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)
Pinsk
The Trans-Siberian
The South
FROM A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW (1989–1991)
The Third Rome
The Temple and the Palace
We Look, We Cry
The Man on the Asphalt Mountain
Fleeing from Oneself
Vorkuta—to Freeze in Fire
Tomorrow, the Revolt of the Bashkirs
Russian Mystery Play
Jumping over Puddles
Kolyma, Fog and More Fog
The Kremlin: The Magic Mountain
The Trap
Central Asia—the Destruction of the Sea
Pomona of the Little Town of Drohobych
Return to My Hometown
THE SEQUEL CONTINUES (1992–1993)
The Sequel Continues

Ryszard Kapuscinski was born in eastern Poland in 1932. His earlier books, which include Shah of Shahs, The Emperor, and The Soccer War, have been translated into nineteen languages. He died in January of 2007.