. When I started writing Imperium, I had a problem with my conscience, because if I wrote strictly from the point of view of this Polish experience, the book would be completely unacceptable and incomprehensible to the Western reader. So I had to put aside our Polish experience, and to find an angle, an objective way of writing about Russia.

Kapuscinski's writing is fabulous. There is nothing I can say that can do it justice. There isn't a book by him that I've read that I haven't recommended strongly to anyone who would listen.

I can add little to earlier reviews other than to comment that Kapuscinski takes a refreshingly unique angle in trying to make sense of USSR/Russia. He was obviously touched by visits to the Caucausian region and these are the most emotional chapters of the book. Don't expect a travel book. Kapuscinski approaches the book from a human perspective rather than from a structural/physical geographic angle. In that respect its a book about people and their daily lives within a specific regime that so obviously turned sour from its early existence. A great book. The only way to do it justice is to read it.

As per usual, Kapusinski is insightful, witty, and incredibly well versed on his topic. I found Imperium to be one of his best, and was immediatly pulled in by the beginning chapters about his childhood in wartime Poland. Kapusinski's extensive travel in the region allows for insigtful commentary, ripe with interesting facts and blunt commentary. Overall I found Imperium extremely enjoyable, and after reading 2 of his books have already bought a third. Kapusinski is truly on of the great travel writers/commentators of our time.

I consider myself a lifelong student of Russia and the former Soviet Union, having read and studied a huge number of books and reports on the subject. But Ryszard Kapuscinski's Imperium is superior to everything else I have read and imagined. He is a keen observer and a superb writer; he has traveled to cities and regions where even the most hardened Russian reporters didn't go. His prose is gripping and the translation is excellent. Reading this book is a rare pleasure. I recommend it very highly to all those who want to understand what Russia is and why the Russians are the way they are. They are very different from the rest of the world and Kapuscinski unravels the mystery better than any body else. Having studied Eastern Europe for more than 50 years I can say this with a great deal of confidence.

Obligatory lecture to anybody, not just Russia fans or haters. Facts, observations, descriptions and information - everything that is so vital in reporters' style presented with skill and fluency.

I've read this book several time since I first chanced across it in the library several years ago. Kapuscinski's vision is unique since it is essentially unclouded by idealogical or political bias. His outlook is more cultural than political and he breaks apart the image (so prevalent in the U.S.) of the Russia is/was a monolithic and homogenous bastion of Marxism.The truth (not surprisingly) is much more complicated than that.

Imperium reads like a travelogue across the sweeping expanse of that was once collectively called the U.S.S.R. Kapuscinski shows that the "republic" was never more than a far-flung and disparate collection of principalities yoked by violence to form a unified front. Underneath this exterior he reveals the ethnic, cultural, and religious tensions that have always threatened to rend the region apart, and now seem destined to set the various factions against one-another.

All of this underscores the fact that Kapuscinski is one of the great writers of our time (although, regretably, his output is pretty limited). His writing transcends genre and is timeless and well crafted enough to draw the reader in no matter what the subject matter. Because he seems to have little to prove his vision is less self-conscious, less affected, and more mature than the most of the batch of current fiction writers.

Read this book. Read it for the history. Read it for the story-telling. Or read it for the power and grace of its language. Any way you read it, you'll be better for it...

Yes, this is a great book, but not because it shows disintegration of the Soviet Union. The book shows Russia's drive to depopulate ethnic Russia and plant Russians in various places in Eurasia where they hardly belong (Vorkuta). Russians are a hardy lot, and they have survived so far, but at the expense of incredible misery, lack of human rights, and continuous and unrelenting fear of the state. The book shows Russia's strengths and weaknessess, and it takes an optimistic view: the author suggests that Russia will survive, owing to the fact that Western governments will always help it survive. So far, he has been right.

At first I have to say, that I really haven't read that book in english, so I don't know the english translation, only the original version of the book. I LOVED IT. I have always been intrested in history and I have always loved "fact literature", and this book is a comprehensive and colorful, tragic story of a tragic country. It turns us inside-out. We can hardly stop reading. And all the time we have a chance to admire Ryszard Kapuscinski's specific, beutiful and simple in it's structure - style. We see a picture of a country of misery.Country of pain and blood. But not only. Through the author's eyes, we watch the people,see their emotins, their life, their faith and power.Ryszard Kapuscinski,unequalled for many world's great journalist,master of reportage has written a beautiful book, which made me a huge fan of him. Imperium - especially recommended.

I my opinion, that is the one of the best book of Soviet Union, of paranoy that resim. Kapu�ci�ski is for me a poet and his book is poem... I agree with Pavel (the first review). In 1998 in Poland Kapu�ci�ski publised his last book "Heban", it's about Africa. He went there of vew years (was like a respondent)and he write of african paradoxs. It's very good book too. I hope that it will be translaiting on English soon. I'm glade too, that "Imperium" was good translated, it's very importent.

I read this book about five years ago and still consider it one of the best and moving I have ever read. Kapuzinsky to me is a poet. No wonder another poetic friend of mine never returned the book.

Kapuscinski is one of the three greatest travel writers that I know of. (The others are Norman Lewis and William Dalyrimple.) Imperium is his best book.

It is difficult to classify this book as a memoir or a book of poetic prose. Kapuscinski's tales of his travels truly illustrate the resounding failure that collectivism is and was. The seventy years of waste, and the ongoing economic, ecological, and personal disasters that were created are all poignantly illustrated with a deftness of hand which leaves an indelible impression on the reader. As Radzinsky's `Stalin' gives an accountant's balance sheet of the Communist disaster, Kapuscinski gives us the artist's.

I reccomend this book for begginer Journalists. It�s amazing to find out how a journalist can analyse and describe so well the issues of a rising new nation, from the roots and pains of an old empire. Ryszard is a outstanding reporter, an outstanding author. You realize, for sure, how great is to be a journalist. I am sure that you gonna think twice if you REALLY knew something about Soviet Union. By the Way, I also reccomend this book to Boris Yeltsin...

IMPERIUM by Ryszard Kapuscinski This is one of the most important books of the century, ranking with ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, and THE CATCHER IN THE RYE in its intensity and ability to leave an impression. It deals with the author's experiences in travelling throughout the vast stretches of the crumbling soviet empire "Imperium" during the last days of its existence. He notices the things that only a Pole in his perverse and observant way does. He has a dry and unique style and thanks to the brilliant translation into English, his nuances come through shining and memorable. He saw the sham of communism and saw it for what it was, he exposed the nonsense of the barbed wire, the stupid logic of keeping the borders fenced in, the enslavement and imprisonment of millions. Kapuscinski is someone who directly endured the rule of the system and in his chosen profession of journalist, which presented its own problems. This is not some outsider, but someone writing from the heart, but at the same time distancing himself from it and gleaning the essentials in order to preserve forever and for all the incredible. That it is thus so seemingly simply written is an illusion. Each page can be re-read many times because it is so concentrated and filled with wondrous tales of hazardous and eventful trips to Armenia, Siberia, the Aral Sea and the desperate outer fringes of this vast land. Many incredible people were encountered along the way, one feels, that many were like him, enduring the sternness of a system designed to enslave and persist with a lie. Most endured with a wryness and a pragmatic approach of existence, taking each day as it came. That this system has ended for ever, please God willing, is in large part thanks to people like the author, whose good sense has been to record the incredible truth. IMPERIUM is a continuation of telling the truth that started in other equally bizarre stories like his EMPEROR, about Hailie Salassie, and SHAH OF SHAHS, about the Shah of Iran. Slim volumes all, but so, so evocative and lingering in the mind for years. Who can forget the official door-opener, or the cushion-bearer who travelled the world carrying an assortment of cushions and pillows to raise his height-disadvantaged imperial employer to match the chairs he encountered everywhere, whether in the White House or Buckingham Palace ? Good triumphs over evil, it always will. But it takes a long, long time and much pain. How many more years must the poor Armenians endure their plight? Who speaks for them ? Who speaks for the countless millions murdered and broken by decades of communism ? Kapuscinski is one. There are not many others. IMPERIUM is one of those books you should read. It's an incredible book that stays in the mind. Once you read it you'll be glad you did and you'll want to recommend it to everyone you meet. George Wallner Jakarta Indonesia