jonfaith 's review for:

Imperium by Ryszard Kapuściński
4.0

Imperium isn't merely a travel narrative; such would ignore its vitality as palimpsest. It traverses the same roads again and again over time, it returns to immense crime scenes and it ponders a policy of ecological suicide. The book was published in 1994 just before a number of the text's issues came to boil: the two Chechen Wars. There are whispers of the rise of the oligarchs and somewhere lurking is in the frozen mist is Putin. Kapuściński has penned an amazing account of an empire. He often suffers the human failing of bullshit philosophy and guessing wrong about an inchoate state of affairs.

Stalin's chessboard left nascent atrocities across Central Asis. The author notes that dissent could've been crushed with death camps and mobile killing units, but then there would be a culpable element. Famine and cold spread the blame around. There is a sting of commiseration at the book's conclusion. I felt the stab of such as well.